Alive, Fed, Moved

At first light the dog went over Kettle Island with her nose down and told them nothing Kaisa had not already said.

Anders held the canoe off the south shelf and watched. Tansy lay down between the two hollows in the moss and swept her tail, and Kaisa photographed the bed, the fish bones and the root. She wrote for ten minutes. Then she came down the rock with the dog and stepped into the bow.

Back at the point she had his wool shirt folded on top of her pack. She was in her own clothes again, with her cap pulled down.

“Thank you for this,” she said, and held it out.

“Keep it till we’re home, if you’re cold.”

“I’m not cold now.”

He put it on. It had been against her skin all night, and it smelled of her and of smoke. He paddled the two miles down Hirvi with that around his shoulders and made himself think about the wind.

They were at the lodge dock by eleven. Word had got there before them, as it always did. Somebody had seen the red canoe come round the point from the portage a day early, and by the time Kaisa walked into the hall there were thirty people in it and more on the porch.

She did not make a speech. She went straight to the board, uncapped her pen, and wrote under the last entry in the same large hand.

FRI 25 / SAT 26 SEPT. Kettle Island, Hirvi Lake. Bed, both children, side by side. Used several nights. Last used Mon 21 or Tue 22. Confirmed by dog, Sat a.m.

Under that she wrote three words in capitals.

ALIVE. FED. MOVED.

The room made a sound like one long breath going out.

Elsa Hautala was nearest. She read the three words, and then she sat down on the bench under the board as if her knees had been cut, and Sanna Niskanen sat down beside her and took her hand. Neither of them spoke.

Urho had pushed in from the porch. He stood in the middle of the hall with his big hands hanging and read the board from the top, slowly, moving his lips. When he came to his grandson’s name his face folded up like a child’s. He cried standing up, loudly, with his mouth open, and nobody in the room looked away from him or thought less of him for it. Dagny Lund went and put her arm as far round him as it would go.

“He’s alive,” Urho said. “The boy’s alive. He’s eating.”

“As of Tuesday,” Kaisa said. “Yes.”

He wiped his face with his sleeve and looked at the board again. Anders saw him read the name of the island a second time, and the date after it.

“Kettle Island,” Urho said. His voice was coming back. “That’s a stone’s throw off the Long Carry landing. You went by it on Monday. It’s on your own board. Monday, the pair of you, and my grandson lying on it.”

“He may have been. I can’t tell you yet whether he was there that day or came after.”

“You paddled past him!”

“I did. I looked at that island and wrote it on a list, and I went on. That’s mine, Mr. Niskanen, and I’m not going to argue it with you.” She said it levelly. “I can show you where he slept. That’s more than I could do on Monday.”

Urho’s mouth worked. He had been ready for her to defend herself, and she had left him nothing to push against.

Hilja’s cane knocked twice on the floor. She was sitting by the fireplace with Ivar Pucel, and Stefan stood behind them with his arms folded.

“The council is all in this room,” Hilja said. “So is half the lake, and I see no reason to walk up the hill and say it again. Tell us what you’ve seen, Kaisa. All of it that you’re sure of.”

Kaisa turned her back to the board. Anders had taken the wall by the office door, where he could see her face and the room together.

“I’ve found thirty-eight lost people,” she said. “Every one of them, the living ones, wanted to be found. Children most of all. A lost child goes downhill and stops at water. She stays near the last thing she knew. She drops a mitten or breaks branches, and she walks in soft ground because it’s easier. When she’s tired she lies down in the open, beside a trail, where she can hear someone coming. And when she hears a voice she comes to it.”

She looked along the bench at the two mothers.

“Pia and Oskar have done none of that. They left their houses by the back way and went straight to the lake. On the portage they left the path and climbed bare granite, twice, where the easy way was right beside them. They go into the water to leave a shore and they come out of it somewhere else, so a nose on the bank has nothing to follow. They’re bedding on an island a wolf can’t walk to, on the side where the wind won’t carry them to the mainland. I’ve been out five days with a dog and they’ve stayed ahead of me. A month ago one of them couldn’t walk on four legs without falling over.”

“Say it plain,” Hilja said.

“They’re hiding. They’re good at it, and they aren’t frightened. That bed smelled of two pups who slept sound. Children that age don’t work this out alone. Someone told them to do it and showed them how.” She took one breath. “And someone is taking them food. There was cooked food on that island, out of a kitchen on this lake, and it was fresher than the day either of them left.”

