Eating Crow: an introduction

When I wrote a novel three years ago, I had no idea it would become a critical and popular sensation, and thus I have not been disappointed. I've let it steep for awhile after a couple of rejections: Graywolf was disturbed by the lack of dialogue in the sample chapter; Coffee House actually summoned the entire manuscript before remitting a form letter rejection. I saw this as progress, because at the time I'd just gained my first freelance byline.

I have recently started to feel the pulse of inspiration to revisit the story, work out a few kinks, and flesh out the characters. And, shameless self-promoter that I've become, I resolved to do so via frequent postings to this blog. I welcome any regular reader who will not flinch from the yeoman's duty of posting honest commentary.

The chassis on which I've tried to hang this novel is the notion that we are all beings with a consciousness that, properly tended, exceeds our hat size. That spiritual fulfillment is as diverse as are the means by which life reproduces, as varied as the many shapes of seeds. That some get a second chance to sum up their mistakes and soar on the thermals for awhile, and that some get it right the first time. Eating Crow certainly will require your suspension of disbelief, but I would not call it magical realism--I'd prefer the term supernaturalism. If I have succeeded, I have adapted the story of the ugly duckling.

Chapter 1.1

But for my children, I would have them keep their distance from the thickening center; corruption
Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster’s feet there are left the mountains.
-Robinson Jeffers


