Burnt Point

From the bottom of the Step Portage, Ukonvesi went north until the water and the sky ran together.

Kaisa stood on the landing at half past nine on Friday morning and let her eyes get used to the size of it. It was nine miles long, and she could see perhaps four. The day was clear and cold, with a light air out of the southwest and a skin of ice in the rock pools at her feet. The board in the lodge hall said the canoe team was camping on Hirvi tonight to work its north bays. The logbook in her jacket said they were here.

Behind her Anders set the red canoe in the water without a sound.

“Before I get in,” she said, “I want your half of this. I’ve read this lake off a map. You’ve paddled it for twenty years. Turn it over, the way I showed you on Vaara. Two young wolves come off this portage a week ago Wednesday, at night. They want fish, and they don’t want a boat following them in. Where’s the worst landing within a mile?”

He did not answer quickly. She watched him look, and she saw him go past the sand beach to the east, where every canoe party in the county stopped for lunch.

“Burnt Point,” he said. “Across the west bay. It burned to the rock before I was born and never grew back. It’s got broken shelf all round it, and there’s no soil for a tent peg and no firewood. Nobody’s camped on it in my lifetime.” He frowned. “It has a perch bed off the south side. I’d forgotten that until I said it.”

“How far?”

“Half a mile.”

“What’s sitting on it?”

He shaded his eyes. The point lay low and grey across the bay, a long spine of bare ledge with a fringe of dead snags.

“Nothing,” he said. “There ought to be a raven on those snags. There’s always one.”

“Then that’s where we’re going. Take me round downwind.”

She saw him register that he had picked it himself. He did not make anything of it. He knelt in the stern and they went.

Since Wednesday night she had felt lighter by some weight she could not measure. It was not all pleasant. Under Item 3 in the logbook she had written a date and a sum in her own hand, and she had read the line a dozen times. She had read the five names under Item 2 just as often. She had not let herself draw a line between the two pages. She had no trail yet between a check and a key, only two marks. She meant to keep her hands off them until a paper came to a post office box in Ely.

A hundred yards off the point, Tansy stood up on the packs. Kaisa had Oskar’s bag open on her knee.

“Hold us.”

He held. The dog’s nose worked, and her tail began its slow flat sweep. Under the smell of wet rock, even Kaisa’s poor daylight nose caught something else. It was old woodsmoke, cold and sour.

“Somebody had a fire on your point,” she said. “You told me it had no firewood.”

“It hasn’t.”

They waded the last thirty feet over stones like broken plates. He lifted the canoe clear and laid it on the ledge. She clipped on the long line.

The camp was behind the spine of the point, in a pocket of the ledge that opened south to the water and was walled on the other three sides. Nobody on the portage or the open lake could have seen a light in it. Tansy went straight to the back of the pocket, where a little blueberry and moss had found a hold, and lay down.

Kaisa stood at the edge and looked at all of it before she set a foot inside.

There was a fire ring. Somebody had built it properly, with eight stones set close and a flat one at the back to throw the heat forward. The ash in it was pale and deep. Beside it lay a short length of drift log, dragged up for a seat. Six sticks of unburnt firewood were stacked against the ledge.

“Stay there a minute,” she said, and went in on the bare rock.

She began with the beds, because the dog was lying in one. It was a deep hollow in the moss, six feet from the ring, and it was Oskar’s. She laid the back of her hand in it and pressed a finger into the moss. Beside it there was a second hollow, shallow and already half risen. She changed bags, and Tansy sniffed that one briefly for Pia and did not lie down. Then the dog put her nose to the rock and went out of the pocket, over the spine, and away along the point.

Kaisa followed her on the line for two hundred yards. At the very tip, where the ledge ran down into the lake and the wind had a clear run from three sides, a mat of crowberry had been pressed flat. Tansy lay down beside it and looked back.

There were duck feathers and the hind leg of a hare. There was no cooked food at all this time, touched or untouched. Kaisa crouched and read the ground around the bed. Every print in the thin soil was a paw.

On Tern Rock it had been forty feet. She did not let herself stay there long.

When she came back Anders was standing where she had left him, with his hands in his pockets.

“Three beds,” she said. “Oskar’s is by the fire. He lay in it every night they were here, and the last time was three or four nights ago. That makes it Monday or Tuesday. Pia’s is beside his, and she used it once, the first night. Then she moved out to the tip. She’s as far from him as the ground allows, in the open, and she’s killing for herself. She never came to this fire. There isn’t a track of hers within fifty feet of it.”

His jaw set. “And the fire?”

“Come and look. Step on rock.”

He came and crouched beside her at the ring.