Nobody spoke. Anders watched it travel across the hall. He saw neighbours not look at each other. Britta stood in the kitchen door with a dish towel in her fist, and her eyes went to the counter behind her and came back.

She had not said whose kitchen, and she had not said a word about green paint. He noticed both.

“Pia had a secret,” Elsa said from the bench. Her voice was flat and careful. “I told you. I thought it was a boy.”

“I think it was this.”

“Who?” Hilja asked.

“I don’t know.”

“I do,” Urho said.

He had shaken off Dagny’s arm. He was pointing, and for once it was not at Kaisa. He was pointing south, down the length of the lake, through the wall.

“Walk on rock. Take to the water. Sleep on an island with the wind at your back. I know those tricks, and so does every grey head in this room. There’s one man on Vaara Lake who ever taught them to a pup. He called it the hiding game. He ran it every August for twenty years, and he was proud of it. Reino Rautio.” He swung round on Kaisa. “He’s got a canoe and the whole south end to himself. He’s got seven years of grudge. And now his daughter comes home at six hundred a day to hunt for what he hid. Tell me that isn’t neat.”

Anders had learned those tricks at twelve, lying in a cedar swamp with his heart pounding while Reino counted to five hundred on the shore. So had most of the men in this hall. He kept his arms folded. She had told him once already that she did not need a room cleared for her.

He could give them a fact, though, and a fact was not an order.

“Pia was five when Reino stopped teaching,” he said. “Oskar was six. He hasn’t had a pup on his porch since. This pack saw to that.”

“Then he’s had them since, on the quiet,” Urho said. “Who goes down there to see?”

“Nobody,” said Ivar Pucel, around his pipe. It was the first thing he had said.

Kaisa stood with the pen in her hand. Anders saw her look for the answer and saw that she did not have it. Her father had walked his own shore for these children; she had told him that in the canoe. It proved nothing. She knew that better than anyone here.

“I can’t answer you today, Mr. Niskanen,” she said. “I’ll say this much. If it’s him, I’ll write it on that board in the same pen. I don’t find people for one side.”

“We’ll see what you write.”

“Nobody is accusing anyone this afternoon,” Stefan said gently. He came forward and put a hand on Urho’s shoulder. “We know more than we did yesterday, and it’s good news, old friend. Let her work. The moon’s up at seven, and Britta’s boy has been waiting twelve years for it. Let’s not give him this to remember.”

It was kindly said, and it settled the room. Anders saw too that it left Reino’s name hanging in the air where Urho had put it.

Kaisa capped her pen. She did not look at Anders as she went out.
***
The moon came up a little after seven, out of the trees on the east ridge, as orange as a coal.

They had gathered on the grass below the lodge, where the ground ran down to the water. There was no fire. On a first-moon night the pack wanted nothing between the child and the sky. Most of the lake was there, a hundred people or more in old coats, with the smallest children on shoulders.

Mikko stood in the middle in a blanket. He had been sick twice that afternoon and had eaten a whole chicken in between. His hair was soaked with sweat. Britta stood on one side of him and Jari on the other, and neither of them touched him, because that was the rule and because he would have bitten them.

“It itches,” Mikko said, through his teeth. “It itches inside.”

“I know,” Britta said.

“You don’t know. You forgot.”

“Nobody forgets that.”

Anders stood ten feet off, as the alpha did. He had seen this forty times and it caught him in the throat every time. He looked once past the crowd to the edge of the yard. Kaisa was there, well back, by the corner of the gear shed, with the dog sitting against her leg. She was outside the ring, where an unsworn wolf had to stand. She had come anyway.

Mikko had seen her too. Anders watched the boy’s eyes find the yellow dog and hold on to it.

The moon cleared the pines and went from orange to white.

The boy dropped the blanket and went down on his hands. It was never pretty the first time. He made a noise that was half a yell and half something else, and Britta put her knuckles in her mouth. It took him a good deal longer than ten breaths. But at the end of it there was a wolf standing on the grass, black and lanky, with ears too big for his head and legs too long for the rest of him.

He took one step and fell on his nose.

The pack laughed, low and warm, as it had laughed at every one of them. Mikko got up, sneezed, turned a full circle after his own tail, and saw it. He stood there shaking with pride.

Anders raised his head and howled.

He did it in his own shape, the one time in the month it was done that way, and a hundred throats came in under him. The sound went out over the water and came back off the far shore. The black pup sat down hard on his haunches, pointed his nose at the moon, and produced a squeak. Then he produced a better one.

After that everyone was shedding coats on the grass.