I left Calumet on a warm early October evening, riding the caboose of an ore train through the copper hills of upper Michigan, down to the Portage and a packet schooner bound for Ashland and Superior. My one friend Eino was the fireman onboard and would be glad for a little company and a younger back under the coal. There was a softness in the air that night, a feeling so suspicious after the first bracing nights of fall. Once you have given in to that next layer, it’s tough to let down your guard, but I was steaming up under my canvas coat and new woolens.
That rattly engine room would be plenty warm on the trip west. I had taken the trip twice before for a few dollars at times when Eino’s children were being born in Houghton. My first trip, the engineer had burst a can of oil all over the piping hot engine just before we left, and I spent the first six hours flustered and sick from the fumes in a four-foot roll abeam. I scrambled to keep up with the demands of the throttle above, but the schooner itself was happy as a cork. I thought that was it for me, sick and exhausted, but the engineer spelled me up through the Apostles and past the red cliffs, and I got some fresh air and salt herring in me. I guess they felt pity for my weakness.
This time I was going away on that boat. I had been laid off two months from any work and was in receivership at the boarding house. Pekka said she’d advance me another month but I’d had it with digging anyway. I knew a guy ran a skiff out of Tofte, a real upright norske I had met in Bergen on the boat from Europe. He was heading back to Minnesota, having worked the logging camps up above the mills at Cloquet for three winters. He’d made a stake, enough to come home and get a wife and buy a fishhouse cove on the Lake Superior. He had written once about trouble finding hands up there when the ciscoes started to shoal and he had more heaps of rotting fish than he could pack. That was my destination.
The train pulled into Hancock and I skipped down to the schooner, and soon we headed out on the big lake. The breeze that night! Offshore, just as soft as could be, smelling of every fresh pine stump in northern Wisconsin. I took turns with Eino going up on deck and watching the sun slant into the horizon as we came around the point into Chequamagon Bay. The Ashland docks had those electric lights since my last trip, cold jewels on the horizon that got fatter as we approached. A few moths still flew about, even in October, and they haloed those lights like crazies. The brightening was just getting started then. But that’s all I see at night nowadays, a century later, brightness. It’s all been laid bare to me.
We passed inside of Sand Island and motored easily up to the head of the lake, the breeze coming around to the east and quartering off the stern. It was fast sailing to the entrance at Superior. The boys dropped me off on the Minnesota side, and I walked a mile along the beach toward Duluth before bedding down for the night. Talk about lights! The hillside to the west was like a forest ablaze. I figured this electricity would stick. Folks like a lot of light—from an early age, I had noticed that.
I woke up chilly in my bedroll. The wind had come around so it was off the lake and kicking spittle off the surf. That damned breeze was damp and cold, and had entered my neck, kinking it up to my right. So I watched, mostly, the waves run up the beach as I walked the miles west toward the Duluth entrance. That canal is only a stone’s throw wide, but we had to ferry across in those days before they put in that bridge with the lifting deck. On the far side, I missed my step thinking too much about my damned neck. I pitched forward, stepped ahead without a sense of where I was going, and my right leg went down over the edge of the barge just before it rode up against the pier.
The next few hours are cloudy, and I wish I could travel back there now and peer over my own shoulder and see who it was that tended to me and got me up the hill to the hospital, and who it was that stole my pack. My leg was busted bad, the femur twisted, shattered into strands was how the doctor described it. I never walked right again after that slip, when I finally walked at all. That old ache, the physical memory of something so sudden and violent, is something I do not miss.
I was laid up in the seaman’s home for three weeks before somebody managed to question whether I belonged there. They gave me a week to make a go, but kept me aglow on morphine and finding every day swell, and then slung me on a stretcher and dropped me over at a Finn Church on Michigan Street. They, in turn, farmed me out to a family of Lutherans up over the hill in Esko. Those Finn farmers hoped, for the down payment of a winter of charity, to get a summer’s work out of me.
It was a bad time, then. They bunked me up in their kitchen. Plenty of heat, always somebody to fetch a slab of bread, but never a moment to crack a fart or get the crust out of my nose until night. Women jabbering about this and that, every little nicety and meaningless, a lantern burning twenty hours a day. After a month the man and his boy got me out to the sauna, and I screamed twice so sudden and loud from the leg that the neighbors come over.
The nights were dark then, and long, and I learned to sleep through all sorts of commotion, which helped, because they preached, too, all the time. But it wasn’t all hosannas and tales of the ancients. They kept telling me about the farm and how they were so lucky to be a part of something they owned. They were dirt poor, hardly owned anything that came out of a catalog, and most of those were second hand. They got along alright, I guess, always had coffee. But I felt sorry for them.
The leg knit up by spring so that I could go outside on willow crutches that the boy built. The air was good, still days with the sun dashing off the deep snow and water droplets falling everywhere. The old woman taught me to knit, and I made up enough socks that I was still wearing them three years later in the logging camps. They had me chopping wood by the end of May, and I could manage a wheelbarrow by June.
They talked all summer about how much work it was to cut the hay quick in August when it was ready, and how I was looking more ready every day to swing a scythe, how I would be able to pivot on my good leg. Damn it to hell, they went on about that hay! I grabbed my coat after dinner one cool night in early August, thanked them for their hospitality, and walked up the road to Cloquet. They sent the boy after me, and I tried to wave him off, but he came up and handed me two dollars.
I knew that fall would be the right time for a start in the logging camps. The leg felt good, stiff as a tree trunk, but little pain until the end of the day. The limp was a problem though, something that would keep me out of work. I’d never hire a gimp like me, never did. But it wasn’t a problem anyway, because they were busy like moths around the mills, and all of the crew foremen were trolling the taverns for strong young men to stack lumber. I had a job by the end of the night, and two beers from a soused Suomi in trade for a pair of socks that I had made wrong. I made both transactions from a bar stool, never walked once until I left at midnight to go find a place to sleep.
I worked two weeks with them boys, told them I had a cramp at first until they saw that it didn’t matter, that I could pull my load. That Cloquet smelled bad, though. And so much sawdust in the air that I was sneezing all the time, quick surprise sneezes so loud they sometimes called me snusa. Two of the fellers on that crew were going up the river for the winter, said they’d vouch me onto a crew to build a new camp up in Brimson. Free tickets on the train and everything. We rode the Missabe grade up from Two Harbors, sledged a load of lumber four miles on deer trails, sometimes knee-deep in loon shit. The camp site was on a high bank above a clear lake, lots of sun, nice breeze to knock down the bugs. The pines towered to the horizons, so many and so thick that they had no branches up the first fifty feet. Those top guys what decided to send us here knew what they were doing.
Once we’d built the bunkhouse and cookhouse, I stayed on with the winter crew to start the cut. The cook left after two weeks when the crew threatened mutiny over his flapjacks. He made them all runny, with little spots of flour still inside, couldn’t get it right even under threat of amputation. I got the job by default, the foreman thinking my gimp was slowing me down. It was that or leave, he said. I was steamed at first, but had a pretty good knack for it and the pay was just the same.
I made the flapjacks the old way, with lots of potatoes, and the crew ate as many as I could make. It’s cold work in that country in January, out in the woods at first light, the little birds drumming past your ears light as snow. Those boys burned up everything you could feed them. I cut wood all day, always something thawing or steeping or boiling on the stove. The smells, I’ll say, were wonderful: salt pork boiling with carrots and potatoes, herring sizzling in butter with onions. The thought of those smells! Smells that reach down and will your stomach to growl. The raw yearning of hunger! I was snug in that job all winter, a stroke of luck.
All the more lucky because I had the key to the larder. There were still some Chipeways living their old ways on Bear Lake near the river back then, and I’d trade pork and butter for furs, at great advantage for it was a hard winter, even for this country. I had a stash so big by spring I could barely keep them hidden, especially from the damned squirrels. I sold the whole lot to that half-breed dog-runner Micmac for three hundred dollars before he sledded down to Duluth. Not a fair price, but I had to keep him quiet. No other way could I have done it.
And so it was that I established myself up the Cloquet valley. Three more years as a camp cook and I had a stake enough to start up a little tavern at the rail stop. From that point it was like shooting sparrows in a birdbath. A fair percentage of loggers were dependable to drink up all of their wages, and I cornered that market by building some drafty shacks out back where they could while away their worthless bachelor youth after exhausting their backs another season. After a few years, I snatched up some equipment and ran ‘em as crews of my own, and they paid me back every penny they earned. After meals, booze, and shelter I managed to keep some of those poor bastards in debt for six, seven years. I even sold ‘em socks, finally. Loyal to a fault, stupid drunks. I’d throw in a skimpy pine box in the end to get their carcass off my place and seal the deal.
Those big money fellers cut this country like mowing a field, and built hillside mansions in Duluth, all lit up like that. I did pretty well too by the time all of the big pines were gone, and I was staying put up here in the country. I bought up cutover highlands for a pittance, and sent my bastards out to plant stock in the summers. There was still enough timber left in pockets to make a buck in the winter, but the boom was over, and new folks were moving in. They were just like those Finn farmers back in Esko, starry-eyed dreamers hoping to carve out a farmstead on the edge of a spruce bog. For a narrow profit, I happily peddled some of the “improved” real estate I had recently gathered. These folks would want something more from me eventually. Whoever heard of a duchy without peasants?
Or a duchess. One such new peasant, a Tauno Maki recently of Tower where he had labored deep in the mines for six years, a man who had shipped out of Tromso for the Keweenaw back when I was just a sniveling whelp in Sweden, purchased a stumpy forty acres up in Toimi from me, and brought three grown daughters into the fold. Helmi, the oldest, was the apple of her mother’s eye and the salt on my hard-boiled eggs. She took the tavern by storm, demanding wallpaper and privies and niceties, but I’ll be the first to say she gave the place some staying power. Boys I had never seen came in just to watch her fish pickles out of a barrel.
We ran that roadhouse for fifty years, seen a lot come and go, before I left my brittle and frozen corpse beneath the snow on a cold, cold February day long ago. That’s why I’m this now, this wispy disembodied too brainy nothing. I’m still around to tell you a story.

