Last Night In Twisted River

CHAPTER 16. LOST NATION

FOR THREE WINTERS NOW, THE WRITER DANIEL BACIAGALUPO-who’d reclaimed the name that the cook and Cousin Rosie had given him-spent the months of January and February, and the first two weeks of March, on Turner Island in Georgian Bay. The island still belonged to Charlotte, the onetime love of Danny’s life, but Charlotte and her family had no desire to set foot on the frozen lake or those frigid, snow-covered rocks in the heart of the winter, when they lived happily in Los Angeles.

Danny had actually improved the place-not only according to Ketchum’s standards. Andy Grant had taped heated electrical cables to the waste lines that were used during the winter. These same pipes were also wrapped with a foil insulation and covered with an ice-and-water membrane. Danny could have had running hot water by applying similar heat-line and insulation methods to the water pipe running to the bay, but Andy would have had to do a lot more work-not to mention move the hot-water heater inside the main cabin to ensure that those pipes wouldn’t freeze. It was simpler for Danny to chop a hole in the ice on the lake, and carry the water from the bay in a bucket. This amounted to a lot of chopping and carrying, but-as Ketchum would have said-so what?

There wasn’t just the ice-chopping; there was a lot of wood to cut. (Ketchum’s chainsaw was a big help.) In the ten weeks Danny was there, he cut all the wood he would need the following winter-with enough left over for Charlotte and her family to use on those summer nights when it was cool enough to have a fire.

In addition to the woodstove in the main cabin, there was a propane fireplace in the bedroom and an electric heater in the bathroom-and Andy Grant had put fiberglass insulation between the floor joists. The main cabin was now sustainable for winter weather, and there was a second woodstove in Danny’s writing shack, though there was no insulation there; the little building was small enough to not need it, and Danny banked the perimeter walls of the shack with snow, which kept the wind from blowing under the building and cooling off the floor.

Every night, Danny also banked the fire in the woodstove in the main cabin; when the writer awoke in the morning, it was only necessary for him to put more wood on the fire and fully open the flue. Then he tramped outside to his writing shack and started a fire in the woodstove there. Overnight, the only concession he made to his IBM typewriter was that he covered it with an electric blanket-otherwise, the grease would freeze. While the writing shack was warming up, Danny chopped a hole in the ice on the lake and brought a couple of buckets of water up to the main cabin. One bucket of water was usually sufficient to flush the toilet for the day; a second sufficed for what cooking Danny did, and for washing the dishes. Charlotte ’s oversize bathtub easily held four or five buckets, which included the two that had to be heated (near to boiling) on the stove, but Danny didn’t take a bath until the end of the day.

He went to work every morning in his writing shack, inspired by the view of that wind-bent pine-the little tree that had once reminded both the writer and Ketchum of the cook. Danny wrote every day until early afternoon; he wanted to have a few remaining hours of daylight in which to do his chores. There was always more wood to cut, and almost every day Danny went to town. If there wasn’t much garbage to haul off the island, and he needed only a few groceries, Danny would make the trip on cross-country skis. He kept the skis and poles, and a small haul sled, in Granddaddy’s cabin near the back dock. (That was the unheated, possibly haunted cabin Ketchum and Hero had preferred during their days and nights on the island-the cabin with the trapdoor in the floor, where Charlotte ’s grandfather, the wily poacher, had likely hidden his illegally slain deer.)

It was a short ski from the back dock of the island across Shawanaga Bay, and then Danny took the South Shore Road into Pointe au Baril Station. He wore a harness around his chest; there was a ring attached to the harness, between Danny’s shoulder blades, where a carabiner held a tow cord to the haul sled. Of course, if there was a lot of garbage to take to town, or if he needed to do more extensive shopping in Pointe au Baril, Danny would take the snowmobile or the Polar airboat.

Andy Grant had warned the writer that he would need to have his own snowmobile as well as the airboat. There weren’t many days in the winter months when boating conditions were unfavorable, except when the temperature climbed above freezing; then the snow sometimes stuck to the bottom of the hull, making it difficult for the airboat to slide across the snow-covered ice. That was when you had to have a snowmobile. But in early January, when Danny arrived at Charlotte’s island, there was usually open water in the main channel out of Pointe au Baril Station-and often floating slabs of ice in the choppy water in the Brignall Banks Narrows. Early January was when the Polar airboat was essential-and, only occasionally, in mid-March. (In some years, albeit rarely, the ice in the bay began to break up that early.)

The airboat could cruise over ice and snow and open water-even over floating chunks of broken ice-with ease. It could go 100 MPH, though Danny never drove it that fast; the airboat had an airplane engine and a single, rear-mounted propeller. It had a heated cabin, too, and you wore guards to protect your ears from the sound. The airboat had been the most expensive element of making Turner Island habitable for Danny during those ten weeks in the coldest part of the winter, but Andy Grant had shared the cost with the writer. Andy used it as a work boat, not only in December, when the ice began to form in the bay, but from the middle of March till whenever the ice was entirely gone-usually, by the end of April.

Danny liked to be gone from Georgian Bay before the start of mud season; the ice breaking up in the bay held no attraction for him. (There wasn’t much of a mud season in Georgian Bay -it was all rocks there. But for Daniel Baciagalupo, mud season was as much a state of mind as it was a recognizable season in northern New Eng land.)

Since Charlotte ’s family used the bedroom in the main cabin only sparingly, as a guest room, Danny kept some of his winter clothing in the closet year-round-just his boots, his warmest parka, his snow pants, and his ski hats. Naturally, Charlotte’s and her family’s summer paraphernalia was everywhere-with new photographs on the walls every winter-but Charlotte had left Danny’s writing shack as it was. She’d found a couple of pictures of Ketchum with the cook, and two or three of Joe, which she had hung in the shack-perhaps to make Danny feel welcome there, not that she hadn’t already done enough to make him feel warmly invited to use the place.

Charlotte ’s husband, the Frenchman, was evidently the cook in their family, because he left notes for Danny in the kitchen about any new equipment that was there. Danny left notes for the Frenchman, too, and they traded presents every year-gadgets for the kitchen and sundry cooking ware.

The more recently restored sleeping cabins-where Charlotte and her husband, and their children, slept every summer-were understood to be off-limits to Danny in the winter. The buildings remained locked; the electricity and propane had been turned off, and the plumbing drained. But, every winter, Danny would at least once peer in the windows-no curtains were necessary on a private family island in Shawanaga Bay. The writer merely wanted to see the new photographs on the walls, and to get a look at what new toys and books the kids might have; this wasn’t really an invasion of Charlotte ’s privacy, was it? And, if only from such a wintry and far-removed perspective, Charlotte ’s family looked like a happy one to Daniel Baciagalupo. The notes back and forth with the Frenchman had all but replaced Charlotte ’s now-infrequent phone calls from the West Coast, and Danny still stayed out of Toronto at that September time of the year, when he knew Charlotte and her director husband were in town for the film festival.

Ketchum had advised the writer to live in the country. To the veteran river driver, Danny hadn’t seemed like a city person.

Well, that the writer spent a mere ten weeks on Turner Island in Georgian Bay didn’t exactly constitute living in the country; though he traveled a lot nowadays, Danny lived in Toronto the rest of the year. Yet-at least from early January till the middle of March-that lonely island in Shawanaga Bay and the town of Pointe au Baril Station were extremely isolated. (As Ketchum used to say, “You notice the birch trees more when there’s snow.”) There were not more than two hundred people in Pointe au Baril in the winter.

Kennedy’s, which was good for groceries and home hardware, stayed open most of the week in the winter months. There was the Haven restaurant out on Route 69, where they served alcohol and had a pool table. The Haven had a fondness for Christmas wreaths, and they displayed an abundance of Santas-including a bass with a Santa Claus hat. While the most popular food with the snowmobilers were the chicken wings and the onion rings and the French fries, Danny stuck to the BLTs and the coleslaw-when he went there at all, which was rarely.

Larry’s Tavern was out on 69, too-Danny had stayed there with Ketchum on their deer-hunting trips in the Bayfield and Pointe au Baril area-though there was already a rumor that Larry’s would be sold to make room for the new highway. They were always widening 69, but for now the Shell station was still operating; supposedly, the Shell station was the only place in Pointe au Baril where you could buy porn magazines. (Not very good ones, if you could trust Ketchum’s evaluation.)

It could be forlorn at that time of year, and there wasn’t a lot to talk about, except for the repeated observation that the main channel didn’t freeze over for all but a week or two. And all winter long, both the gossip and the local news provided various gruesome details of the accidents out on 69; there were a lot of accidents on that highway. This winter, there’d already been a five-vehicle pileup at the intersection with Go Home Lake Road, or near Little Go Home Bay-Danny could never keep the two of them straight. (To those year-round residents who didn’t know he was a famous author, Daniel Baciagalupo was just another out-of-it American.)

Naturally, the liquor store-out on 69, across from the bait shop-was always busy, as was the Pointe au Baril nursing station, where an ambulance driver had recently stopped Danny, who was on his snowmobile, and told him about the snowmobiler who’d gone through the ice in Shawanaga Bay.

“Did he drown?” Danny asked the driver.

“Haven’t found him yet,” the ambulance driver replied.

Danny thought that maybe they wouldn’t find the snowmobiler until the ice broke up sometime in mid-April. According to this same ambulance driver at the nursing station, there’d also been “a doozy of a head-on” in Honey Harbour, and an alleged “first-rater of a rear-end job” in the vicinity of Port Severn. Rural life in the winter months was rugged: snow-blurred and alcohol-fueled, violent and fast.

Those ten weeks that Danny lived in the environs of Pointe au Baril Station were a strong dose of rural life; maybe it wasn’t enough country living to have satisfied Ketchum, but it was enough for Danny. It counted as the writer’s requisite country living-whether Ketchum would have counted it or not.

IN THE AFTER-HOURS RESTAURANT, the eighth and final novel by “Danny Angel,” was published in 2002, seven years after Baby in the Road. What Danny had predicted to Ketchum was largely true-namely, his publishers complained that a book by an unknown writer named Daniel Baciagalupo couldn’t possibly sell as many copies as a new novel by Danny Angel.

But Danny made his publishers understand that In the After-Hours Restaurant was absolutely the last book he would publish under the Angel name. And, in every interview, he repeatedly referred to himself as Daniel Baciagalupo; over and over again, he told the story of the circumstances that had forced the nom de plume upon him when he’d been a young and beginning writer. It had never been a secret that Danny Angel was a pen name, or that the writer’s real name was Daniel Baciagalupo-the secret had been why.

The accidental death of the bestselling author’s son-not to mention the violent murder of the writer’s father, and the subsequent shooting of the cook’s killer-had been big news. Danny could have insisted that In the After-Hours Restaurant be the debut novel by Daniel Baciagalupo; their complaining aside, and however reluctantly, Danny’s publishers would have agreed. But Danny was content to let his next novel (it would be his ninth) be Daniel Baciagalupo’s debut.

In the After-Hours Restaurant got a warm reception and mostly good reviews-the author was often praised for a nowadays-atypical “restraint.” Maybe the oft-repeated restraint word was what bothered the writer, though it was meant as praise. Danny would never know what Ketchum thought of In the After-Hours Restaurant, but restraint had never been a prominent part of the logger’s vocabulary-not in the category of admired qualities, anyway. Would Danny Angel’s last novel have satisfied the former river driver’s demand that Danny let himself go-that is, be more daring as a writer? (Apparently, Danny didn’t think so.)

“You keep skirting the darker subjects,” Ketchum had told him. In the case of In the After-Hours Restaurant, would the nightly efforts of the gentle sous chef to teach himself his illustrious father’s trade constitute more of the same “writing around the periphery of things”-as Ketchum had unkindly put it? (Danny must have thought so; otherwise, why wouldn’t he have proudly put Daniel Baciagalupo’s name on the new novel?)

“His most subtle work,” one reviewer had written glowingly about In the After-Hours Restaurant. In Ketchum’s unsubtle vocabulary, the subtle word had never been uttered in praise.

“His most symbolic undertaking,” another critic had commented.

There was no telling what Ketchum might have said about the symbolic word, Danny knew, but the writer didn’t doubt what the fearless riverman would have thought: Symbolism and subtlety and restraint added up to “dodging the squeamish stuff,” which Ketchum had already criticized Danny for.

And would the old logger have liked how Danny answered the repeated political questions he was asked during the promotional trips he took to publicize In the After-Hours Restaurant? (In 2005, the novelist was still answering political questions-and there were a few translation trips for In the After-Hours Restaurant yet to come.)

“Yes, it’s true-I continue to live in Canada, and will continue to live here,” Danny had said, “though the reason for my leaving the United States has been, as an old friend of my family once put it, removed.” (It had been Ketchum, of course, who’d used the removed word in reference to the deceased cowboy-more than once.)

“No, it’s not true that I am ‘politically opposed,’ as you say, to living in the U.S.,” Danny had said, many times, “and-just because I live in Canada, and I’m a Canadian citizen-I do not intend to stop writing about Americans, or about behavior I associate with being an American. It could even be argued that living in a foreign country-especially in Canada, which is right across the border-enables me to see America more clearly, or at least from a slightly less American perspective.” (Ketchum would certainly have recognized the writer’s sources for that answer, though the combative woodsman wouldn’t necessarily have appreciated how tactful Danny usually was in answering those questions regarding the novelist’s political opposition to his country of birth.)

“It’s too soon to say,” the writer was always saying-in response to how the attacks of September 11, and President Bush’s retaliation to those attacks, had affected the United States; in response to where the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were headed; in response to whether or not Canada would be dragged into a recession, or a depression. (Because the U.S. was fast approaching one, or both, wasn’t it? From the Canadian journalists, that was generally the implication.)

It was going on four years since Ketchum had called the United States “an empire in decline;” what might the old logger have called the country now? In Canada, the questions Danny was asked were increasingly political. Most recently, it had been someone at the Toronto Star who’d asked Danny a battery of familiar questions.

Wasn’t it true that the United States was “hopelessly overextended, militarily”? Wasn’t the federal government “wallowing under massive debt”? And would the writer care to comment on America ’s “belligerent, warmongering nature”? Wasn’t the bestselling author’s “former country,” as the Canadian journalist referred to the United States, “in decay”?

For how much longer, Danny wondered, would the answers to these and other insinuating questions fall into the too-soon-to-say category? The writer knew that he couldn’t get away with that answer forever. “I am a slow processor-I mean, as a writer,” Danny liked to preface his remarks. “And I’m a fiction writer-meaning that I won’t ever write about the September Eleventh attacks, though I may use those events, when they’re not so current, and then only in the context of a story of my own devising.” (The combined evasiveness and vagueness of that cautious manifesto might have elicited from Ketchum something along the lines of the embattled woodsman’s mountains-of-moose-shit expletive.)

