Side by Side

The dew was still on the dock boards when Anders slid the red canoe into the water.

He had been up since four. He had written the morning into his log by lamplight: thirty-eight degrees, wind northwest and light, cloud coming. Then he had carried the canoe down from the rack, and after that there was nothing to do but stand beside it.

Kaisa came down the path from Cabin 3 at half past six with a canoe pack on her back, a day pack in one hand and the dog at her knee. She had a wool cap pulled down over the top of her braid. She stopped at the end of the dock and looked at the canoe before she looked at him.

“That isn’t aluminum.”

“No.”

“Yours?”

“I built her in 2022. Seventeen feet, cedar and canvas. She’ll carry the three of us and the gear and still turn when I ask her to.”

Kaisa crouched and sighted along the hull at the waterline. He thought she was judging the lines, and he found he badly wanted her to like them. She said nothing about them. She straightened and nodded at the three paddles he had laid out on the boards.

“Which is mine?”

“Whichever you want.”

She lifted each one, stood it against her chin, and leaned on the blade to feel it give. She kept the narrow ash one. It was the one he would have handed her, and he did not say so.

“Has the dog been in a canoe?”

“She’s been in a raft and a sheriff’s jet boat. She’ll lie where I put her.” She saw him glance at the yellow feet. “I cut her nails last night. I know what canvas costs.”

Tansy stepped down between the packs, turned once, and lay with her chin on the canoe pack. Kaisa took the bow seat without a wobble. Anders pushed off and knelt in the stern, and the dock slid away behind them.

For the first quarter mile nobody spoke. She paddled the way Reino did, with short quick strokes close to the hull, and he fitted his own to hers. It had been years since he’d had a bow paddler who needed nothing said. The canoe ran straight and quiet. The back of her neck showed between her cap and her collar, four feet beyond the dog, and he kept his eyes on the water.

Half a mile up, Otter Rock went by on the right. She turned her head and watched it until the point hid it.

Then she laid her paddle across the gunwales.

“I’m going to talk for a while,” she said. “I do it with every boatman, so you’ll know why I’m asking for things. Stop me when I get to something you already know.”

“I won’t know it.”

She looked over her shoulder to see whether that was a joke. It wasn’t, and she faced front again.

“What’s the wind doing?”

“Northwest, six or seven. It’ll be ten by noon.”

“So where does everything loose on this lake end up?”

“The southeast corner. Leaves, foam, somebody’s hat.”

“Scent goes with the hat. Think of it as smoke you can’t see. Today the wind is lifting it off the water and off the whole west side and carrying it over here, and it piles up wherever the air slows down. That’s behind a point, or in a bay, or under a high bank. If we run the east shore close, the wind brings the lake to the dog. She doesn’t have to go and get it.” She tipped her head toward the shore sliding past. “Your people walked these miles with their noses on the ground. That finds a trail where it crosses the shoreline. It tells you nothing about what’s sitting upwind.”

“And what’s on the far shore?”

“That’s the other half. Look across. You’re tired, it’s dark, and you’ve never seen this lake. Where do you land?”

He looked. It was a mile of trees and rock that he had passed ten thousand times.

“The gravel, north of the big pine.”

“You said that because you know the gravel’s there. Forget that you know.”

He tried. The shore stayed a shore. “I can’t,” he said.

“All right. Look at the skyline first. See where it dips? Low ground runs between two lakes, so a portage is in a dip, and so is a creek. Now look under the dip for alder. It’s gone yellow, lighter than the birch. That’s your creek, and the landing will be on the hard side of it, never the soft. Next is the rock. If the water is dark right up to a pale ledge, it’s deep, and a loaded boat floats in without grounding. Where there’s a light band out in front of the rock, that’s a shelf, and you’ll be wading. A tired person wants to step out dry. They want to be out of the wind. And in the dark they want something to steer for, a white rock or one tall pine against the sky.” She pulled the map case onto her knee. “I’m marking every place on this route that has all of that. There won’t be many.”

“I couldn’t have told you one of those things.”

“You don’t need them. You know where you’re going.” She picked up her paddle. “I get called when nobody does.”

She had said it all flatly, as she would to a client who was paying for the lesson, and he took it that way. He looked at the west shore again. He could find the dip now, and the yellow under it. It was like being shown a second lake inside the one he owned.
***
Paddle Portage was at the head of Vaara, a strip of gravel under old cedars. Kaisa was out of the canoe before it touched. She did not reach for a pack. She went down on her knees at the edge of the water and put her cheek almost on the stones, and she worked the whole width of the landing that way while the dog stood and watched her.

