Where To

The ice went out of Vaara Lake on the twenty-ninth of April. Anders wrote it in his log. It was six days later than last year, with a south wind and a noise like furniture being moved.

Nine days after that, at five on a Saturday morning, he took the paddle down from the pegs over his bench.

It had taken him the winter. He could have done it in a week, and he had not wanted to. He had brought the blank down from the rafters on the afternoon of the twenty-sixth of October and wiped seven years of dust off it with a rag. Then he had worked it a little at a time, in the evenings, between the Minneapolis hull and the one after it. He took the shaft down with a spokeshave until it was oval and fitted a hand smaller than his own. He carved the grip from memory, because he knew by then exactly how her fingers closed. He thinned the blade until it flexed a certain amount under his weight and no more, and he left the edge wide and flat, in the old way, to take a knife.

He had put no varnish on it. A tracker’s paddle was finished with oil, so that the wood would darken with the hand that used it. He had rubbed in nine coats, a week apart. It was the colour of honey now and would be the colour of tea in thirty years.

For the last week it had not been in his shop at all. He turned it to the lamp and looked at the reason.

There were three notches on the edge of the blade, near the throat. They were small and deep and perfectly square, and each had been cut with a single knife.

He put out the lamp and went to find her.

He did not have to wonder where. She had slid out of their bed at half past four, and since then she had been forty yards to the west, sitting still. He had felt her the whole time, steadily, like his own pulse.

There was a board over the door of Cabin 3. Mikko had lettered it in March with a ruler and great suffering, in black, because Kaisa had said she had seen enough green paint to last her. It read FAR SHORE K9. Smoke was coming from the stovepipe.

Anders leaned the paddle against the outside wall, where the eave hid it, and knocked.

“It’s open. Nothing here is locked.”

The bunk was gone. In its place stood a long table he had built her out of leftover ash, and on the table lay six folders, six coiled long lines, and a tin of dried liver. The map on the wall was the old pencilled one, cleaned up and mounted. She had cut the south shore of Vaara into training sectors and lettered them. Tansy lay under the table with her chin on a harness.

Kaisa sat with her boots hooked on the chair rung and a pencil behind her ear. She wore the red-and-black shirt, with the collar open and her braid over one shoulder.

“Read me this and tell me if it’s too hard for a Monday,” she said. “Seven o’clock, the bottom of the creek behind the ice house, before the air turns. They don’t touch a dog until they’ve each told me which way the cold is running and how they know.”

“Who’s in the creek?”

“Mikko. He’s been promised ten dollars a day to lie under things. He’d have paid me.”

“It isn’t too hard. You did worse to me on my first morning.”

“You were a special case.” She pushed a folder across. “It’s three from the St. Louis County squad and three from Lake County. Two shepherds, three Labs, and something the sheriff in Two Harbors describes as a hound. They sleep in the two south cabins. Britta’s feeding them.”

One of those cabins had been Stefan Zalar’s. The pack had kept it, since the easement allowed no selling of roofs, and the treasury had made up the difference. The green canoe had gone to a collector in Duluth before Christmas. On the thirtieth of November, Carol Bergstrom had driven out with her own lunch and a folder, and Anders had signed his name eleven times at the hall table. The Shagawa State Bank had its three hundred and eighty thousand dollars the next day. Glenn Garrity had written a short, decent letter to say that Greenstone was withdrawing from the district, and he had enclosed a receipt for sixty thousand. Dagny Lund kept the ledger now, in a drawer without a lock, and Anders read it on the first of every month.

Nobody had heard from Stefan. Jari had left him at the motel on Sheridan Street with one suitcase. Nobody on the lake asked after him. Now and then Reino went quiet over his coffee, and Anders did not ask what he was thinking about.

“Will you keep to your feet all week?” Kaisa asked. “They’re human, every one of them.”

“The pack’s kept to its feet for paying guests every summer since my grandfather. You’re a paying guest who brings six more.” He picked a postcard off the table. It showed a ski lift, and on the back, in a square hand, it said: Missoula man still starts at the top. Sending him in August. Is the desk taken? N.W.

