Northwest Angle

TWENTY-ONE

Cork swam hard for the island with the high bluff. The wind had been up all morning, and the debris that had choked the channel the night before had washed against the shorelines. He had a clear passage, but he swam against the wind and wasn’t making the crossing as quickly as he would have liked. He knew that he had to reach the island and climb the bluff before the man who hunted them found Jenny’s shelter. How much time he actually had he didn’t know. All he really knew was that every second was precious.

He’d discarded his pants and hidden them in a thicket. He’d removed his shirt and had rolled his sneakers in it, along with the knife, and had tied the bundle around his waist. The distance to the island was roughly three hundred yards. Cork was a runner, a man with several marathons to his credit, but swimming was a different ball game, especially battling waves and carrying the ballast around his midsection. He tired faster than he’d imagined. With still a hundred yards to go, he was breathing in gasps, and his arms and legs were burning with fatigue. As much as he hated having to do it, he stopped for a couple of minutes and floated on his back to keep from completely exhausting himself. He stared up at the sky, which was remarkably clear and breathtakingly blue. He watched a pelican glide effortlessly along the current of the wind, and he wished he, too, could fly. He wished he’d never brought his family to this place. He wished he’d never shown Jenny the rock paintings. He wished he’d never tried to interfere in her life. He wished, as he sometimes did in the dark of his own regrets, that he was a different man, a wiser man, a better man. Or at least, he thought now, a better swimmer.

He rolled onto his stomach and began again to stroke hard for the island, battling once more the relentless wind and endless waves.

Jenny’s heart was a wild horse galloping. After her father left, she realized how much his presence had meant to her, and for a short while, she stood absolutely paralyzed by the enormity of the threat they faced, frozen in the little sanctuary they’d found among the trees, wishing desperately that she and her father and the child could simply hole up there and be safe. She gazed down where her baby boy lay asleep, blessedly oblivious to all the danger around him.

Her baby boy. In less than a day, that’s how she’d begun to think of him. Irrational, she knew. The child had relatives, people who had legal claim. But had they risked their lives for him? Had they sweated bullets worrying about him? Wasn’t that what made people belong to each other, what they risked and what they sacrificed and what they shared?

“Won’t matter one way or the other, girl, if you don’t get moving,” she finally whispered and forced herself to act.

She gathered the items they’d brought, set them in the blanket, and tied the ends together. She carried the blanket to the edge of the trees a few yards from where the narrow raft her father had constructed the night before lay drawn up on the shore. She set the blanket bundle down in the tree cover. Before she moved into the open, she carefully studied the island on the far side of the channel for any sign of the hunter. Nothing moved there, and finally she risked a dash to the raft and eased it almost completely into the water so that it would shove off easily when she was ready to evacuate. Back among the shadows of the trees, she lingered a moment, looking south toward the bluff island, trying to spot her father, but she didn’t see him. Should that concern her? She had no idea.

She made three trips between the shoreline and the small area of grass and wildflowers at the base of the rock wall where they’d spent the night. Each trip, she followed a slightly different route so that she wouldn’t wear a visible trail. All that was left at the end was the wicker basket and the baby. She looked at the flowers and grass, much of it flattened where their bodies had lain. A good hunter would know that something had bedded there recently. But it was the kind of place deer might lie down, and with all evidence of their presence gone, Jenny hoped that was exactly what the hunter would assume.

She lifted the basket, and the baby opened his eyes and blinked and stared at her. There was such concentration on his little face that he looked as if he was thinking deeply. But what could a child so young think about?

“Are you wondering where she is, little guy? Your mother?” she asked gently. “Are you wondering who I am and will I leave you, too?” Jenny put her hand to his warm cheek. “The answer is no. I absolutely won’t leave you. And whoever he is out there, I won’t let him hurt you.”

She spoke more for herself than for the child, but, God, it felt good and right for it to be said.

She turned and carried the basket through the trees toward the shoreline, where she waited in the shadows for her father to play decoy. Waited for him to put himself in the crosshairs.

He made the island and staggered ashore on the back side of the bluff, where he fell to his hands and knees and struggled to catch his breath. He looked up at the height still ahead to be climbed and tried to calculate how much time he might have before the hunter found the shelter, mounted the cedar-capped promontory, and had a good look around. He hauled himself up, untied the bundle of his shirt, put on his sneakers, and started the long slog to the top of the bluff.

Most of the trees on the south slope had been toppled, and Cork fought his way through one tangle of branches after another. He dragged himself over horizontal trunks or slithered under them. His wet clothing caught on snags that seemed determined to keep him from his goal, but he tore loose again and again until nothing remained of his shirt but a few strips of rag. He was scratched and bleeding, and blackflies had begun to land on his wounds and add their own torment. His whole body was in rebellion. But he kept thinking how much depended on him, how much Jenny and the baby needed this from him, and he kept on going.