After all, Danny was on record for saying that the 2000 U.S. election-the one Bush “stole” from Gore-was, indeed, a “theft.” How could the writer not comment on the 2004 version, when Bush had beaten John Kerry with questionable tactics and for the worst of all reasons? In Danny’s view, John Kerry had been a hero twice-first in the war in Vietnam, later in his protests against it. Yet Kerry was viewed with disfavor by America ’s bully patriots, who were either stupid or stubborn enough to still be defending that misbegotten war.

What Danny had said to the media was that his so-called former country occasionally made him remember and appreciate Samuel Johnson’s oft-quoted “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.” Regrettably, that wasn’t all Danny said. In some instances, sounding like Ketchum, the writer had gone on to say that in the case of the 2004 U.S. election, the scoundrel was not only George W. Bush; it was every dumber-than-dog-shit American voter who’d believed that John Kerry wasn’t patriotic enough to be the U.S. president.

Those remarks would be repeated-especially that bit about the “bully patriots,” not to mention singling out “every dumber-than-dog-shit American voter.” The novelist Daniel Baciagalupo had indeed written and published eight novels under the nom de plume of Danny Angel, and Danny and his father had fled the United States and come to Canada-an act of emigration to evade a madman who wanted to kill them, a crazy ex-cop who eventually did kill Danny’s dad-but the way it appeared to most of the world was that Daniel Baciagalupo had chosen to stay in Canada for political reasons.

As for Danny, he was getting tired of denying it; also, sounding like Ketchum was easier. Danny, pretending to be Ketchum, had commented on a recent poll: Twice as many Americans had expressed more unrestrained loathing at the prospect of gay marriage than they’d registered even mild anxiety about the outcome of the war in Iraq. “Bush’s regressive gay-bashing is reprehensible,” the writer had said. (A comment like that further contributed to Danny’s political reputation; sounding like Ketchum was very quotable.)

On the refrigerator in his Toronto kitchen, Danny had compiled a list of questions for Ketchum. But they didn’t look like a list; they hadn’t been assembled in an orderly way. There were many small scraps of paper taped to the fridge. Because Danny had dated each note, the recorded information on the door of the refrigerator resembled a kind of calendar of how the war in Iraq was proceeding. Soon the fridge would be covered.

Even the most anti-American of the writer’s Canadian friends found his refrigerator politics a futile and juvenile exercise. (It was also a waste of Scotch tape.) And the same year In the After-Hours Restaurant was published, 2002, Danny had gotten in the habit of listening on the radio to a patriotic country-music station in the States. Danny could find the channel only late at night; he suspected that the signal was clearest when the wind was blowing north across Lake Ontario.

Did Danny do this to make himself angry at his former country? No, not at all; it was Ketchum’s response to the crappy country music Danny wished he could hear. The writer longed to hear the old logger say, “I’ll tell you what’s wrong with dumb-shit patriotism-it’s delusional! It signifies nothing but the American need to win.” Might not Ketchum have said something like that?

And now, with the war in Iraq almost two years old, wouldn’t Ketchum also have railed that the majority of Americans were so poorly informed that they failed to see that this war was a distraction from the so-called war against terror-not a furtherance of that avowed war?

Danny had no quarrel with seeking out and destroying al-Qaeda-“Seek out and destroy fucking Hamas and Hezbollah while you’re at it!” Ketchum had thundered-but Saddam’s Iraq had been a secular tyranny. Did most Americans understand the distinction? Until we went there, there’d been no al-Qaeda in Iraq, had there? (It didn’t take much for Danny to be over his head, politically; he wasn’t as sure of himself as Ketchum had been. Danny didn’t read as much, either.)

What would the raging woodsman from Coos County have said about the United States declaring an end to “major combat operations” in Iraq in May 2003-less than two months after the war had begun? It was tempting to wonder.

The questions for Ketchum on Danny’s refrigerator may have been a reminder of the war’s folly, but the writer had to wonder why he’d bothered to keep such an overobvious account; it served Danny no purpose, other than to depress him.

To the separate but similar-sounding denials by U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell and British prime minister Tony Blair-who swore in May 2003 that intelligence about Iraq ’s weapons of mass destruction was neither distorted nor exaggerated in order to justify the attack on Iraq -Danny could imagine Ketchum saying, “Show me the weapons, fellas!”

At times, Danny recited the questions for Ketchum to the dog. (“Even the dog,” Ketchum might have quipped, “is smart enough to know where this war is headed!”)

Daniel Baciagalupo would be sixty-three this coming mud season. He was a man who’d lost his only child and his father, and he lived alone-not to mention that he was a writer. Naturally, Danny would talk and read aloud to the dog.

As for Hero, he seemed unsurprised by Danny’s somewhat eccentric behavior. The former bear hound was used to being spoken to; it usually beat getting mauled by a bear.

THE DOG WAS OF INDETERMINATE AGE. Ketchum had been vague about how old this particular Hero was-meaning how many generations were descended from that first “fine animal,” which the current Hero represented. There were more gray hairs on Hero’s muzzle than Danny remembered, but the Walker bluetick’s mottled-white and bluish-gray coat made the gray hairs of age harder to distinguish. And that Hero was lame was not only an indication that the dog was advanced in years; the claw wounds from the bear-mauling had healed long ago, though the scars were very visible, and that hip, where the bear had clawed Hero, suffered from some joint damage. The mangled, mostly missing ear had also healed, but the scar tissue was black and furless.

Most disconcerting to anyone encountering Hero for the first time was that the veteran bear hound was missing an eyelid-on the opposite side of the dog’s fierce face from his mangled ear. The eyelid was lost in Hero’s last confrontation with Six-Pack’s German shepherd, though-according to Pam-Hero had gained the upper hand in the dogs’ final, kennel-clearing fight. Six-Pack was forced to put the shepherd down. She’d never held it against Hero, however; by Pam’s own account, the two dogs had always and sincerely hated each other.

To the writer, the battle-scarred bear hound was a living replica of Coos County, where lethal hatreds were generally permitted to run their course. (As elsewhere, Danny considered-whenever he happened to glance at the questions for Ketchum on his refrigerator door.)

In January 2004, the number of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq since the start of the war had climbed to five hundred. “Hell, five hundred is nothing-it’s just getting started,” Danny could imagine the old logger saying. “We’ll be up to five thousand in just a few more years, and some asshole will be telling us that peace and stability are right around the corner.”

“What do you think about that, Hero?” Danny had asked the dog, who’d pricked up his one ear at the question. “Wouldn’t our mutual friend have been entertaining on the subject of this war?”

Danny could tell when the dog was really listening, or when Hero was actually asleep. The eye without the eyelid followed you when Hero was only pretending to sleep, but when the dog was truly dead to the world, the pupil and the iris of the constantly open eye traveled somewhere unseen; the cloudy-white orb stared blankly.

The onetime bear hound slept on a zippered dog bed stuffed with cedar chips in the Toronto kitchen. Contrary to Danny’s earlier opinion, Ketchum’s stories of Hero’s farting hadn’t been exaggerated. On the dog bed, Hero’s preferred chew toy was the old sheath for Ketchum’s biggest Browning knife-the one-footer that the riverman used to stash over the sun visor on the driver’s side of his truck. The sheath, which had absorbed the sharpening oil from Ketchum’s oilstone knife sharpener, was possibly still redolent of the slain bear that had once ridden in the cab of the truck; from the way Hero seemed neurotically attached to the lightly gnawed sheath, Danny understandably believed so.

The foot-long Browning knife itself proved to be less useful. Danny had taken the knife to a kitchen-supply store, where they’d tried unsuccessfully to resharpen it; Danny’s repeated efforts to rid the knife of any residue of Ketchum’s sharpening oil, by putting the knife in the dishwasher, had dulled the blade. Now the knife was dull and oily, and Danny had hung it in a most visible but unreachable part of his Toronto kitchen, where it resembled a ceremonial sword.

Ketchum’s guns were another matter. Danny hadn’t wanted them-not in Toronto. He’d given them to Andy Grant, with whom Danny went deer hunting every November. Killing Carl had made it easier for Danny to shoot deer, though he’d refused to fire a shotgun. (“Never again,” he’d said to Andy.) Danny used Ketchum’s Remington.30-06 Springfield instead. In a wooded area, even at reasonably close range, it was harder to hit a deer with that prized collectible, but the kick of the carbine-or the resonance of the short-barreled rifle’s discharge, in his ear-was different from what Danny remembered of the 20-gauge.

Andy Grant knew the Bayfield area like the back of his hand; he’d hunted there as a boy. But, for the most part, Andy took Danny deer hunting on what was more familiar terrain for Danny-that area west of Lost Tower Lake, between Payne’s Road and Shawanaga Bay. In the vicinity of the winter snowmobile portage, and sometimes within sight of the back dock on Charlotte ’s island, was a natural runway-a virtual game path for deer. That way, every November, Danny could look across the gray water at his winter destination. There were places on the mainland, overlooking Shawanaga Bay, where you could see the back dock on Turner Island-even the roof of Granddaddy’s cabin, where Ketchum had once thrown the skin from that rattlesnake he’d shot.

For those November hunting trips, Danny always stayed at Larry’s Tavern. In the bar was where he’d heard the rumor that Larry’s would one day be sold, whenever the new highway advanced that far north. Who was Danny to say, as the old-timers in the bar often did, that Larry’s should be spared? Neither the tavern nor the motel seemed worth saving to the writer, but he couldn’t deny that both parts of the roadside establishment had long served a local (albeit largely self-destructive) purpose.

And every winter, when Danny arrived on Charlotte ’s island, Andy Grant loaned him Ketchum’s Remington. (“In case of critters,” Ketchum would have said.) Andy also left a couple of extra loaded cartridge clips with the writer. Hero invariably recognized the carbine. It was one of the few times the bear hound wagged his tail, for that bolt-action Remington.30-06 Springfield had been Ketchum’s gun of choice for bear, and doubtless Hero was reminded of the thrill of the chase-or of his former master.

IT HAD TAKEN TWO YEARS for Danny to teach the dog to bark. The growling and farting, and the snoring in his sleep, came naturally to Hero-that is, if the bear hound hadn’t learned these indelicate arts from Ketchum-but Hero had never barked before. In his earliest efforts to encourage Hero to bark, Danny would occasionally wonder if the old logger had disapproved of barking.

There was a little park and playground, probably as big as a football field, near Danny’s Rosedale residence and adjacent to those two new condominiums on Scrivener Square, which-as luck would have it-did not block the writer’s view of the clock tower on the Summer-hill liquor store. Danny walked Hero in the park three or four times a day-more often than not on a leash, lest there might happen to be a German shepherd present in the park, or some other male dog who could have reminded Hero of Six-Pack’s late shepherd.

In the park, Danny barked for Hero; the writer made every effort to bark authentically, but Hero was unimpressed. After a year of this, Danny wondered if Hero somehow didn’t think that barking was a weakness in dogs.

Other dog-walkers in the little park were disconcerted by Hero’s lean-and-mean appearance, and by the bear hound’s preternatural aloofness from other dogs. There were also the scars, the stiff-hipped limp-not to mention the wonky-eyed, baleful stare. “It’s only because Hero lost an eyelid-he’s not really giving your dog the evil eye, or anything,” Danny would try to reassure the anxious dog owners.

“What happened to that ear?” a young woman with a brainless breed of spaniel asked the writer.

“Oh, that was a bear,” Danny admitted.

“A bear!”

“And the poor thing’s hip-those terrible scars?” a nervous-looking man with a schnauzer had asked.

“The same bear,” Danny said.

It was their second winter on Charlotte ’s island when the barking began. Danny had parked the Polar airboat on the ice off the front dock; he was unloading groceries from the boat, while Hero waited for him on the dock. Danny tried once more to bark at the dog-the writer had almost given up. To both Danny and the dog’s surprise, Danny’s bark was repeated; there was an echo of the bark from the direction of Barclay Island. When Hero heard the echo, he barked. Of course there was an echo attending Hero’s bark, too; the bear hound heard a dog uncannily like himself bark back.

It had gone on for over an hour-Hero barking at himself on the dock. (If Ketchum had been there, Danny thought, the former river driver would probably have shot the bear hound.) What have I created? the writer wondered, but after a while, Hero had stopped.

After that, the dog barked normally; he barked at snowmobiles and at the once-in-a-while airplanelike sound of a distant airboat out in the main channel. He barked at the train whistles, which the dog could hear from the mainland-and, less frequently, at the whine of the tires on those big long-haul trucks out on 69. As for intruders-well, in those winter weeks, there were none-there was only a now-and-again visit from Andy Grant. (Hero barked at Andy, too.)

One could never say that Ketchum’s bear hound was normal-or even almost normal-but the barking did much to alleviate the sheer creepiness of Hero’s one-eared, gaping-eyed face. Certainly, Danny’s fellow dog-walkers in that little park near Scrivener Square were less visibly anxious about the bear hound-and now that the dog barked, he growled less. It was a pity that there was nothing Danny could do about Hero’s silent farting or his colossal snoring.

What the writer was realizing was that he hadn’t known what owning a dog was like. The more Danny talked to Hero, the less the writer was inclined to think about what Ketchum would have said about Iraq. Did having a dog make you less political? (Not that Danny had ever been truly political; he’d never been like Katie, or like Ketchum.)

Danny did take sides, politically; he had political opinions. But Danny wasn’t an anti-American-the writer didn’t even feel like an expatriate! The world that was captured in the barest outline form on his Toronto refrigerator began to seem less and less important to the author. That world was increasingly not what Daniel Baciagalupo wanted to think about-especially not, as Ketchum would have said, as a writer.

THERE’D BEEN AN ACCIDENT on 69 near Horseshoe Lake Road. A dipshit driving a Hummer had rear-ended a cattle-transport trailer, killing himself and a bunch of beef cattle. This happened the first winter Danny stayed on Charlotte ’s island, and he’d heard about the accident from his cleaning woman. She was a First Nation person-a young woman with black hair and eyes, a pretty face, and thick, strong-looking hands. Once a week, Danny drove the airboat to the Shawanaga Landing Indian Reserve; that was where he picked her up, and where he returned her at the end of the day, but she almost certainly didn’t live there. Shawanaga Landing was mostly used in the summer months, both as a campsite and as a gateway to the bay. The residents of the reserve lived in the village of Shawanaga, though there were a few First Nation people who lived year-round in Skerryvore-or so Andy Grant had told Danny. (Both areas could be reached by road in the winter months, at least on snowmobiles.)