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.

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.

Chapter 1.4

How the boy got into this mess is a very long story, one that I’ve started to hint at, but one that needs background. All of this so far is background, really, on either side of the Event. The Event is the big climax—so big that Mutt himself could never write of it—something like had never happened in my life and a strong sign, I think, that the world has changed. And not changed like seeing light bulbs on a dock for the first time, either, or seeing women become doctors, or seeing Finlanders build houses in the suburbs like everybody else. Changed like light becoming dark is more like it, or water turning to ice. Like an ice age, only inside of folks. I was mostly a cruel s.o.b.—I’ll grant that, and I won’t hide it, but I never destroyed anything I truly loved.

Back when I was shadowing his long-hair cousin, that’s when I first crossed paths with the mutt. That’s not entirely true, because I didn’t die until a year after he was born, and I can say for certain now that I only saw him once back then, setting him and his momma off screaming with my vodka and cigarette cackle. But I never saw him after that, until this hitch, after he come up to the Maki farm to visit that long-hair cousin. He stayed about a week, taking saunas with long-hair, playing cribbage and guitar, splitting firewood. He was swift, a nice ride compared to that stonestill egghead. At night, they would look over maps of the road up to Alaska. And pictures, too, of Tauno back in the war when he worked for the Corps of Engineers building that road with the Canooks. It came clear to me that the Mutt was heading up that way for the summer in the kraut van. I had never left the valley since I died, suppose I sort of embraced the idea of haunting the old tavern, but with my own dead and gone there was less to keep me here. Middle of April we headed west on a wet morning with the creeks about springing their banks.

It’s a wide country once you get beyond the trees and out into Dakota, a long country too, and slightly uphill most of the way. He drove south of the border on the high line, old number two, until we could see the Rockies up ahead on the horizon. I would have sworn it was a storm brewing for the first hour or so, looming larger as we bounced along. But we got close enough, just before he hung a right up into Canada, to see the slaty peaks of the front range, single mountains as big, I reckoned, as all the land I ever had under deed. Heading north we stayed in grassy country for so long I started to wonder if there was ever a tree in the west. We passed two cities full of glass boxes, but mostly it was just wheat rows to the horizon and plump Canadian farmers riding their fancy tractors.

