I Choose

The moon was not up yet when Kaisa walked down to the dock on the point in her mother’s blue dress.

It had hung in the closet of her old room for seven years, inside a pillowcase, where her father had put it. She had driven to the south end that afternoon and taken it down. It still fitted, though it pulled a little across the shoulders, and she put that down to paddling. She wore wool stockings and her boots under it and the red-and-black shirt over it, because Thursday’s snow still lay blue in the shade of the pines.

Tansy went ahead of her along the boards. The lake was flat and the colour of pewter. Over the east ridge the sky had begun to pale where the moon would come.

The children had been home since Friday night. Pia Hautala had slept nineteen hours in her mother’s bed and woken up asking for toast. Kaisa had slept nearly as long in Cabin 3, and nobody had knocked on her door.

She heard his boots on the planks and knew them.

“You’ve left me alone for two days,” she said. “I know what that cost you. Thank you.”

“You said after.” Anders stopped beside her. He had on a clean white shirt under his jacket, and he had trimmed his beard. He looked at the blue hem showing under the wool. “That’s the dress.”

“It is. I thought it ought to see how the night comes out this time.”

He did not seem able to answer that. She turned to face him.

“I’ve two things to tell you, and they come in an order. I telephoned Naomi Whitcomb yesterday at noon and turned the job down. I did that before I’d settled what I would say to you, and I did it for my own reasons. I want to teach handlers, and I can do it here. My father is here. So is the only water I ever learned to read from somebody who loved me. She asked me whether there was a man in it. I said there was, and that he came fourth on the list.”

“Fourth,” Anders said gravely.

“She told me the handler from Missoula would do, and that she’d send him to me to be taught where to start.” Kaisa drew a breath. It was easier than she had expected. “That’s the first thing. The second is that I love you. I’ve been angry with you for most of a month, and I loved you the whole time. I expect I’ll manage both again before we’re old.”

He shut his eyes. When he opened them they were wet, and he let her see it.

“Kaisa, will you...”

“No.” She put her fingers against his mouth. “Keep it. I know you’ve had the words ready since you were twenty-six. The last time, I stood across that fire with my hands empty and waited to be asked, and I’ve come to think the waiting was half the trouble. Tonight I do the asking. You can stand in the ring and find out what it’s like.”

“And I answer as I choose.”

“As you choose. I’m not deciding it for you.”

He laughed then, low and surprised, against her fingers. Up the shore the iron began to ring, three strokes and a pause and three again. The first rim of the moon showed orange in the pines.

She took his left hand, the one with the short finger, and they walked up the road together.
***
The fire in the ring of lake stones was as tall as a man. The whole lake had come. Kaisa let go of Anders’s hand at the last bench and stopped there, behind it, in the place where an unsworn wolf stood.

Elsa Hautala sat at the end of that bench with Pia against her side. The girl wore a grey sweatshirt that said ELY SWIM, and she was eating a cardamom roll.

“I said I’d tell you the rest when she was in it,” Elsa said, without turning her head. “You lied to my face for three weeks. Then you sat bare in the snow and talked her back. I’ve weighed the one against the other, and it wasn’t close. Thank you.”

“Hi, Kaisa,” Pia said, with her mouth full.

“Hello, Pia.”

Stefan Zalar stood on the lodge side of the fire between Eino Saari and Tom Lund. He wore his good wool jacket. He had spent two nights in the ice house with Dagny’s stove, and he looked ten years older than the man who had taken her hand in both of his.

Anders stepped up to the stones.

“You all know what he did. He said it himself, at a fire on Ukko Island, with three children listening. Stefan, do you deny any of it?”

“No.”

“Will any wolf stand for him?”

Kaisa remembered that question, and the quiet after it. The quiet came again. Then a bench creaked, and her father got to his feet, and a hundred people drew breath at once.

“Sit easy,” Reino said. “I’m not standing for him. I’m standing to say one thing, since nobody said one for me. The winter my wife was dying he pulled my sets and sat by her bed so I could sleep. That’s true as well. Put it in the book beside the rest.”

He sat down.

Hilja Maki rose on her cane. “Then the pack will say it by voice. The name of Stefan Zalar is struck from the howl. Who says so?”

“Struck.”

It came from every bench at once, low and heavy, and it was hard to hear. Kaisa had no voice in it, and she was not sorry. Britta said it with her arm round Mikko. Urho Niskanen said it with his eyes shut.