Anders went down with the rest and felt the night widen. His sister was beside him, black and rawboned, and Jari, brown, with his shoulder against hers. The pack poured north along the shore path, forty wolves and then sixty, stringing out through the cedars.

The new ones ran at the back, as they always did, and Stefan ran with them.

He was a thick-set grey wolf with a muzzle gone silver, and he had been run-master since Anders was a small boy. Anders dropped back on the first rise to watch. There were three pups this year: Mikko, and the Saari girl who had come on in June, and a Lund boy from July. Stefan had them in a line. When Mikko overran a corner and went end over end into a juniper, the old wolf waited. He did not help the boy out. He stood with his tail level and let him fight free by himself, and then he touched his nose to the pup’s ear and set off again at a pace the child could hold. At the creek he crossed first and stood in the current below the stones so that anyone who slipped would fetch up against him.

He was patient, and he was proud of them. He looked like a man with his own grandchildren. Anders had been one of those pups, twenty-one years ago, and that same grey shoulder had been there at every creek.

He ran on with a lighter heart than he had carried in three weeks. At Otter Rock he stopped.

The pack went by him and on up the shore toward the head of the lake. Britta checked and looked back. He flattened his ears at her, and she went on.

It was the first-moon run. An alpha led it out and led it home, and every wolf who passed him on that rock would remember that he had turned back after half a mile. In twenty-nine days some of them would be asked whether he was fit to keep his place. He knew it and he went south anyway, through the trees.

He shifted at his own door. He pulled on trousers, boots and the wool shirt and walked the forty yards down to the dock below Cabin 3.

She was sitting at the end of it with her legs hanging over and the dog pressed to her hip. The moon was high enough now to light every board. She had heard him coming, and she did not turn round.

“You’re missing your run,” she said.

“They know the way.”

“That isn’t the point of it. You know it isn’t.”

“I know.” He stopped six feet behind her. “May I sit?”

She moved her hand along the planks, an inch or two. He took it for a yes and sat down on the other side from the dog, with a foot of dock between them. Far up the lake the pack gave tongue, thin and silvery with distance.

“He fell on his nose,” she said.

“So did I. So did you. I was there, I was sixteen.”

“I fell in the lake.”

“You walked into the lake. You thought you could still stand on two feet.” He heard her breath catch on something that was nearly a laugh. “He looked for you before he went down. You and the dog.”

“I saw.” She was quiet. “I used to lead that run back, some nights. When my father was out on a search. I’d forgotten that until I was standing by the shed.”

“I hadn’t.”

The dog sighed. Out on the water a fish rose, and the rings spread through the moon’s track. Her hands were flat on the boards. Her face was turned up the lake toward the sound, and in that light he could see the pale line through her eyebrow and the pulse in her throat.

He had run beside her last night as if seven years were nothing. He had stood at a fire and not looked at her, and she had crossed the ground and taken a shirt from his hand. He knew what the thing under his ribs was doing. It was not the reason he moved. He looked at her mouth, and he wanted it, and he leaned in.

She turned her face away.

He stopped where he was. Her cheek was a hand’s width from him.

“You don’t get to,” she said. Her voice was low and shook a little, and she let it shake. “Not until I hear why. And not the words you said to the whole pack. I know those. I’ve had them by heart since I was twenty-two.”

He sat back.

Up the shore the howl turned. They had reached the head of the lake and were coming home. In ten minutes there would be sixty wolves on the path behind these cabins, and every one of them could hear a whisper across a hundred yards of still water. The why was no small thing to say. It had his dead father in it, and an hour in the sauna that stood forty yards from this dock, and other names besides his own. He would not shout it down a shoreline to people who were already counting him.

“I can’t tell you here,” he said.

“Why not?”

“Listen to them. They’ll be on the point before I’m halfway through. And it isn’t all mine. Other people are in it, Kaisa. I won’t say it where the whole run can hear.”

“Other people.” She nodded slowly, still looking at the water. “There were a hundred and sixty other people the last time, and you managed.”

He had no answer to that which was not the answer.

She got up. The dog scrambled up with her. She stood over him for a moment with the moon behind her head, and he could not see her face.

“You’ve had seven years of other places,” she said. “You’ve had a canoe with nobody in it but me and a dog. I’m not asking twice.”

She walked up the dock. He heard her boots on the path and the cabin door, and he saw the lamp come up yellow in the window. He was still sitting there when the pack came down the shore. The first wolves slowed as they passed the point and looked at the alpha alone on the end of a dock with his boots on.
***