Past Edmonton the dark woods started to close in again. The Mutt had driven hard all this way so far, stopping only to sleep, and he was wearing out at the end of this third day, shaking his head to rattle a few more miles out of his brain. We came over a rise, and the road wound down into a foggy valley, the mist yellow, and he began to look like he was sucking a lemon. There was a small sickly town down on the river surrounding around a giant pulp plant spewing the cloud. They were working three shifts there for sure, all lit up here at night and the stacks spewing forth atop strings of glittery lights. It looked like old Cloquet smelled after it turned from lumber to paper, only bigger. The trucks steamed in like nothing I had imagined, three backed up at the stoplight when we came through. Must have been armies of bastards out in these woods! We met at least another twenty trucks careening and hammering toward us as we passed east and out of the valley. He climbed all the way out of that stink before pulling over to sleep, exhausted.
The next day we passed through even more farms before the land settled back into being the north for good. We might as well have been in the upper Cloquet country with those bogs creeping right up to the highway, spindly awkward spruces throughout, and a forlorn moose every ten miles or so looking at you like you just walked off a spaceship. I think we saw as many moose as other cars from thereon to Anchorage. I suppose I knew the world was big—in a New York, London, Paris, Hong Kong sort of way—but never before understood how big were the empties. They were big enough running alongside that highway, but you could have turned that road at any angle and kept driving through those spruces for days on end. There were mountains on that drive, too, and great rivers, but the spruce empties stick with me most.

That van was no royal coach, I’ll tell you. I was ever thankful to have no sense for leaf springs with all the miles I put in that deathtrap. I suspect he rattled loose most of his good sense in all those wanderings, that explains part of it. Throw in the fact that they grow frost heaves in those parts like were dug by surly bears on overtime, and that highway could be an adventure of its own. But he drove on, seven days in all. Only place he stopped aside from gas and sleep was a hot springs about halfway up, where a moose waded through the steam like some lost hairy dinosaur. He had a long bath there, and I drifted up into the mist and enjoyed the stillness.

Anchorage was gritty, the way a winter city gets when the old snow is splashed over with dirty water from traffic. He kept right on going though, down that Kenai peninsula to a town of Homer at the very end of the road. Can’t go farther than that without something that floats. That was what he looked for: work aboard some boat. He walked the docks the first few days with no success. I suspect they knew he was a finlander and thought he would bring them foul luck or just make them look bad. He kept going back to a group of three little tubs on the far end of the dock that set off all by themselves. They was crazy lookin’ fellers what were baiting up a bunch of tubs full of hooks and line. They had scraggly beards and wore these old-timey shirts without collars and none of them, it seemed, had eyes that looked in the same direction. I saw that they had Russian words scrawled on important things, scribbles that I couldn’t read. The boats weren’t much to look at if they had been heading out on some little lake in Minnesota, let alone the big ocean out yonder. Wood boats, all splintery rails and a plastic bucket for a biffy. All the other boats baiting up along the dock were plastic and new, with computer gizmos running on the dash and a radar whirligig on the roof and antennas sprouting everywhere. These Russkies had a leaner operation, but after enough pestering, they took the mutt in and set him to that bait work, then mostly just sat around and watched him. He sat there all day long the next two days with a big galvanized tub between his legs, putting chunks of herring on circular hooks.

He crewed on the flimsiest tub, with one of the long-beards and a boy couldn’t have been more than twelve. The mutt was green as they come, and got greener every mile as they set out the fishing lines. They weren’t giant killers, I guess. Only hauled in a dozen or so of those big flat fish, halibuts you would call ‘em, but one was about the size of a dining table. I suppose they didn’t count on him being much help, and he wasn’t. He had both hands ahold of something the whole time they were out there, and pretty much turned himself inside-out with heaving. That little boy sure worked though! Scampered around the rails like a cat like he was scared of a beating! They never went too far from shore in that little tub, but far enough to get into a trough, and the horizon passed back and forth through the window while Mutt sat in there sipping on a pop. They unloaded the boat and cut him just over forty bucks for a share, and he had his first hard lesson in working cheap for cheats.

He slept deep after the voyage, lost the look of gills that had creeped into his neck. Whatever ideas he had about being a hero of the seas must have vanished. He took up with some idlers that were camped on that long spit of land with their tents. They were ragtag, like gypsies, huddling in the lee of driftwood logs, eating from communal pots, smoking the green tufts, drinking canned beer, standing in circles kicking around a tiny leather bag. They were waiting for the salmon to run so the canneries would hire them up, and the mutt went in and got himself applied too.