Anders unloaded and asked nothing.

He rolled the canoe up onto his thighs and then over his head, and settled the yoke on his shoulders. From underneath he saw her boots come close and stop. She was bending to look along the keel.

“Is there something wrong with my boat?”

“No. It’s a nice keel.”

“It’s a shoe keel. The stem bands are brass.”

“I saw.”

Her boots went ahead of him up the trail. It was sixty rods over a low ridge. He had carried canoes across it since he was fourteen and could have walked it blind, which under a canoe was nearly what he did. All he could see was six feet of path, her heels, and the end of a yellow tail.

“There’s a root on your left,” she said. “Now a wet rock. Step long.”

He stepped long. It was a rock he had known for nineteen years. He found he was smiling under the hull, where nobody could see it, and he did not tell her to stop.

Hirvi Lake was two miles long and lay open to the northwest. By the time they had loaded, the wind had come up as he’d said it would, and there were small whitecaps out in the middle. Off the shore, a hundred and fifty yards out, Kettle Island sat low and dark with its jack pines bent. Kaisa looked at it and wrote its name on her list.

“East side,” she said. “Close in, and slow.”

He took them along the east shore with the wind on their left hand. It wanted to shove the bow into the rocks, and he would not let it. She had stopped paddling. She sat half turned with one hand on the dog’s harness, and before they left the landing she had opened one of her bags under the yellow nose.

A mile up, Tansy got to her feet.

It was sudden. She had been lying like a sack, and then she was standing with her front feet on the canoe pack and her head high. Her nostrils worked. The canoe rocked, and Anders flattened his blade on the water and stopped the roll.

“Hold us here,” Kaisa said quietly.

He held. The chop slapped the left side and the wind leaned on the bow. He set the paddle deep and drew and pried in turn, an inch at a time, and the canoe stayed where it was as though he had driven a post through it. He could do that for a long while. It was the one thing on a lake that nobody did better.

She did not thank him for it. She used it. For a full minute she watched the dog’s nose and nothing else.

“It’s coming down the shore, from the north,” she said. “Take us up. I’ll call it.”

“What is she smelling?”

“Pia. I gave her the pillowcase. Left a little. Hold. Now go on.”

He went where she pointed. He had not taken orders in a canoe since his father taught him to paddle, and he waited to find out how much he would mind. He did not mind at all. She wasted no words and she was never unsure. Each time the dog’s head swung, Kaisa’s hand moved, and he put the boat there. He thought he would be glad to do this for a long time.

The dog brought them to a slab of grey rock in the lee of a point, where a blazed pine marked the south end of the Long Carry.

Anders stepped out into shin-deep water and walked the canoe in by the gunwale. Kaisa was rising from the bow seat when Tansy went over the side in one leap, and the hull kicked. She caught at the gunwale to steady herself. He had reached for the same place to steady the boat.

His hand came down over hers.

It went up his arm like heat from an opened stove door and landed under his ribs. For a moment he could not have said which lake he was standing in. He felt her knuckles under his palm, cold from the paddle, and he saw it reach her too. Her breath stopped. The colour came up her throat, and her eyes went wide and dark, and she was looking straight at him for the first time since she had driven in.

“Don’t,” she said.

He took his hand away.

She stayed bent a second longer with her fingers white on the cedar. “I need my head for this,” she said, lower. “All of it.”

“You have it.”

She nodded once. Then she stepped out on the rock, clipped the long line to the harness, and was a tracker again. He hauled the canoe up and turned it over with hands that were not as steady as they had been in the wind.
***
They left the canoe at the landing. The Long Carry was a hundred and forty rods, close to half a mile, and it climbed over two ledges of bare granite with low wet ground between them. Tansy took it at a hard pull. Kaisa walked behind her with the line running through her glove, and Anders walked behind Kaisa.

Before the first ledge the worn path bent left around the rock, on soft duff, the way every tired portager went. The dog did not take it. She went straight up the granite.

“There,” Kaisa said, without turning. “She had the easy way and she took the rock.”

“Pia did?”

“Whoever Tansy’s following.”

