Dry Hide

By Monday morning the whole lake knew.

Kaisa could tell it from the lodge hall at a quarter to seven. Nobody stared. It was a room full of wolves, and none of them needed to. Their noses had told them on Sunday, when she came in for coffee with cedar smoke and Anders Korpela on her skin under her own clean wool. Two women at the urn stopped talking and started again a little too quickly. Eino Saari held the door for her, which he had never done before.

She uncapped her pen and gave the board its lie for the day. MON 5 OCT. Canoe team: Vaara, east shore and islands.

The kitchen door swung open. Britta stood in it with a tray of lunches on her hip. She looked Kaisa over from her cap to her boots, the way she looked over a delivery.

“Good,” she said.

She set the tray on the counter by the back door, counted the foil packets with one finger, and went back in. Kaisa waited to see whether there was more. There was no more.

She was at the dock on the point by half past seven. The morning was clear and very cold, with a heavy dew on every board, and the lake smoked. Anders had the red canoe in the water. He handed her the narrow ash paddle and said good morning, and his eyes said a good deal more. She found she did not mind that.

They had the packs in when she heard feet pounding on the shore road.

Mikko came down the path at a dead run with his jacket open. He had grown into his legs a little since his moon. He stopped at the end of the dock and bent over with his hands on his knees.

“Mrs. Maki says come,” he got out. “Both of you. The council lodge. Mr. Niskanen found something at the ice house, and he’s yelling.”

“What did he find?” Anders asked.

“A glove. He says it’s Mr. Rautio’s.” The boy looked at Kaisa and went red. “I ran the whole way.”

Kaisa laid the paddle back in the canoe. Her stomach had gone cold and her hands were steady. It was the fifth of October. Seven years ago today a guide had come down off the east ridge with a stake in his hand.

“Bring the dog’s lead, Mikko,” she said. “You can hold her at the door.”
***
The council lodge was full. There were twenty people inside the door and more on the steps, and they made way for her without being asked. The fire was lit in the ring of stones. All five of the council were on the far bench. Urho Niskanen stood in front of them with Tom Lund on one side and a rangy, tawny-haired young woman in a borrowed coat on the other. Her feet were bare, and Kaisa knew her by her ears. She was the Lund female who had paced Tansy through the cedars on the twentieth of September.

On the bench under the north wall, under the map and under the paddle with its blade turned in, lay a glove.

Kaisa knew it from the door. It was moosehide, smoke-tanned to the colour of strong tea, with a long cuff that came halfway to the elbow. The thumb was worn pale. She had seen it on her father’s left hand every working day of her childhood, pushing aside alder.

“There,” Urho said. His voice filled the room. “On the rock at the ice house, where my grandson’s trail stops. Lying there in the open. Every grey head here knows whose hand that fits. I said his name nine days ago, and I was told to hush and let her work. Well, she’s worked. Now let her tell me what that is.”

“It’s my father’s glove,” Kaisa said.

The room had been ready for her to deny it. She heard the breath go round.

“Then there’s nothing more to say,” said a man by the door.

“There’s a lot more to say, and I’d like to be the one to ask it.” She looked at Hilja. “It’s my search, Mrs. Maki. That glove was found on it. I want to treat it as I’d treat anything else that turned up on a search. I’d rather do it here, with everyone watching, than in a back room.”

“Do it,” Hilja said.

Anders had gone to the bench by the fire and sat down. He had his elbows on his knees. He had not said a word since he came in, and she knew he would not say one unless it was a fact.

Kaisa took a clean bag from her vest and turned it inside out over her hand. She did not pick the glove up yet.

“Who’s touched it?”

“I have,” Urho said. “And Tom.”

“Nobody else?”

“Nobody.”

“Who saw it first?”

“I did. I go down there every morning. I’ve gone every morning since the fifteenth.” His chin came up. “Is that a crime?”

“No. It’s the most useful thing anyone’s told me today. How was it lying?”

He frowned. He had not expected to be asked anything. “Flat. Palm down. About a yard up from the water.”

“What was it lying on?”

“The rock.”

“Bare rock?”

“Leaves,” Tom Lund said. “Alder leaves. The whole shelf’s yellow with them since the rain.”

“Were the leaves wet?”

“Soaked. There was a dew like a frost. My boots are wet now.”

“Thank you, Tom.” She turned her head. “Alpha. You keep a log. What’s fallen since Friday?”

“An inch and a half of rain on Saturday, from six in the morning until dusk,” Anders said. “There’s been none since. We had a heavy dew on Sunday morning and a heavier one today.”

“An inch and a half,” Kaisa said. “Remember that number.”

She picked up the glove in the bag and held it high, where the people at the door could see.

“Mr. Niskanen, you carried this up the shore. Was it heavy?”

