The Stern Seat

Anders Korpela had felt the truck leave the Fernberg Road.

He had been feeling her since Friday. It had started as a faint pressure under his ribs, on the west side, and it had grown all through Saturday until he put his tools down at noon. He had lost the tip of his left little finger to a bandsaw six years ago, on a day when his mind was somewhere else, and he had learned from it.

Now she stood in the doorway of the council lodge with the dusk behind her, and he was on his feet without having decided to stand.

She was twenty-nine. He had the number ready, and it did him no good. The girl he had refused had been quick and bright, and every feeling she had went straight across her face. This woman’s face told him nothing. She wore dark green wool and carried a map tube under her arm. There was a white scar through her left eyebrow, her grey eyes took in the room in one sweep, and a yellow dog in a harness that said SEARCH stood at her knee.

Her eyes met his and went on past him. She gave him the look she might give a piece of furniture she had expected to find there.

The bond hit him low in the chest like a fist. He kept his hands open at his sides, and then he sat down and put them on his knees.

He had asked for this. On Wednesday night, with Oskar’s bed twelve hours empty, he had stood by this fire and said her name out loud for the first time in seven years. He had told the council there was one tracker left who had been taught by Reino Rautio, and that she found lost people for a living. Urho had shouted. The vote had gone four to one. Afterward Anders had asked Hilja to make the call and to leave him out of it, because Kaisa would not cross the road for his asking. Hilja had told him it was a coward’s kindness, and then she had done it.

“Kaisa Rautio,” Hilja said from the far bench. “Come in and shut the door. You’re letting the heat out.”

“Mrs. Maki.” Kaisa shut the door. She nodded along the bench. “Mrs. Lund. Mr. Pucel. Mr. Zalar. Mr. Niskanen.” Then she turned her head just far enough. “Alpha.”

It was his title, and she said it like a stranger. She might have been greeting a county commissioner.

“Kaisa,” he said.

She did not answer that. She walked around the fire ring with the dog at heel, opened a folder, and held out two sheets of paper to Hilja.

“Before anything else. It’s what we agreed on Thursday. Six hundred dollars a day, starting today, for thirty days. That runs through Sunday the eighteenth of October and comes to eighteen thousand. If the children are home sooner, you pay for the days worked. If the pack sends me away, the same. I run the search and I answer to you.”

Hilja took the reading glasses that hung on a cord round her neck and read every line of the first copy. Nobody spoke. The fire ticked. Dagny Lund, broad and calm, had her knitting in her lap and did not touch it. Ivar Pucel turned his cold pipe over in his fingers.

Stefan Zalar got up and brought Hilja a pen from his shirt pocket. That was Stefan all over. He was fifty-seven, stocky, with a silver crew cut, and he had been the old alpha’s second before he was Anders’s. He was the one who noticed that a thing needed doing and did it quietly.

“The treasury will find it,” he said. “I’ll have the first week in cash on Friday, if cash suits you.”

“Cash is fine.”

Anders did the sum anyway. Eighteen thousand dollars was better than two and a half of his canoes. Then there was the note at the Shagawa State Bank, three hundred and eighty thousand, due the first of December. He would have paid her from his own pocket and built canoes till spring to cover it.

Hilja signed. The pen scratched.

“Eighteen thousand dollars,” Urho Niskanen said.

He had been silent until then, which for Urho was a long time. He was seventy, bald and heavy, and his voice had filled this room at every gathering Anders could remember. He had not slept since Tuesday. It showed in the grey skin under his eyes.

“Urho,” Dagny said.

“No. I’ll say it. I said it Wednesday and I was outvoted, and I’ll say it to her face so she knows where I stand.” He heaved himself up off the bench. “My grandson is out there. And we have sent to Montana and opened the treasury for thief’s blood. Her father took money for this ground. That paddle hangs the way it hangs for a reason. Blood tells, and I won’t sit here and...”

“Urho. Not another word.”

Anders had not raised his voice. He had not needed to since the first month after his father died, and he had been careful ever since about how often he used it. The words went across the fire, and Urho’s jaw shut. The old man stood there swaying a little, his big hands opening and closing. Then he sat down.