“You’re off Vaara ground by moonset,” Anders said. “Jari will drive you to Ely. Your cabin and the green canoe are forfeit to the pack. With the forty thousand in Duluth they make up Greenstone’s sixty, and it goes back to them this week, every dollar, with a letter saying the option was never yours to sign.”

“Dagny has the passbook,” Stefan said. “It’s all there.”

He looked once toward the bench where Oskar sat, and at Mikko, and at the girl in the sweatshirt. His mouth opened. Whatever he had meant to say, he thought better of it. He walked out of the firelight between the two guides, and nobody watched him go.

“Now the ground,” Anders said.

He read them both offers and nothing else. Greenstone would pay nine point two million dollars at signing, for six drill pads on the east ridge and trucks on the logging grade the year round. The land trust would pay two point one million, and the pack would keep its land and could never mine it or sell it off in lots. The bank wanted three hundred and eighty thousand on the first of December. Then he sat down on the near bench with his hands on his knees and looked at nobody.

Hilja called for hands. She and Dagny Lund counted them twice, from opposite ends.

“Ninety-seven for the easement,” Hilja said. “Twenty-one for the lease. It is carried.”

Urho’s hand had been among the ninety-seven. He lowered it slowly, and then he heaved himself up.

“I’ve something to do,” he said, “and I’ll do it before I lose my nerve.”

He went up the steps of the council lodge. The door stood open and the lamps were lit, and from where she stood Kaisa could see the north wall. She saw the old man reach up with both arms and lift her father’s paddle off its pegs. On her first night she had promised herself that she would turn it round before she left. She found she did not mind being beaten to it.

Urho came down the steps carrying it upright, with the face of the blade turned out, so that the firelight ran along the notches. He stopped in front of Reino.

“Fifty-four,” he said. His voice shook. “I counted them coming down. My own brother is one of those. I called you a thief for seven years, and I called your girl thief’s blood to her face. I beg your pardon, Reino Rautio, in front of all of them. I haven’t the right to it.”

Reino stood and took the paddle. His hand closed on the worn place in the shaft, and Kaisa saw his throat move.

“Hm,” he said. “You owe my daughter a chair.”

“Oskar!” Urho roared, quite in his old voice.

The boy came out of the lodge at a trot with a straight-backed kitchen chair. Urho took it from him and set it down inside the ring, beside Reino’s place on the bench, and stood behind it with his hand on the rail.

Kaisa came round the benches. She did not sit.

“I’ll take it, Mr. Niskanen, and thank you. First I’d like to earn the bench.” She turned to Hilja. “I was hired from outside. I’d like to be sworn.”

“As what?”

“As tracker to Vaara Lake, with my father.”

“You know what sworn means,” Hilja said. “An alpha may lay a word on a sworn wolf.”

“I know. I know what one did to your alpha.”

“I have never laid one,” Anders said. He had risen. “I’ll put no word on any throat on this lake while I’m alpha. I’m saying it here so that a hundred of you can hold me to it.”

Kaisa looked at him across the fire, and then she laid her hand on the cedar beside her father’s.

“I swear to Vaara Lake,” she said. “I swear to its ground and its water, and to its people on two legs and on four. I’ll go out when I’m called. I won’t come in while one of ours is still out.”

“Who stands for her?” Hilja asked.

Britta was up before the words were finished, and Jari with her. Elsa stood, pulling Pia up by the hand. Annika Lund stood, and Eino Saari, and Ivar Pucel with his pipe. Then the benches scraped all round the ring, and there was nobody sitting but the smallest children. Her father looked slowly round at their faces, every one of them, and took his time.

“That paddle’s full,” he said to her quietly. “You’ll want your own.”

On the near side of the fire Anders had gone perfectly still.

“Vaara Lake has two trackers,” said Hilja. “Sit down, all of you. It is the Hunter’s Moon. Is there an asking?”

The moon had cleared the pines and gone white. Kaisa unbuttoned the wool shirt and put it in her father’s free hand. He held it as he would have held a wet dog. She walked into the middle of the ring in her mother’s blue dress, and the heat of the fire was on her bare forearms.

She had once stood here with every feeling she owned on her face. She let them see it again.

“Seven years ago I waited to be asked,” she said. “I’m finished with waiting. This man kept the truth from me, and then he told it to me, and then he told it to all of you. He held a canoe still in a crosswind for a month and went where I pointed. He’s the best I ever worked beside. I choose him.”

Anders came round the fire. He stopped an arm’s length from her, as he had on every hard day of that month.