He did not answer.

“I’ll tell you what moosehide does, and Mr. Pucel can correct me, since he’s tanned more of it than I’ve seen. It drinks. Leave this out in a day of rain and it weighs a pound more by night and hangs like a wet rag. It doesn’t dry in two days on a north-facing rock in October. And when it does dry, it goes dark and hard as a board.”

“That’s so,” Ivar Pucel said around his pipe. He did not sound pleased to say it.

“This is light, and it’s the same colour it always was.” She bent the cuff with her covered thumb, and it creaked. “It’s stiff. But see where it’s stiff. There’s one hard line straight across the palm, and another across the cuff. It’s been lying folded in three for a very long time, somewhere dry.” She tipped it to the window. “There’s grey dust in the creases of the fingers. Rain would have taken that in the first minute.”

She turned it palm upward.

“This is the side that was on the ground. Tom says the ground was wet alder leaves. Look at it. It has no leaf on it, and it isn’t stained or damp. Leave a glove on wet leaves for a night and it comes up with half of them stuck to it. This one was laid on top of leaves that fell in Saturday’s rain. It was laid there after the dew came down, and it was picked up within an hour or two.”

Nobody was talking now. She could hear the fire.

“Annika,” Hilja said. “You’ve a nose. You were on four legs when it was found.”

The young woman in the coat shifted her bare feet. She looked at Urho, and then away from him.

“I smelled it on the rock, before anybody picked it up,” she said. “It’s Reino Rautio’s. But it’s old. It smells like the back of a cupboard. There isn’t a fresh hand on it, his or anyone’s, until you get to Mr. Niskanen and Tom. I think whoever put it there carried it in a cloth.” She swallowed. “I tried to say so down there.”

“You did try,” Tom said quietly.

Kaisa took the logbook from inside her jacket and opened it to the page for the twentieth of September. She kept her thumb over the little bag that was taped there.

“I’ll read you my own record. ‘Sunday, twentieth of September. Ice-house landing. Dog cast both ways at the waterline and sat. I worked the shelf on my knees from the water up.’ I went over every hand’s width of that rock. Annika sat in the trees and watched me do it. There was no glove. And there was no Reino Rautio in the air, or on the ground, or she’d have known it before my dog did. Is that right?”

“That’s right,” Annika said.

“So it wasn’t there fifteen days ago.” Kaisa closed the book. She turned to Urho, and she made her voice as it had been on her first night, when she had asked him about his grandson’s supper. “Mr. Niskanen. You’ve stood on that rock every morning for three weeks. You stood on it yesterday. Was that glove there yesterday?”

Urho’s mouth opened. His big hands had begun to open and close at his sides.

“Take your time,” she said. “You’re the only one who can tell them.”

“No,” he said. It came out hoarse. “No. It wasn’t there yesterday.”

“He could have dropped it in the night,” said the man by the door. “Rautio’s got a canoe.”

“He could have paddled three miles in the dark and left the one thing on this lake that everybody knows is his, on the one rock a grandfather visits at sunrise. He could have done it without leaving a breath of himself on the glove or the stone.” She let them think about it. “This is the man who taught half this room to walk on rock so you’d leave nothing behind you.”

“She’d say so,” a woman’s voice said, well back in the crowd. “She’s his daughter. And she’s in the alpha’s bed besides.”

Anders’s head came up. Kaisa did not look at him.

“Both of those are true,” she said. “Neither one of them makes this glove wet.”

There was a startled sound that was nearly a laugh, and it died. Dagny Lund had put down her knitting.

“Then say what you make of it,” Hilja said. “Plainly.”

Kaisa sealed the bag. She wrote the date and the time on the label, and she took her time over it, because her heart was hammering and she wanted her voice to come out right.

“This glove was put on that rock this morning, between the dew and Mr. Niskanen. It was put there by somebody who knew he’d come. It’s been kept dry and folded for years. The person who laid it down was careful not to leave a hand on it.” She looked along the far bench, and then round the room. “Somebody in this pack wants a Rautio blamed. I don’t know yet whether it’s the same somebody who’s feeding those children. I do know I told this lodge nine days ago that the children were taught to hide. Mr. Niskanen put a name to it, and this morning that name turned up on the right rock. I don’t believe in luck like that.”

The silence held for a long breath. Then Stefan Zalar got to his feet.

“May I?” he said to Hilja, and came round the fire. His kind, square face was troubled. He stopped in front of Kaisa, and for a moment she thought he would take her hand again, as he had on her first night.

