Kettle Island

The wind took two days to wear itself out. By Friday morning it was down to a light push from the northwest, and Kaisa had the canoe loaded before the sun was over the trees.

Stefan Zalar had come down to the dock in his slippers to see them off. He had handed her a bank envelope with four thousand two hundred dollars in it and made her count it in front of him. “Seven days,” he had said. “Never take a treasurer’s word.” She had put it at the bottom of the canoe pack, under the sleeping bags.

Now it was past six in the evening, and she was sitting on a slab of rock on the east shore of Hirvi Lake, tired to her bones and with very little to show for the day.

They had worked every yard of Hirvi’s shoreline. Tansy had lifted her head four times, and each time the scent had thinned away to nothing before Kaisa could put a direction to it. The wind had been the trouble. It had been too light to carry far, and it had kept shifting a point or two, back and forth. Something was on this lake, or had been. All the dog could say was that it was upwind, and upwind was a mile of open water.

So Kaisa had picked this camp with care. It was a flat point halfway up the east side, with nothing to the northwest of it but water and, a hundred and fifty yards out, the low dark back of Kettle Island.

Anders had the tent up. It was hers, a two-person dome, and he had pitched it without being asked and then carried his own sleeping bag down to the overturned canoe. He had not made anything of that. He had simply laid his bag under the hull and started on the fire.

He was good in a camp. She had expected it, and it was still a pleasure to watch. He did everything once. The wood was split small and stacked by size, the pot was on, and the food pack was already slung from a branch. He had fried the walleye he caught trolling up the shore that afternoon. Tansy had been given the skin and lay now on her tie-out by the tent, flat on her side.

“She’s done,” Anders said.

“She’s been done since four. She’d go again if I asked, and she’d find nothing, and it would teach her that the game doesn’t pay.” Kaisa looked at the sky. It was clear, going from yellow to green in the west, and one day short of full, the moon was already up behind them. “The dog’s had her turn. I’m going to take mine.”

He set down the stick he was holding.

“Do you want me here or gone?”

“I want you with me. Two noses are better, and you know this shore.” She made herself say it like a line on the board. “I haven’t shifted in front of anyone from this lake in seven years. I’d rather not make a ceremony of it.”

“Then we won’t.”

He stood up, walked to the far side of the canoe, and turned his back. She went behind the tent. There was nothing strange in this. Pack children undressed on beaches without a thought, and she had shifted beside this man a hundred times before she was twenty. Her fingers were clumsy on her buttons all the same. She folded her clothes on a dry rock and stood for a second with the cold air on her skin.

She was careful about this shape. She had her reasons, and they were her own business. In Montana she let herself have it one night in a month, never two together.

She breathed out and let it come.

It took ten breaths, as always. On the third her spine lengthened and the ground came up to meet her hands. On the sixth the world lost most of its colour and gained everything else. By the tenth she was standing on four feet in the moss, and the evening had opened around her like a book.

There was the fire, and under the fire the fish bones in it. There was the dog, warm and familiar, and the canvas of the canoe, and every place on this point where a mink had been in the last week. She could hear a loon take a breath a quarter mile out on the lake.

She shook herself and trotted round the tent.

He was waiting by the water. She had forgotten how big he was. He was black from nose to tail, heavy through the chest, with the one white forefoot that had made the old women say at his first moon that he had stepped in the milk. He stood almost twice her weight. His eyes were the same in this shape, pale in the dark face.

He did not come to her. He lowered his head a few inches and held it there, and let her be the one to close the distance or not.

She was a small wolf and always had been, light grey with a cream throat, built for covering ground. She walked up to him because it would have been foolish not to. The scent of him filled her whole head. There was the wolf, and under it cedar shavings, varnish, and the lake. Under those was the thing that had no name, which her body had known at twenty-two and had never agreed to forget.

She turned north and ran.

He came up on her left side and half a length behind, and stayed there.

She had braced herself for it to be hard. She had expected to be watchful, and she had thought there would be seven years of stiffness in it. Nothing of the kind happened. The shore was ledge and root and deadfall, and they went over it like water going downhill. When she swung inland round a blowdown, he had already moved to give her room. When she checked at a creek mouth to read it, he stopped a moment before she did. He never crowded her, and he never fell back so far that she had to wonder where he was. She did not once have to think about him. Her feet knew where his were.

It was the easiest thing she had done since she drove through Ely. It was easier than the lodge board, or her father’s kitchen, or one sentence spoken to Britta.

That frightened her badly.

She had not chosen any of it. Her body was running beside his as though the two of them had done this every night for seven years, as though nobody had ever said five words across a fire. If she let it, this shape would go on running beside him until morning and be perfectly happy. She knew how good a wolf was at being happy. She knew how little a wolf cared about what had been said.

