What the Ground Is Worth

The wind that was supposed to give Kaisa her search back had come in behind the rain at twenty-five miles an hour.

Anders had been right about the rain blowing out and wrong about the rest. At first light he had stood on the dock beside her and watched whitecaps run the whole length of Vaara. She had looked at the lake for about one minute.

“No,” she had said. “That’s tearing every scent on the water to rags, and Hirvi will be worse. I won’t put a dog and a canvas boat out in it to learn nothing. We go when it drops, and we take a tent, so I stop spending half of every day paddling home.”

She had gone up to the lodge to change her board. Anders had gone to the office, where a man from Greenstone Minerals was due at ten.

Glenn Garrity was on time. He was fifty, sandy and pleasant, in a fleece vest with the company’s name stitched small on the chest. He had driven up from Duluth that morning. He wiped his boots at the door without being asked, and he admired the mounted lake trout over the filing cabinet as though he meant it.

The office was a small room off the lodge hall, with a desk, a wood stove, and one big window that looked across the yard to the sheds and the lake. Stefan had brought in a third chair and a pot of coffee. He sat at the end of the desk with the treasury ledger closed under his hand.

“I’ll keep it short, Mr. Korpela,” Garrity said. “You’ve had our letters. I wanted to say the number to your face.”

He opened a binder and turned it round. There was a map of the pack’s ground, all of it, the south shore and the east shore and the ridge behind. Anders had never seen it drawn by a stranger. Six small squares were printed along the east ridge.

“A mineral lease on the full twenty-four hundred acres. Copper and nickel, six hundred feet under that ridge. Nine point two million dollars to the Vaara Lake Association, paid at signing. Royalties after that, if we ever go to production, and that would be years off.”

The association was what the pack called itself on paper. It had bylaws and a tax number, and one hundred and eighteen voting members.

“What are the squares?” Anders asked.

“Drill pads. Exploration only. Each one’s about the size of this building.”

“How do the rigs get to them?”

“We’d improve the old logging grade off the Fernberg Road.”

“You’d improve it to carry what?”

Garrity smiled a little. “Trucks, Mr. Korpela. I won’t tell you they’re small.”

“For how many months of the year?”

“Year-round, during drilling.”

“And the water you drill with. Where does it come from, and where does it go?”

“From the lake, under permit. It goes to lined sumps on the pads. I’ve got the engineering in the back of the binder.”

Anders turned to the back and read it. He took his time. He sold quiet for a living. People drove ten hours from Chicago to hear nothing but a paddle for a week, and he knew to the dollar what a week of that was worth to them. He did not know what it was worth with a drill running on the east ridge. Nobody had ever needed to find out.

“I’ll be straight with you,” Garrity said. “I read county records. It’s my job. There’s a note at the Shagawa State Bank with three hundred and eighty thousand dollars coming due on the first of December. That’s a balloon payment, and I don’t think the outfitting covers it. I’m not saying it to squeeze you. I’m saying this would fix it in an afternoon, and there’d be a good deal left over.”

“You’ve done your reading.”

“I’d be glad to come and present it to your members. I understand they vote.”

“They vote on Sunday the twenty-fifth of October. It’s a members’ meeting. I’ll present it.”

“Fairly?”

“I’ll read them your number and show them your map. They can all count.”

Garrity nodded as if that were all he had hoped for. He left the binder on the desk. “Then the only other thing is the calendar. The option expires on Saturday, October thirty-first. After that I can’t hold the number, and they send me to somebody else’s lake.” He stood up and offered his hand. “You’d have six days after your vote. That’s plenty of time to sign your name.”

Anders shook the hand. It was dry and warm. He had nothing against the man, who was only doing his work and had been honest about the trucks.

Stefan walked Garrity out to his car. Anders heard them on the porch, Stefan’s low voice saying something about the road and the deer. When Stefan came back he shut the door, poured two cups, and sat down in the chair Garrity had left.

“You don’t like him,” Stefan said.

“I like him fine. I don’t like his squares.”

“No.” Stefan turned the binder to face himself and looked at the map. “Tell me the other one again. Say it to me the way you’ll say it to them.”

Anders had the letter in the desk drawer. He did not need it.

“The Border Lakes Land Trust buys a conservation easement on the whole twenty-four hundred acres for two point one million dollars. We keep the land. We keep the lodge, the cabins, the guiding and the trapping. We give up the right to subdivide it, or mine it, or sell it off in lots, for good. The appraisal’s done. They can close by the end of November. We pay the bank its three eighty, and there’s better than one point seven million left to put the outfitting on its feet.”

“For good,” Stefan said.

“That’s the point of it.”

“It’s the part that keeps me awake.” He said it mildly. He turned his cup on the desk. “I’m going to tell you a story you’ve heard, and I want you to let me, because I’m the treasurer and it’s my job to be the one who says it.”

“Go on.”

