Lima ran the cigar along the line of his mustache under his nose and inhaled deeply. “These are my own cigars. It’s what I do. Manufacture good smokes. You know the island Cuba?”
He’d heard of it, but had no clear idea of its location in relation to anything he knew.
“The best cigars, they come from Cuba, from my factory. Have one, boy. On me.”
Lima held it out, long and brown like the dropping of a big animal. Henry didn’t want the cigar, but he didn’t want to offend the man. He took it.
Lima pulled out a cigar for himself. “Now, you clip the tip like this.” He pulled out his knife and deftly sliced off a small nub at the end of the cigar.
Henry took his own knife and did the same. He was aware that Wellington watched him with gleaming eyes.
Lima struck a match on one of the rocks Henry had used to ring the fire. “Before you light your cigar, make sure the sulfur is burned out of the match head, okay? Sulfur can kill the taste of a good cigar. Don’t put the cigar in your mouth yet. Hold it in your hand and rotate it near the flame, like this.” He rolled the cigar between his index finger and thumb, near the match flame, until the entire tip on all sides glowed with ember. “Now you put it in your mouth and take a gentle puff or two to blow out the taste of anything not tobacco that may have come from lighting it. Only then are you ready to enjoy the pleasure of this truly fine product.” He looked at Henry expectantly. “Well, go on, boy.”
Henry imitated Lima’s actions and soon the cigar smoke crawled down his throat like a thick snake.
“Good, good,” Lima said with a big grin. “Enjoy.”
Henry didn’t. He got sick. After he’d puffed for a while, he became dizzy and had to lie down. The men guffawed. A little later, he stood up, stumbled out of the firelight, and puked. The men roared with laughter.
“Don’t worry, boy,” Lima called. “We’ll make a man of you yet.”
Later, as Henry lay in his bedroll, he thought to himself that if his uncle didn’t kill these men, he would do it himself.
He woke to the rustle of the tent flap. Woodrow entered and lay down on his bedroll.
“You fed them?” he asked.
“Yes,” Henry answered.
He wanted to ask where his uncle had been, but he knew if Woodrow meant for him to know, he would say. In a few minutes, he could hear the soft susurrus of deep breathing that told him Woodrow had gone to sleep.
Next morning he watched his uncle leave to follow the two white men again. Henry stayed back, dealt with the aftermath of breakfast, then took his rifle and a handful of cartridges and began to circle the lake on foot. Although he told himself he was going hunting, he didn’t look for signs of game. An hour later he came to the place along the far shoreline where the white men had drawn up their canoe. He didn’t see any sign of his uncle’s canoe, but he hadn’t expected to. Woodrow would have hidden it.
Henry easily found a trail broken through the undergrowth. It led toward the base of the ridge that ran the length of the lake and beyond. Henry paused, listened carefully, but heard nothing except the complaining of jays in the branches of a nearby poplar. He was curious about the men. He felt on the outside of whatever it was his uncle was thinking. He wondered at Woodrow’s silence, wondered if his uncle was merely watching or actively stalking. Truthfully, if Woodrow intended to kill the men to keep any gold they found a secret, Henry believed he should be a part of that. It wasn’t something he anticipated with pleasure, but it felt to him like a responsibility he should shoulder. Though Woodrow had not asked for his help, Henry believed it was the kind of thing a man-a true-blood Ojibwe- should be prepared to do.
The ridge was steep gray rock two hundred feet high. The top was capped with a mix of lithe aspen and sturdy spruce that shivered in a wind Henry couldn’t feel. The trail followed the base and was easy to read despite the rocky ground. From the far side of the lake, the ridge had looked solid. After half a mile, however, Henry came to a place where a second ridge folded against the first with a narrow break between them through which a tiny creek ran. The trail left by the men led beside the creek, and Henry followed.
On the other side of the ridges, he found a great expanse of marsh and understood immediately the mud that had caked the men’s boots and pants. He lost the trail in the soup of black water and yellow marsh grass. He climbed the ridge to high ground and scanned the tamarack trees that grew in profusion along the edges of the wetland. He saw no sign of the men or Woodrow.
It was midmorning. The sun had climbed halfway to its zenith. The day was turning hot. Henry found a place in the shade of a cedar and waited. Although he’d seen no evidence of Woodrow during his tracking, he was certain his uncle wasn’t far behind the white men. He wasn’t sure what waiting might accomplish, but he knew that the men would have to come back this way eventually-unless Woodrow did something to stop them.
He sat for two hours as the sun mounted directly overhead and the cedar shade shrank to nothing and the heat increased. His rifle lay across his legs. He’d chambered a cartridge, mostly to be able to say, if he was spotted, that he’d been hunting. He didn’t know if the men would believe him.
The screams came to him first. They were distant sounds that might have been animals, though he’d never heard animals like that. Then he saw the two white men burst from the tamaracks at the northern edge of the marsh and flail their way into the black muck at a desperate run. Wellington was in the lead, Lima a few yards back. They made it halfway to the break in the ridges before an enormous bull moose crashed out of the trees behind them, head lowered, his rack aimed at the men. Henry had no idea what the white men had done to enrage the animal, but in the North Country even an idiot knew enough to stay clear of a moose. Not even the biggest black bear was a match for a raging bull.
The legs of the moose lifted it high above the swamp water. It closed on the men quickly. Henry had no time to think. He knelt and brought his rifle into position. The Winchester was meant for smaller game, deer at most. As he sighted, Henry tried to think how with a single shot of a too-small-caliber bullet he could stop the moose. The round would never penetrate deep enough to reach the heart.
Out of the corner of his open eye, he saw Lima stumble and go down. Henry led the moose, held his breath, then let it out slowly and squeezed the trigger. He lost the animal for a moment in the jar of the recoil. When he found it again, he saw the moose pitch forward, coming to rest only a few feet from where Lima cowered in the muck.
Henry sat back. He began to shake. Numbly, he watched Wellington return and kneel beside his fallen companion. A moment later the man looked up and spotted Henry on the ridge.
Henry stood, worked his way down, and waded into the swamp grass and black water. Even at a distance, he could hear Lima’s moans.
Henry went first to the moose. The animal’s right eye socket was nothing but a deep, bleeding hole. In the wake of the adrenaline flood he’d felt on the ridge, Henry experienced an overwhelming sadness at the death of this great and beautiful creature.
“You?” Wellington asked with disbelief. “It was you? That was one hell of a shot, boy.”
Henry turned. “I’m not a boy.”
“Son of a bitch,” Lima moaned.
Wellington carefully lifted the other man’s leg clear of the black soup. Lima shouted something in Spanish that Henry didn’t understand but guessed was a curse. Wellington paid no heed as he worked his fingers along the muddy pants leg.
“Broken,” he pronounced. “Pretty bad, I’d say. We’ve got to get him to a doctor.”
Henry didn’t know what to say. The nearest doctor was a lot of miles, a lot of paddling, a lot of portages away. How did he explain that to a man looking to him for help?
Wellington’s eyes moved past Henry. Woodrow was slogging toward them across the marsh, rifle in hand. His eyes dropped to the moose as he passed.