She stopped on a spit of bare rock and made herself stand still, sides heaving. He stopped two lengths off and looked away over the water, giving her room.

Work, she told herself. You came out here to work.

She put her nose up.

The wind was dying with the light. All day it had pushed out of the northwest, and now the last breath of it was sliding across the lake, slow and steady, in one piece at last. She let it come to her and took it apart.

It brought cold water and wet rock, jack pine, and a beaver somewhere to the north. Then, thinly, she got fish that had been dead a few days. Fish was nothing on a lake. But wolf was wrapped in it, young wolf, two of them, rubbed into moss. Under that was a smell that had no business on an empty island in the middle of Hirvi Lake. It was fat and flour, cooked and gone stale.

She swung her head a few inches each way to find the edges of it. That was the lesson she had given Mikko in the yard on Wednesday, done with her own nose. The scent came from straight across the water, and there was nothing out there but Kettle Island.

She looked at Anders once and went down the rock into the lake.

The cold closed on her like a fist. She swam with her nose high and her legs driving, and behind her she heard the heavier splash as he came in. A hundred and fifty yards was no distance for a wolf. It was long enough for the water to get through her coat to the skin. A twelve-year-old who swam for the team in Ely would not have thought twice about it.

She came out on a shelf at the island’s south end and shook. The smell was all round her now.

It was a small island, a hump of granite with a cap of moss and blueberry and a few dozen crooked jack pines. She worked up from the shore with her nose down. Halfway to the top she turned and stood across Anders’s path. He stopped at once and sat down where he was, dripping, and stayed there.

The bed was in the lee of a boulder on the southeast side, where the northwest wind could not reach and nobody on the portage trail could see.

There were two hollows in the deep moss, pressed side by side. One was a little longer than the other. The moss in them had begun to lift again, and Tuesday’s rain had been on them. She put her nose into each. The smaller one held the girl whose pillowcase she carried in a bag. The other held the boy. They had lain here curled nose to tail for more than one night. They had been warm and had slept deeply, and there was none of the sour edge that fear left in a bed.

Around the hollows were the bones of perch, a dozen or more small fish. Some were chewed to splinters and some were picked clean, with the heads left. The newest had been rained on. She judged the bed three or four days old. They had last lain here on Monday night or Tuesday.

On Monday she had paddled past this island, and she had looked at it and put its name on her list.

She set that aside for later and went on working. The stale cooked smell was under a root at the head of the larger hollow. She pawed the moss back.

It was a square of kitchen foil, the size of her two hands, crumpled and licked flat again. There were tooth marks in it. The inner side still held a smear of grease, and she breathed it in. It was lard pastry, beef, rutabaga, and a great deal of pepper.

She had eaten four of those on her own doorstep on Tuesday night.

She tried the outer side for a hand. The rain had washed it, and two pups had mouthed it from end to end. All it could tell her was that they had fought over the last of the crust.

She quartered the rest of the island quickly. The pups had gone in and out of the water at the shelf where she had landed, many times. Their newest trail went down that shelf and did not come back. She found nothing else. No fire had been lit here and no cloth left behind, and she found no mark of a boat on the rock.

She went back to the bed and took the foil gently between her front teeth.

Anders was sitting where she had left him. He looked at what she carried, and his ears went flat to his skull. She walked past him to the water.

The swim back was slower. She had to hold her head up to keep the foil dry, and by the time her feet found the rock of the point she was shuddering in long waves. He had passed her halfway and gone ahead. When she came up into the firelight he was already on two legs, in his trousers and a grey undershirt, feeding split pine to the coals. Tansy was on her feet at the end of the tie-out, whining.

Kaisa laid the foil on a flat stone by the fire. Then she went no farther than the edge of the light, because she was too cold to care, and came back to her own shape.

It was worse than the lake. In this body the water was on bare skin, and the night air found all of it at once. She crouched on the moss with her arms round her knees and her wet braid like a rope of ice down her spine. Her teeth were going so hard she could not have said her own name. Her clothes were behind the tent, twenty feet off in the dark.

“Here.”

He was holding out his wool shirt at arm’s length. It was the heavy red-and-black one he had worn all day, and he had hung it on a stick by the fire. He held it by the collar, and his face was turned to the flames. He kept his eyes there and did not look round.

She saw all of it at once. There were six feet of firelit ground between her skin and his hand. His jaw was set. A drop of lake water ran down the side of his neck into the grey cotton. He was standing as he had stood in the stern in a crosswind, holding the boat still for as long as she needed.

He would stand there until she took it or told him to put it down. She knew that as she knew the wind.

She got up, crossed the distance, and took the shirt.