The young cleaning woman seemed to like riding in the Polar air-boat. Danny always brought a second pair of ear guards for her, and after she’d met Hero, she asked why the bear hound couldn’t come along for the ride. “The airboat is too loud for a dog’s ears-well, for his one ear, anyway,” Danny told her. “I don’t know how well Hero can hear out of the mangled ear.”

But the cleaning woman had a way with dogs. She told Danny to put her ear guards on Hero when he drove to Shawanaga Landing to pick her up, and when he drove back to Turner Island without her. (Surprisingly, the dog didn’t object to wearing them.) And when the cleaning woman rode in the airboat with Hero, she held the bear hound in her lap and covered his ears-even the mostly missing one-with her big, strong hands. Danny had never seen Hero sit in anyone’s lap before. The Walker bluetick weighed sixty or seventy pounds.

The dog devotedly followed the young woman throughout her cleaning chores, the same way Hero attached himself to Danny everywhere on the island when Danny was otherwise alone there. When Danny was using the chainsaw, the bear hound maintained a safe distance between them. (The writer was sure that Hero had learned this from Ketchum.)

There was an ongoing misunderstanding in regard to where the young First Nation person lived-Danny never saw anyone waiting for her at Shawanaga Landing, or any kind of vehicle she might have used to get herself to and from the boat landing. Danny had asked her only once, but the young cleaning woman’s answer struck him as dreamy or facetious-or both-and he’d not asked her for clarification. “ Ojibway Territory,” she’d said.

Danny couldn’t tell what the First Nation woman had meant-maybe nothing. He could have asked Andy Grant where she was actually from-Andy had put him in touch with her in the first place-but Danny had let it go. Ojibway Territory was a good enough answer for him.

And the writer had instantly forgotten the young woman’s name, if he’d ever really heard it. Once, early in the first winter she worked for him, he’d said to her admiringly, “You are tireless.” This was in reference to all the ice-chopping she did-and how many full buckets of water she hauled up from the lake, and left for him in the main cabin. The girl had smiled; she’d liked the tireless word.

“You may call me that-please call me that,” she’d told him.

“Tireless?”

“That’s my name,” the First Nation woman had told him. “That’s who I am, all right.”

Again, Danny could have asked Andy Grant for her real name, but the woman liked to be called Tireless, and that was good enough for Danny, too.

Sometimes, from his writing shack, he saw Tireless paying obeisance to the inuksuk. She didn’t formally bow to the stone cairn, but she respectfully brushed the snow off it-and, in her submissiveness, she demonstrated a kind of deference or homage. Even Hero, who stood eerily apart from Tireless on these solemn occasions, seemed to acknowledge the sacredness of the moment.

Danny worked as well in his writing shack on the one day a week when Tireless came to clean as he did when he was alone with Hero there; the cleaning woman didn’t distract him. When she was done with her work in the main cabin-it didn’t matter that, on other days, Danny was used to Hero sleeping (and farting and snoring) in the writing shack while he worked-the writer would look up from his writing and suddenly see Tireless standing by that wind-bent little pine. She never touched the crippled tree; she just stood beside it, like a sentinel, with Hero standing beside her. Neither the First Nation cleaning woman nor the bear hound ever stared at Danny through the window of his writing shack. Whenever the writer happened to look up and see them next to the weather-beaten pine, both the dog and the young woman had their backs to him; they appeared to be scouting the frozen bay.

Then Danny would tap the window, and both Tireless and Hero would come inside the writing shack. Danny would leave the shack (and his writing) while Tireless cleaned up in there, which never took her long-usually, less than the time it took Danny to make himself a cup of tea in the main cabin.

Except for Andy Grant-and those repeat old-timers Danny occasionally encountered in the bar at Larry’s Tavern, or at the Haven restaurant, and in the grocery store-the First Nation cleaning woman was the only human being Danny had any social intercourse with in his winters on the island in Georgian Bay, and Danny and Hero saw Tireless just once a week for the ten weeks that the writer was there. One time, when Danny was in town and he ran into Andy Grant, the writer had told Andy how well the young First Nation woman was working out.

“Hero and I just love her,” he’d said. “She’s awfully easy and pleasant to have around.”

“Sounds like you’re getting ready to marry her,” Andy told the writer. Andy was kidding, of course, but Danny-if only for a minute, or two-found himself seriously considering the idea.

Later, back in the airboat-but before he started the engine or put the ear guards on the bear hound-Danny asked the dog: “Do I look lonely to you, Hero? I must be a little lonely, huh?”

IN THE KITCHEN OF DANNY’S HOUSE on Cluny Drive -particularly as the year 2004 advanced-the politics on the writer’s refrigerator had grown tedious. Conceivably, politics had always been boring and the writer only now had noticed; at least the questions for Ketchum seemed trivial and childish in comparison to the more personal and detailed story Danny was developing in his ninth novel.

As always, he began at the end of the story. He’d not only written what he believed was the last sentence, but Danny had a fairly evolved idea of the trajectory of the new novel-his first as Daniel Baciagalupo. Danny was slowly but gradually making his way backward through the narrative, to where he thought the book should begin. That was just the way he’d always worked: He plotted a story from back to front; hence he conceived of the first chapter last. By the time Danny got to the first sentence-meaning to that actual moment when he wrote the first sentence down-often a couple of years or more had passed, but by then he knew the whole story. From that first sentence, the book flowed forward-or, in Danny’s case, back to where he’d begun.

As always, too, the more deeply Danny immersed himself in a novel, the more what passed for his politics fell away. While the writer’s political opinions were genuine, Danny would have been the first to admit that he was mistrustful of all politics. Wasn’t he a novelist, in part, because he saw the world in a most subjective way? And not only was writing fiction the best of what Daniel Baciagalupo could manage to do; writing a novel was truly all he did. He was a craftsman, not a theorist; he was a storyteller, not an intellectual.

Yet Danny was unavoidably remembering those last two U.S. helicopters that left Saigon -those poor people clinging to the helicopters’ skids, and the hundreds of desperate South Vietnamese who were left behind in the courtyard of the U.S. Embassy. The writer had no doubt that we would see that (or something like that) in Iraq. Shades of Vietnam, Danny was thinking-typical of his age, because Iraq wasn’t exactly another Vietnam. (Daniel Baciagalupo was such a sixties fella, as Ketchum had called him; there would be no reforming him.)

It was with little conviction that Danny spoke to the yawning, otherwise unresponsive dog. “I’ll bet you a box of dog biscuits, Hero-everything is going to get a lot worse before anything gets a little better.” The bear hound didn’t even react to the dog biscuits part; Hero found all politics every bit as boring as Danny did. It was just the world as usual, wasn’t it? Who among them would ever change anything about the way the world worked? Not a writer, certainly; Hero had as good a chance of changing the world as Danny did. (Fortunately, Danny didn’t say this to Hero-not wanting to offend the noble dog.)

IT WAS A DECEMBER MORNING IN 2004, after the final (already forgotten) question for Ketchum had been taped to the door of Danny’s refrigerator, when Lupita-that most loyal and long-suffering Mexican cleaning woman-found the writer in his kitchen, where Danny was actually writing. This disturbed Lupita, who-in her necessary departmentalizing of the household-took a totalitarian approach to what the various rooms in a working writer’s house were for.

Lupita was used to, if disapproving of, the clipboards and the loose ream of typing paper in the gym, where there was no typewriter; the plethora of Post-it notes, which were everywhere in the house, was a further irritation to her, but one she had suppressed. As for the political questions for Mr. Ketchum, stuck to the fridge door, Lupita read these with ever-decreasing interest-if at all. The taped-up trivia chiefly bothered Lupita because it prevented her from wiping down the refrigerator door, as she would have liked to do.

Caring, as she did, for Danny’s house on Cluny Drive had been nothing short of a series of heartbreaks for Lupita. That Mr. Ketchum didn’t come to Toronto for Christmas anymore could make the Mexican cleaning woman cry, especially in that late-December time of year-not to mention that the effort she’d had to expend in restoring the late cook’s bedroom, following that double shooting, had come close to killing her. Naturally, the blood-soaked bed had been taken away, and the wallpaper was replaced, but Lupita had individually wiped clean every blood-spattered snapshot on Dominic’s bulletin boards, and she’d scrubbed the floor until she thought her knees and the heels of her hands were going to bleed. She’d persuaded Danny to replace the curtains, too; otherwise, the smell of gunpowder would have remained in the murderous bedroom.

It is worth noting that, in this period of Danny’s life, the two women he maintained the most constant contact with were both cleaning women, though certainly Lupita exerted more influence on the writer than Tireless did. It was because of Lupita’s prodding that Danny had gotten rid of the couch in his third-floor writing room, and this was entirely the result of Lupita claiming that the imprint of the loathsome deputy sheriff’s body was visible (to her) on that couch. “I can still see him lying there, waiting for you and your dad to fall asleep,” Lupita had said to Danny.

Naturally, Danny disposed of the couch-not that the imprint of the cowboy’s fat body had ever been visible to Daniel Baciagalupo, but once the Mexican cleaning woman claimed to have sighted an imprint of Carl on that couch, the writer soon found himself imagining it.

Lupita hadn’t stopped there. It was soon after Hero had come to live with him, Danny was remembering, when Lupita proposed a more monumental change. Those bulletin boards with their collected family history-the hundreds of overlapping snapshots the cook had saved, and there were hundreds more in Dominic’s desk drawers-well, you can imagine what the Mexican cleaning woman thought. It made no sense, Lupita had said, for those special photos to be on display in a room where they were now unseen. “They should be in your bedroom, Mr. Writer,” Lupita had told Danny. (She’d spontaneously taken to calling him that, or “Señor Writer.” Danny couldn’t recall exactly when this had started.)

And it followed, of course, that those photographs of Charlotte would have to be moved. “It’s no longer appropriate,” Lupita had told Danny; she meant that he shouldn’t be sleeping with those nostalgic pictures of Charlotte Turner, who was a married woman with a family of her own. (Without a word of resistance from Mr. Writer, Lupita had simply taken charge.)

Now it made sense. The late cook’s bedroom served as a second guest room; it was rarely used, but it was particularly useful if a couple with a child (or children) were visiting the writer. Dominic’s double bed had been replaced with two twins. The homage to Charlotte in this far-removed guest room-at the opposite end of the hall from Danny’s bedroom-seemed more suitable to what Danny’s relationship with Charlotte had become.

It made more sense, too, that Danny now slept with those photographs of the cook’s immediate and extended families-including some snapshots of the writer’s dead son, Joe. Danny had Lupita to thank for this even being possible, and Lupita was the one who maintained the bulletin boards; she chose the new and recycled photographs that she wanted Danny to sleep with. Once or twice a week, Danny looked closely at the pictures on those bulletin boards, just to see what Lupita had rearranged.

Occasionally, there were small glimpses of Charlotte in the snapshots-for the most part, these pictures were of Charlotte with Joe. (They had somehow passed Lupita’s unfathomable radar of approval.) And there were pictures of Ketchum galore, of course-even a few new ones of the woodsman, and of Danny’s young mother with his even younger dad. These long-saved shots of Cousin Rosie had come into Danny’s possession together with Hero, and Ketchum’s guns-not to mention the chainsaw. The old photos had been spared any exposure to sunlight, pressed flat in the pages of Rosie’s beloved books, which had also come into Danny’s possession-now that the old logger could no longer read them. What a lot of books Ketchum had hoarded! How many more might he have read?

That December morning in 2004, when Lupita caught Danny writing in the kitchen, he was closing in on a couple of scenes he imagined might be near the beginning of his novel-even actual sentences, in some cases. He was definitely getting close to the start of the first chapter, but exactly where to begin-the very first sentence, for example-still eluded him. He was writing in a simple spiral notebook on white lined paper; Lupita knew that the writer had a stack of such notebooks in his third-floor writing room, where (she felt strongly) he should have been writing.

“You’re writing in the kitchen,” the cleaning woman said. It was a straightforward, declarative sentence, but Danny detected an edge to it; from the critical tone of Lupita’s remark, it was as if she’d said, “You’re fornicating in the driveway.” (In broad daylight.) Danny was somewhat taken aback by the Mexican cleaning woman’s meaning.

“I’m not exactly writing, Lupita,” he said defensively. “I’m making a few notes to myself about what I’m going to write.”

“Whatever you’re doing, you’re doing it in the kitchen,” Lupita insisted.

“Yes,” Danny answered her cautiously.

“I suppose I could start upstairs-like on the third floor, in your writing room, where you’re not writing,” the cleaning woman said.

“That would be fine,” Danny told her.

Lupita sighed, as if the world were an endless source of pain for her-it had been, Danny knew. He tolerated how difficult she could be, and for the most part Danny accepted Lupita’s presumed authority; the writer knew that one had to be more accepting of the authority of someone who’d lost a child, as the cleaning woman had, and more tolerant of her, too. But before Lupita could leave the kitchen-to attend to what she clearly considered her out-of-order (if not altogether wrong) first task of the day-Danny said to her, “Would you please clean the fridge today, Lupita? Just throw everything away.”

The Mexican was not easily surprised, but Lupita stood as if she were in shock. Recovering herself, she opened the door to the fridge, which she had cleaned just the other day; there was practically nothing in it. (Except when Danny was having a dinner party, there almost never was.)

“No, I mean the door,” Danny told her. “Please clean it off entirely. Throw all those notes away.”

At this point, Lupita’s disapproval turned to worry. “¿Enfermo?” she suddenly asked Danny. Her plump brown hand felt the writer’s forehead; to her practiced touch, Danny didn’t feel as if he had a fever.

“No, I am not sick, Lupita,” Danny told the cleaning woman. “I am merely sick of how I’ve been distracting myself.”

It was a tough time of year for the writer, who was no spring chicken, Lupita knew. Christmas was the hardest time for people who’d lost family; of this, the cleaning woman had little doubt. She immediately did what Danny had asked her to do. (She actually welcomed the opportunity to interrupt his writing, since he was doing it in the wrong place.) Lupita gladly ripped the little scraps of paper off the fridge door; the damn Scotch tape would take longer, she knew, digging at the remaining strips with her fingernails. She would also scour the door with an antibacterial fluid, but she could do that later.

It’s not likely that it ever occurred to the cleaning woman that she was throwing away what amounted to Danny’s obsession with what Ketchum would have made of Bush’s blundering in Iraq, but she was. Maybe in Danny’s mind-way in the back, somewhere-the writer was aware that he was, at that moment, letting go of at least a little of the anger he felt at his former country.

