Henry lay awake that night, and though he was in the middle of a vast Canadian wilderness, the sounds he heard were as familiar to him as his own breathing. The chirr of crickets and tree frogs. The creak of branches stirred by the wind. The lap of the lake against the shoreline. The smell was like home, evergreen pitch and clean water. But he was as far from home as he’d ever been, and he felt it. This was not like the government boarding school where the trees were spare and the land was flat and cultivated and smelled of manure. This was a different distance. He had the sense that he’d embarked on a long journey, without any idea of his destination.
TWENTY-FIVE
At first there was routine to the days.
After breakfast, Wellington and Lima took off with their packs full of instruments. Sometimes they used the collapsible boat they’d brought in the plane, which they called a Folbot; sometimes they struck out on foot. Always they headed toward the ridges. Usually they were gone until late afternoon, often until almost dark.
Henry’s principal job was to feed the expedition and see to the safety of the camp-and Maria. Henry didn’t wonder that Lima trusted him to be alone with his daughter. He understood clearly that Lima thought of him as little better than a stock animal-a horse or an ox, say-something to be worked hard, put up for the night, and forgotten. That his daughter might look at Henry in a different way probably never occurred to Lima. That was fine with Henry. On the plane he’d been intrigued by the young woman. When he discovered that she was his responsibility, he was no happier with the arrangement than she. Lima forbade her leaving camp unless Henry accompanied her. And Henry was forbidden to leave her alone. He was eager to explore the area and to hunt game, but when she walked in the forest, Maria made more racket than a wounded moose. Henry hated taking her with him. For several days he confined himself to camp. He dug three pit toilets-one for the white men, one for Maria, and one for himself-and constructed rudimentary seating for each using a sturdy section of limb lashed to supporting Y branches. He built a shelter suitable to eat under when it rained. Much of the rest of his time was passed fishing for walleye and trout from the lake. Maria spent the bulk of her time reading or writing in her journal and looking bored or unhappy.
“I’m sick of fish,” she declared on the fourth day, after her father and Wellington had left. “And I’m sick of sitting.” She squatted on a flat rock, half hidden by leatherleaf, at the edge of the water, and she looked across the lake at the tallest ridge. “I’m hiking up there today.”
“There are wolves,” Henry said.
It was true. He’d heard the howl of a pack at night. Mostly, though, he said it to scare her.
“Wolves don’t hunt in the day. And they won’t attack unless they believe you’re sick or infirm.”
“You read that in one of your books?”
“As a matter of fact.”
Henry had his hands in a bucket full of leeches he’d collected for fishing. “If they’re hungry, wolves will attack a bull moose in broad daylight. They’ll tear it apart.”
“I don’t believe you.”
Henry shrugged.
“I’m going.” She put down the book she’d been reading and stood up.
“I’m not ready to go,” he said.
“I don’t care.” She stomped off, following the shoreline.
Henry sighed and waited. When she was out of sight, he took up his rifle and followed, keeping himself hidden.
Henry expected her to tire quickly, but he was surprised by her endurance. The lake snaked for more than two miles to the west and Maria followed the shoreline at a steady pace. She stopped several times to drink from small streams and once to relieve herself. Henry looked away. By noon she’d reached the base of the ridge. She paused for a while, taking the measure of the height and looking, Henry supposed, for the best route up. Finally she began her ascent.
Henry gave her a little head start, then slung his rifle over his shoulder and started up himself. He stayed a couple of hundred yards west of her and downslope, keeping to the scrub jack pines and black spruce whose roots dug tenaciously into the cracks in the rock. The bare stone often had a thin skin of slippery green-gold lichen, making the climb more treacherous. The crest of the ridge was a good three hundred feet above the lake. Maria clambered up quickly and steadily. Between his own climbing and his tracking of Maria, Henry had his hands full.
In twenty minutes, Henry neared the top. Maria wasn’t far below and he pushed hard to be there ahead of her. He positioned himself in a copse of aspen whose leaves in that early autumn were gold as new doubloons. Maria stood on a jut of gray rock, smiling in the sunshine, looking at the scene below her. The ridges that cupped the lake lay at the meeting of two topographies. South, the land was folded in a series of rugged hills; north, the forest ran flat all the way to the horizon. The deep ravines of the hills were lined with ragged outcrops that erupted from the earth like fractured bone through flesh. It reminded Henry of Noopiming, the woods that Woodrow had taught him to love.
Maybe it was the beauty of the scene and the way it lightened his heart, or maybe it was because he saw that Maria had been moved by it, too; whatever the reason, he found himself walking toward her, purposely making just enough noise that she would hear. She turned and did not look happy.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“What I’m paid to do.”
“You followed me. I should have known.”
He wanted to say something to her, something soothing, but the words wouldn’t come. “I’m sorry,” he finally said. “I’ll wait below.” He turned away.
“No,” she said to his back. Then more gently, “Stay.”
They stood together, for a long time silent, drinking in the magnificence of what lay before them.
“Why don’t you want me with you when you go into the woods?” Maria asked.
“You make too much noise. You scare the game.”
“I don’t mean to. You could teach me how to be quiet. I learn quickly.”
He liked the sound of her voice. It reminded him of water pushed by wind.
“Why did you come?” he asked.
Instead of answering she said, “Do you have family?”
“My parents are gone. Two sisters are in school in Wisconsin.”
“I’ve heard my father and Leonard talk about someone named Woodrow.”
“My uncle. He is gone, too.”
She nodded, and her eyes rested on the deep green that reached to the horizon. “My mother died when I was a little girl. Since then I’ve lived in boarding schools, mostly in the States.”
“I know about boarding schools,” Henry said.
“Nuns.” Maria made a sour face, and Henry laughed. “You don’t do that much,” she told him.
“What?”
“Laugh.”
He thought about it. Woodrow could make him laugh. Since his uncle had passed away, Henry hadn’t felt like laughing.
She sat down on the rock and hugged her knees. Henry sat down and laid his rifle on the ground.
She said, “They’re hunting gold, you know.”
“I know.”
“Leonard is a geologist. He knows where to look, but he doesn’t have the money to prospect. My father foots the bill. They met in a casino in Havana. My father was probably throwing away money, as usual. He loves to gamble. I’m sure that’s part of the attraction of looking for gold. They’ve found it twice already. First in Australia, but it turned out not to be a very rich strike. Then again in South America, but they lost that claim somehow. They won’t talk about it. Anyway, I thought maybe if I came with him this time, it might be a chance to get to know him.”
Henry didn’t like her father and couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to know him better. Family made a difference, he supposed.
“I should be in college, a place called Bennington. It’s in Vermont. My second year there. But I have no interest in it. Not right now.”