Three to Two

The frost on Stefan Zalar’s green canoe had not been broken in four mornings.

Anders had the last watch on Friday night. He lay in the alders south of the rack, on two legs and downwind, with a wool blanket under him and his cap pulled over his ears. He had watched that hull go from black to grey to white as the cold came down on it. At a quarter past six a lamp came on in Stefan’s kitchen. At half past, Stefan came out on his step in his cardigan, looked at the sky, and went back in to his breakfast.

It had been the same on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Jari took the evenings and Britta took the middle of the night. Kaisa and Anders split the hours before dawn, and each of them had lain in the leaves and watched a careful man sleep.

He walked back along the shore with his knees aching. Kaisa was on the step of Cabin 3 with two cups and the dog.

“Nothing,” he said.

“I know. I’d have heard you running.” She gave him a cup. “Sit down. You look terrible.”

He sat. The coffee was hot and strong, and her shoulder was against his arm. Since Monday night she had let it rest there whenever they sat, and he had not got used to it.

“I had the weather radio on at five,” he said. “There’s an Arctic front coming down out of Manitoba. They’re calling it for Thursday the twenty-second. Snow, wind, and a low of nineteen.”

She did not say anything for a moment. He watched her do the sum he had done.

“Pia’s been out forty-two nights,” she said. “Mikko’s had five, and he’s been a wolf three weeks. Oskar needs a fire to sit by, and somebody has to light it for him. If it goes to nineteen on bare rock with snow blowing, he won’t keep them all alive on perch.”

“No.”

“Then he has to go to them before Thursday. He knows it better than we do. He’s had the same radio on.” She turned her cup in her hands. “So why is that boat dry?”

“He’s careful.”

“He’s waiting. I’ve thought about nothing else since Wednesday, and I think he’s waiting for me. Since I stood up over that glove he’s known how much I see. He won’t put a paddle in the water while I’m on this lake.” She looked at the frost on the dock. “My thirty days are up tomorrow.”

“Hilja means to put thirty more to the council tomorrow night. I’ll pay it myself if the treasury won’t.”

“I’d stay for nothing. You know that. I only want a paper that says I’m allowed to.” She bumped his arm with her shoulder. “Go to bed. Jari has the evening and Britta has the night. You and I are off until tomorrow, and I intend to sleep for ten hours.”

“Is that an order?”

“It’s my search. Go on.”

He went. He slept until two, and he planked the stern of the Minneapolis hull until dark. At eight her lamp went out. At nine Tom Lund knocked on the shop door.

“Council,” Tom said. He would not quite look at him. “Mr. Zalar called it. They want you now.”

“Does the tracker come?”

“Mrs. Maki asked that. They said it’s about her contract, so she’s a party and can’t sit.” Tom shifted his feet. “I’m sorry, Alpha. I’m only carrying it.”
***
All five of them were on the far bench, and the fire in the ring had been lit for some time. Stefan was the one standing. He had the treasury ledger under his arm, closed, and he looked like a man who had not wanted to come.

“Sit down, Anders,” Hilja said. Her mouth was a thin line. “I voted against sitting at all without her, and I lost that one too. You may as well hear the rest.”

He sat on the near bench with his elbows on his knees. Above the map the paddle hung with its blade to the wall.

“I’ll be quick, because I hate it,” Stefan said. “Five days ago a third child went. I’ve lain awake every night since, and I’ve made myself look at things I didn’t want to look at. I’m going to say them once, in here, among the six of us.”

“Say them.”

“First. Kaisa told us herself that those pups were taught to hide. She called it what it is. Rock, water, islands, the wind at your back. Those are tracker’s tricks, and there are two people on this lake who were raised in them from the cradle.”

“You run the hiding game yourself,” Anders said. “Reino taught you. He taught me.”

“He did, and I’ve thought of that. I’ve thought of every one of us.” Stefan nodded, sadly. “Second. On Tuesday I went to every household and asked where each wolf had been the night before. I asked Reino from my boat, off his dock. He told me straight, as he always does. He was on the water from ten o’clock until past one, setting whitefish nets off the creek mouth. He was alone and nobody saw him. That is the night Mikko went, and those are the hours.”

