Grey on the Back

At twenty-five to three on the morning of the thirteenth of October, Kaisa knelt on the Tormalas’ porch and opened a bag under her dog’s nose.

Seven years ago this morning she had woken up happy. She let herself think that once, and then she put it away, because there was a pillowcase in the bag that was still faintly warm.

She had done the first things in order. She had dressed in ninety seconds and put the harness on Tansy. On the path she had asked Anders for the one thing she could not do herself.

“I need every wolf on this lake indoors and on two legs until the dog has run. Jari’s out there now on four feet, and by three there’ll be forty of them. They’ll go straight over the top of it. I can’t give that order.”

“I can,” he had said, and he had gone up the shore road at a run. She had heard his voice outside the lodge a minute later. He did not raise it. Lamps had come on from cabin to cabin, and no one had come down to the water.

Britta had stood in the door of her son’s room and let Kaisa go in alone. It was a small room with a model canoe on the shelf. The covers were thrown back, and the wool blanket was gone from the bed. The window stood open on the lake side, with the catch undone from inside and a scuff of dirt on the sill where a foot had gone over. His boots were by the kitchen door, and his jacket was on its hook.

It was all as Elsa Hautala had described her daughter’s room, twenty-three days ago, at a kitchen table.

“Four hours at the outside,” Kaisa said now, to the three people on the porch. “Britta saw him at half past ten. I have never once been given a trail this fresh. Stay behind me, walk where I walk, and don’t talk to the dog.”

Jari Tormala had come in off the shore when Anders called. He was a lean brown-haired man of thirty-eight in trousers and unlaced boots, with spruce needles still in his hair. He had his arm round his wife. Britta had put on boots and nothing else over the nightgown and coat. Anders stood a pace behind them with a lantern.

“Find him,” Kaisa said.

Tansy hardly needed the bag. She had known that boy for three weeks and had slept under his arm on the hall floor. She dropped her nose, swung once across the boards, and went down the steps and round the corner of the house. Under the open window she checked for half a breath. Then she leaned into the harness so hard that the line burned through Kaisa’s glove.

There was no casting in it and no slow sweep of the tail. The dog ran with her head low and her bell going, and Kaisa ran behind her with the headlamp jolting. It was the difference between reading an old letter and hearing somebody speak. The trail went down the slope from the house, across the shore road, and along the back of the gear sheds with their green doors. It was two hundred yards, as straight as a string. It never once turned toward the trees.

It came out at the lodge’s own dock.

The guest dock was stacked on the bank where she and Britta had put it. The towboat dock was left in until freeze-up, and both boats lay at it with frost on their covers. Tansy ran to the foot of it and then swung left, off the planks, onto the ground beside it. She went to the edge of the water and stopped. She cast ten feet each way, came back, and whined at the black lake.

“Stop there,” Kaisa said, and put her arm out. “Nobody past me. Anders, bring the lantern low.”

Beside the dock there was a strip of sand where the towboats were hauled out each November. It was damp and fine and no wider than a kitchen floor. She crouched at the edge of it with the headlamp turned down.

The prints were as clean as type.

There were two lines of them, side by side, crossing the sand to the rock ledge at the waterline. One line was bare feet, long and narrow, with the toes printed sharp. The other was a man’s boot with a rubber bottom and a chain tread, size ten or eleven, worn down on the outer heel. Half the men on the lake owned that boot.

“Tell me that’s not his,” Britta said.

“It’s his. Look at the second toe, longer than the first. He gets it from you.” Kaisa kept her voice even. “I’m going to read this aloud, and I need you to hear all of it. The boots came down first and stood here. The heels are deep, so he waited. Then the bare feet came from the sheds and walked straight up to the boots. They stopped a foot off, toes pointing at him. After that the two of them crossed the sand together.”

She moved the light along.

“The stride’s even. The boy’s heel comes down first every time. A child being pulled digs in with his toes, and a frightened one goes up on the balls of his feet. This is a walk. And here,” she touched the air over one print, “he got half a step ahead and turned to wait. He was in a hurry to get where they were going.”

“He went with him,” Jari said. It came out cracked.

“He went with somebody he knew, in the dark, wrapped in his own blanket. He went as he’d go fishing with an uncle.” She thought of the boy’s scowl in the hall. She said I’d find out when I was old enough. “On the first day I met him he told me Pia had a secret she wouldn’t share. I think last night somebody told him he was old enough.”

Britta made a sound and put her fist against her mouth.