Ketchum had called America a lost nation, but Danny didn’t know if this was fair to say-or if the accusation was true yet. All that mattered to Daniel Baciagalupo, as a writer, was that his former country was a lost nation to him. Since Bush’s reelection, Danny had accepted that America was lost to him, and that he was-from this minute, forward-an outsider living in Canada, till the end of his days.

While Lupita made a fuss over the refrigerator door, Danny went into the gym and called Kiss of the Wolf. He left a fairly detailed message on the answering machine; he said he wanted to make a reservation at the restaurant for every remaining night that Kiss of the Wolf was open-that is, until Patrice and Silvestro closed for the Christmas holiday. Lupita had been right: Christmas was always hard for Danny. First he’d lost Joe, and those Christmases in Colorado; then Danny’s dad had been blown away. And every Christmas since that also-memorable Christmas of 2001, the writer was reminded of how he’d heard about Ketchum, who was lost to him, too.

Danny was not Ketchum; the writer was not even “like” Ketchum, though there’d been times when Danny had tried to be like the old logger. Oh, how he’d tried! But that wasn’t Danny’s job-to use the job word as Ketchum had meant it. Danny’s job was to be a writer, and Ketchum had understood that long before Danny did.

“You’ve got to stick your nose in the worst of it, and imagine everything, Danny,” the veteran river driver had told him. Daniel Baciagalupo was trying; if the writer couldn’t be Ketchum, he could at least heroize the logger. Really, how hard was it, the writer was thinking, to make Ketchum a hero?

“Well, writers should know it’s sometimes hard work to die, Danny,” Ketchum had told him when it had taken Danny three shots to drop his first deer.

Shit, I should have known then what Ketchum meant, the writer was thinking on that day when Lupita was madly cleaning all around him. (Yes, he should have.)

CHAPTER 17. KETCHUM EXCEPTED

DANNY DID HAVE SOME GLIMMER OF UNDERSTANDING IN regard to what Ketchum was up to-this had happened around the time of American Thanksgiving, in November 2001. The writer was having dinner one evening-naturally, at Kiss of the Wolf-and Danny’s dinner date was his own doctor. Their relationship wasn’t sexual, but they had a serious friendship; she’d been Danny’s medical-expert reader for a number of his novels. She’d once written him a fan letter, and they’d begun a correspondence-long before he came to Canada. Now they were close friends.

The doctor’s name was Erin Reilly. She was almost Danny’s age-with two grown children, who had children of their own-and, not long ago, her husband had left her for her receptionist. “I should have seen it coming,” Erin had told Danny philosophically. “They both kept asking me, repeatedly-I mean about a hundred times a day-if I was all right.”

Erin had become the friend in his Toronto life that Armando DeSimone had been to Danny in Vermont. Danny still corresponded with Armando, but Armando and Mary didn’t come to Toronto anymore; the drive from Vermont was too long, and airplane travel had become too inconvenient for people their age, and of their disposition. “The airport-security goons have taken every Swiss Army knife I ever owned,” Armando had complained to Danny.

Erin Reilly was a real reader, and when Danny asked her a medical question-whether this was a concern he had for himself, or when he was doing research for a character in a novel-Danny appreciated that the doctor gave long, detailed answers. Erin liked to read long, detailed novels, too.

That night, in Kiss of the Wolf, Danny had said to his doctor: “I have a friend who has a recurrent desire to cut off his left hand; his left hand failed him somehow. Will he bleed to death, if he actually does it?”

Erin was a gangling, heron-like woman with closely cut gray hair and steely hazel eyes. She was intensely absorbed in her work, and in whatever novel or novels she was reading-to a flaw, Danny knew, and maybe the flaw was why he loved her. She could be blind to the world around her to an alarming degree-the way, with the passage of time, the cook had managed to convince himself that the cowboy wasn’t really coming after him. Erin could joke that she should have “seen it coming”-meaning her husband’s involvement with her receptionist-but the fact that they’d both kept asking Erin if she was all right, was not (in Danny’s opinion) what his dear friend Erin should have noticed. Erin had written her husband’s Viagra prescriptions; she had to have known how much of that stuff he was taking! But Danny loved this about Erin-her acute innocence, which reminded him of everything his father had been blind to, which Danny had also loved.

“This … friend who has a recurrent desire to cut off his left hand,” Dr. Reilly slowly said. “Is it you, Danny, or is this a character you’re writing about?”

“Neither. It’s an old friend,” Danny told her. “I would tell you the story, Erin, but it’s too long, even for you.”

Danny remembered what he and Erin had to eat that night. They’d ordered the prawns with coconut milk and green curry broth; they’d both had the Malpeque oysters, with Silvestro’s Champagne-shallot mignonette, to start.

“Tell me everything, Erin,” he’d told her. “Spare me no detail.” (The writer was always saying this to her.) Erin smiled and took a tiny sip of her wine. She was in the habit of ordering an expensive bottle of white wine; she never drank more than a glass or two, donating the remainder of the bottle to Patrice, who then sold it by the glass. For his part, Patrice every so often paid for Erin’s wine. Patrice Arnaud was Dr. Reilly’s patient, too.

“Well, Danny, here goes,” Erin had begun that night in November 2001. “Your friend probably would not bleed to death-not if he cut his hand off at the wrist, with a clean swipe and a sharp blade.” Danny didn’t doubt that whatever instrument Ketchum might use would be sharp-be it the Browning knife, an ax, or even the old logger’s chain-saw. “But your friend would bleed a lot-a real spurting mess out of the radial and ulnar arteries, which are the two main vessels he would have severed. Yet this unfortunate friend of yours would have a few problems-that is, if he wanted to die.” Here Erin paused; at first, Danny didn’t know why. “Does your friend want to die, or does he just want to be rid of the hand?” the doctor asked him.

“I don’t know,” Danny answered her. “I always thought it was just about the hand.”

“Well, then, he may get what he wants,” Erin said. “You see, the arteries are very elastic. After they were cut, they would retract back into the arm, where the surrounding tissues would compress them, at least to a degree. The muscles in the arterial walls would immediately contract, narrowing the diameter of the arteries and slowing the blood loss. Our bodies are resourceful at trying to stay alive; your friend would have many mechanisms coming into play, all making an effort to save him from bleeding to death.” Here Erin paused again. “What’s wrong?” she asked Danny.

Daniel Baciagalupo was still thinking about whether or not Ketchum wanted to kill himself; over all those years with the incessant talk about the left hand, it hadn’t occurred to the writer that Ketchum might have been harboring more serious intentions.

“Are you feeling sick, or something?” Dr. Reilly asked Danny.

“No, it’s not that,” Danny said. “So he wouldn’t bleed to death-that’s what you’re saying?”

“The platelets would save him,” Erin answered. “Platelets are tiny blood particles, which aren’t even large enough to be real cells; they’re actually flakes that fall off a cell and then circulate in the bloodstream. Under normal circumstances, platelets are tiny, smooth-walled, non-adherent flecks. But when your friend cuts off his hand, he exposes the endothelium, or inner arterial wall, which would cause a spill of a protein called collagen-the same stuff plastic surgeons use. When the platelets encounter the exposed collagen, they undergo a drastic transformation-a metamorphosis. The platelets become sticky, spiculated particles. They aggregate and adhere to one another-they form a plug.”

“Like a clot?” Danny asked; his voice sounded funny. He couldn’t eat because he couldn’t swallow. He was somehow certain that Ketchum intended to kill himself; cutting off his left hand was just the logger’s way of doing it, and of course Ketchum held his left hand responsible for letting Rosie slip away. But Rosie had been gone for years. Danny realized that Ketchum must have been holding himself accountable for not killing Carl. For his friend Dominic’s death, Ketchum faulted himself-meaning all of himself. Ketchum’s left hand couldn’t be blamed for the cowboy killing the cook.

“Too much detail while you’re eating?” Erin asked. “I’ll stop. The clotting comes a little later; there are a couple of other proteins involved. Suffice it to say, there is an artery-plugging clot; this would stem the tide of your friend’s bleeding, and save his life. Cutting off your hand won’t kill you.”

But Danny felt that he was drowning; he was sinking fast. (“Well, writers should know it’s sometimes hard work to die, Danny,” the old logger had told him.)

“Okay, Erin,” Danny said, but his voice wasn’t his own; neither he nor Erin recognized it. “Let’s say that my friend wanted to die. Let’s assume that he wants to cut off his left hand in the process, but what he really wants is to die. What then?”

The doctor was eating ravenously; she had to chew and swallow for a few seconds while Danny waited. “Easy,” Erin said, after another small sip of wine. “Does your friend know what aspirin is? He just takes some aspirin.”

“Aspirin,” Danny repeated numbly. He could see the contents of the glove compartment in Ketchum’s truck, as if the door were still open and Danny had never reached out and closed it-the small handgun and the big bottle of aspirin.

“Painkillers, both of them,” Ketchum had called them, casually. “I wouldn’t be caught dead without aspirin and some kind of weapon,” he’d said.

“Aspirin blocks certain parts of the process that activates the platelets,” Dr. Reilly was saying. “If you wanted to get technical, you could say that aspirin prevents blood from clotting-only two aspirin tablets in your friend’s system, and very possibly the clotting wouldn’t kick in quickly enough to save him. And if he really wanted to die, he could wash the aspirin down with some booze; through a completely different mechanism, alcohol also prevents platelet activation and aggregation. There would be a real synergy between the alcohol and the aspirin, rendering the platelets impotent-they wouldn’t stick to one another. No clot, in other words. Your hand-deprived friend would die.”

Erin finally stopped talking when she saw that Danny was staring at his food, not eating. It’s also worth noting that Daniel Baciaglupo had hardly touched his beer. “Danny?” his doctor said. “I didn’t know he was a real friend. I thought that he was probably a character in a novel, and you were using the friend word loosely. I’m sorry.”

DANNY HAD RUN HOME from Kiss of the Wolf that November night. He’d wanted to call Ketchum right away, but privately. It was a cold night in Toronto. That late in the fall, it would have already snowed a bunch of times in Coos County, New Hampshire.

Ketchum didn’t fax much anymore. He didn’t call Danny very frequently, either-not nearly as often as Danny called him. That night, the phone had rung and rung; there’d been no answer. Danny would have called Six-Pack, but he didn’t have her phone number and he’d never known her last name-no more than he knew Ketchum’s first name, if the old logger had ever had one.

He decided to fax Ketchum some evidently transparent bullshit-to the effect that Danny thought he should have Six-Pack’s phone number, in case there was ever an emergency and Danny couldn’t reach Ketchum.

I DON’T NEED ANYBODY CHECKING UP ON ME!

Ketchum had faxed back, before Danny was awake and downstairs in the morning. But, after a few more faxes and an awkward phone conversation, Ketchum provided Danny with Pam’s number.

It was December of that same year, 2001, before Danny got up the nerve to call Six-Pack, and she wasn’t much of a communicator on the phone. Yes, she and Ketchum had gone a couple of times that fall to Moose-Watch Pond and seen the moose dancing-or “millin’ around,” as Six-Pack said. Yes, she’d gone “campin’” with Ketchum, too-but only once, in a snowstorm, and if her hip hadn’t kept her awake the whole night, Ketchum’s snoring would have.

Nor did Danny have any luck in persuading Ketchum to come to Toronto for Christmas that year. “I may show up, I more likely won’t,” was how Ketchum had left it-as independent as ever.

All too soon, it was that time of year Daniel Baciagalupo had learned to dread-just a few days before Christmas 2001, coming up on what would be the first anniversary of his dad’s murder-and the writer was eating dinner alone at Kiss of the Wolf. His thoughts were unfocused, wandering, when Patrice-that ever-suave and graceful presence-approached Danny’s table. “Someone has come to see you, Daniel,” Patrice said with unusual solemnity. “But, strangely, at the kitchen door.”

“To see me? In the kitchen?” Danny asked.

“A tall, strong-looking person,” Patrice intoned, with an air of foreboding. “Doesn’t look like a big reader-might not be what you call a fan.”

“But why the kitchen door?” Danny asked.

“She said she didn’t think she was well-enough dressed to come in the front door,” Patrice told the writer.

“She?” Danny said. How he hoped it was Lady Sky!

“I had to look twice to be sure,” Patrice said, with a shrug. “But she’s definitely a she.”

In that Crown’s Lane alleyway behind the restaurant, one-eyed Pedro had spotted the tall woman; he’d graciously shown her to the service entrance to the kitchen. The former Ramsay Farnham had said to Six-Pack Pam: “Even if it’s not on the menu, they often have cassoulet at this time of year-I recommend it.”

“I ain’t lookin’ for a handout,” Six-Pack told him. “I’m lookin’ for a fella, name of Danny-a famous writer.”

“Danny doesn’t work in the kitchen-his dad did,” one-eyed Pedro told her.

“I know that-I’m just a back-door kinda person,” Pam said. “It’s a fuckin’ fancy-lookin’ place.”

The former Ramsay Farnham appeared momentarily disdainful; he must have suffered a flashback to his previous life. “It’s not that fancy,” he said. In addition to whatever snobbishness was in his genes, Ramsay still resented his favorite restaurant’s change of name; though no one had ever seen it, Kiss of the Wolf would always be a porn film to one-eyed Pedro.

There were other homeless people in the alleyway; Six-Pack could see them, but they kept their distance from her. It was perhaps fair to say that one-eyed Pedro was only a half-homeless person. The others in the alley were wary of Pam. Six-Pack’s rough north-woods attire notwithstanding, she didn’t look like a homeless person.

Even one-eyed Pedro could see the difference. He knocked at the service entrance to Kiss of the Wolf, and Joyce-one of the female sous chefs-opened the door. Before Joyce could greet him, Pedro pushed Six-Pack ahead of him into the kitchen.

“She’s looking for Danny,” one-eyed Pedro said. “Don’t worry-she’s not one of us.”

“I know Danny, and he knows me,” Six-Pack quickly said to Joyce. “I ain’t some kinda groupie, or anythin’ like that.” (At the time, Pam was eighty-four. It’s not likely that Joyce mistook her for a groupie-not even a writer’s groupie.)

Kristine ran to get Patrice, while Joyce and Silvestro welcomed Six-Pack inside. By the time Patrice brought Danny back to the kitchen, Silvestro had already persuaded Pam to try the duo of foie gras and duck confit with a glass of Champagne. When Danny saw Six-Pack, his heart sank; Six-Pack Pam was no Lady Sky, and Danny guessed that something had to be wrong.

