Tern Rock

Hilja Maki’s stovepipe was already smoking at half past five on Thursday morning.

Anders had not knocked on the door of Cabin 3 once on Wednesday. He had planked four feet of the Minneapolis hull and thrown away a rib. Now he stood on Hilja’s porch in the dark, one step behind Kaisa and the dog, and felt as he had at twelve when he was sent to this same door to recite his letters.

Hilja opened it in a wool dressing gown with her braid down her back. She looked at Kaisa, and then at him, and stood aside.

“I won’t keep you,” Kaisa said. She did not sit. “I want to ask the head of the council about a law. Is there one called the law of the stain?”

The old woman’s eyes did not move from her face.

“There is,” she said. “My grandmother made me learn it with the rest. A wolf who sells the pack’s ground for his own gain is stained, and the stain is on his roof. His household goes out with him, and their names leave the howl. If the alpha’s heir takes a mate from under that roof, the heir goes out too, and the pack passes to the second.” She folded her hands on the head of her cane. “That is the whole of it. It was used once that I was told of, before there was a lodge.”

“Could an alpha set it aside?”

“An alpha can judge the man and leave the roof alone, if nobody calls for the full law. Tauno knew it as well as I did. I sat on that bench seven years ago waiting for him to speak it, and he gave your father the lightest sentence in his power. I put it down to thirty years of friendship.” She glanced at Anders, briefly. “I will not ask why you want it before breakfast, or why he is standing behind you like a man at the dentist.”

“Thank you,” Kaisa said. “That’s what I needed.”

“Then you may have something you didn’t come for. I’ve kept it two weeks, and I never liked keeping it.” Hilja tapped the cane once on the floor. “I did not think of you, girl. I’m ashamed to say it. On the Wednesday, with Oskar’s bed empty, this one stood up at the fire and said your name. He told the council there was one tracker left who had been taught by Reino Rautio, and he fought Urho for the vote. Then he asked me to make the call and leave him out of it.”

Kaisa turned round.

Anders had imagined her finding this out. In his imagining he had not been two feet away in an old woman’s kitchen.

“Is that so?” she said.

“Yes.”

“Why leave yourself out?”

“You wouldn’t have crossed the road for my asking. The children needed you to cross twelve hundred miles.”

“I told him it was a coward’s kindness,” Hilja remarked.

“It was,” Anders said. “It was one more thing I settled for you without telling you. I can’t take it back. I can say it’s the last one.”

Kaisa looked at him for a moment longer. He could not read all of it. There was no softness in it, but she was taking his measure again, and the last one she had taken had been seven years old.

“We’re losing the light we came for,” she said. “Good morning, Mrs. Maki.”
***
The air on Sumu Lake was so light that it barely wrinkled the water.

They had crossed Vaara in the grey and Hirvi at sunrise, and he had carried the canoe over the Long Carry with her boots ahead of him. She had spoken to him as she would to any boatman, with nothing over. He had taken that as more than he was owed.

At the Sumu end she did not get into the canoe. She stood on the tongue of rock for a full ten minutes with her hands in her pockets and looked down the lake. He held the boat and kept quiet. He knew by now what that kind of looking was.

“That rock,” she said at last. “Off the west shore, the white one. What’s it called?”

“Tern Rock.”

“What sits on it in October?”

“Gulls. The terns are gone by Labor Day. The gulls keep it white.”

“Where are the gulls?”

He looked. The rock lay a quarter mile off, long and low, as bare as a table but for a crack of juniper down the middle and three stunted spruce. Nothing was on it. Two hundred yards south, a line of gulls sat hunched along a drowned log.

“Sulking,” Kaisa said. “My father told me to count the birds. And look at the water off the south end.”

A smooth streak lay there across the ripple, as long as the rock itself, drawn out by the breeze.

“Fish oil,” she said. “Take us round downwind of it. Slowly.”

He took them round. Fifty yards off, Tansy stood up on the packs with her head high, and her tail began to go. Kaisa had Oskar’s bag open in her lap.

Tern Rock had a pale band all the way round it. Anders had passed it every season of his life and had never set foot on it. He told her so.

“There’s a shelf out thirty feet. You’d tear the canvas off a boat.”

“The worst landing on the lake,” she said. “That’s why they picked it. We wade.”

He stepped out into knee-deep water and walked the canoe in by hand, and he lifted it clear onto the stone. She put the dog on the long line and let her go.

