Chapter 1.3

The mutt had the trick of making days go by, turning small tasks into big moments. But I wondered what he was planning. He wasn’t crazy enough to try and make a go of it out here for good; by summer this place would be crawling with canoes, and his food would run out. He looked pretty crazy sometimes though, the way the beard grew right up near his eyes. Those eyes, those Tauno eyes, sparking in the firelight. And the way he was always jumping from one thing to the next—the camp was beginning to look like some kind of Japanese gizmo about to unspring—between breaks with his pipe and the weed he smoked and a long ponder after. He went to bed early and got up late, not that I could blame him with winter always right there outside the sleeping bag. The days were at their shortest and the snow was deep. He had piled all that he could up against the wigwam. Of a dark December night, with the firelight bouncing back and forth across the tarps and underneath the spruces, it looked downright cozy to me, who knows no longer cold from warm.

He read plenty, and I would try to my best to keep up. He read about the desert, and this made sense, something some feller wrote who lived in those all about the solitaire. If I was the mutt I would have portaged in a deck of cards–not his style. He read from that Olson kook up in Ely, lynched in effigy in his home town, the big shot who shut down most of this border country when we ran out of good timber further south. Mutt read books about trees and creatures and rocks and berries, but he knew not a damned thing about what hunted him out here. He read until he fell asleep, and I would sit and watch until the light rose in the east and he would rouse and brave a dash in frozen boots to stir deep for coals and fan the baby flames.

The Mutt also wrote, from which I would learn more about him and his mind, his aches and yearnings, boo hoo. But that came later, in the next year, for what could a mutt write to interest me, before dark winter had risen up and taken a sharp bite from him? I was content, night after frigid night, to watch the fire jump and play, remember my stories, long for a full belly—even an empty belly, for Chrissake—and the firebite of a shot of vodka. Finally, the fire would flicker out, and red coals closed the show as I watched his sleeping bag rise and fall with his breathing, or twist around his restless dreams.

One of those bad arctic snaps came in after Christmastime. After a heavy snow that lasted two days, the sky grew clear, but the weak sun frowning low over the trees on the south shore never melted a drop. He’d fish only for a short stretch, without much luck. He was having to go deeper, I could see, to find the sleepy trout. Once, with his line almost all unspooled, he set down the rod for a minute as he fumbled for a smoke. The rod scooted from his lap and zipped down that whole as fast as he could turn around. Christ, he raised bloody hell after that one! Thundered around that hole like a crazy bear, like he was dancing for a drink. Smacked himself upside the head with his fist until his ear bled, then balled up there and cried for a long time, big sobs what looked like roars, right in the snow. Perhaps I hadn’t been watching his face enough, to miss such sadness before it welled full and burst.

He finally got himself up and trudged back to camp—just left his gear there on the lake. He got into bed, didn’t even stoke the fire, and curled up in the middle of the day. He made some soup on his little brass stove in the morning, but other than that he stayed in that bag for three days, crying and shivering and sleeping without rest. I missed the firelight for my part. It made the vigil harder, nothing to distract me from the cold reality of that hairy demon crawling in here on its all-fours and ripping him up for good.

It has been years now since I first noticed the others that notice me. They come in all shapes and sizes. I once saw that Nanaboojoo what the Chippeways always bragged on, a big hulking feller about twenty feet tall, all rocks and moss and branches but a man’s face. He was walking right up the new highway they paved through in ’79, and he glanced toward me and winked. I have seen tiny little green people what you would call elves, quick little buggers that get away when I catch a glimpse. There was that Cupid, too, stalking two young ones back in the woods, shushing me, and you won’t believe it, but he was wearing an orange camo vest and cap above no pants whatsoever. And I see sad looking tattered old birds that look back with pity at my nothingness. Never seen one like this demon before, though.

I learned some Kalevala, old stories, back in the days after Tauno died. I had returned from his deathsite with a long-hair cousin of the Mutt’s who was wintering with Tauno at the Maki farm. This one had books and pads of paper everywhere. He did nothing but read and write, piss and dump and sauna, a real upright Finlander. He went back to that Kalevala all the time, taking notes all the way. The stories were so simple, I couldn’t see what all the fuss was about, but they were good stories, like you’d hear at the bar when the bastards was all riled up about some mess somebody had made and the shit who had to clean it up. One that stuck with me had that feller with the long name—Lomenkainen or Lokihainen or some such thing—battling the Frost-Fiend. That was a beast that froze up everything, the oceans and the fish inside them even, to the deep. Must have read that one a hundred times. Anyway, I’m glad I learned those stories, because soon I found when I recalled them I could make things happen: like grow little clouds a little bigger or big clouds a little smaller, or make a leaf go one way around a rock when it was about to go the other as it floated downstream. Little things like that, but a pretty good distraction when all you do is think and watch all the time.

I thought that Frost-Fiend story often during those three days when the Mutt slept, how Lomenkainen had his ship frozen in the sea by that cold son of a bitch, and how he stood there on the rail and told the fiend to knock it off now or he would cast him into a fiery furnace or book him on a one-way trip south. That Lomenkainen got a bad frostbite, but he stared that fiend down and got home alright in the end, leaving his boat behind. That was what the Mutt was facing here, I thought: a deep, evil, cold, dark empty, and worse yet, one with a grip. The weather stayed clear those three days, but the moon was gone. The nights were dark without the fire, so dark that even I could hardly see, no starlight at all down in the snowless beneath the spruces.

That shit demon came in closer every day. I caught a sharp whiff the first two nights just after dusk, and I sensed him watching out there, just beyond the door. Middle of the third night, I barely noticed when its bony silver arm reached in through the door, the claw tamping upon the floor. The smell was powerful so it almost burned, like a rotten ammonia reek to suck the air right from you. The demon found the boy’s ankle, and its touch reached deep in and made him sick, heaving dry through sobs with a rank oily nausea. I did my nothing best, rethinking hard those heat verses in Finn, one’s I’d been recalling for days:

In my stockings I shall kindle fire to drive thee from my presence,
In my shoes lie glowing embers, coals of fire in every garment,
Heated sandstones in my rigging, thus will hold thee at a distance
Then thy evil form I’ll banish to the farthest northland borders.

The boy shuddered and writhed, his face was terrible to behold, he cried and moaned and shrieked, his mouth forming no no no over and over. The demon loomed inside now, slamming the boy against the floor. Its face was a horror of spongy frostbite, snot icicles dangling from its beard, and a long tongue licked the chalky teeth, and it had a spiky hard-on going about the size of a bat. I worked those verses again and again through my mind, loud as I could think. And suddenly, looking like someone had lit a sparkler up its own ass, the demon reared back and released the boy then snatched its way out the door. It stopped at the shore to look back and release a howl, furious and defeated, loudest thing I’d heard in years. That shave was close, a knick in time.

The boy woke up the next morning looking a little blue and spent, like he had been running for hours trying to catch the last train and had missed it by seconds. The demon had clawed right up his wrists, and Mutt’s face was heavy with confusion and shame. But the boy got up and kindled a fire and faced his big bowl of oats like a person, sullen but alive.