“Is Ketchum with you?” the writer asked her, but Danny already knew that Ketchum would have come in the front door-no matter how the old woodsman was dressed.

“Don’t get me started, Danny-not here, and not till I’ve had somethin’ to eat and drink,” Six-Pack said. “Shit, I was drivin’ all day with that fartin’ dog-we only stopped to pee and gas up the truck. Ketchum said I should have the lamb chops.”

That’s what Six-Pack had. They ate together at Danny’s usual table by the window. Pam ate the lamb chops, holding them in her fingers, with her napkin tucked into the open neck of one of Ketchum’s flannel shirts; when she was done eating, she wiped her hands on her jeans. Six-Pack drank a couple of Steam Whistles on tap, and a bottle of red wine; she ordered the cheese plate in lieu of dessert.

Ketchum had given her very detailed directions to Danny’s house, warning her that if she arrived near dinnertime, she would probably find Danny at Kiss of the Wolf. The logger had also provided Six-Pack with directions to the restaurant. But when she looked inside Kiss of the Wolf-Six-Pack was tall enough to peer over the frosted-glass part of the large window facing Yonge Street-some of those overdressed types among the restaurant’s Rosedale clientele must have discouraged her from just walking in. She’d gone searching for a rear entrance instead. (That Rosedale crowd can be snooty-looking.)

“I put Hero’s dog bed in the kitchen-he’s used to sleepin’ in kitchens,” Pam said. “Ketchum told me to let myself in, ’cause you never lock the place. Nice house. I put my stuff in the bedroom farthest away from yours-the one with all them pictures of that pretty lady. That way, if I have one of my nightmares, I might not wake you up.”

“Hero’s here?” Danny asked her.

“Ketchum said you should have a dog, but I ain’t givin’ you one of mine,” Six-Pack said. “Hero ain’t the friendliest critter to other dogs-my dogs sure as shit won’t miss him.”

“You drove all this way to bring me Hero?” Danny asked. (Of course the writer understood that there was probably more purpose to Six-Pack’s visit than bringing him the bear hound.)

“Ketchum said I was to see you in person. No phone call, not a letter or a fax-none of that chickenshit stuff,” Six-Pack told him. “Ketchum musta meant it seriously, ’cause he put everythin’ in writin’. Besides, there’s other crap he wanted you to have-it was all in his truck.”

“You brought Ketchum’s truck?” Danny asked her.

“The truck ain’t for you-I’m drivin’ it back,” Pam said. “You wouldn’t want it for city drivin’, Danny-you wouldn’t want it anyway, ’cause it still smells like a bear took a shit in it.”

“Where’s Ketchum? What happened?” the writer asked her.

“We should go walk the dog, or somethin’,” Six-Pack suggested.

“Someplace more private, you mean?” Danny asked.

“Christ, Danny, there’s people here with their noses born outta joint!” Six-Pack said.

Kiss of the Wolf was crowded that night; since the name change, and Patrice’s back-to-bistro renovation, the restaurant was packed most nights. Some nights, Danny thought the tables were too close together. As the writer and Six-Pack Pam were leaving, Pam appeared to be favoring her bad hip, but Danny soon realized that she’d meant to lean on the adjacent table, where a couple had been staring at them throughout their dinner. Because he was famous, Danny was used to-almost oblivious to-people staring at him, but Pam (apparently) hadn’t taken kindly to it. She upset the wineglasses and water on the couple’s table; suddenly seeming to catch her balance, Six-Pack struck the seated gentleman in his face with her forearm. To the surprised woman at the wrecked table, Six-Pack said: “That’s ’cause he was gawkin’ at me-as if my tits were showin’, or somethin’.”

Both a waiter and a busboy rushed to the ruined table to make amends, while Patrice smoothly glided up to Danny, embracing the writer at the door. “Another memorable evening-most memorable, Daniel!” Patrice whispered in Danny’s ear.

“I’m just a back-door kinda person,” Six-Pack said humbly to Kiss of the Wolf’s owner and maître d’.

Once they were out on Yonge Street, and while they were waiting for the crossing light to change, Danny said to Six-Pack: “Just tell me, for Christ’s sake! Tell me everything. Spare me no detail.”

“Let’s see how Hero’s doin’, Danny,” Six-Pack said. “I’m still rehearsin’ what I gotta say. As you might imagine, Ketchum left me with a shitload of instructions.” As it had turned out, Ketchum put several pages of “instructions” in an envelope in the glove compartment of his truck. The door to the glove compartment had been left open purposely, so that Pam couldn’t miss seeing the envelope, which was pinned under Ketchum’s handgun. (“A better paperweight bein’ unavailable at that time,” as Six-Pack said.)

Now Danny saw that Ketchum’s truck was parked in the driveway of the Cluny Drive house, as if the former riverman had changed his mind about coming for Christmas. Appearing to guard his dog bed, Hero growled at them-a surly greeting. Pam had already put the sheath for Ketchum’s foot-long Browning knife in the bear hound’s bed; maybe it served as a pacifier, the writer considered. He’d spotted the long Browning knife on the kitchen countertop, and had quickly looked away from the big blade. The dog’s farting had filled the kitchen-possibly, the entire downstairs of the house. “God, what’s wrong with Hero’s eye?” Danny asked Pam.

“No eyelid. I’ll tell ya later. Just try not to make him feel self-conscious about it,” Six-Pack said.

Danny saw that she’d put Ketchum’s favorite chainsaw in the gym. “What am I going to do with a chainsaw?” the writer asked her.

“Ketchum said you should have it,” Six-Pack told him. Perhaps to change the subject, she said: “If I had to guess, Hero has to take a crap.”

They walked Hero in the park. Christmas lights twinkled in the neighborhood surrounding them. They brought the dog back to the kitchen, where Danny and Six-Pack sat at the kitchen table; the bear hound sat at what seemed a purposeful distance, just watching them. Pam had poured herself some whiskey in a shot glass.

“I know you know what I’m gonna tell ya, Danny-you just don’t know the how of it,” she began. “I see the story startin’ with your mother-all because Ketchum was fuckin’ your mom instead of learn-in’ ta read, ain’t that right?” Six-Pack said. “So, anyway-here’s the endin’.”

LATER, WHEN THEY UNLOADED THE TRUCK TOGETHER, Danny was grateful that Six-Pack had postponed telling him the story. She’d given him time to prepare himself for it, and while he’d been waiting to hear what had happened to Ketchum, Danny had already imagined a few of the details-the way writers do.

Danny knew that Ketchum would have wanted to see the moose dancing one last time, and that this time the old woodsman wouldn’t have invited Six-Pack to come with him. As it had snowed that day, and the snow had stopped-quite a cold night, well below freezing, was expected-Ketchum had said to Six-Pack that he knew her hip wasn’t up to camping out at the cookhouse site, but that maybe she would like to join him there for an outdoor breakfast the next morning.

“Kind of a cold spot for breakfast, ain’t it?” she’d asked him.

After all, it was past mid-December-coming up on the longest night of the year. Twisted River rarely froze over until January, but what was Ketchum thinking? Yet (as Pam explained to Danny) they’d had breakfast together at the cookhouse site before. Ketchum always enjoyed making a fire. He would set some coals aside, and brew the coffee the way he liked it-in the roasting pan, with the coffee grounds and eggshells in the snow he melted for the water. He would grill a couple of venison steaks and poach three or four eggs on the fire. Six-Pack had agreed to meet him there for breakfast.

But the plan didn’t add up, and Pam knew it. Six-Pack had taken a look in Ketchum’s pickup; there was no tent and no sleeping bag. If the veteran river driver was camping out, he must have been planning on freezing to death-or else he was intending to sleep in the cab of his truck with the motor running. Furthermore, Ketchum had left Hero with Pam. “I think the cold kind of gets to Hero’s hip, too,” he’d told her.

“First I heard of it,” as Six-Pack said to Danny.

And when she’d shown up at the cookhouse site the next morning, Six-Pack knew right away that there was no outdoor breakfast in Ketchum’s plan. The coffee wasn’t brewing; nothing was cooking. There was no fire. She spotted Ketchum sitting with his back against the remains of the crumbled brick chimney, as if the logger might have imagined that the cookhouse was still standing-the burned-to-the-ground building somehow warm and cozy, all around him.

Hero had run to his master, but the dog stopped short of where Ketchum sat on the snow-covered ground; Pam saw that the bear hound’s hackles were up, and the dog suddenly walked stiff-legged, circling the old logger. “Ketchum!” Six-Pack had called, but there’d been no response from the woodsman; only Hero had turned his head to look at her.

“I couldn’t walk over to him-not for the longest time,” Six-Pack told Danny. “I could tell he was a fuckin’ goner.”

Because it had snowed the previous day, and the snow had stopped before nightfall, it was easy for Pam to see how he’d done it. There was a trail of blood in the fresh snow. Six-Pack followed the blood down the hill to the riverbank; there were some big stumps above the bank, and she saw where Ketchum had wiped the snow off one of them. The warm blood had seeped into the stump, and Ketchum’s ax was stuck so firmly in the stump that Pam couldn’t pull it out. There was no left hand to be found; obviously, Ketchum had thrown it in the river.

Having seen the spot in the river basin where Ketchum shot the apple-juice jar containing the cook’s ashes, Danny had no trouble imagining exactly where Ketchum had thrown his left hand. But it must have been hard work for the old woodsman to walk back up the hill to the site of the cookhouse; from all the blood Pam saw in the snow, she knew Ketchum must have been bleeding profusely.

“Once, when they was still drivin’ hardwoods on Phillips Brook,” Six-Pack told Danny, “I seen Ketchum stealin’ some firewood for himself. You know, he was just pickin’ some pulpwood outta the pile-them four-foot small-diameter logs didn’t amount to much. But I seen Ketchum turn half a cord of pulpwood into kindlin’ in less than half an hour! That way, no one would recognize the stuff-if they spotted the wood in his truck, sometime later. Ketchum just choked up on the handle of his ax-he held it in one hand, you know, like a hatchet-and he split them logs lengthwise, and then split ’em again, till they was skinny enough so he could chop them four-foot logs inta two-foot sticks of fuckin’ kindlin’! I never seen him swing that ax. He was so strong, Danny, and so accurate-he just wielded that ax with one hand, like it was a fuckin’ hammer! Those Paris Manufacturin’ Company clowns never knew why their pulpwood was disappearin’! Ketchum said the assholes were too busy makin’ toboggans in Maine-that’s where they were truckin’ most of their hardwoods. Them Paris peckerheads never noticed where their pulpwood was goin’.”

Yes, Ketchum could split a four-foot hardwood log one-handed; Danny had seen how the woodsman could wield an ax, both as an ax and as a hatchet. And after Ketchum had cut off his hand, the old river driver was still strong enough to walk up the hill, where he’d sat down to rest his back against all that was left of the cookhouse chimney. There’d been a bottle of whiskey beside him, Six-Pack said; she told Danny that Ketchum had managed to drink most of it.

“Anything else?” Danny asked Six-Pack. “I mean-on the ground, beside him.”

“Yeah-a big bottle of aspirin,” Pam told the writer. “There were still plenty of aspirin left in the bottle,” Six-Pack said. “Ketchum wasn’t much of a painkiller person, but I suppose he took some aspirin for the pain-he musta just washed ’em down with the whiskey.”

As Danny knew, the aspirin hadn’t been “for the pain;” knowing Ketchum, Danny believed that the old riverman had probably relished the pain. The whiskey wasn’t for the pain, either. Both the aspirin and the whiskey, the writer knew, were strictly to keep Ketchum bleeding; the logger had little forgiveness for anyone who had a job to do and did a piss-poor job of it. (Only Ketchum could kill Ketchum, right?)

“Ketchum couldn’t forgive himself for failin’ to keep Cookie alive,” Six-Pack told the writer. “And before that-after your boy died, Danny-Ketchum felt he was powerless to protect you. All he could do was obsess about your writin’.”

“Me, too,” the writer said to Six-Pack. “Me, too.”

SIX-PACK DIDN’T STAY for Christmas. After they’d carried Ketchum’s guns up to Danny’s bedroom on the second floor-Pam insisted that all the guns be stowed under Danny’s bed, because this was what Ketchum had wanted-and once they’d lugged the boxes of Rosie’s books up to Danny’s third-floor writing room, Six-Pack warned the writer that she was an early riser.

“How early?” he asked her.

Ketchum’s truck and Six-Pack Pam were gone when Danny woke up in the morning; she’d made coffee for him and had left him a letter, which she’d written by hand on several pages of the typing paper he kept in the gym. Six-Pack’s handwriting was very familiar to Danny, from those years when she’d written Ketchum’s letters for the then-illiterate logger. But Danny had forgotten how well Pam wrote-far better than she spoke. Even her spelling was correct. (The writer wondered if this was the result of all the reading-aloud she’d once done to Ketchum.)

Naturally, Six-Pack’s letter included instructions for taking care of Hero, but most of her letter was more personal than Danny had expected. She was having the hip-replacement surgery at Dartmouth-Hitchcock hospital, as Ketchum had recommended. She’d made a few new friends at the Saw Dust Alley campground, that nice-looking trailer park on Route 26-the attacks of September 11 had served to introduce her to many of her neighbors. Henry, the old West Dummer sawyer with the missing thumb and index finger, would look after Pam’s dogs while she was having the surgery. (Henry had volunteered to look after the dogs while Six-Pack was driving Ketchum’s truck to Toronto and back, too.)

Six-Pack had also made some long-standing friendships at the Androscoggin Valley Hospital in Berlin, where she still worked nights as a cleaning person; she’d called her friends at the hospital when she found Ketchum’s body at the cookhouse site. Six-Pack wanted Danny to know that she’d sat with Ketchum for the better part of that morning, just holding his one remaining hand, the right one-“the only one he ever touched me with,” as Six-Pack put it in her letter.

Pam told Danny he would find some photographs pressed flat in the books that had once belonged to Danny’s mother. It had been hard for Six-Pack not to burn the pictures of Rosie, though Pam did more than put her jealousy aside. Six-Pack admitted that she now believed Ketchum had loved the cook even more than the logger had once loved Rosie. Six-Pack could live with that-the left-hand business notwithstanding. Besides, Six-Pack said, Ketchum had wanted Danny to have those photos of the writer’s mother.