“In the spring of 1986 I was seventeen. The county nailed a tax notice to that door out there. Three years in arrears, and forty-one days to pay or forfeit. My father sold his boat. The old men sold the pine off the east ridge, every stick of it, to a mill in Virginia. My mother took in laundry from the motels in Ely, and Hilja Maki sold her own mother’s silver. We made it with four days to spare. I remember the women counting it on the kitchen table in there, in fives and ones.” He looked up. “I was a boy, and I watched grown wolves be afraid of a piece of paper. I’ve kept this ledger for twenty-six years so that I’d never see it again.”

“The easement pays the note, Stefan.”

“It pays this note. And it leaves us a guiding outfit on a lake, in a business where one bad summer of smoke or one new rule about motors can take a third of the bookings. You know that better than I do. What do we sell the next time? We’ll have signed away the only thing we had.” He put his broad hand flat on Garrity’s map. “This is two hundred and ninety-six thousand dollars for every household on this lake. It’s a new roof on every cabin, and college for every pup who wants it. Nobody’s mother takes in laundry again. And the land is still ours. They lease it. They don’t buy it.”

“They drill it.”

“On six squares, on a ridge the old men already logged once to save us. The pine grew back.”

He was not wrong about the pine. Anders had hunted that ridge all his life and never thought of it as second growth. Stefan was always hard to argue with. He never raised his voice, and every one of his numbers was right.

“I’m not asking you to like it,” Stefan said. “I’m asking you to put it to them without your thumb on the scale. Half of them will be thinking of 1986. The other half weren’t born, and they’ll be thinking of three hundred thousand dollars.”

“I told Garrity I’d read them his number.”

“I heard you. I was proud of you.” Stefan was quiet for a moment. Then he spoke more gently still, and Anders knew something worse was coming. “There’s another thing. I’d rather you heard it from me in here than from Urho across the fire.”

“Say it.”

“The gathering on the twenty-fifth is the Hunter’s Moon. It’s the one night in the year when any sworn wolf can stand up and call a vote of the howl. If two pups are still gone that night, somebody will stand up. An alpha who cannot keep the pups is the oldest reason there is. It was the reason before there was a lodge or a ledger.” He shook his head. “It won’t be me. I stood second to your father for nineteen years and I’ll stand second to you as long as you want me. But I count votes, Anders. It’s what I’m for. Today I would not like to count that one.”

Anders looked at the lake trout on the wall. He had been alpha for less than two years. He had never asked to be good at it. He had only ever asked not to be his father.

He badly wanted to tell Stefan the rest. On Monday, on a tongue of rock at the end of the Long Carry, he and Kaisa had worked out that somebody on this lake had known where Pia Hautala was for ten days and had taken Oskar to her. That somebody would be sitting by the fire on the twenty-fifth with a vote in his hand. Stefan had run the shore searches. He knew every household’s quarrels and debts. He was the one man who might have looked at a hundred and sixty-four names and seen the wrong one.

The rest stays in the canoe, she had said.

It was her search. He had agreed to that in front of the council, and she had brought him the green flake yesterday because he had kept to it on Monday.

“Thank you for saying it in here,” Anders said.

“Find them, and nobody stands up.” Stefan rose and tucked the ledger under his arm. “That girl of Reino’s may do it. I watched her board yesterday. She’s put more order into this in four days than I managed in two weeks, and I don’t mind admitting it. I’m going to the bank tomorrow for her first week. Four thousand two hundred.”

“Take it from the outfitting account.”

“I’ll take it from where it hurts least.” He smiled and went out.

Anders sat a while with the binder. Then he got up and stood at the window, because the thing under his ribs had been pulling him toward it for a quarter of an hour.

She was in the yard with Mikko and the dog.

The wind was flattening the grass and banging a loose shed door. Kaisa had her cap pulled down and her braid tucked into her collar. She gave Mikko something small, a glove by the look of it, and pointed. The boy ran straight across the yard into the wind, sixty yards, and pushed the glove into the woodpile beside the far shed. He ran back with his hair on end.

Anders could hear none of it through the glass. He did not need to. She held both hands out in front of her with the wrists together and the fingers spread, and then she walked backward, opening her arms as she went. It was a wedge, narrow at the woodpile and wide where they stood. He remembered her saying scent was smoke you couldn’t see. She was showing the boy the shape of the smoke.

She led the dog off to one side, well out of the wedge, and let her go.

Tansy trotted along the yard with her nose high and found nothing. Then she crossed some line that only she could feel. Her head snapped round. She swung into the wind and ran until she had lost the scent on the far side, and then she turned and came back across. Each pass was shorter than the last. She was sewing her way up the yard, side to side, tighter and tighter, and Mikko had caught on. He was pointing each time she turned. Kaisa caught his arm and held it out to show him the angle of the dog’s head against the wind. When the passes had shrunk to a few feet, Tansy drove straight in and dropped on her belly at the woodpile with her tail thrashing.

Mikko jumped in the air.

Kaisa laughed. Anders saw her head go back and her whole face open. He had not seen that in seven years. He had come to think she had left it in Montana, or that he had ended it himself at his father’s fire.