It was hot from the fire. She pulled it on and it fell to the middle of her thighs, and the cuffs covered her hands. It smelled of cedar and woodsmoke and of him, and the heat went into her like a drink. She shut her eyes for one second. Then she did up four buttons with fingers that would hardly work.

“All right,” she said.

He turned round then. He looked at her face and nowhere else, and he gave her a tin cup of tea so sweet it made her jaw ache. She sat down on the log by the fire with her bare feet tucked under her. Tansy was let off the line and came to lie across them.

“I’ll get your things,” he said, and did. He set her folded clothes and her boots on the log beside her and sat on the far side of the fire.

She drank half the tea before she trusted her voice.

“There’s a bed on that island. Two hollows in the moss, side by side. Pia in one and Oskar in the other. They slept there more than one night, and they slept easy.”

His hands closed on his knees. “You’re sure it’s them?”

“I’m sure. I’ll put the dog on it at first light, for the log. I don’t need her to tell me.”

“How old?”

“Three or four days. They were last in it Monday night or Tuesday. Then they swam off the south shelf and didn’t come back.” She looked at the black shape of the island across the water. “I can’t yet tell you which way round it goes. Either they were lying up there on Monday while we went by, and the tracks on the carry were from some earlier day, or they went north and somebody brought them back behind us to a lake we’d already searched. Whichever it was, I looked straight at that island and wrote it on a list.”

“Mikko told you nobody had done the islands.”

“Mikko told me on Tuesday. I paddled past it on Monday.” She let that go. It would keep, and it was hers to chew on. “They’ve been eating perch. A lot of perch, and I don’t think two pups a month old caught them all. But that isn’t the thing.”

She nodded at the stone. The foil lay on it, drying, with the firelight in its creases.

He leaned forward and looked without touching. “That’s from the kitchen.”

“Tell me how you know.”

“Britta cuts the squares off the big roll on Sunday nights. Mikko does it, mostly. They wrap the guides’ lunches in them.” He stopped. “What was in it?”

“A pasty. Beef and rutabaga, heavy on the pepper. It was under a root at the head of Oskar’s bed, licked clean.”

He said nothing for a moment. The fire snapped.

“He goes back and forth,” Anders said slowly. “Oskar. He’s thirteen, he’s been shifting for a year. He could have taken it from home.”

“He left home ten nights ago. His mother told me his jacket and boots were on their pegs, and his pockets with them. A wolf can’t carry a lunch across three miles of Vaara, a portage and half of Hirvi without eating it. A thirteen-year-old wolf can’t, anyway.” She shook her head. “And that grease wasn’t ten days old. Wolf pups don’t carry foil, Anders. Someone on two legs brought it out here. I’d guess it was more than once, and that the fish came the same way.”

It was the first time she had used his name since she came back. She heard it after it was out. He had heard it too, and he had the sense to let it pass.

“So that’s what it means,” she said. “I’ll give it to you in order, the same as I’ll give it to their mothers. They’re alive. As of three or four days ago they were well enough to squabble over a crust. They’re together. And somebody from home is feeding them.”

He put both hands over his face.

He sat like that for a long breath, with his elbows on his knees and his shoulders gone slack. She understood that he had been carrying a drowned girl around in his head for nearly three weeks and had just been allowed to set her down. Kaisa looked at the fire and gave him the time. It was what he had done for her on the rock.

When he took his hands away his eyes were wet, and he did not hide it.

“Alive,” he said.

“Alive and fed.”

“Fed.” The relief went out of his voice as he said it, and what came in behind it was very quiet. “Forty of those go out of my sister’s kitchen every morning. They sit on the counter by the back door. Half the lake walks through that door for coffee.”

“I know. I’m not looking at Britta. I’m not looking at anyone yet.” She pulled the shirt cuffs down over her knuckles. “Somebody picked up a lunch off that counter. Maybe they said good morning to her. Then they went out to feed two children whose mothers were standing in the next room in front of my board.”

“And Hilja read out the law to them on Wednesday.”

“Yes. Whoever it is heard her, or has been told by now.”

He looked at her across the flames. “Then why haven’t they brought them home?”

Kaisa had been turning that over since the island, with the foil between her teeth. A person who took food to children was not trying to kill them. A person who kept children hidden while a whole pack searched wanted something, and wanted it badly enough to feed two wolves on an island for it.

“I don’t know,” she said. “That’s the question I’d pay eighteen thousand dollars to answer.”

The moon had cleared the pines behind them. It laid a white road over the water to Kettle Island. Tomorrow night it would be full, and Mikko Tormala would go down on four legs behind somebody’s woodshed with half the lake standing round.

She drew her knees up inside the shirt. She would have to give it back in the morning, and she was already sorry about it.
***