Kaisa stepped from the sand to the ledge. It was a low table of grey rock that ran along beside the dock and sloped into the water. She went down on her knees with her cheek near the stone, as she had done at the ice house on her second morning, and she found it almost at once.

It was a scrape, running straight up from the waterline. This one was two feet long and deeper than the first, with a bright scar at the top where something had struck a knob of the ledge and jumped. The rock dust in it was still pale and loose. Green was smeared all along it. Where the knob had caught, a flake had come away whole. It was as big as her thumbnail.

She photographed it with her pencil for scale. Then she took the tweezers from her vest, lifted the flake, and turned it over in the beam of the headlamp.

The face of it was deep glossy green. The back was a flat chalky grey, with a faint weave pressed into it like the print of cloth.

“Anders,” she said. “Come and look at the back of this.”

He crouched beside her with the lantern. He looked at it for perhaps two seconds. She watched the understanding come into his face, and then the pain behind it.

“That’s filler,” he said.

“Tell me what filler is.”

“It’s what goes on canvas before the paint. Silica and oil and white lead, trowelled into the weave and left a month to cure. It dries grey, and it keeps the cloth pattern on the underside.” His voice had gone very quiet. “You don’t put filler on a shed door or an oar or a towboat. It only goes on a canvas canoe. The flake you found at the ice house came off the top coat, and I told you it could be anything. This one came off down to the cloth. He hit this rock hard, in the dark, with weight in the bow.”

“How many canvas canoes are there on Vaara?”

“Three.” He said it to the rock. “Mine is red, and it’s been on the rack below your cabin since Sunday night. Britta’s is blue.”

“Mine hasn’t been wet since Labor Day,” Britta said. “It’s behind the kitchen with a tarp on it.”

“And Stefan’s,” Anders said. “Stefan’s is green. I put a new canvas on it in the spring of 2023. I filled it myself and painted it out of the lodge can, because he wanted it to match the sheds.”

Nobody spoke. The water lapped at the ledge. Kaisa sealed the flake in a bag and wrote the label by headlamp, and her hand was quite steady. She had kept two pages of her logbook apart for eight days. One held five keys, and the other held a ledger with nothing in it. She did not need to open the book to see them close up together.

“Where does he keep it?” she asked.

“On the rack below his cabin. The last house south, before the ice-house path.”

“Then we go and look at it. Quietly, along the shore, and without the lantern. Where is he now?”

Anders looked up the bank. Every window of the lodge hall was lit.

“He was there when I gave the order. He had the urn on.”
***
Stefan Zalar’s cabin was dark. His rack stood on the shore below it, two cedar posts and two crossbars, with the canoe lying on it keel up.

Kaisa turned the headlamp to its lowest and held her hand half over it.

It had not rained in ten days. On her way past the kitchen she had looked at Britta’s blue canoe, and it was dull and dry under its tarp. The gunwales of this one were hung with drops. Water stood in beads all along the keel and had run in clean tracks down the green sides. Under each end of the hull the dry pine needles were dark in a patch the size of a plate. A strand of lake weed was caught on the brass at the bow.

She touched one bead with her knuckle. It was just beginning to stiffen with ice.

Anders ran his hand along the keel toward the stem and stopped. She brought the light. There was a scar there as long as her finger, where the green was gone and the grey showed through. In the middle of the grey was a thread of bare canvas.

“He fishes at night,” Jari said. He sounded like a man arguing with himself. “He always has. He’s out half the nights there are. Nobody’s looked twice at that boat being wet in twenty years.”

“I know,” Kaisa said. “It’s why he could use it.”

“Lamp oil,” Anders said. He had not taken his hand off the hull. “He takes a lantern out with him. Wet wool, and fish, and lamp oil. I had my nose on that log on Burnt Point for a quarter of an hour, and I wouldn’t let it be him.”

“You were right not to guess then. It isn’t a guess now.”

Britta had stood without moving since they reached the rack. Now she turned, all at once, and started up the shore toward the lighted windows.

Kaisa got in front of her. She was six inches shorter and forty pounds lighter, and she took hold of both of Britta’s forearms and set her feet.

“No.”

“Get out of my way.”

“No. Listen to me first, and then knock me down if you still want to.”

“He taught my son to cross a creek.” Britta’s voice was low and shaking. “He’s had his nose in that child’s ear every evening for two weeks. He stood in my kitchen yesterday morning and asked how the boy was sleeping. I’ll have his throat out on the hall floor. Let go of me.”

“What happens after that?”

“I don’t care what happens after that.”