Then she handed the boy the line and made him run it himself. She walked behind him with her hands in her jacket pockets and corrected nothing. She let him find out, as she had let Anders find the dip in the skyline. On the second try Mikko put the dog in at the wrong side of the wind and had to stand there watching her find nothing at all. Kaisa waited. The boy looked at the grass, and at the banging shed door, and worked it out. He moved forty feet and tried again.

Britta’s son was three days from his first moon and too restless to sit, and somebody had given him one true thing to do with all of it. Anders stood with his forehead nearly on the cold glass. He knew the pull under his ribs was not the bond, or not the bond alone. He had been watching a woman do her work well, and he would have stood there if he had never met her.

Somebody knocked twice on the office door. It opened before he answered.

It was two of his guides, and they were not speaking to each other. Eino Saari was fifty and had guided on this lake for thirty years. Tom Lund was twenty-six, Dagny’s grandson, and in his fourth season.

“You first,” Anders said to Eino, and sat down on the corner of the desk.

“Bill Pruitt, from Chicago. He’s fished with me eleven Septembers. This year his wife booked it on the computer, and the lodge put him with Tom. Fine. Tom took him to the reef off the Sumu narrows, which I found, and which I have never shown to one living soul except Bill Pruitt. Now Pruitt’s told the front desk he wants Tom next year, because the boy carries the canoe faster.”

“I didn’t ask for him,” Tom said. “And Pruitt showed me the reef himself. He pointed at it. What was I supposed to do, paddle past?”

“You were supposed to say it was my water.”

“Is it?” Anders asked.

They both looked at him.

“Is it your water, Eino? Did you buy it?”

Eino’s ears went dark. “No.”

“A reef belongs to whoever’s sitting on it that morning. You taught me that when I was fifteen and wanted to keep the pike bay to myself.” Anders turned to Tom. “And the client isn’t yours. He isn’t Eino’s either. He books with the lodge, and the lodge decides. Here’s what the lodge has decided. Eino guides Pruitt next September, because eleven years counts for something here and I want every guide in this outfit to know it will count for him too. You carry on that trip, Tom, at full day rate, because Eino’s knees aren’t what they were and Pruitt has noticed.”

“My knees,” Eino began.

“I’ve portaged behind you. They click.” He went on before either of them could speak. “This week’s tip stays with Tom. He earned it. And you take him up Ukonvesi before freeze-up, Eino, and show him the two other reefs you think I don’t know about. One of these years you’ll want a winter off, and somebody has to know where the fish are.”

There was a silence. Tom was trying not to look pleased, and Eino was trying not to look relieved.

“Full rate to carry a canoe,” Tom said.

“And to listen. He’ll talk the whole way. Some of it’s worth hearing.”

“Most of it,” said Eino.

They went out together, already arguing about which Saturday. Anders let his breath go. That kind of trouble he could mend in five minutes. He understood it down to the grain, as he understood cedar.

Before the door had swung shut, a small hand caught it.

Hilja Maki came in with her cane and her white braid and did not sit down. She looked at the binder on the desk, and then out the window, where Mikko was on his third try.

“Stefan has told you about the howl,” she said.

“He has.”

“He would. He’s a careful man, and he is counting the wrong thing.” She pulled the door wide, so that the hall behind her could hear. There were a dozen people out there by the coffee urn. Elsa Hautala stood among them in her hospital scrubs with her car keys in her fist, reading the board. Stefan had stopped beside the fireplace. “I am going to say the law aloud, Alpha, because I’ve listened to this lake for eighteen days and everybody has been thinking it and nobody will say it. It is worse left unsaid.”

“Hilja,” Stefan said gently, from the hall. “Elsa’s standing right here.”

“Elsa is a nurse. She knows what happens to a thing nobody will name.” The old woman turned so that her voice carried. It was dry and clear, the voice that had taught most of them to read. “This is the two-moon law. It is older than the council. A child takes the first shift at a full moon. If that child stays on four legs and is still a wolf when the second full moon after it rises, the way back may close. The child may stay a wolf. Pia Hautala first shifted on the twenty-seventh of August. Saturday’s moon is her first. The Hunter’s Moon, on the twenty-fifth of October, is her second.”

Nobody in the hall moved. Elsa had not turned from the board. Her shoulders were very straight.

“I’ve seen it happen once,” Hilja said. “It was a boy, in 1961, and he ran with us for nine years and never knew his mother’s name again. I would like not to see it twice. So when you count, count that.”

The outside door of the hall opened, and wind and leaves came in with Kaisa, the dog, and Mikko. Kaisa looked at the room once and understood it. She had been raised under the same law. She walked to the board without a word, uncapped her pen, and wrote across the top in capitals: SUN 25 OCT. HUNTER’S MOON.

Anders did the sum while she wrote. It was thirty-two days. The contract she had signed in front of the council ran out a full week short of that.

She capped the pen and looked across the hall at him. He could read that look now. It was the one she had worn at the end of the Long Carry, when she asked him how much rain was coming.
***