And then he was at the top. He dropped to a crouch and cautiously made his way to the edge of the bluff, which dropped straight down into the murky green of the lake water fifty feet below. He shielded his eyes and looked across the channel to the island and to its outcrop topped with cedars. He saw no sign of the hunter. He swung his gaze northwest, to the island where Jenny, he hoped, was prepared to return to her shelter. He had only a general idea of how long it had taken him to reach the place where he now stood, and he hoped he’d arrived in time to do what he’d come there for.

To his right lay the snapped trunk of an aspen. He hunkered down behind it and watched the cedars across the channel, praying he’d guessed right about everything.

She saw her father on the bluff three hundred yards away, but only for a moment before he dropped from her sight. He’d done his part. Now she waited to do hers. The baby had begun to fuss. He squirmed and made little noises. Jenny had put a prepared bottle in his basket, and she took it out and fed him. She was proud of herself for this forethought. She was doing all she could to make this plan, which she and her father had formulated together, work.

While she sat idle just inside the blind of trees, blackflies and mosquitoes had begun to gather and to land on her and the baby. She shooed them away, but they became more and more persistent and greater in number. She hadn’t remembered them being this bad the day before in the shelter, but maybe, like every other living thing, they’d been temporarily disoriented by the storm. If so, they weren’t disoriented any longer.

She walked and burped the baby, then set him in the wicker basket and covered the whole thing with a blanket to protect him from the insects. He began to whimper immediately, as if he didn’t like not seeing her, or didn’t like not being in her arms. The insects had become a swarm, a shifting cloud of tiny mosquitoes and large blackflies, and Jenny waved her arms wildly trying to disperse them. It did no good. She needed to move away, but if she did, would she miss the hunter and the exchange, whatever it turned out to be, between him and her father? Would she jeopardize the only chance she might have of escape?

The insects crawled her arms and legs and face and were in her hair. En masse, they crawled over the blanket that shielded the baby. Jenny reached for the basket and would have grabbed it and turned and run, but she saw the hunter.

He hadn’t climbed the outcrop as her father had predicted. He’d come along the base of the rock to the small inlet where Jenny had beached the dinghy. He held a rifle in his hands, and she could see that it was mounted with a powerful scope. He moved cautiously, and she understood that he was, indeed, a man who knew how to hunt. He paused and used the barrel of his rifle to move aside some debris. Jenny realized he’d found the wolf that, out of mercy, she’d killed. The hunter’s head turned, and his eyes swung to the island where she stood in the shadows, besieged and tortured but struggling to remain still. His gaze hung there an eternity while her skin crawled. Then he moved again, this time to where the dinghy lay crushed. He studied the obliterated hull, then turned and went to where the base of the outcropping met water. He waded into the lake until he could see the island where her father had taken a position atop the bluff. The hunter looked there, looked to his right across the channel toward Jenny’s island, and finally to his left beyond the outcrop at something Jenny couldn’t see. For a few moments, he was like the rock he stood next to. He lifted the rifle, fitted the stock to his shoulder, sighted through the powerful scope, and swung the barrel in a slow, purposeful arc. He didn’t have field glasses, Jenny guessed, and was using the scope for that purpose.

He carefully scanned the island where her father was atop the bluff, scoped another island farther south, and finally directed his eye to the island where Jenny hid. She flattened herself on the ground with her arm wrapped protectively around the wicker basket crawling with flies. Inside, the baby’s fussing was becoming more pronounced. She prayed he wouldn’t begin to cry. They were shielded by a very porous wall of underbrush. Jenny could see the hunter and knew that, with his magnified vision, he could see her, and any movement at all might be her undoing. The scope swung gradually until it held directly on the spot where she lay. She stared, and the black eye of the rifle barrel stared back. The baby squirmed, his little arms batting at the blanket that covered the basket. Jenny began to sing in a whisper, “Hush, little baby, don’t say a word. Papa’s going to buy you a mockingbird.” The man lifted his face from where he’d laid his cheek against the rifle stock and studied the island with his naked eye. Had he seen the raft? If he came for her and the baby, what would she do? Her mind began to search desperately for a fallback plan.

The hunter put his cheek to the stock again and continued his scan of the area. Finally he lowered the rifle, turned, and disappeared into the devastation at the base of the outcrop, heading in the direction of the makeshift shelter.

As soon as he was gone, Jenny grabbed the basket and bolted for another hiding place, fleeing the swarm of insects threatening to drive her mad. In her haste, she caught her foot on a snag and went sprawling. The basket flew from her hand. The baby spilled out onto the ground. He lay a moment, staring up at the sun as if dazed; then he let out a wail that could have been heard in Greenland.

Jenny shot a look toward the island across the channel. The hunter broke from the cover of the fallen timber, eyes on the place where the baby lay. He lifted his rifle, and he sighted.