The room was very quiet.

Kaisa had not flinched at “thief’s blood.” She did not look grateful now, either. She was signing her own name under Hilja’s on the second copy, and she finished the signature before she looked up.

“I don’t need the room cleared for me, Alpha,” she said. “I’ve been called worse by people who were paying me.” She folded one copy into the folder and left the other on the bench beside Hilja. Then she turned to Urho, and her voice changed. It was not softer, exactly, but it was aimed at him. “Mr. Niskanen. You don’t have to like me. I need you anyway, because you saw Oskar last. Will you answer some questions?”

Urho stared at her. His eyes were wet.

“He ate supper at my table,” he said hoarsely.

“Then you’re the one I want. Give me a minute to put the map up.”

Anders looked at his hands. He had spent his authority on her behalf, and she had handed it back to him across the fire in front of the council. She had been right to. He let that sit in him and found it didn’t sting. It felt more like respect.

Stefan broke the silence, as he always did. He crossed the floor and took her free hand in both of his.

“Reino’s girl,” he said, in his kind low voice. “Look at you. You used to ride in the bow of your father’s canoe with your chin on the gunwale, and you’d shout at the rest of us when we walked on a track.” He smiled. “I ran the shore searches for both children. Four noses on every mile. I’ve got it all written down, who went where and when. It’s yours tonight if you want it.”

“I want it,” Kaisa said. Her shoulders came down half an inch. “Thank you, Mr. Zalar.”

“Stefan. You’re old enough now.”

Urho and Stefan had used the same two words for her, and from Stefan they were a welcome. Anders was glad of him, as he had been glad of him a hundred times in two years.

She went to the north wall.

There was bare log on the east side, and more by the door. She chose the space between the windows, straight under her father’s paddle with its blade turned in, and she pinned the map there with four brass tacks from her pocket. She did not look up at the paddle while she did it. Everyone else in the room had to, each time they looked at the map. Anders understood that she knew it.

The map was her own work, four sheets printed and taped edge to edge, with Vaara Lake at the bottom and the chain running north. He could see Paddle Portage, Hirvi, the Long Carry, Sumu, the Step, and the long ragged body of Ukonvesi going off the top of the paper. She had drawn every portage in red. She had made this in a motel room in North Dakota, or before that.

“Dates first,” she said, and uncapped a pen. “Pia Hautala. Last seen?”

“Saturday the fifth,” Hilja said. “Elsa put her to bed at half past nine. The bed was empty at six on Sunday.”

“Oskar.”

“Tuesday,” Urho said. “This Tuesday, the fifteenth. He went up at nine o’clock. I looked in at five in the morning and he wasn’t there.”

“Which house?”

“Mine. Him and his mother live with me.”

She marked both houses. Her hand was quick and small and exact. “Where did your noses lose them?”

“Pia at Otter Rock,” Stefan said. “Oskar at the old ice-house landing. Both trails go to the edge of the water and stop.”

Two red crosses went on the shore. She stood back and looked at them for a moment with her head on one side.

“Weather,” she said. “Both nights. Does anyone actually know, or am I going to get five opinions?”

“I know,” Anders said.

She turned. He made himself speak as he would to any guide who asked.

“I keep a log for the outfitting. The night of the fifth was clear and dead calm. The lake was glass. It was forty-six degrees at sunrise, and there was half a moon that came up after midnight. The fifteenth had cloud all night, with a northwest wind around ten miles an hour and a chop on the open water. There was no moon worth the name. Forty-one degrees.” He thought. “We had rain on the ninth and tenth. It was light, maybe a quarter inch altogether, and there’s been nothing since.”

She wrote it down the margin of the map without comment. When she had finished she looked at him a second longer than she had so far, and he knew she was weighing the answer. Then her eyes dropped to his left hand on his knee and stopped on the short finger.

She had never seen it. It had happened in the first spring she was gone.

She did not ask about it. She looked back at the map.