“It’s taken,” Kaisa said. “I’m sitting at it.” She capped her pencil and looked at him properly. “You’ve been up since five, and you’ve got a face like a boy with a frog in his pocket. What is it?”

“Come down to the dock when you’ve done. Bring the dog.”

“Now you’re giving orders.”

“I’m asking. I’ve learned the difference.”

“You have,” she said, and smiled, and went back to her folder. “Twenty minutes. Go and annoy your sister.”
***
His sister was in the lake to her thighs, in chest waders, with a wrench as long as her forearm.

Five sections of the guest dock were already out on their pipe legs. Jari stood in the shallows steadying the sixth and looking patient.

“Don’t just stand there in dry boots,” Britta said. “No, do. You’ll only put it in crooked. I want to tell you about the twenty-sixth of June.”

“What happens on the twenty-sixth of June?”

“It’s Midsummer, and a Saturday, and your wedding supper. I’ve set it. Tables down the whole of this dock and up the grass, the fire on the shore, and Hilja to say the words at sunset. I’ve ordered forty pounds of whitefish from Reino. Kaisa’s are without onions. You’ll wear the white shirt.”

“Have you told Kaisa?”

“I told her in March. She said to ask what you thought.” Britta tightened a bolt with one savage turn. “So I’m asking. What do you think?”

“I think it’s a good day for it.”

“There. That’s you asked.” She straightened and pushed a strand of black hair off her face with her wrist. Her eyes went past him down the shore, and her voice dropped a little. “Look at that old man. Seven years he had nobody on his porch.”

Reino Rautio stood on the ledge beside the towboat dock with five children in a row in front of him. His canoe was drawn up on the sand, since he paddled the three miles every Saturday now. He had the canvas pack on his back and the long cuffed glove on his left hand, with an inch of faded blue stitching above the wrist. The council storeroom had been emptied on the first of November. The six pegs by his door were full.

Anders walked down the bank and stopped where he would not be in the way.

“West shore,” Reino was saying. “You’ve come over the ridge with a man and a pack of hounds a mile behind you. It’s dark, and there’s a moon in the south. Where do you go into the water? Oskar.”

“The gravel,” Oskar said. “It’s quickest.”

“It’s quickest for the hounds too. Mikko.”

“The ledge by the white rock?”

“You’ve a white rock at your back and a moon in front, and you’re as black as a stove. You’d be seen from here. Pia.”

Pia Hautala had grown two inches since October, and there was flesh on her again. She stood with her arms folded and looked at the far shore for a good while. Reino let her.

“The shelf south of the gravel,” she said. “There’s a light band out front, so it’s shallow a long way and a boat can’t follow me in. The cedars hang over it, so the moon doesn’t get me. I wade north in the shade till the creek, because the creek’s cold and the air’s going down it and out onto the lake, and it takes my smell out with it. Then I swim.” She frowned. “There aren’t any gulls on the flat rock, though. Something’s denned there. I’d go round that.”

“What’s denned there?”

“I don’t know. Mink?”

“Otter, this year.” Reino turned his head and found Anders with one grey eye. “It took this one’s wife eighteen years to see the birds. It took this one thirty-three, and he still can’t.”

“I can’t,” Anders agreed.

“He can paddle,” said Mikko loyally.

“He can paddle. So you’d better each learn both, since you won’t always have the two of them in one boat.” Reino looked back at the girl. “That was right, and it was right for the right reasons. Now do it backward. You’re the one hunting. Where did she go in?”

Pia grinned and turned to the water. Up on the lodge steps Elsa was sitting in her scrubs with a cup of coffee, late for her shift and plainly not caring. She lifted the cup an inch to Anders. She had told him at Christmas that she had made up her mind about him as well, and it had come out in his favour by a narrow margin.

Reino stepped back beside him while the children argued.

“You’ve given it to her?”

“In a quarter of an hour.”

“Hm.” The old man studied the lake. “Tell her I used the knife her mother gave me. She’ll ask.”
***
She came down to the dock on the point with the dog at her knee and her cap in her pocket. The sun had cleared the east ridge. The lake was dark blue and flat, and a pair of loons had come back to the bay the week before.