“First, when. Saturday’s rain was an inch and a half. If this ash had been under that, it would be grey paste with a crust on it. It’s dry to the bottom. It’s had a few dews and nothing else. This fire was lit after Saturday, and the camp was empty by Tuesday. So it was Sunday night or Monday night.”

“Monday you stood up in the council lodge.”

“I’d thought of that. Now the wood.” She picked up one of the stacked sticks by its end. “Tell me about it. That’s your trade.”

He turned it in his hands. “It’s birch. Split with a maul, and sawn square at sixteen inches. It was cut last winter and dried under a roof.” He looked at the stack. “That’s out of a woodbox on Vaara. It could be any woodbox, mine included.”

“So it points at everyone, like the paint.”

“It didn’t swim here, though.”

“No, it didn’t.” She pointed with her pencil at the lip of the ring. Two burnt matches lay there, the wooden kitchen kind, black to the stub. “And here’s the plainest thing on this point. A wolf can’t strike a match. A boy who swam two lakes on four legs has no pocket to keep one dry in. Somebody came here in a boat with dry matches and an armful of split birch. He built a ring a pup wouldn’t know how to build, and he lit it.”

“For Oskar.”

“For Oskar. Look at this.”

She had seen it from the edge of the pocket, and she had saved it. On the near side of the ring a drift of fine ash had spilled over the stones onto the flat rock. Pressed into it, as clean as a print in new snow, was a hand.

It was a human hand, the left, with the fingers spread. The heel of the palm had gone in deepest, where its owner had leaned his weight to shift closer to the heat. She laid her own hand in the air above it. Each of his fingers came a joint short of hers.

“That’s a boy,” Anders said quietly.

“That’s a thirteen-year-old on two legs, with no clothes, in October. He’d sit as near as he could get. There’s the mark of his knee beside it.” She sat back on her heels. “He’s shifting back and forth, and he’s doing it here, by a fire, because somebody wants him able to listen and answer. Pia can’t be told anything any more. So the boy gets his orders, and she follows him.”

“How long did they sit?”

“That’s a lot of ash for sixteen-inch birch. Two hours, perhaps three.” She looked at the drift log. “He sat there. A grown wolf with hands sat on that log on Sunday or Monday night and talked to Urho Niskanen’s grandson for half the night. Then he went home and drank coffee in front of my board.”

Anders looked at the log for a long moment.

“You had your night on four legs two weeks ago,” he said. “I haven’t got a rule. Let me put my nose on it.”

She had been about to weigh that herself. He had remembered what she told him in the dark, and he had said it as flatly as a fact about the wind.

“Go on,” she said.

He went behind the canoe. In ten breaths the big black wolf came over the spine of the ledge with his white forefoot flashing. He worked the pocket for a quarter of an hour, and she watched him do it and wrote nothing. He spent a long time at the drift log, with his nose moving along it an inch at a time. Once he lifted his head and stared at the water with his ears half back. Then he went away behind the canoe again.

He came back buttoning his shirt.

“The boy’s everywhere,” he said. “It’s him and smoke and ash. On the log there’s somebody heavier. A grown wolf. I get wet wool, and fish, and something like lamp oil. It’s four days old on bare rock with the wind across it.” He shook his head. “I can’t give you a name. I stood there trying to make it into one, and I could have made it into six. Half my pack smells like that in October. If I picked one I’d be doing what Urho did.”

“Is it a man?”

“I think so. I wouldn’t swear.”

“Then I’ll write what you’re sure of.” She did. A.K. on four legs: adult wolf at seat log, prob. male, not identified. “Thank you for not guessing.”

“You taught me that in a canoe.”

She photographed the hand with her pencil beside it, then the matches, the ring, and each of the three beds. She measured the print. Then she took the dog along the shore of the point until the newest trail ran down the north side into the water and was gone.

Ukonvesi lay open ahead, with five miles of it in plain sight and more beyond. It was past two o’clock.

“We camp here,” she said. “They chose this point because nobody uses it. I want to see what it looks like at the hour they used it, and I want a still dawn on this water. Can you pitch a dome on rock?”

“With stones in the corners. I’ll fetch wood from the mainland.”

“Where do you want your bag, canoe or tent?”

She asked it lightly. It was the first night they had camped since the sauna.

“That’s yours to say.”

“Tent. It’s October.”
***
By dark he had a small fire going on the open ledge, well away from the pocket, and they had eaten. There was no moon, for it was a day or two off new, and the stars came down to the water on every side. Tansy slept on Kaisa’s feet. Kaisa sat on a pack with her shoulder against his arm, because it was warm there and she had stopped pretending otherwise.