That was how he spent the summer, which did finally come to that spit of land after the damp, grey, winter-spring. The sun stayed later and later until there was nothing but light. But the mutt spent his days deep inside a wide metal cavern. He yanked racks of fish on wheels in and out of freezer rooms—forty below when they cracked them open—and heavy fog clung so low that no one could see. He looked beat at the end of each day, and each day led right into another. Once he really got rolling he was only off from midnight to six in the morning, and if he was lucky he would get a half-hour at lunch and dinner. He was thankful, I suppose, for a floor that didn’t go a-tilt, and the shared misery of his companions. At least he got to move around—some of those drones spent all day in a single spot with their gum boots deep in fish guts. But his movement was tight and regular and forever indoors, and I began to question the sense of following his path.

That drudgery didn’t go on forever, though. Early in September things ground to a halt, and they cut loose those gypsies to scatter in the wind. The mutt slept long nights in that van for a week, and reveled the days away, squandering some of his stake in a rickety bar with a low ceiling along the beach. What that place could have used was a few shacks out back to winter over these gypsies, and harness the steady cash trickle of their idling.

When the sun started getting back to the kind of schedule that regular folks keep, he pointed that van south, which in that country meant pointing it north and east for a few days first. And he wasn’t alone. He packed three gypsies in there with him, and I noted every day my pleasure at having left my sense of smell behind. Up front with Mutt was one I called the chocolate snowman, a rotund jolly colored with thick ropes of hair coming out of his head. He played guitar almost all the time, seemed to carry on his conversations that way. In back was the Librarian, a tall girl who never said much behind her little round glasses. Sprawled across some baggage was blonde tonto, a long-hair always decked out in injun finery. He tanned up so quick after getting out of that cannery that I thought he had the jaundice.

That van was no rocket sled with just the mutt and my weightless ether. But with this load—cases of beer in the back, spare parts under the seat, packs and bikes strapped on the roof, a gypsy but denting every seat—we could have made better time in a canoe with a decent tailwind. We were passed by big trucks, buses, and motorhomes, and once, on a long uphill stretch, by two lean fellers on bicycles. The gypsies drove straight through until the Canadian border, where the van was thoroughly searched for half a day. I noticed that the mutt stuffed a big sack of that green smoke down his pants before they got there, and the snowman did the same.

The road was a real piece of work on the Canadian side, stop-still right angles in the middle of nowhere, as if somebody had kicked that road and bent it. The path followed every nick and dent on the ground. It was as if the Canooks were suggesting that you might as well stay home, trying to slow the invasion. The mutt stopped twice, after bottoming out in a pothole, to check the damage, and he barely kept things together with duct tape and baling wire. It held, though, through ingenuity less than luck. What he didn’t count on was a blown head gasket. That bitty engine lost its thrust as we snaked along a gravelly river, and the mutt brought progress to a dusty halt. He biked forty miles up ahead to a wayside called Destruction Bay and found a garage to tow the van. The gypsies and their unseen pet spirit kicked around in that windswept high country for three days, waiting for a head gasket to show up from Calgary.

I recalled how Tauno’s role in building this stretch, and suppose I blamed him for the way things was laid out. Not that he was an engineer or any such thing—he’d have been lucky if they let him drive a cat on that crew. But it just peeved me to think of one of mine being involved in something this big and not be able to get it right, or at least pilfer enough off the big shots to set up a fishing lodge up here or hire some locals to haul rocks. Them gypsies seemed pretty laid back about the troubles, though, taking every day as it came, kicking around their leather sack. They seemed impressed with the picture of Tauno that the Mutt kept clipped to the visor above the windshield, a spindly sad man holding a survey stick. That’s my Tauno: somebody else’s prop.

Once they got rolling again they rolled ahead slowly and certainly. The highway was smooth on either side of Whitehorse, which I suppose you would call a city. But soon enough the Mutt took a right turn on an unpaved road. That gravel led due south for three days through dark green forest, climbing up and over high ridges. They camped twice beside swift streams, red salmon skitting out over the gravel bars. On the last day, they climbed up into some moist country, and we saw the first real snow of the fall. The Mutt clutched that wheel and clung to the roadside with the wipers flashing. Almost hit three wild sheep that wandered in the snow, and he had a loose spinout to tame after he dodged ‘em. Coming down into the next valley it looked like the end of the world. The clearcuts ran as far as the eye could see, and that was no mean distance. There were whole shorn mountainsides that looked to be five miles away. Those gypsies pulled off the road and kicked around and looked like they’d been punched in the gut. They must have forgot it was the world of men they were traveling through.