“Calm and clear, and then dark with a chop,” she said, half to herself. “All right. Tomorrow I work both land trails on foot with the dog. I’ll want to speak to both mothers first, and I’ll want something each child slept in. After that I go on the water, and I’m going to be on it a lot.” She capped the pen. “I can paddle. I can’t paddle stern, work a dog, and read a shoreline at once. I need somebody in the back of the canoe who knows every portage north of here in the dark and can hold a boat still in a crosswind while I look. It can’t be a parent or a grandparent. I need someone who’ll go where I point and won’t argue with me about where the child ought to be.”

“Jari Tormala guides that route,” Stefan offered.

“Jari has clients until the end of the month,” Hilja said. “And he is not the best. You asked for the best paddler on this lake.” She folded her glasses. “That is the alpha.”

Anders had seen it coming from the moment she said stern. He still felt his pulse in his throat.

Kaisa stood with her back to the map. For one breath something went across her face, too fast for him to name, and then she had it shut away again.

“Is that true?” she asked. She was asking the bench.

“He won the Ukonvesi race four years running,” Dagny said. “And he builds the boats.”

“Then that’s who I need.” She faced him. “Alpha. First light Monday, at whatever dock is nearest the canoes. I sit in the bow. On the water it’s my search. If I say stop, we stop, and if I say land, we land.”

“It’s your search on the water and off it,” Anders said. “I’ll be at the dock.”

“Good.”

That was all he got. It was a fair hire, and a civil one, and he was aware of every inch of the twelve feet between them.

There was the matter of a bed. Hilja raised it, and Kaisa said her father’s spare room had a stove that drew badly and was three miles from her work.

“Guide Cabin 3 is empty,” Anders said. “The stove is good, and there’s a woodpile and a dock. It’s beside the canoe shop, so the boat’s right there in the morning.” He made himself say the rest. “It’s forty yards from my cabin, on the point. You should know that before you say yes. There are others farther off, if you’d rather.”

She considered it as she had considered the two red crosses.

“Is it the nearest to the canoes?”

“Yes.”

“Then I’ll take it. I’m here to work.” She bent and gathered up the dog’s lead. “Is the door locked?”

“Nothing here is locked.”

Her eyes went, just once, to the padlock on the storeroom door at the back of the room. Then she thanked the council, told Stefan she would come for his lists in ten minutes, and walked out with her dog. The door closed behind her, and the pressure under Anders’s ribs turned to follow her like a compass needle.

Hilja was watching him.

“Well,” she said dryly. “She has Reino’s manners.”

“She has better,” said Anders, and went out.
***
He did not go near Cabin 3. He saw her headlights swing down the point road, and he saw the cabin window fill with lamplight. He went into his shop and shut the door.

The shop was the one place on Vaara Lake where he was sure of himself. It was forty feet long and smelled of cedar shavings and varnish. His tools hung on the wall in the order his hands wanted them. On the building form in the middle of the floor lay a sixteen-foot hull, ribbed and half planked, for a customer in Minneapolis who was paying six thousand eight hundred dollars and wanted it by spring. The white cedar planks lay ready on the bench. The next one had to be tapered to fit the turn of the bilge. It was half an hour’s quiet work.

He picked up the plane and set the plank in the vise. He took one stroke, and the shaving came off too thick at one end. He looked at it and put the plane down.

Through the window he could see her light. A shadow crossed it, and a smaller, lower shadow followed. That was the dog.

He knew what he had said to her seven years ago, and he knew why he had said it. He could not have told her the why that night. He had gone on not telling her, and every year he waited had made it harder. Tonight she had looked through him like a pane of glass, and he had earned that. He was not going to ask her for anything. He would sit in the stern, hold the boat where she wanted it, and help her bring two children home. Then he would see whether there was anything of his that she would take.

He leaned on the bench with both hands and looked up.

It hung in the rafters above the steam box, among the spare gunwale stock, where he had put it in the fall of 2019. It was a paddle blank, a single length of cedar. He had sawn the outline, and he had roughed out the shaft and the long blade with a spokeshave and gone no further. Seven years of dust lay grey on its upper side.

It was a tracker’s paddle, the old pattern, with the wide flat edge that would take notches. He had cut it in the last two weeks of that September, when he still believed how the autumn would go.

It was a foot too short for him, and it had never been meant for his hands.

Anders stood under it until her light went out.
***