“I know it’s none of my business,” Pam also wrote to Danny, “but if I were you, I would write and sleep in that third-floor room. It is peaceful up there, in my opinion-and it’s the best room in the house. But-don’t get your balls crossed about this, Danny-I suspect you are well acquainted with more than your fair share of ghosts. I suppose it’s one thing to work in a room with a ghost, but quite another matter to sleep in the same room with one. I wouldn’t know-I never had children, on purpose. My philosophy was always to do without those things I didn’t dare to lose-Ketchum excepted.”

Danny wrote the Ketchum excepted words on a scrap of typing paper and taped it to one of his outdated typewriters-another IBM Selectric II, the one he was currently using in that third-floor room he shared with Joe’s ghost. The writer liked the phrase Ketchum excepted; maybe he could use it.

All that had happened three years ago, and counting. The only reason Danny hadn’t thrown out his relic of a fax machine, which was still in the kitchen of that house on Cluny Drive, was that Six-Pack occasionally faxed him and he faxed her. Pam must have been eighty-eight or eighty-nine-the same age Ketchum would have been, if the old logger were still alive-and her messages via the fax machine had lost what literary pizazz she’d once demonstrated as a letter writer.

Six-Pack had grown more terse in her old age. When there was something she’d read, or had seen in the news on TV-and provided the item was in the dumber-than-dog-shit category of human stupidities-Six-Pack would fax Danny. Pam unflinchingly stated what Ketchum would have said about this or that, and Danny never hesitated to fax her back with the writer’s version of the river driver’s vernacular.

It was not necessarily what Ketchum might have said about the war in Iraq, or the never-ending mess in the Middle East, that particularly interested Danny or Six-Pack. It was what Ketchum would have said about anything. It was the old logger’s voice that Danny and Six-Pack wanted to hear.

Thus we try to keep our heroes alive; hence we remember them.

THE MID-FEBRUARY STORM had blown across Lake Huron from western Canada, but when the wind and snow hit the Georgian Bay islands, the wind shifted and the snow just kept falling; the wind now blew from a southerly direction, from Parry Sound to Shawanaga Bay. From his writing shack, Danny could no longer see where the bay ended and the mainland began. Because of the whiteout from the storm, the fir trees on what Danny knew was the mainland appeared as a mirage of a floating forest-or the trees seemed to be growing out of the frozen bay. The wind whipped little spirals of snow skyward; these twisters looked like small tornadoes of snow. Sometimes, when the wind blew northward, along the length of Shawanaga Bay, there were actual tornadoes-not unlike the kind you see in the American Midwest or on the Canadian prairies, Danny knew. (Andy Grant had warned the writer to watch out for them.)

Tireless had called Danny on his cell phone. She didn’t want to be an island cleaning woman today; it wasn’t a good idea to be out in the Polar airboat, not when the visibility was this bad. In a similar storm, only a few years ago, Tireless told Danny, some butt-brained oaf from Ohio had run his airboat aground on the O’Connor Rocks-just a little northwest of Moonlight Bay. (Danny had to come that way in order to pick Tireless up at the Shawanaga Landing Indian Reserve.)

“What happened to him-the butt-brained oaf from Ohio?” Danny asked her.

“They found the poor fool frozen-stiff as a stick,” Tireless told him.

“I’ll come get you tomorrow, or the next day-whenever the storm’s over,” Danny said. “I’ll call you, or you call me.”

“Kiss Hero for me,” she said.

“I don’t kiss Hero a lot,” Danny told Tireless. “At least I’m not inclined to.”

“Well, you should kiss him more,” the First Nation woman said. “I think Hero would be nicer to you if you kissed him a lot.”

All morning, in the writing shack, Hero had been farting up a storm-the near equal of the snowstorm Danny was watching out his window. It was a morning when the writer wasn’t tempted to make his relationship with the bear hound a closer one. “Jesus, Hero!” Danny had exclaimed several times in the course of the foul-smelling morning, but it was unfit weather for the Walker bluetick to be put outside. And despite the dog’s unrelenting flatulence, the writing had been going well; Danny was definitely getting closer to the start of his first chapter.

Certain sentences now came to him whole, intact; even the punctuation seemed permanent. When two such sentences were born consecutively, one emerging immediately after the other, the writer felt especially riveted to his task. He’d written the first twosome of the morning on a piece of typing paper and had thumbtacked the page to the rough pine-board wall of his writing shack. Danny kept looking at the sentences, rereading them.

“As for the river, it just kept moving, as rivers do-as rivers do. Under the logs, the body of the young Canadian moved with the river, which jostled him to and fro-to and fro.”

Danny liked the repetition. He knew this was first-chapter material, but the passage belonged at the end of the chapter-it definitely didn’t sound like a beginning. Danny had circled the under the logs phrase, which the writer thought wouldn’t be a bad chapter title. Yet much of the focus of the first chapter seemed to be on the cook; the focus really wasn’t on the boy who’d slipped under the logs.

“You could not say ‘the past’ or ‘the future’ in the cook’s presence without making him frown,” Daniel Baciagalupo wrote. There were other, isolated sentences about this young cook; they were like landmarks or signposts for Danny, helping to orient the writer as he plotted his first chapter. Another sentence was: “In the cook’s opinion, there were not enough bends in Twisted River to account for the river’s name.” There would be much more about the cook, of course; it kept coming. “The cook could see that the river driver with the broken wrist had come ashore, carrying his pike pole in his good hand,” Danny wrote.

The cook would be a major point-of-view character in the first chapter, the writer imagined-as Danny also imagined the cook’s twelve-year-old son would be. “The cook knew too well that indeed it was the young Canadian who had fallen under the logs,” Daniel Baciagalupo wrote. And there was one sentence about the cook that the writer left unfinished-at least for the moment. “The cook had an aura of controlled apprehension about him, as if he routinely anticipated the most unforeseen disasters”-well, that was as far as Danny wanted to go with that sentence, which he knew he would have to complete another day. For now, it was enough to type all these thoughts about the cook on a single piece of paper and thumbtack the page to the wall of the writing shack.

“In a town like Twisted River, only the weather wouldn’t change,” Danny had also written; it could work as a first sentence to the chapter, but the writer knew he could do better. Still, the sentence about the weather was a keeper; Danny could use it somewhere. “Now it was that mud-season, swollen-river time of year again,” Daniel Baciagalupo wrote-a better beginning sentence, but it wasn’t really what the writer was looking for.

Everything about the Ketchum character was more fragmentary. Nothing about the Ketchum character came to Danny in a complete sentence-not yet. There was something to the effect that “Ketchum had done more damage to himself than breaking his wrist in a river drive;” Danny liked that line, but he couldn’t see where the sentence was going. There was another fragment about Ketchum being “no neophyte to the treachery of a log drive.” Danny knew he could and would use that, but he wasn’t sure where-maybe in proximity to an as-yet-uncertain sentence about Ketchum lying on his back on the riverbank “like a beached bear.” Yet these fragments also found their way to the writing-shack wall, where they were thumbtacked alongside the first chapter’s other signposts or landmarks.

At this point, the writer could see the Angel character more clearly than he could see the Ketchum character-though it was obvious to Daniel Baciagalupo that the Ketchum character was more major. (Maybe most major, Danny was thinking.)

Just then-at what amounted to a wave of more noxious farting from the dog-Danny’s cell phone rang again.

“Buenos días, Señor Writer,” Lupita said.

“Buenos días, Lupita,” Danny said.

The Mexican cleaning woman didn’t call often. In those ten weeks of the winter when Danny lived on the island in Georgian Bay, Lupita looked after the house on Cluny Drive; she opened and read the author’s mail, she replayed the messages on his answering machine, she kept an eye on the fax machine, too. Once a week, Lupita would compile a list of what she considered was important for Danny to know-in essence, what she believed couldn’t wait until he returned to Toronto. She faxed the list of priority messages to Andy Grant’s office in Pointe au Baril Station.

Danny always left a couple of checkbooks of signed blank checks for Lupita, who paid his bills while he was gone. Most of all, the Mexican cleaning woman demonstrably enjoyed reading the writer’s mail and deciding what was important-and what wasn’t. This doubtless appealed to Lupita’s pride-her sense of herself as having an immeasurable authority, an almost managerial control over the bestselling author’s domestic life.

Danny knew that Lupita would have seized any opportunity that presented itself for her to take charge of the writer’s wretched personal life, too. If she’d had daughters, she would have introduced them to Danny. Lupita did have nieces; she would shamelessly leave their photographs on the kitchen countertop, calling Danny (after she’d gone home) to tell him that she’d “lost” some photos that were dear to her. Perhaps he’d seen the pictures lying around somewhere?

“Lupita, the pictures are on my kitchen countertop-where you evidently left them,” he would tell her.

“The dark-haired beauty in the pink tank top-the one with the wonderful smile and the gorgeous skin? My precious niece, actually, Mr. Writer.”

“Lupita, she looks like a teenager,” Danny would point out.

“No, she’s older-a little,” Lupita would tell him.

Once Lupita had told him: “Just don’t marry another writer. All you’ll do is depress each other.”

“I’m not going to marry anybody-not ever,” he told her.

“Why don’t you stab yourself in the heart instead?” she asked him. “Soon you’ll be consorting with prostitutes! I know you talk to the dog-I’ve heard you!” she told him.

If Lupita was calling him in Pointe au Baril, she was vexed about something, Danny knew. “What’s up, Lupita?” he asked her on the cell phone. “Is it snowing in Toronto? We’re having quite a snowstorm up here-Hero and I are stranded.”

“I don’t know about that unfortunate dog, but I think you like to be stranded, Mr. Writer,” Lupita said. Clearly the weather wasn’t on her mind; that wasn’t why she’d called.

Sometimes, Lupita became convinced that people were watching the house on Cluny Drive; occasionally, they were. Shy fans, a few every year-mildly obsessed readers, just hoping to get a look at the author. Or lowlifes from the media, maybe-hoping to see what? (Another double shooting, perhaps.)

Some sleazy Canadian magazine had published a map of where Toronto’s celebrities lived; Danny’s house on Cluny Drive had been included. Not often, but once a month or so, an autograph-seeker came to the door; Lupita shooed them away, as if they were beggars. “He gets paid to write books-not sign them!” the cleaning woman would say.

Some half-wit in the media had actually written about Lupita: “The reclusive writer’s live-in girlfriend appears to be a stout, Hispanic-looking person-an older woman with an extremely protective disposition.” Lupita hadn’t been amused; both the stout and the older grievously troubled her. (As for Lupita’s disposition, she was more protective than ever.)

“There’s someone looking for you, Señor Writer,” Lupita now told him on his cell phone. “I wouldn’t go so far as to call her a stalker-not yet-but she is determined to find you, I can tell you that.”

“How determined?” Danny asked.

“I wouldn’t let her in!” Lupita exclaimed. “And I didn’t tell her where you were, of course.”

“Of course,” Danny repeated. “What did she want?”

“She wouldn’t say-she’s very haughty. She looks right through you-if looks could kill, as they say!-and she boldly hinted that she knew where you were. She was fishing for more information, I think, but I wouldn’t take the bait,” Lupita said, proudly.

“Boldly hinted how?” Danny asked.

“She was unnaturally informed,” Lupita said. “She asked if you were up on that island you’d once lived on with the screenwriter! I said, ‘ What island?’ Well, you should have seen how she looked at me then!”

“As if she knew you were lying?” Danny asked.

“Yes!” Lupita cried. “Maybe she’s a witch!”

But every Danny Angel fan knew that he’d lived with Charlotte Turner, and that they’d gone to Georgian Bay in the summer; it had even been written somewhere that the allegedly reclusive writer was spending his winters on a remote island in Lake Huron. (Well, it was “remote” in the winter, anyway.) For a Danny Angel reader, this was basically an intelligent guess; it hardly meant that the woman looking for the writer had witchlike powers.

“What did this woman look like, Lupita?” Danny asked; he was tempted to ask the Mexican cleaning woman if she’d spotted a broom, or if the unnaturally informed woman had been attended by the smell of smoke or the crackling sound of a fire.

“She was really scary-looking!” Lupita declared. “Big shoulders-like a man! She was hulking!”

“Hulking,” Danny repeated, reminding himself of his dad. (He was the cook’s son, clearly-repetition was in his genes.)

“She looked like she lived in a gym,” Lupita explained. “You wouldn’t want to mess with her, believe me.”

The word bodybuilder was on the writer’s lips, but he didn’t say it. Lupita’s combined impressions suddenly caused Danny to conjure the spirit of Lady Sky, for hadn’t Amy looked like she lived in a gym? Hadn’t Lady Sky been capable of looking right through you? (If looks could kill, indeed!) And hadn’t Amy been a hulking presence? Somehow the haughty word didn’t suit Lady Sky, but the writer understood that this may have been Lupita’s misinterpretation.

“Did she have any tattoos?” Danny asked.

“Mr. Writer, it’s February!” Lupita cried. “I made her stay outside, in the cold. She looked like an Arctic explorer!”

“Could you see what color her hair was?” Danny asked. (Amy had been a strawberry blonde, he remembered; he’d never forgotten her.)

“She was wearing a parka-with a hood!” Lupita declared. “I couldn’t even see what color her eyebrows were!”

“But she was big,” Danny insisted. “Not just broad-shouldered, but tall-right?”

“She would tower over you!” Lupita exclaimed. “She’s a giantess!”

There was no point in asking if Lupita had noticed a parachute somewhere. Danny was trying to think of what else he could ask. Lady Sky had at first seemed older than the writer, but later he’d reconsidered; maybe she was closer to his own age than he’d thought. “How old a woman was she, Lupita?” Danny asked. “Would you guess that she was my age-or a little older, maybe?”

“Younger,” Lupita answered, with conviction. “Not much younger, but definitely younger than you are.”

“Oh,” the writer said; he knew that his disappointment was audible. It made Danny feel desperate to have imagined that Amy might fall from the sky again. Miracles don’t happen twice. Even Lady Sky had said that she was only an angel sometimes. Yet Lupita had used the determined word to describe the mysterious visitor; Lady Sky had certainly seemed determined. (And how little Joe had loved her!)

“Well, whoever she is,” Danny said to Lupita on the phone, “she won’t show up here today-not in this storm.”

“She’ll show up there one day, or she’ll be back here-I just know it,” Lupita warned him. “Do you believe in witches, Mr. Writer?”

“Do you believe in angels?” Danny asked her.

“This woman was too dangerous-looking to be an angel,” Lupita told him.

“I’ll keep an eye out for her,” Danny said. “I’ll tell Hero she’s a bear.”

“You would be safer meeting a bear, Señor Writer,” Lupita told him.