The bed was in the juniper crack, out of sight of both shores. There were two hollows in the duff, side by side, and perch bones all round them. Some of the heads still had their eyes. Tansy lay down between the hollows and thumped her tail.

Kaisa got on her knees. She laid the back of her hand in each hollow. She pressed a finger into the duff and watched how slowly it rose.

“This one’s Oskar. It’s a day old. He lay up here yesterday through the daylight and went into the water last night.” She moved her hand to the other. “This one’s older. It’s had three or four dews on it.”

She changed bags. The dog breathed in Pia’s pillowcase and sniffed the older hollow for a moment without lying down. Then she put her nose to the ground and trailed away up the crack. She went forty feet, to the far end of the rock, where the last spruce leaned over a ledge. She lay down there by herself and looked back at them.

Kaisa walked to her. Anders followed and stopped where she pointed.

There was a third hollow under the spruce, small and deep, facing the open lake. Grey feathers were scattered about it, and the wing of a grouse lay there, chewed. On a flat stone beside it sat half a pasty, dried hard. No one had touched it.

“Nobody fought over that,” Kaisa said.

Her voice was wrong. He looked at her. She had gone white to the lips, and she was crouching at the edge of that small hollow with her fingertips resting on the duff, the way a woman touches a sick child’s forehead.

“She started beside him,” she said. “One night, maybe two. Then she moved as far from him as the rock goes. She’s killing for herself, and she’s stopped wanting cooked food.”

Anders knew it. Every child on Vaara Lake was told it, the winter before their first moon. The old women said a pup going under left the pile first.

“That’s the beginning of it,” he said.

“I know what it is.”

She said it flatly and did not look up, and something in the set of her back told him not to ask how. He stood and waited. After a while she took her hand away, photographed the hollow, the feathers and the pasty, and wrote for a long time.

Pia had been out twenty-six nights. He thought of Elsa in her scrubs, reading the board with her keys in her fist.

Kaisa quartered the rest of the rock with the dog. The newest trail went off the north end into the water. She came back and sat down on the stone beside the canoe, and after a moment he sat too.

“Work it through with me,” she said. He had heard those words once before, at the far end of the Long Carry. “When did I write Sumu on the board?”

“Sunday evening, after you’d done the docks with Britta.”

“What did I write?”

“Thursday the first of October. Canoe team to Sumu Lake.”

“And when did they leave this rock?”

“Last night. Wednesday the thirtieth.”

“They’d been here four or five days. They had fish and grouse, and nobody could land a boat. Then they left, the night before I was due. Now go back to Kettle Island. When did they leave that?”

“Monday night or Tuesday. The twenty-second at the latest.”

“What happened on Tuesday the twenty-second?”

He went back through it. That was the day of the rain. He had bent eight ribs while she watched, and she had shown him the green flake. Then she had gone up to the lodge to put up her board, and his nephew had knelt on the floor with his arm round a dog.

“Mikko,” he said slowly. “He told you nobody had done the islands, and you wrote it up.”

“I wrote it at one in the afternoon, in capitals, where everybody getting coffee had to pass it. It said the islands on all the lakes hadn’t been searched yet. By Wednesday morning that bed was empty.”

“That could be chance.”

“Once could be. I let myself call it chance for nine days.” She nodded at the juniper. “This is twice. Somebody is reading my board. I put it up so the whole pack could help, and I’ve been posting him my timetable.”

Anders felt it go through him, cold and exact. He saw the hall as it was every morning. There were forty people in it and an urn of coffee, and the lunches lay on the counter by the back door. One of those people stood in front of her careful columns with a cup in his hand and read where the red canoe would be on Thursday.

“So he knew on Sunday night,” he said. “He had Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday to get word to them. Tuesday nobody could cross Hirvi. That leaves Monday, or yesterday when it eased.”

“Good. Keep going.”

“He gets here by water, because there’s no other way. He can’t land on this rock. So he stops off the shelf and Oskar swims out to him.” He saw it as he said it. “The boy’s the one he talks to. Oskar can shift back and listen. Pia can’t be told anything now.”

“That’s how I read it. And one thing more. He brought that pasty for her, and she let it lie. He’s seen that hollow under the spruce, or the boy has told him. He knows what it means as well as you do, and he still sent them on.”