Beyond the ledge a seep crossed the trail from one side to the other, ten feet of black mud with no way round it. Kaisa’s left hand came up flat behind her.

“Stop. Stay on the rock.”

He stopped. She called the dog back, sat her, and went forward alone, placing each boot at the very edge. Then she crouched and was still for so long that he heard the wind in the pines turn over twice.

“Come up on my right,” she said. “Step where I stepped.”

He came and crouched beside her, careful to leave a foot of air between their shoulders.

There were tracks in the mud. He would have seen them himself, since they were plain enough. They were wolf prints, heading north, and they were small. A grown wolf of his pack left a print the size of his palm. These were perhaps two thirds of that, with the toes spread wide as a young animal’s toes spread on soft ground.

“Tell me what you see,” she said.

“A pup.”

“Count again.”

He looked until his eyes watered, and then he had it. Two of the prints lay side by side, and one was a finger’s width longer than the other.

“Two pups.”

“Two. Now look at this.” She pointed with her pencil and did not touch. “Here the bigger one has stepped on the edge of the smaller one’s print. Three feet on, the smaller one has stepped on the bigger one’s. They weren’t a day apart, or an hour. They crossed this mud together and traded the lead while they did it.”

She took Oskar’s bag from her vest and gave it to the dog. Tansy breathed it in, put her nose down, and went across the seep on the same line she had been pulling all along.

“That’s both of them,” Kaisa said.

She photographed every print with the pencil laid beside it. She measured them and wrote the numbers down. Anders stayed crouched where he was, because his legs had gone strange.

Pia Hautala had been gone sixteen nights. He had carried her on his shoulders at the midsummer fire when she was four. He had spent two weeks trying not to picture her at the bottom of his lake, and here was her foot in the mud, going somewhere on purpose.

“When?” he said.

“I won’t give you a day. It was after Tuesday, because he’s in it. The last rain was the tenth, and nothing has fallen on these. That’s as much as the mud will say.”

“We could go on. Sumu’s at the end of this trail. If they went north...”

“They went north on rock, with a day’s start at the very least, and beyond this carry there’s another lake.” She was not unkind about it. “It’s past one o’clock. What’s the weather going to do?”

He made himself think about the sky. “The cloud’s thickening. There’ll be rain by morning, and a lot of it.”

“Then these will be gone tomorrow, and I’m glad I’ve got them tonight. We run this carry to the end, so I know they reached Sumu. Then we go home. I come back north the first day the dog can work, and I come with a plan.” She looked at him. “You want to run.”

“Yes.”

“Their mothers will too. I’ll tell Elsa and Sanna tonight what’s in this mud, both sets, together, going north. I’m sure of that much, so they get it.” She capped her pencil. “The rest stays in the canoe.”

“What rest?”

She did not answer at once. She took the dog’s line again and they walked on, over the second ledge, where the trail went on bare stone and the easy path once more went round it. At the Sumu end the scent ran down a tongue of rock into the water and stopped. Tansy whined at the lake. Kaisa paid her and stood looking out at a mile of grey waves.

“Work it through with me,” she said. “Pia went into Vaara at Otter Rock on the fifth. Where did Oskar go in?”

“The ice house. On the fifteenth.”

“That’s a different rock, ten days later. In between, your four best noses walked every shore you own and couldn’t say where she came out. Why not?”

“Water breaks scent.”

“It breaks it for everybody. So tell me how a thirteen-year-old boy leaves his grandfather’s house on a black night with a chop on the lake, goes to the water in a place she never went, and turns up two lakes north, walking beside her.”

Anders opened his mouth. Nothing he could put in it was any good. The boy had not tracked her, because nobody could have. He had not stumbled on her by luck, across three miles of Vaara and a portage and Hirvi after that. And he had not wandered. He had walked on stone the whole way, behind the green sheds and over these ledges, like somebody who had been told how.

“He knew where she was,” he said slowly.

“He’s thirteen. Go one more.”

The wind came down Sumu and went through his jacket.

“Somebody knew where she was,” Anders said. “Somebody knew for ten days, while her mother sat in my lodge. And then they took him to her.”

“That’s how I read it.”

No human had done this. No human knew what Pia was, or would have found two young wolves on a chain of empty lakes. Anders was alpha to one hundred and sixty-four people, and he could have named every one of them, down to the baby born in August. One of those names belonged to whoever had carried Oskar Niskanen to the water.
***