Chapter 1.2

It all begins with the Mutt, this half-bred kid. He’s what you would call my great-grandson, running away. I’ve shadowed him for much of the past two years, and he is damned hard to keep pace with sometimes: out to the deep woods, across broad bays in a stiff wind, down a steep ravine, up the highway in a sputtering metal box. The little mutt was always on the move, breaking camp before dawn when his breath ran in little clouds up to the trees and sheets of hoarfrost fell from his sleeping bag. His current journey has me worried, though. He is in it deep this time, deeper than before, running straight into the maw of hungry winter godlings that would no sooner blink than swallow him whole.
This adventure began on an October morning after his latest piece of theatrical nonsense. I would have turned in the little monster if I was anything more than the impotent know-it-all I am cursed to remain. Barring that I figured it best to stay with him, watch his back like had become habit, study how he figured his way at the next fork in the road. He had the instincts of a wolf, and crossed open country just as fast, sometimes outpacing his own good sense.
He drove his pop-can German bus up to the Kawishiway landing before dawn after only a couple hours of sleep, snatched his canoe off the top, and loaded it to the gunnels. He was traveling heavy for a change: a whole pack full of rice, beans, coffee and oats, must have been over a hundred pounds of food, in addition to all of the winter equipment. He packed a puffy winter sleeping bag, a stout spruce-green dome tent, a hatchet, an ice auger, two spare paddles, cross-country skis, big sheets of blue plasticky tarpage, and plenty of rope. All that bulk and several smaller bags holding aluminy knick-knacks, his usual kit, all those items that remained after months of casting aside useless gadgets that did not aid his light living. And last, though certainly not least, a stack of books sealed inside a rubbery pouch. The canoe was packed to the gunwales, and sat low in the water. He jumped into the van and backed it thumping over spruce roots until it was deep in the bog and well out of sight from the parking lot.
Mutt shoved off into the current, the canoe tippy then right, and I watched the birch woods on the banks as we slipped upriver under first light. He sprung a moose right off while quietly rounding a reedy bend, and the big bull heaved a wave off its back as it post-holed through the muck and up into the willows. It looked back with slow eyes and a snort. But Mutt and the moose did not see, as I would too much in the weeks to follow, that hairy, silver-white demon that stalked this country. And the demon saw me, of course, peering vigilant from the canoe, and backed into the birches. That one I could smell, even, a reeking vinegar mist on the wind.
The Mutt made camp after a short paddle, back up a little side marsh off the river, and hid the canoe deep in the reeds. He slept fitfully for the day, and we traveled all through the next two nights, portaging under a full moon. On the third day he stashed the winter gear in a south-facing ravine on the lower end of a long lake, and made a temporary camp closer to shore under a tight canopy of spruce tops. Dusk came earlier every day, and he would paddle out on the lake in the evenings to jig for lake trout. He ate well most days, fresh fish for the taking. I watched him use up the last of the butter after a week, a bright orange laker frying in the pan, and saw the wisps of smoke tease past his nose. I moved in closer, but nothing! Even when drifting up into the shower of sparks when he prodded at the fire. No heat; no savory, stomach-groping fish smoke.
The nights were growing colder. I noticed a glaze of ice some mornings, watched his breath become cloudier, saw a few flakes gusting under overcast iron skies. We took a side trip up to Knife Lake, according to his map, and he poked around campsites, checking for coals to see if anyone was still out in these parts. We stopped on the island of that old root beer lady who wintered here till she died, and he stepped over the old foundation of her cabin. He was skittish here, so close to a portage and on the border route, scared of his own shadow, but he slept out under the stars inside those old stones, without a fire. We made it back to the camp a few hours ahead of the first winter storm. Winter set in just like that. Two days later he was walking out on the lake and carving holes with the auger to get at the fish.
When more snow had set in, he harvested some willow rods and cut them up all the same. Then he weaved the willow patiently into a framework, must have taken half a day, and over that web he stretched the tarps, with a layer of spruce boughs between them. The result was a space big enough to pitch the tent inside, though he did not do that. He made a thick floor of more spruce boughs. The wigwam opened with a flap to the fire pit, and that he used for short stretches at night. Once he had heard something and clambered up the ridge to see a dog team pulling a sled along the north shore of the lake, and he heard planes regularly, it seemed, casting his eyes around the horizon. For my part, I saw that stinking demon twice again, once working its way up the west end of the lake about a mile off, not even bothering to stay out of sight, all hunched over and its knuckles dragging in the snow, and ravens sweeping out of the trees trying to chase it off. The second time it was in a treetop out on the nearest island, watching the mutt jig through the ice, me scribing nervous circles around him, reciting a verse from the finn Kalevala. It seemed to be learning to stay downwind.