Sixteen nights were left until the Hunter’s Moon, and nine on her contract. A girl had been out thirty-four nights, and she was sleeping somewhere north of here with the wind on three sides of her.

“You’re quiet,” she said.

“I’m working up to something.”

She took her shoulder away so that she could see his face. In the firelight it looked as it had at Hilja’s door.

“There’s one thing I’ve left out,” he said. “Under the tarp I told you I never came to you because I had nothing to bring. That was true, and it wasn’t all of it. I did come once.”

She did not move.

“My father died on the ninth of November. Ten weeks later I put a bag in the truck and drove to Montana. I had your address from the return on a card you sent your father, because the postmistress let me look. I left on the Thursday and I was in Whitefish on Saturday morning. It was the eighteenth of January, last year.”

“You were in Whitefish.”

“I found the garage and the horses. Your truck was gone. A woman was forking hay over the fence, and she said you’d been called out at four that morning. A skier had gone out of bounds on Big Mountain the afternoon before and never come down. She told me which lot the searchers were using.”

Kaisa remembered the day. A boy of nineteen had spent the night in a tree well with a broken collarbone. It had been eleven below at the summit, and it was the first hard winter find Tansy had ever made.

“I got there about noon,” he said. “I parked at the far end. There was a trailer and a lot of trucks. A short square woman with a clipboard was shouting into a radio. I was working out what I’d say to you. I’d been working it out for eleven hundred and fifty miles, and I hadn’t got anything.”

“And then?”

“And then you came down. There was a sled with the skier in it, with the ski patrol pulling, and behind it there was you. You had a yellow dog on a lead, jumping straight up in the air every three steps. Somebody put a cup in your hand. A big man in an orange jacket said something, and you laughed, with your head back. All of them were looking at you the way my people look at your board now. You were the best one there, and they knew it, and so did you.”

She could see it. She could see herself from the far end of a parking lot, and it gave her a queer cold feeling.

“I felt you,” he said. “It nearly put me on my knees against the truck. You never turned round. The dog looked straight at me, but you didn’t.”

“I’d spent five years teaching myself not to check.”

“I didn’t know that. I thought it was dead on your side, and I thought it was better dead. You had work and a team and a place. All I had was a story about a sauna that didn’t clear your father, and a pack that would spit when you drove in.” He turned his cap over in his hands. “So I decided you were better off. I got back in the truck and I was home on Monday.”

The fire shifted. Out on the lake a loon called once.

“How long did you watch?”

“Ten minutes.”

“Ten minutes.” She heard her own voice go flat and quiet. “You drove two days, and you watched me for ten minutes on the best morning I’d had all winter. I was laughing because a boy was alive. It didn’t mean I was finished. You saw one print in the mud and called it the whole trail.”

“Yes.”

“I’d have been angry. I might have thrown the coffee at you. But I’d have known, Anders. I’d have had twenty months of knowing. My father would have had them too.”

“I know.”

“You decided for me. Again.”

“Yes,” he said. “I did. It was the same thing as the fire and the same as the phone call, and I called it kindness all three times. I’m not going to do it again.”

She looked at him. He had not flinched, and he had not dressed any of it up. That made it harder. He had sat down at this fire with her shoulder against his arm and chosen to give that up. Nobody had forced it out of him. Britta had seen nothing this time, and no old woman had kept it for two weeks. If he had held his tongue she would never have learned it.

She knew that, and she was still angry.

“Why tonight?”

“Because you asked me on Wednesday what had stopped me from waiting. I gave you an answer I was proud of, and I was still sitting on this.”

She got up. The dog scrambled off her feet. She walked to the edge of the ledge and stood with her arms crossed, looking at black water and the faint line of the far shore. Under her breastbone the pull lay toward him as steadily as ever. It had no opinion on the eighteenth of January.

He stayed by the fire and let her stand there.

When the cold had got through her jacket she came back. She banked the coals with the side of her boot.

“I’m going to bed,” she said. “You’re still in the tent. It’s twenty-five degrees, and I’m not a fool.”

“All right.”

She crawled in first. She put her bag hard against the left wall and let the dog settle in the middle. She heard him come in and lie down on the other side, careful of every inch. Then she turned on her side with her back to him and pulled the hood up.

Neither of them slept for a long time. She could hear it in his breathing.

“I know you told me yourself,” she said at last, to the tent wall. “I know what that cost you. I’m putting it in the book.”

“I didn’t tell you so you’d count it.”

“I’m counting it anyway. I count things.” She shut her eyes. “And you can count this. The next time you decide for me is the last time.”

“I heard you,” Anders said.

She lay with the dog’s spine warm against the backs of her knees. Behind her there was a man she had wanted since she was twenty-two, and tonight she could not turn over and face him.
***