“Nobody in this room wants it to be Reino,” he said. “I want you to hear that from me. I ran with him for thirty years. When Urho carried that glove in, my heart went into my boots. If you tell me it’s wrong, I’m glad of it, and I think every one of us is.” He turned to include the bench. “I don’t like what it means. It’s an ugly thing to think about a neighbour. But I’d sooner have an ugly thing looked at than have the wrong man named. She’s shown her work, and I can’t fault it.”

“Nor can I,” Dagny said.

“The council takes no step on a glove,” said Hilja. She rapped her cane once. “It stays with the tracker. Go back to your segments, all of you. There are two children out, and this has cost us a morning.”

People began to move. Kaisa put the bag inside her jacket with the logbook. She found that her knees were not quite reliable, and she stood still until they were.

Urho had not moved. He was looking at his own right hand, the one that had carried the glove up the shore. Tom Lund touched his arm and he did not seem to feel it. After a moment he sat down heavily on the bench, under the paddle. For the first time since she had come home he had nothing to say.

She had no pleasure in it. He had been used, and now he knew it.

Anders waited for her on the steps, with Mikko and the dog.

“You didn’t need me in there,” he said, when the boy had run ahead.

“I needed your rain gauge.”

“You had it.” He walked beside her, a careful foot away, under the eyes of his pack. “Where to?”

“The islands, as the board says. This evening I’m going to the south end by myself. I want my father to see this before anybody else tells him about it.”
***
The sun was low and red across the bay when she took the right fork.

Reino was on the porch, lacing a snowshoe. He had the frame across his knees and a hank of wet rawhide over his shoulder. He glanced at her as she came up the steps, and then he looked again.

“You look rested,” he said.

“I slept.”

“Hm.”

He left it there, and she was grateful. Tansy flopped down on his boots. Kaisa took the bag out of her jacket and laid it on the bench beside him.

His hands stopped in the lacing.

He did not pick it up. He looked at it through the plastic for a long time, the way he read a shore. Then he set the snowshoe down and wiped his fingers on his trousers, and he turned the bag over to see the cuff.

“Where did you get that?”

“Urho Niskanen found it this morning on the rock at the ice house. He carried it into the council lodge and laid it under your paddle.”

“On the fifth of October.” His mouth went thin. “Somebody is fond of the date.”

“I took it apart in front of them. It was bone dry after Saturday’s rain. There was dust in the fingers, and no fresh scent on it. It had been lying on that rock an hour, perhaps. I said so. Hilja ruled that nothing is to be done about it.” She sat down on the step below him. “I need to know one thing, Isä. When did you lose it?”

“I never lost it.”

He ran his thumb over the plastic, just above the cuff. There was a mend there, an inch of small tight stitches in thread that had once been blue.

“That’s your mother’s sewing. I tore it on a spruce stub the winter you were three. I shot that moose in ‘ninety-one, and she cut the glove from the neck of the hide.” He took his thumb away. “Tauno came for it on the Monday morning. The fourteenth. You’d been gone about three hours. He didn’t send anyone. He walked in the door himself and took everything off those six pegs, the pack and the line and the map case and that. He put the rest into the pack and carried it out to his boat. He said it would lie in the council storeroom until Vaara Lake had a tracker again.”

Kaisa sat very still.

She saw the back wall of the council lodge, and the door with its iron hasp. On her first night Anders had told her that nothing here was locked, and her eyes had gone to that padlock. She had stood thirty feet from it this morning with the glove in her hand.

“You’ve not seen any of it since?”

“Not a strap.”

“Who can open that room?”

“The council. It’s their room, and it always was. The pack’s papers are in there, and the old treaty maps, and the things an alpha isn’t supposed to be able to hide from them. That’s why the alpha carries no key. There are five keys, one to a seat.” He counted them on his fingers. “Hilja Maki. Dagny Lund. Ivar Pucel. Urho Niskanen. Stefan Zalar.”

“Nobody else? No spare in a drawer?”

“I sat outside that door for thirty-one years waiting for old men to finish talking. It’s five keys.”

She took out her logbook and wrote the five names under Item 2, one beneath another. Her pencil was steady. Hilja had hired her. Dagny had spoken up for her work an hour after it was done. Ivar had backed her on the hide with his pipe in his teeth. Urho had found the glove, and it had broken him. Stefan had crossed the floor and said he was glad.

One of them had turned a key in that padlock. One of them had lifted her mother’s stitching off a shelf, wrapped it in a cloth, and carried it down to the water before sunrise.

“You’re thinking it’s the same hand,” her father said. “As the can in my boathouse.”

“I can’t think it yet. I haven’t got enough.” She shut the book. “But I stood up this morning in front of all five of them and told them I knew it was planted. Whichever one it is has known since nine o’clock exactly how much I can see.”

Reino picked up the snowshoe again. He drew a strand of rawhide through and pulled it tight.

“Then you’d better see the rest before he moves,” he said.
***