“You do, because Mikko’s in it.” Kaisa held on. “What have we got? A flake of paint and a wet boat that’s wet half the nights of the year. You walk in there and say it to his face, and he’s sorry, and he’s shocked, and he’s kind about it. He’s kind in front of forty people who’ve known him all their lives. Half of them take his side before he’s finished the sentence. And from that minute he’s watched. He can’t put that canoe in the water again.”

“Good.”

“It isn’t good. Britta, he’s the only grown wolf alive who knows where they are. I’ve been three weeks behind those children with a dog and the best paddler on the lake, and I’ve found nothing but cold beds. Up there are six miles of water and more islands than your brother can count. A girl out there has stopped eating cooked food, and Oskar’s keeping warm at fires another person lights for him. And tonight there’s a twelve-year-old with them who’s been a wolf for seventeen days.” She said it straight into Britta’s face. “If Stefan never goes back, nobody brings them fish or matches. Nobody tells them to move, or to come home. In twelve nights the moon comes up on Pia Hautala. So there are three of them out there who can starve or go under, and one of the three is yours.”

Britta’s arms were rigid under her hands. Her breath smoked.

“So what do we do?” Jari said hoarsely.

“He’ll go back. He has to. He fed them on Kettle Island and he lit a fire for Oskar a week ago, and now he’s got a new one out there who doesn’t know the rules. The next time that canoe leaves this rack, somebody’s behind it. That’s how I find them. I follow the one person who doesn’t have to look.”

“And until then I pour his coffee,” Britta said.

“Until then you take the coffee he pours for you, and it’s the hardest thing anyone’s asked of you. I know more than my board says, and tonight you and Jari will hear all of it, at the point, with the door shut. This morning I need him to believe he’s got away with it.”

Britta looked over Kaisa’s head at her brother.

“He’s your second,” she said. “That’s my son. Say something.”

Anders had taken his hand from the hull at last. In the faint light his face was grey and set. Kaisa thought of the wolf with the silver muzzle who had stood below the stones at every creek, for him too.

“It’s her search,” he said. “I said that in front of the council on the night she came. I’ve sat behind her for three weeks and watched what she does with it. If I take it off her now because it’s Mikko, I’m doing what Dad did. I’d be settling it for everyone in an hour because I couldn’t stand to wait.” He looked at Kaisa. “It’s your call. Whatever you say, I’ll stand on it.”

“Then we follow him,” Kaisa said.

For a long moment Britta did not move. Then the stiffness went out of her arms, and she bent her head. Kaisa let go.

“If you’re wrong,” Britta said.

“If I’m wrong it’s mine, and you can have my throat instead.”

“I’d take it.” She wiped her face with the cuff of Jari’s coat, hard. “Give me a minute. I can’t go in looking like this. He’ll know.”

“You look like a woman whose child is gone. That’s all he’ll expect to see.”
***
The hall was full and too warm. Forty people stood about in coats over their nightclothes. They had been ordered indoors by their alpha, and they had obeyed him and did not like it. Eino Saari was by the fire with Tom Lund. Annika Lund sat on a bench with her bare feet tucked up. Elsa Hautala was there in her scrubs, standing very straight under the board.

Stefan Zalar was at the urn.

He wore a grey cardigan and his slippers. He was filling paper cups and handing them along the line, with a word for each person. His silver hair was dry, and his square face was creased with worry. He might have been anyone’s uncle at a funeral supper. Kaisa looked at his hands once and then made herself stop looking.

She went to the board. The pen was where she had left it.

TUE 13 OCT. Mikko Tormala, 12. Left his room by the window between 10:30 p.m. and 2 a.m. Trail (dog, 2:35 a.m.) runs from house to towboat dock and ENDS AT WATER. Shore teams out at first light: put your names below.

She wrote nothing about bare feet beside a pair of boots. She wrote nothing about the colour green.

“Can we go now?” someone called. “Alpha?”

“At first light,” Anders said from the door. “The dog’s had her run. I want you in pairs, and I want every name on that board first.”

The room began to move toward the pen. Stefan put down the cup he was holding and came through the crowd, slowly, saying “Excuse me, Tom,” and “Mind your feet, Annika.” He stopped in front of Britta.

She was standing by the kitchen door with Jari at her back. Her fists were inside the sleeves of the canvas coat, where no one could see them.

“Britta,” Stefan said, in his kind low voice. He laid his broad hand on her shoulder. “My dear girl. I’ve had that boy at my heels for two weeks, and there isn’t a better pup on this lake. We’ll find him. I promise you that. We’ll find all three of them.”

Kaisa capped her pen and watched his hand. Britta lifted her eyes to his face.

“I know you will, Stefan,” she said.
***