“He nets whitefish every October. So did his father.”

“He does. I’m telling you where he was.”

“And the glove?” Anders kept his voice level. “On the fifth you stood in this room and said you couldn’t fault her work.”

“I can’t fault it now. That glove was planted. She proved it, and I was glad.” Stefan put the ledger down on the bench. “But I’ve asked myself since who gained by it. It was so clumsy that a tracker took it apart in ten minutes in front of forty people. After that morning nobody on Vaara Lake could say Reino Rautio’s name without shame. Urho couldn’t, and nor could I. A week later Britta’s boy walked out of his window.” He spread his hands. “I don’t say it’s so. I say a clever man who wanted to be left alone could not have done himself a better turn.”

Urho made a sound in his throat. He was grey in the face. His big hands lay open on his knees, and he was staring at them.

“Third,” Stefan said gently, “and this is the treasurer talking. We have paid six hundred dollars a day for four weeks. In the first week she found a bed on Kettle Island. Read her board since. Sumu, nothing found. Hirvi, nothing found. Vaara, nothing found. Every trail she touches goes cold, and the children move the night before she comes. I’ve been run-master for thirty years and I never saw pups do that without a grown wolf to warn them.”

Anders felt it land. She had written those lines to starve one reader, and he had put his name under them and promised to hold to the lie. Stefan had read every word and was handing them back to him.

He could end it in one sentence. He could say green canoe. But the flake was in her logbook, and the paper was in a lawyer’s drawer in Duluth. Three children were on a rock somewhere, and only this man knew the way to them. If he spoke now, Stefan would be shocked and wounded and would never touch a paddle again.

“She found two of your grandson’s camps before any of you found one,” he said to Urho. It was as near as he could go. “I’d stake my place on her.”

“You may have to,” Ivar Pucel said around his pipe.

“What is it you want, Stefan?” Hilja asked.

“I want Reino where we can see him. That’s all. Put him in the ice house, warm and fed, with two guides at the door. If the children are still moved after that, I’ll go down on my knees to him. And I want the contract to end tomorrow, as it’s written, and the tracker off our ground. We’ve hunted our own for a thousand years. We can do it for a week.”

“There’s snow coming Thursday,” Urho said hoarsely. He did not lift his head. “Nineteen degrees. The boy’s got no coat but his own. I was wrong about that glove and I said so. I can’t sit on my hands being sorry while he freezes. If there’s one chance in ten it’s Rautio, I want him under a lock.”

“It is a shameful thing to do to a man twice,” Dagny Lund said. She had not picked up her knitting.

“Then vote it down,” said Stefan.

Hilja put it. Stefan’s hand went up, and Urho’s, and after a moment Ivar’s. Hilja and Dagny sat with their hands in their laps.

“Three to two,” Hilja said. Her voice was dry as paper. “Dagny, see that he has a stove and blankets. I won’t have him cold.”

“There’s the other half,” Ivar said. “The alpha ends it. At the morning fire, in front of the pack, so there’s no doubt who’s with us. She goes by sundown.”

“And if I won’t?”

“Then three seats of five call the vote of the howl at that same fire, and we don’t wait for the moon,” Urho said. He looked up at last. His eyes were red. “I’ll stand up myself. I’d sooner not. I’ve known you since you were born.”

“I’ve counted it,” Stefan said quietly. “I told you I would always count it for you honestly. With three children gone you would lose, Anders. I’d be standing where you sit by noon, and God knows I don’t want it.”

“And the girl would still go,” said Ivar. “She’s unsworn. The law on that’s older than this lodge. A pack may drive an unsworn wolf off its ground, by force, if she won’t walk. It takes no vote.”

“Is that so?” Anders asked Hilja.

“It is the law,” Hilja said. “I’ve never wished more that it wasn’t.”

He had seen it done once. He had been nine. A drifter from the Gunflint side had been told to leave and had laughed, and forty wolves had gone into the trees after him at dusk. The man had left the lake in the bed of a pickup with a tarp over him. He had lived, people said.