As soon as their phone conversation ended, Danny found himself thinking that-fond of her as he was-Lupita was a superstitious old Mexican. Did Catholics believe in witches? the writer was wondering. (Danny didn’t know what Catholics believed-not to mention what Lupita, in particular, believed.) He was exasperated to have been interrupted from his writing; furthermore, Lupita had neglected to say when she’d confronted the giantess in Toronto. This morning, maybe-or was it last week? Moments ago, he’d been on track, plotting the course of his first chapter. A pointless phone call had completely derailed him; now even the weather was a distraction.

The inuksuk was buried under the snow. (“Never a good sign,” the writer could imagine Tireless saying.) And Danny couldn’t bear to look at that wind-bent little pine. The crippled tree was too much his father’s likeness today. The pine appeared near to perishing-cringing, snow-laden, in the storm.

If Danny looked southeast-in the direction of Pentecost Island, at the mouth of the Shawanaga River-there was a white void. There was absolutely nothing to see. There was no demarcation to indicate where the swirling white sky ended and the snow-covered bay began; there was no horizon. When he looked southwest, Burnt Island was invisible-gone, lost in the storm. Due east, Danny could make out only the tops of the tallest trees on the mainland, but not the mainland itself. Like the lost horizon, there was no trace of land in sight. In the narrowest part of the bay was an ice fisherman’s shack; perhaps the snowstorm had swept the shack away, or the ice fisherman’s shack had simply vanished from view (like everything else).

Danny thought that he’d better haul some extra pails of water to the main cabin from the lake while he could still see the lake. The new snow would have hidden the last hole he’d chopped in the ice; Danny and Hero would have to be careful not to fall through the thin ice covering that hole. There was no point in risking a trip to town today-Danny could thaw something from the freezer. He would take the day off from cutting wood, too.

Outside, the wind-borne snow stung Hero’s wide-open, lidless eye; the dog kept pawing at his face. “Just four buckets, Hero-only two trips to the bay and back,” Danny said to the bear hound. “We won’t be outside for long.” But the wind suddenly and totally dropped, just as Danny was hauling the second two buckets from the bay. Now the snow fell straight down in larger, softer flakes. The visibility was no better, but it was more comfortable to be out in the storm. “No wind, no pain, Hero-how about that?” Danny asked the Walker bluetick.

The dog’s spirits had notably improved. Danny watched Hero run after a red squirrel, and the writer hauled two more (a total of six) pails of water from the bay. Now he had more than enough water in the main cabin to ride out the storm-no matter how heavily the snow kept falling. And what did it matter how long the storm lasted? There were no roads to plow.

There was a lot of venison in the freezer. Two steaks looked like too much food, but maybe one wasn’t quite enough-Danny decided to thaw two. He had plenty of peppers and onions, and some mushrooms; he could stir-fry them together, and make a small green salad. He made a marinade for the venison-yogurt and fresh-squeezed lemon juice with cumin, turmeric, and chili. (This was a marinade he remembered from Mao’s.) Danny built up the fire in the woodstove in the main cabin; if he put the marinated venison near the woodstove, the steaks would thaw by dinnertime. It was only noon.

Danny gave Hero some fresh water and fixed himself a little lunch. The snowstorm had freed him from his usual afternoon chores; with any luck, Danny might get back to work in the writing shack. He felt that his first chapter was waiting for him. There would only be the bear hound’s farting to distract him.

“Under the logs,” the writer said aloud to Hero, testing the phrase as a chapter title. It was a good title for an opening chapter, Danny thought. “Come on, Hero,” he said to the dog, but they’d not left the main cabin when Danny’s cell phone rang again-the third call of the day. Most days, in the writer’s winter life on Charlotte’s island, the phone didn’t ring once.

“It’s the bear, Hero!” Danny said to the dog. “What do you bet that the big she-bear is coming?” But the phone call was from Andy Grant.

“I thought I better check up on you,” the builder said. “How are you and Hero surviving the storm?”

“Hero and I are surviving just fine-in fact, we’re very cozy,” Danny told him. “I’m thawing some of the deer you and I shot.”

“Not planning on going shopping, are you?” Andy asked him.

“I’m not planning on going anywhere,” Danny answered.

“That’s good,” Andy said. “You’ve got whiteout conditions at your place, have you?”

“Total whiteout,” Danny told him. “I can’t see Burnt Island-I can’t even see the mainland.”

“Not even from the back dock?” Andy asked him.

“I wouldn’t know,” Danny answered. “Hero and I are having a pretty lazy day. We haven’t ventured as far as the back dock.” There was a long pause-long enough to make Danny look at his cell-phone screen, to be sure they were still connected.

“You and Hero might want to go see what you can see off the back dock, Danny,” Andy Grant told the writer. “If I were you, I would wait about ten or fifteen minutes-then go take a look.”

“What am I looking for, Andy?” the writer asked.

“A visitor,” the builder told him. “There’s someone looking for you, Danny, and she seems real determined to find you.”

“Real determined,” Danny repeated.

SHE’D SHOWN UP at the nursing station in Pointe au Baril, asking for directions to Turner Island. The nurse had sent her to Andy. Everyone in town knew that Andy Grant was protective of the famous novelist’s privacy.

The big, strong-looking woman didn’t have her own airboat; she didn’t have a snowmobile, either. She didn’t even come with skis-just ski poles. Her backpack was huge, and strapped to it was a pair of snowshoes. If she’d had a car, it must have been a rental and she’d already gotten rid of it. Maybe she’d spent the night at Larry’s Tavern, or in some motel near Parry Sound. There was no way she could have driven the entire distance from Toronto to Pointe au Baril Station-not that morning, not in that snowstorm. The snow had blanketed Georgian Bay, from Manitoulin Island to Honey Harbour, and-according to Andy-it was supposed to snow all that night, too.

“She said she knows you,” Andy told the writer. “But if it turns out that she’s just a crazy fan, or some psycho autograph-seeker, there’s enough room in that backpack for all eight of your books-both the hardcover and the paperback editions. Then again, that backpack’s big enough to hold a shotgun.”

“She knows me how-she knew me when, and where?” Danny asked.

“All she said was, ‘We go back a ways.’ You’re not expecting a visit from an angry ex-girlfriend-are you, Danny?”

“I’m not expecting anybody, Andy,” the writer said.

“She’s one powerful-looking lady, Danny,” the builder said.

“How big is she?” Daniel Baciagalupo asked.

“We’re talking giantess category,” Andy told him. “Hands like paws-boots bigger than mine. You and I together could fit in her parka; there would probably be room for Hero, too.”

“I suppose she looks like an Arctic explorer,” the writer guessed.

“She’s sure got the right clothes for this weather,” Andy said. “The snowpants, the snowmobiler’s gloves-and her parka has a big old hood.”

“I don’t suppose you saw the color of her hair,” the writer said.

“Nope-not under that hood. I couldn’t even be sure of the color of her eyes,” Andy said.

“And what would you guess her age was?” Danny asked. “About my age, maybe-or a little older?”

“Nope,” the builder said again. “She’s way younger than you are, Danny. At least what I could see of her. She’s really fit-looking.”

“With all the clothes she had on, how could you tell she was fit?” the writer asked.

“She came into my office-just to look at my map of the bay,” the builder told Danny. “While she was locating Turner Island on the map, I lifted her backpack-I just picked it up off the floor and set it down again. It’s about a seventy-pound pack, Danny; that pack weighs as much as Hero, and she left here carrying it like a pillow.”

“She sounds like someone I met once,” Danny said, “but her age is wrong. If she were the woman I’m thinking of, she couldn’t be ‘way younger’ than I am-as you say.”

“I could be wrong about that,” Andy told him. “People age differently, Danny. Some folks seem to stay the same; others, if it’s been a while, you wouldn’t recognize them.”

“Oh, it’s been a while-if she’s the one I’m thinking of,” Danny said. “It’s been almost forty years! It can’t be her,” the writer said; he sounded impatient with himself. Danny didn’t dare to hope that it was Lady Sky. He realized that it had also been a while since he’d hoped for anything. (He had once hoped that nothing terrible would ever happen to his beloved Joe. He’d also hoped that his dad would long outlive the cowboy, and that Ketchum would die peacefully-in his sleep, with both his hands intact. Daniel Baciagalupo didn’t have a good record with hope.)

“Danny, it’s dumb to think you can even guess what someone’s going to look like after forty years,” Andy said. “Some people change more than others-that’s all I’m saying. Look,” the builder said, “why don’t I come out there? I could probably catch up to her on my snowmobile. I could bring her the rest of the way, and if you don’t like her-or she’s not the person you’re thinking of-I could bring her back to Pointe au Baril.”

“No, Hero and I will be all right,” Danny said. “I can always call you if I need help getting her to leave, or something.”

“You and Hero better be on your way to the back dock,” Andy told him. “She left here a while ago, and she’s got a real long stride.”

“Okay, we’ll get going. Thanks, Andy,” Danny told him.

“You sure I can’t come out there, or do anything for you?” the builder asked.

“I’ve been looking for a first sentence to my first chapter,” the writer answered. “You wouldn’t have a first sentence for me, would you?”

“I can’t help you with that,” Andy Grant said. “Just call me if you have any trouble with that woman.”

“There won’t be any trouble,” Danny told him.

“Danny? Take that old Remington with you, when you go to the back dock. It’s just a good idea to have the gun with you-and make sure she sees it, okay?”

“Okay,” the writer answered.

Hero was excited, as always, to take a walk with Ketchum’s.30-06 Springfield carbine. “Don’t get your hopes up, Hero,” Danny told the dog. “The odds are she’s not a bear.”

The snow was knee-deep on the wide-open path to the writing shack, and not quite as deep on the narrow path through the woods from Danny’s workplace to the back dock.

When he passed his writing shack, the writer said aloud, “I’ll be back, first chapter. I’ll see you soon, first sentence.”

Hero had run ahead. There was a grove of cedars, out of the wind, where a small herd of deer had bedded down for the night. Either Hero had spooked them, or the deer had moved on when the wind dropped. Hero was sniffing all around; there were probably deer turds under the snow. The snow in the cedar grove was flattened down where the deer had huddled together.

“They’re gone, Hero-you missed them,” Danny told the bear hound. “Those deer are on Barclay Island by now, or they’re on the mainland.” The dog was rolling in the snow where the herd had bedded down. “If you roll in any deer turds, Hero, I’ll give you a bath-with shampoo and everything.”

Hero hated baths; Danny didn’t much like washing the uncooperative dog, either. In the Cluny Drive house, in Toronto, Lupita was the one who washed the dog. She seemed to enjoy scolding Hero while she did it. (“So, Señor Macho-how do you like having only one eyelid? But that’s what you get for fighting, Mr. Macho-isn’t it?”)

There must have been three feet of snow on the roof of Grand-daddy’s cabin, to which neither the writer nor the dog gave more than a passing glance. If that cabin had been haunted before, it was more haunted now; neither Danny nor Hero would have welcomed an encounter with Ketchum’s ghost. If the old logger were a ghost, Danny knew that the poacher’s cabin was just the spot for him.

The snow had drifted thigh-high onto the back dock. Across the frozen bay, parts of the mainland were visible in the whiteout, but the far shore didn’t emerge distinctly; the mainland was blurred. The clarity of the shoreline was fleeting. In the distance, fragments of the landscape momentarily appeared, only to disappear the next instant. There were no identifying landmarks that allowed Danny to see exactly where the snowmobile portage from Payne’s Road came into contact with the bay, but from the vantage of the dock, the writer could make out the shape of the ice fisherman’s shack. It had not been blown away by the storm, yet the shack was so indistinct in the steadily falling snow that Danny knew the snowshoer would be halfway across the reach of the bay before he could see her.

What had little Joe said that day at the pig roast? “Plane. Not a bird.” And then, because Danny had been watching Katie instead of the small airplane, he’d heard Joe say: “Not flying. Falling!” Only then did Danny see her: The skydiver was free-falling, hurtling through the sky, when the writer had first spotted her, only seconds before her parachute opened. And Amy herself had come consecutively more and more into view. First, it became clear she was a woman skydiver; then, all at once, she was naked. Only when Danny was beside her, in the pigpen-in all the mud and pig shit-did he realize how big Amy was. She’d been so solid!

Now the writer squinted across the bay, into the falling snow, as if he were waiting for another little airplane to appear on the vanished horizon-or for another red-white-and-blue parachute to pop open.

Whoever she was, she wouldn’t be naked this time, the writer knew. Yet he also knew that, like the skydiver, she would suddenly just be there-the way an angel drops down to earth from the heavens. He was looking and looking for her, but Danny understood that in the whiteout of the snowstorm, the woman would just plain appear, as if by magic. One second, nothing would be there. The next second, she would be halfway across the bay and coming closer-one long stride after another.

What the writer had overlooked was the fact that Hero was a hunter; the bear hound had one good ear and a very good nose. The growl began in the dog’s chest, and Hero’s first bark was muffled-half swallowed in his throat. There was no one out there, on the frozen bay, but the bear hound knew she was coming; the dog’s barking began in earnest only seconds before Danny saw her. “Shut up, Hero-don’t scare her away,” Danny said. (Of course the writer understood that, if she was Lady Sky, nothing could scare her.)

The snowshoer was in full stride, practically running, when Danny saw her. At such a pace, and carrying a backpack that heavy, she’d worked up quite a sweat. She had unzipped the parka to cool herself off; the hood, which she’d pushed off her head, lay on the back of her broad shoulders. Danny could see her strawberry-blond hair; it was a little longer than she used to cut it, when she’d been a skydiver. The writer could understand why both Lupita and Andy Grant thought she was younger than Danny; Amy looked younger than the writer, if not way younger. When she reached the dock, Hero finally stopped barking.

“You’re not going to shoot me-are you, Danny?” Amy asked him. But the writer, who’d not had much luck with hope, couldn’t answer her. Danny couldn’t speak, and he couldn’t stop staring at her.

Because it was snowing, the tears on Danny’s face were mingled with the snow; he probably didn’t know he was crying, but Amy saw his eyes. “Oh, hold on-just hang on-I’m coming,” she said. “I got here as fast as I could, you know.” She threw the backpack up on the dock, together with her ski poles, and she climbed over the rocks, taking her snowshoes off when she gained her footing on the dock.

“Lady Sky,” Danny said; it was all he could say. He felt himself dissolving.

“Yeah, it’s me,” she said, hugging him; she pulled his face to her chest. He just shook against her. “Boy, you’re even more of a mess than I thought you would be,” Amy told him, “but I’m here now, and I’ve got you-you’re going to be okay.”

“Where have you been?” he managed to ask her.