“Then what does he want, that’s worth that?”

“I still don’t know. I know how to stop feeding him.” She shut the notebook. “From tonight the board lies. It’ll say we worked every yard of Sumu and found nothing. It’ll say the canoe team is going back to do Hirvi and Vaara over. The real plan goes in this book, and two people know it. Hilja won’t, and Britta won’t, and neither will your second.”

“And Elsa?”

Her jaw tightened. “On her own porch I told Elsa I’d give her whatever I was sure of. I’m sure of that hollow. I’m going to stand in front of her tonight and write that I found nothing. It’s the worst thing I’ve done on a search, and I’ll answer to her for it the day her daughter’s home. If I tell her, it’s round the lake by breakfast and those children are moved again. Pia can’t afford another move I don’t see.”

“You’re asking the alpha to lie to his pack.”

“I’m telling you I’m going to do it. It’s my search, on the water and off it. You said that in front of the council.” She met his eyes. “You can stop me. You’d only have to say a word to Hilja.”

He thought about the Hunter’s Moon. It was twenty-four days off. His name would be on that board tonight beside the word nothing, and a hundred and eighteen adults would read it and count. Stefan had told him honestly how that count stood.

“I won’t stop you,” he said. “I’ll stand beside it. If anyone asks me, I’ll tell the same lie. I’ll hold to it for as long as you need it.”

She nodded, once. He saw her put that away with the rest of what she knew about him.

“I want to say one thing, and then I’ll load the boat,” Anders said. “I grew up watching your father work. I thought I’d seen it done as well as it could be. He’d have found this rock. I don’t believe he’d have found the board. That was the best tracking I’ve ever watched, Kaisa. I’m not saying it to please you.”

She looked at him, and then away at the gulls on their log.

“He gave me the birds on Sunday,” she said. “Say it to him sometime.”
***
He carried the canoe up from Sumu with the wool collar damp against his neck. On the bare granite of the first ledge her voice came from in front of him.

“Put the boat down.”

He thought she had seen a track. He rolled the canoe off his shoulders and laid it in the blueberry beside the trail. When he straightened, she had slipped her pack off and set it against a rock. The dog was sitting where she had been told to sit, ten feet back, looking interested.

Kaisa walked up to him. She took the collar of his shirt in both hands, one on each side, and pulled his head down and kissed him.

Her mouth was cold from the lake wind, and it warmed against his. He was thirty-three years old. He had wanted this since he was twenty-six and had never had it. Seven years ago he had been saving it for a fire and a question, and he had lost both. It went through him from his mouth to the soles of his feet. Every part of him wanted to close his arms round her and lift her off the stone.

He kept his hands at his sides. He made fists of them and kept them there.

She drew back an inch. Her eyes were open and very dark, and there was colour all along her cheekbones.

“This isn’t forgiveness,” she said. “I’m kissing you. Those are different things.”

“I understand that.”

“I’m still angry. I’ll be angry tomorrow. But I’ve wanted to do this since I sat on that dock on Saturday. Today you followed me through all of that and never once told me what I should do. I’m twenty-nine, and I’m the one who decides what I do with my mouth.”

“Yes,” he said. It came out hoarse.

She glanced down at his fists. The corner of her mouth moved. She let go of his collar, took him by both wrists, and put his hands on her waist.

“There,” she said. “You’re allowed.”

He opened his hands. She was warm through the wool, and narrower than he had thought, and solid. She came up on her toes and kissed him again, slower this time, and he kissed her back. He let her set the pace of it. Her fingers went into the hair at the back of his neck. The place under his ribs had hurt him for seven years, and for a while it stopped hurting.

When she stepped away she was breathing fast, and so was he. She picked up her pack and swung it on.

“Carry your boat,” she said. “We’ve got a board to lie on.”

They were at the lodge by four. He stood by the office door, where he had stood on Saturday, and watched her uncap the pen.

THU 1 OCT. Sumu Lake. All shores and Tern Rock worked with dog. NOTHING FOUND. Canoe team will re-work Hirvi and Vaara, islands and shore. K. Rautio / A. Korpela.

Elsa Hautala read it from the bench. She did not make a sound. She put her car keys in her pocket and went out to her shift.

Kaisa capped the pen. Her face showed the room nothing at all. Anders could still taste her. He looked along the hall at his people getting their coffee, and he wondered which of them was reading his name.
***