“I choose her,” he said, and his voice broke on it.

The pack howled. It started with Britta and went round the benches and out over the water, and somewhere in it a boy’s voice cracked upward into a squeak. Kaisa closed the last arm’s length herself.
***
Tansy had gone home with Mikko, who had asked very politely. Anders’s cabin was warm and smelled of cedar, and the moon lay across the floor from the lake window as bright as a lamp.

She stood with her back to his door.

“Before anything else. There’s a paddle in the rafters of your shop with seven years of dust on it. You told me it was an order that nobody collected. Whose is it?”

“Yours. Since September 2019.” He said it at once, as though he had been waiting a long time to be asked. “I sawed it out in the week after the thirteenth. It’s the tracker’s pattern, cut to your height. I meant to put it in your hands the morning after the Asking. Afterward I couldn’t finish it, and I couldn’t burn it.”

She had guessed, somewhere under her thinking, when her father said she would want her own. Hearing it was different. Her eyes stung.

“Then finish it.”

“I’ll start tomorrow.”

“You’ll start tomorrow afternoon.” She held out her hands. “Come here. I’m promising things tonight.”

“All of them?”

“All of them. I’m staying, and I’m yours, and you’re mine. Do you want that?”

“Yes. I’ve never wanted anything else.”

The dress had eleven small buttons down the front, and her mother had made the buttonholes tight. He knelt to start at the lowest and worked upward, and the short finger was as deft as the others. She watched the top of his dark head in the moonlight and put her hands in his hair. When the last button gave he opened the dress and laid his cheek against her stomach, and stayed there, breathing.

“You’re shaking,” she said.

“I know. Give me a minute.”

She gave it to him. Then she drew him up and undid his white shirt, and they finished undressing each other without hurry, with a good deal of looking. There was no lamp. He carried her the six steps to the bed, which she permitted because it was that kind of night.

They had been solemn in the rain and they had laughed in her bunk. This was neither. It was slow and wide awake, and they talked through it in low voices. He told her what he had thought the first time he saw her read a shore. She told him what his hands looked like bending cedar, and he showed her what else they knew. His mouth moved over her breasts and the inside of her wrist and the hollow of her hip. She learned the long muscles of his back with her palms and felt them gather when she drew him down. When he came into her she said yes aloud, though he had not asked, and he said her name as if it were an answer.

They moved together for a long time. The moon climbed the wall. The brightness under her breastbone grew until she could hardly tell it from her own pulse, and she knew what it was reaching for. She took his face between her hands and held him still.

“I want your mark on me,” she said. “And I want to put mine on you. Will you have it?”

“Yes.” His breath shook. “Will you take mine?”

“Yes. Here.” She turned her head on the pillow and bared the place where her neck met her shoulder. “Now, Anders.”

Three weeks ago his mouth had come down on that spot and lifted away. This time it stayed. She felt his lips, and then his teeth, and one hot clean pain that made her cry out and hold him harder. Under the pain the bond opened like a door. For a moment she could feel his heart as plainly as her own, and the whole weight of what he felt for her, and she had not known it was so much.

“Your turn,” he said hoarsely, and bent his head to give her his neck.

She set her mouth where the big muscle of his shoulder began and bit down. He shuddered through his whole length and said “Yes” again, into her hair. She tasted salt and iron. Then his hips drove against hers, and it broke over both of them together. For a while after that she had no thoughts in her head.

Afterward he fetched warm water from the kettle and a clean cloth, and he washed the mark on her neck as carefully as he did everything. She washed his. They were small, neat wounds, already closing, and they matched.

“Does it hurt?” he asked.

“It aches. I like it.”

He lay down and gathered her against him, and she slept with her nose under his jaw.

She woke when the window was going grey. The bed beside her was warm and empty. A long way off a truck was climbing the lake road toward the fork, and she listened until the sound was gone. The moon would be on the western trees.

She did not sit up to look for him. She had no need to. He was at the end of the dock, facing west, with his hands in his jacket pockets, seeing his own sentence kept. She knew it to the board he stood on. A minute later she knew that he had turned, and how far up the path he had come, and when his hand was on the latch.

For seven years the thing in her chest had been a pull toward something lost. It had changed in the night. It felt now like a shore she had landed on a thousand times, one she could have found in the dark with her eyes shut.

The door opened quietly.

“Forty steps,” she said, without lifting her head. “You stopped once, at the woodpile.”

“I brought an armful in,” said Anders. “Move over.”
***