“I had another project-two, actually,” she told him. “They turned out to be a waste of my time. But I’ve been thinking about you-for years.”

Danny didn’t mind if he was Lady Sky’s “project” now; he imagined that she’d had her share of projects, more than two. So what? the writer thought. He would soon be sixty-three; Danny knew he was no prize.

“I might have come sooner, you bastard, if you’d answered my letter,” Amy said to him.

“I never saw your letter. My dad read it and threw it away. He thought you were a stripper,” Danny told her.

“That was a long time ago-before the skydiving,” Amy said. “Was your dad ever in Chicago? I haven’t done any stripping since Chicago.” Danny thought this was very funny, but before he could clear up the misunderstanding, Lady Sky took a closer look at Hero. The bear hound had been sniffing Amy’s discarded snowshoes suspiciously-as if he were readying himself to piss on them. “Hey, you,” Amy said to the dog. “You lift your leg on my snowshoes, you might just lose your other ear-or your pecker.” Hero knew when he was being spoken to; he gave Amy an evil, crazed look with his lidless eye, but the dog backed away from the snowshoes. Something in Amy’s tone must have reminded the bear hound of Six-Pack Pam. In fact, at that moment, Lady Sky had reminded Danny of Six-Pack-a young Six-Pack, a Six-Pack from those long-ago days when she’d lived with Ketchum.

“Jeez, you’re shaking so much-that gun might go off,” Amy told the writer.

“I’ve been waiting for you,” Danny told her. “I’ve been hoping.”

She kissed him; there was some mint-flavored gum in her mouth, but he didn’t mind. She was warm, and still sweating, but not out of breath-not even from the snowshoeing. “Can we go indoors, somewhere?” Amy asked him. (At a glance, anyone could see that Granddaddy’s cabin was uninhabitable-unless you were Ketchum, or a ghost. From the back dock of the island, it was impossible to see the other buildings-even when there wasn’t a snowstorm.) Danny picked up her snowshoes and the ski poles, being careful to keep the carbine pointed at the dock, and Amy shouldered the big backpack. Hero ran ahead, as before.

They stopped at the writing shack, so that Danny could show her where he worked. The little room still smelled of the dog’s lamentable farting, but the fire in the woodstove hadn’t died out-it was like a sauna in that shack. Amy took off her parka, and a couple of layers of clothes that she wore under the parka-until she was wearing just her snowpants and a T-shirt. Danny told her that he’d once believed she was older than he was-or they were the same age, maybe-but how was it possible that she seemed younger now? Danny didn’t mean younger than she was that day on the pig farm, in Iowa. He meant that she’d not aged as much as he had-and why was that, did she think?

Amy told him that she’d lost her little boy when she was much younger; she’d already lost him when Danny met her as a skydiver. Amy’s only child had died when he was two-little Joe’s age at the pig roast. That death had aged Amy when it happened, and for a number of years immediately following her boy’s death. It wasn’t that Amy was over her son’s death-one never got over a loss like that, as she knew Danny would know. It was only that the loss didn’t show as much, when so many years had passed. Maybe your child’s death ceased being as visible to other people, after a really long time. (Joe had died more recently; to anyone who knew Danny, the writer had noticeably aged because of it.)

“We’re the same age, more or less,” Amy told the writer. “I’ve been sixty for the last couple of years, I think-at least that’s what I tell the guys who ask.”

“You look fifty,” Danny told her.

“Are you trying to get in my pants, or something?” Amy asked him. She read those sentences, and the fragments of sentences, from the first chapter-the lines he’d thumbtacked to the pine-board wall of the writing shack. “What are these?” she asked.

“They’re sentences, or parts of sentences, ahead of myself; they’re waiting for me to catch up to them,” he told her. “They’re all lines from my first chapter-I just haven’t found the first sentence yet.”

“Maybe I’ll help you find it,” Amy said. “I’m not going anywhere for a while. I don’t have any other projects.” Danny could have cried again, but just then his cell phone rang-for the fourth fucking time that day! It was Andy Grant, of course, checking up on him.

“She there yet?” Andy asked. “Who is she?”

“She’s the one I’ve been waiting for,” Danny told him. “She’s an angel.”

“Sometimes,” Lady Sky reminded him, when he hung up. “This time, anyway.”

What might the cook have said to his son, if he’d had time to utter some proper last words before the cowboy shot him in the heart? At best, Dominic might have expressed the hope that his lonely son “find someone”-only that. Well, Danny had found her; actually, she’d found him. Given Charlotte, and now given Amy-at least in that aspect of his life-the writer knew he’d been lucky. Some people don’t ever find one person; Daniel Baciagalupo had found two.

SHE’D BEEN LIVING IN MINNESOTA for the last few years, Amy said. (“If you think Toronto’s cold, try Minneapolis,” she’d told him.) Amy had done a little grappling in a wrestling club called Minnesota Storm. She’d hung out with “a bunch of ex-Gopher wrestlers,” she said-a concept that Danny found difficult to grasp.

Amy Martin-Martin had been her maiden name, and she’d taken it back “years ago”-was a Canadian. She’d lived a long time in the United States, and had become an American citizen, but she was “at heart” a Canadian, Amy said, and she’d always wanted to come back to Canada.

Why had she gone to the States in the first place? Danny asked her. “Because of a guy I met,” Amy told him, shrugging. “Then my kid was born there, so I felt I should stay.”

She described her politics as “largely indifferent now.” She was sick of how little Americans knew about the rest of the world-or how little they cared to know. After two terms, the failed policies of the Bush presidency would probably leave the country (and the rest of the world) in a terrible mess. What Amy Martin meant by this was that it would then be high time for some hero on a horse to ride in, but what could one hero on one horse do?

Not much would change, Lady Sky said. She had fallen to earth in a country that didn’t believe in angels; yet the Bible-huggers had hijacked one of the two major political parties there. (With the Bible-huggers, not much would ever change.) Moreover, there was what Amy called “the cocksuckers’ contingent of the country”-what Danny knew as the dumber-than-dog-shit element, those bully patriots-and they were too set in their ways or too poorly educated (or both) to see beyond the ceaseless flag-waving and nationalistic bluster. “Conservatives are an extinct species,” Lady Sky said, “but they don’t know it yet.”

By the time Danny had shown Amy the main cabin-the big bathtub, the bedroom, and the venison steaks he was marinating for dinner-they’d established that they were bedfellows, at least politically. While Amy knew more about Danny than he knew about her, this was only because she’d read every word he’d written. She’d read almost all the “shit” that had been written about him, too. (The shit word was what they both instinctively used for the media, so that on the subject of the media they discovered they were bedfellows, too.)

Most of all, Amy knew when and how he’d lost his little Joe-and when his dad had died, and the how of that, too. He had to tell her about Ketchum, whom she knew nothing about, and while this was hard-except with Six-Pack, Danny didn’t talk about Ketchum-the writer discovered, in the process of describing Ketchum, that the old logger was alive in the novel Danny was dreaming, and so Danny talked and talked about that novel, and his elusive first chapter, too.

They heated the pasta pots of lake water to a near boil on the gas stove, and with their two bodies in that big bathtub, the tub was full to the brim; Danny had not imagined it was possible to fill that giant bathtub, but not even the novelist had ever imagined that tub with a giantess in it.

Amy talked him through the history of her myriad tattoos. The when and the where and the why of the tattoos held Danny’s attention for the better part of an hour, or more-both in the warm bathtub and in the bed in that bedroom with the propane fireplace. He’d not taken a close look at Amy’s tattoos before-not when she was spattered with mud and pig shit, and not afterward, when she was wearing just a towel. Danny felt it would have been improper and unwelcome to have stared at her then.

He stared at her now; he took all of her in. Many of Amy’s tattoos had a martial-arts theme. She’d tried kickboxing in Bangkok; for a couple of years, she had lived in Rio de Janeiro, where she’d competed in an unsuccessful start-up tour of Ultimate Fighting for women. (Some of those Brazilian broads were tougher than the Thai kickboxers, Lady Sky said.)

Tattoos have their own stories, and Danny heard them all. But the one that mattered most to Amy was the name Bradley; that had been her son’s name, and her father’s. She’d called the boy both Brad and Bradley, and (after he died) she’d had the two-year-old’s given name tattooed on her right hip where it jutted out-precisely where Amy had once carried her child when he was a toddler.

In explaining how how she’d borne the weight of her little boy’s death, Amy pointed out to Danny that her hips were the strongest part of her strong body. (Danny didn’t doubt it.)

Amy was happy to discover that Danny could cook, because she couldn’t. The venison was good, though there wasn’t quite enough of it. Danny had sliced some potatoes very thinly, and stir-fried them with the onions, peppers, and mushrooms, so they didn’t go hungry. Danny served a green salad after the meal, because the cook had taught him that this was the “civilized” way to serve a salad-though it was almost never served this way in a restaurant.

It pleased the writer no end that Lady Sky was a beer drinker. “I found out long ago,” she told him, “that I drink everything alcoholic as fast as I drink a beer-so I better stick with beer, if I don’t want to kill myself. I’m pretty much over wanting to kill myself,” Amy added.

He was pretty much over that part, too, Danny told her. He had learned to like Hero’s company, the farting notwithstanding, and the writer had two cleaning ladies looking after him; they would all be disappointed in him if he killed himself.

Amy had met one of the cleaning ladies, of course, and-weather permitting-Lady Sky would probably meet Tireless tomorrow, or the next day. As for Lupita, Amy called the Mexican cleaning woman a better guard dog than Hero; Lady Sky was sure that she and Lupita would become great friends.

“I have no right to be happy,” Danny told his angel, when they were falling asleep in each other’s arms that first night.

“Everyone has a right to be a little happy, asshole,” Amy told him.

Ketchum would have liked how Lady Sky used the asshole word, the writer was thinking. It was a word choice after the old logger’s heart, Danny knew, which-in his sleep-led him back to the novel he was dreaming.

AMY MARTIN AND DANIEL BACIAGALUPO had a month to spend on Charlotte Turner’s island in Georgian Bay; it was their wilderness way of getting to know each other before their life together in Toronto began. We don’t always have a choice how we get to know one another. Sometimes, people fall into our lives cleanly-as if out of the sky, or as if there were a direct flight from Heaven to Earth-the same sudden way we lose people, who once seemed they would always be part of our lives.

Little Joe was gone, but not a day passed in Daniel Baciagalupo’s life when Joe wasn’t loved or remembered. The cook had been murdered in his bed, but Dominic Baciagalupo had had the last laugh on the cowboy. Ketchum’s left hand would live forever in Twisted River, and Six-Pack had known what to do with the rest of her old friend.

One mid-February day, a snowstorm blew across Lake Huron from western Canada; all of Georgian Bay was blanketed by it. When the writer and Lady Sky woke up, the storm was gone. It was a dazzling morning.

Danny let the dog out and made the coffee; when the writer brought some coffee to Amy in the bedroom, he saw that she’d fallen back to sleep. Lady Sky had been traveling a long way, and the life she’d led would have tired anyone out; Danny let her sleep. He fed the dog and wrote Amy a note, not telling her he was falling in love with her. He simply told her that she knew where to find him-in his writing shack. Danny thought that he would have breakfast later, whenever Lady Sky woke up again. He would take some coffee with him to the writing shack, and start a fire in the woodstove there; he’d already built up the fire in the woodstove in the main cabin.

“Come on, Hero,” the writer said, and together they went out in the fresh snow. Danny was relieved to see that his father’s likeness, that wind-bent little pine, had survived the storm.

IT WASN’T THE KETCHUM character who should begin the first chapter, Daniel Baciagalupo believed. It was better to keep the Ketchum character hidden for a while-to make the reader wait to meet him. Sometimes, those most important characters need a little concealment. It would be better, Danny thought, if the first chapter-and the novel-began with the lost boy. The Angel character, who was not who he seemed, was a good decoy; in storytelling terms, Angel was a hook. The young Canadian (who was not a Canadian) was where the writer should start.

It won’t take long now, Daniel Baciagalupo believed. And whenever he found that first sentence, there would be someone in his life the writer dearly desired to read it to!

“Legally or not, and with or without proper papers,” Danny wrote, “Angel Pope had made his way across the Canadian border to New Hampshire.”

It’s okay, the writer thought, but it’s not the beginning-the mistaken idea that Angel had crossed the border comes later.

“In Berlin, the Androscoggin dropped two hundred feet in three miles; two paper mills appeared to divide the river at the sorting gaps in Berlin,” Danny wrote. “It was not inconceivable to imagine that young Angel Pope, from Toronto, was on his way there.”

Yes, yes-the writer thought, more impatiently now. But these last two sentences were too technical for a beginning; he thumbtacked these sentences to the wall alongside the other lines, and then added this sentence to the mix: “The carpet of moving logs had completely closed over the young Canadian, who never surfaced; not even a hand or one of his boots broke out of the brown water.”

Almost, Daniel Baciagalupo thought. Immediately, another sentence emerged-as if Twisted River itself were allowing these sentences to bob to the surface. “The repeated thunk-thunk of the pike poles, poking the logs, was briefly interrupted by the shouts of the rivermen who had spotted Angel’s pike pole-more than fifty yards from where the boy had vanished.”

Fine, fine, Danny thought, but it was too busy for a beginning sentence; there were too many distractions in that sentence.

Maybe the very idea of distractions distracted him. The writer’s thoughts leapt ahead-too far ahead-to Ketchum. There was something decidedly parenthetical about the new sentence. “(Only Ketchum can kill Ketchum.)” Definitely a keeper, Danny thought, but most definitely not first-chapter material.

Danny was shivering in his writing shack. The fire in the wood-stove was taking its time to heat the little room. Normally, Danny was chopping a hole in the ice and hauling a couple of buckets of water out of the bay while the writing shack was warming up; this morning, he’d skipped the chopping and the hauling. (Later in this glorious day, he would have Lady Sky to help him with the chores.)

Just then, without even trying to think of it-in fact, at that moment, Daniel Baciagalupo had reached out to rub Hero behind the dog’s good ear-the first sentence came to him. The writer felt it rising into view, as if from underwater; the sentence came into sight the way that apple-juice jar with his dad’s ashes had bobbed to the surface, just before Ketchum shot it.

“The young Canadian, who could not have been more than fifteen, had hesitated too long.”

Oh, God-here I go again-I’m starting! the writer thought.

He’d lost so much that was dear to him, but Danny knew how stories were marvels-how they simply couldn’t be stopped. He felt that the great adventure of his life was just beginning-as his father must have felt, in the throes and dire circumstances of his last night in Twisted River.