“You’ll have my answer at the fire,” Anders said, and got up.
***
They brought Reino up the lake road a little before eleven. Anders was waiting at the top of the ice-house path when the truck stopped.

Eino Saari got out first, and then Tom, and then the old man. Nobody had a hand on him. He carried a blanket roll under one arm and a thermos in the other, and he walked between the two guides as he might have walked to his own woodshed.

“They let me bank my stove,” he said, when he saw Anders. “Your father didn’t.”

“Reino. I voted against nothing. I haven’t a vote in there.”

“I know how it’s built. I waited outside that door for thirty-one years.” He stopped on the path. In the light of Eino’s lantern his face was all bone. “Does my daughter know?”

“She’s asleep.”

“Then wake her. She’ll want to hear it from somebody who isn’t Urho.”

“I’ll tell her.”

Reino looked at him a moment longer. Then he grunted and went on down the path. Eino opened the ice-house door, and there was a glow inside where Dagny had already had a stove lit. The door shut. The hasp went over.

The alders moved, and Jari came out of them with leaves on his coat.

“I saw the truck,” he said, low. “What in God’s name?”

Anders told him in six sentences. Jari swore under his breath, steadily, for some time.

“Britta comes on at one,” he said. “I’ll tell her. Do you want me to knock on Cabin 3 on my way?”

“No. It’s mine to do.”

“All right.” Jari looked toward the dark cabin below the path, where the green hull lay on its rack. “He’s home. His lamp came on ten minutes ago. He’s making tea.”
***
It was past midnight when Anders stood on her step.

Half a moon was going down behind the west shore, and the cold had an edge on it. Her window was black. He raised his hand to the planks.

He knew exactly what would happen if he knocked. She would sit up and light the lamp, and he would tell her. She would listen to all of it with the pencil in her hand. Then she would say that she was not going anywhere. She would say her father was in a log box, and three children were north of her, and she had never once left a search because somebody shouted. She would walk up to that fire in the morning in her green wool and stand there, unsworn, with a yellow dog.

Then Urho would stand up. By noon Stefan would be alpha, and he would lay a hand on three sworn throats and say a few words. Anders, Britta and Jari would never speak his name again. She was the only one he could not bind. He would have no use for her on the lake after that, and the old law would give him forty wolves and the dusk.

Anders had been trying to think round that tarp in the pickup for three hours, and he could not.

There was another way. He could say the words the council wanted. She would be in Ely by afternoon, nineteen miles outside any law of theirs. Stefan would see the tracker gone and her father locked up and the alpha brought to heel, and he had a front coming on Thursday. He would put the green canoe in the water within a night or two. Anders would be behind it. Following a lantern across a lake was not reading a shore. He would have the children home, and then he would drive to Ely and tell her everything.

And she would have to be struck by it. Stefan had been reading faces at that fire for forty years. If she walked up there knowing, he would see that she knew.

He heard all of it in his own head, and he recognised it. It had the same voice as the one on the Fernberg Road, and in a parking lot in Whitefish. At Burnt Point he had told her he was finished with that voice. She had answered him from inside her sleeping bag, with her back turned. The next time you decide for me is the last time.

This was different, he told himself. Those other times he had been guarding her happiness. Tonight it was her skin.

Inside the cabin a tail thumped twice on the rug. The dog knew who was on the step. If he stood there another minute, she would whine, and Kaisa would wake, and it would be out of his hands.

He lowered his arm and walked the forty yards back.

In the shop he lit one lamp. The council had ordered her paid from the treasury, and he would not have Stefan’s fingers on a dollar of it. He had brought the season’s float from the office safe. He took the tin from under his bench, with the deposit on the Minneapolis hull in it and what he had put by for the winter. He wrote on a lumber receipt what he owed the lodge. Then he counted it out on the workbench. Stefan had paid her forty-two hundred on the twenty-fifth of September. That left thirteen thousand eight hundred, and he made it up in hundreds and fifties and put a rubber band round it.

He did not look up into the rafters over the steam box.

When he blew out the lamp her window was still dark. She was asleep forty yards away, with ten hours owed to her, and she believed he would be at the dock in the morning.
***