The red canoe was already in the water. He had laid the narrow ash paddle and his own in it. He stood on the boards holding the third behind his leg, which was foolish, since she had read the set of his shoulders from the top of the path.

“You said to finish it,” he said, and held it out.

She did not take it at once. She looked at it lying across his two palms. He watched her take in the pattern, the long blade with its wide flat edge and the oval of the shaft. Then she saw the length.

She closed her hand on the grip. It fitted. He had known it would, and his chest went tight all the same. She stood the paddle on the dock, and the top of it came exactly under her chin. She leaned on the blade to feel it give, as she had tested three of his on a cold morning in September.

“It’s lighter than my father’s.”

“It’s white cedar from the swamp behind the east ridge. I took the tree down myself in 2019. Yours is cut from the heart of it.”

“You carved this grip without measuring my hand.”

“I’ve had a fair chance to learn your hand.”

She laughed, unsteadily, and ran her thumb down the edge of the blade. It stopped at the throat. She turned the paddle to the light and went quiet.

“That’s Isä’s knife,” she said. “He holds it at a slant. Nobody else cuts a corner like that.”

“He had it for a week. He says to tell you it was the knife your mother gave him.”

“Three.”

“Pia, Oskar and Mikko. He said they were owed, and that you’d never cut them yourself, because you weren’t sworn on the day they came home.”

“I didn’t bring in Mikko or Oskar. You hauled them out of the lake over a gunwale.”

“I said so. He told me a notch belongs to whoever ran the search, and that I was a boatman, and to go and oil something.”

Her eyes had filled. She did not wipe them. She stood on his dock with the paddle upright in her fist and let the tears run, as she had once on the floor of Cabin 3. He had learned by now to keep quiet and let her.

“He told me I’d want my own,” she said at last. “At the fire. You went stiff as a post.”

“I thought I was going to fall off the bench.”

“Seven and a half years, Anders.”

“It kept. Cedar does.”

She stepped up to him then, with the paddle still in her hand, and kissed him. It was a long kiss for a dock in plain view of his sister. Her collar had fallen open. Just above it, where her neck met her shoulder, the mark showed. It had healed over the winter to a small silvered crescent, paler than her skin, and it caught the sun when she moved. She had never once covered it. He had seen her touch it absently in the middle of a council meeting, and had lost the thread of what Urho was shouting.

She saw where he was looking. She hooked a finger in the neck of his shirt and drew it aside, and laid her cold fingertips on the twin of it.

“Still there,” she said.

“It isn’t going anywhere.”

“No.” She let the shirt go and bent to the dog. “Tansy. Boat.”

Tansy stepped down amidships, turned once, and lay with her chin on the centre thwart. She had her own folded blanket there now. Kaisa took the bow seat without a wobble. She laid the ash paddle behind her, along the ribs, and kept the cedar.

Anders pushed off and knelt in the stern. The dock slid away.

She took her first stroke with it, short and quick and close to the hull, as Reino did. He saw her feel the blade bite and spring. She took a second, and a third, and then she looked back over her shoulder at him with her whole face open. He had waited seven years to see that look, and he had the rest of his life to go on earning it.

“Well?” he said.

“It’ll do.” She faced front. “It’ll do very well.”

They ran out past the point into open water. He fitted his stroke to hers, and the canoe went straight and quiet, with the dog’s ears lifting in the small wind of it. Behind them Britta’s wrench rang on a pipe. The children were shouting on the ledge. Ahead lay three miles of lake, and beyond it the portage, and lakes after that.

He rested his paddle across the gunwales.

“Where to?”

She stopped paddling and looked across the lake. He watched the back of her head and knew what she was doing, though he would never be able to do it himself. She was finding the dip in the skyline, and the alder under it, pale with new leaf. She was reading the dark water against the ledge and the place where a gull ought to have been sitting.

After a while she raised the cedar paddle, with its three notches bright in the sun, and pointed.

Anders put the bow where she pointed and followed her across.