Except for a few fishing holes nearby, he never ventured onto the lake unless it was snowing. I’d watch him there, and geez, he could be the spitting image of his great-uncle Tauno—my boy—right down to the way he gutted a trout. Tauno had been a sorry disappointment in the end. He was always in the woods, ran a trapline up beyond Toimi all his life. Tauno went native on me early, never brought in a decent wage in his life, no interest in the roadhouse whatsoever. Took a real shine to his own grandfather, who raised him up as much as me, I’ll venture, the boy always eager to go up and help in the garden or bring in some firewood.
He did have some ambition, I admit, prospecting and timber-cruising up in this boundary country. Always had a knack for sniffing things out. He once canoed down the Cloquet, when he was only but twelve, with a cousin from up the road. Tauno’s story was that he found an arrowhead on a gravel bank, flipped it in the air, and they resolved to go wherever the thing pointed and hunt grouse. I don’t remember if they got any birds, but they got into a section of white pine, ancients like I had first seen up here in ‘92. Up in the middle was a real odd one, needles all gold, lit up like a Christmas tree.
I snapped up that parcel sight unseen before those boys could blabber too much. The tall pines were really dear by that time, and it cost the mills more and more to get at them. But I had a shot at leasing a steam hauler, and I rallied my lean bastards, pulled them off of pulp work, and had them felling pines in two weeks, before the deed had cleared even. I made a handsome penny that winter. But I stopped them short of that golden tree. It was just something about it what didn’t seem like lumber. Wasn’t sure how it would pay off then, but it did so, handsomely. We planted in some new ones to make it look bigger and I just let that piece ripen for awhile.
Tauno grew more distant with the seasons. He spent a lot of time up at the co-op that used to get by up in Toimi, talking red politics with old Finlanders, snoose trickling through their stubble. Crazies with too much time on their hands, for my part, and I tried to keep him from their like. I kept him out working with the bastards until he was sixteen and told us he was moving up to his grampa’s farm. I bought him things, tried to send him to the trade school down in Duluth, anything to keep him from those lazy Finns. He was polite and all about it, but said no thanks to everything. It’s not like he hated me, I wouldn’t think. He just didn’t care for my ways. That one gave me a chill.
His sister stuck close, though. Hella was churchy as weak wine, really devoted to her ma, and helped out in the store whenever she wasn’t at school. Bookish, even for a girl, always her nose in something musty and old, or the newspaper. She went off to St. Paul to learn nursing, but returned soon after and worked at the old folk’s home in Two Harbors. She called her brother a bolshevik, a word I had thought meant something about cattle. I don’t think he was all of that in the end—he bailed out of that co-op as ready as anybody—he just liked things simple is all.
I watched both of those children die, both older than I was when it finally come about. Hella went slow with a cancer, and everybody close to her around the bed at some point that day when she finally passed. She floated up just like you see in the movies, still in her nightie. Her daughter and son-in-law sat there sharing a story so that they didn’t even notice her gone for a few minutes. Nothing you could have done about it. Tauno went away worse, on a bright day in March, snowshoeing a short trap line he still worked up in the Seven Beaver swamp. His right foot broke through thin ice on a creek, with only a few feet of water beneath. He must have torn his groin or broke the hip because he showed a lot of pain. His left leg splayed out, the heel of the snowshoe on the right wedged in the muck, and he just couldn’t manage a way out of that fix. It was pure hell to sit there and watch him suffer, my own son of seventy-seven years, however distant. He passed on just before sunset after that icy water wicked the heat out of him for four hours, and got calmer all the way, even taking off his mitts and hat. He didn’t float up like Hella, not at all. I saw a shadow, quick like an otter, slink down and melt into the red-black current that swirled around his leg. I lingered until they found him at dawn, the headlights on their snowmachines glaring off his stiffened frame and sparkling the leaves of frost that lay etched upon his open eyes.
That’s me, the lingerer. I just sit around and watch things happen, don’t smell ‘em happen, don’t hear ‘em happen, don’t feel a change in the breeze or a gush in the air. Night and day, rain or shine, indoors, outdoors, up and down, watching. Fifty-two years now I’ve been doing it, hitching rides with a living mind. A tagalong, a fifth wheel, a speck of dust. You better believe it’s tedious and maddening, like watching blood dry most of the time. But sometimes the action heats up a little.