Northwest Angle

TWENTY-THREE

Atop the bluff, Cork had hunkered behind a blind created by the trunk and branches of the fallen aspen. He’d waited patiently for the hunter to appear on the outcropping where the few ragged cedars still stood. His clothes had begun to dry, and his muscles had begun to cramp, and when the hunter didn’t show, he’d begun to believe he’d been miserably off target, miscalculated completely. All his predictions about the man’s behavior had been wrong. He was afraid that being wrong could lead too easily to being dead.

He should continue to wait, he knew, to be patient, to trust his instincts. That’s what his years as a hunter had taught him. But things were different when the life of his daughter and an innocent child were at stake. Where he hid, he had a view of only the upper half of the cedar-topped outcropping. If the man chose not to climb that promontory, Cork realized he might not even see the hunter. He battled with himself over the urge to get up and stand at the edge of the bluff for a clear view all the way to the waterline. What held him back was the stubborn certainty that the hunter, when he reached the end of the island, would climb the height for the view it would give him. That’s exactly what, in his place, Cork would have done.

Then he heard the baby scream.

He leaped up and looked north. At three hundred yards, he couldn’t see much. He dashed to the edge of the bluff, where he had a clear view of the base of the outcropping and the little beach on which the dinghy lay crushed. He saw the hunter standing there, sighting his rifle. He followed the line of the barrel and spied the distant image of Jenny scrambling madly at the edge of the trees. He realized the hunter was probably drawing a bead. He gave a shrill whistle, earsplitting, waved his arms wildly, and screamed, “Up here, you son of a bitch!”

The hunter turned his head. Quicker than Cork had ever seen a man move, he swung the rifle, and the scope was dead on Cork.

Cork hit the ground and heard the shot in the same instant. The bullet snipped the branches of the fallen aspen behind him. He rolled left and lifted his head, risking a glance to see where Jenny and the baby might be. On that far little island, he saw nothing. He threw a look toward the base of the outcropping. The hunter, too, had vanished.

Cork wasted no time. He knew where the man was headed: back to the cigarette boat, which would shoot him across the channel to Jenny and the baby. Cork turned and stumbled through the devastation that littered the back of the bluff, desperate to reach the lake, knowing he was in a race he had almost no hope of winning.

Jenny swept the baby into her arms and, without a glance back, bounded deeper into the trees. She heard the distant crack of the rifle and tensed for the impact of the bullet, but nothing happened. She kept running while the baby screamed into her breast and his little arms flailed madly.

But where to go?

She reached the tiny clearing where they’d bedded for the night. God, how long ago that seemed, those hours of quiet, of sanctuary. She looked up the rock wall her father had scaled several times in the night to keep his vigil. Where was he now? She wished they’d never formed this plan of separation. What had they been thinking? Didn’t they have a better chance together than separated? Alone with the baby, she was helpless against a hunter and his rifle.

For the briefest of moments, she had a deep, gut-wrenching temptation: Leave the baby. Without the baby, she could run. She could swim to another island. She could hide herself. The screaming baby would become a decoy while she escaped. What was this child to her, after all? A foundling, nothing more. She had no responsibility for him. If she hadn’t stumbled on him, he would have been dead by now anyway. Leave him. Leave him to the thread the fates had already spun for him.

But, with almost no effort at all, she put that temptation behind her. She knew that, whatever the outcome, the thread of her own fate was now bound up with the child’s. They would both live or they would both die together.

With a fiery strength of purpose, she hit the rock wall and began to climb, clutching the baby to her with one hand and clawing her way toward the top with the other. She had no idea what she would do when she got there, but she knew that the hunter, if he wanted his prey, would have to climb, too. At the very least, she would buy time, and at the moment, time seemed to be the only hope she had.

As Cork descended the back side of the bluff, he discarded his shirt and sneakers and even the knife, anything that might hold him back in the water. When he hit the lake, he was down to his black Lands’ End swim trunks. He made a long, arcing dive into the green-tea-colored water and began stroking as if hellhounds were nipping at his bare feet.

The wind was with him on this crossing. The swells as they swept forward carried him on their crests. It didn’t matter. Jenny and the baby were alone on that island, and if he’d had to swim through a lake of hellfire to get to them, that’s what he would have done. Each time he tipped his head to breathe, he listened a fraction of a second for the sound of the cigarette boat’s powerful twin engines.

As he swam, his brain went swiftly over the elements of the situation. The island where the girl had died was a quarter mile long. It was an impossible landscape to cross quickly. Even if the hunter kept to the shallows and skirted the devastation on the island itself, the shoreline offered its own obstacles. The man with the scoped rifle would not have an easy time returning to his launch.

Cork stroked hard and decided to believe that he had a good chance of making it to Jenny first.

He was three-quarters of the way there when he heard the engines. He didn’t hear them on the air. It was the lake that carried the sound to him when his whole head was submerged. The dull, unmistakable drone of propellers churning water. He didn’t pause for even an instant but kept digging at the lake with his cupped hands, shoving distance behind him. His breath came in gasps, and his lungs were ablaze. His legs were made of hot lead. Yet he drove himself harder.

He felt the wet, velvety touch of lake weed on his chest and, looking up, saw that he was only a dozen yards from shore. He glanced north, just in time to see the cigarette boat swing into the channel. With five more strokes, Cork was ashore and running for cover. The cigarette boat was still a hundred yards out, closing fast.

He didn’t know for sure where Jenny was, but he knew where they’d spent the night, and he made for that tiny clearing. If she wasn’t there, he hoped she would be above it, seeking high ground, which in his own thinking was now the only possibility of an advantage they might have. If the hunter had to come up after them, maybe they could find a way to keep him at bay. It was the thinnest of hopes, but it was something.

* * *

She’d rocked the baby, sung to him, and soothed him until at last his crying had subsided into little hiccups.

“It’s all right, little guy,” she cooed. “Everything’s all right.”

Though it wasn’t.

She lay against the only cover the top of the stone wall offered, a rock that stuck up like a solitary molar three feet above the rest of the formation. She’d heard the cigarette boat enter the channel, and she tried desperately to figure what to do next. She scanned the top of the wall and saw loose stones, fractured by the melt and thaw of countless winters. Reaching out carefully so that she wouldn’t startle the baby, she gathered as many of these stones as she could, piling them into a small arsenal within easy reach.

She whispered, “If he comes, we’ll stone him. If that doesn’t work”—she eyed the precipice a few feet away—“we jump and take our chances. What do you say, little guy?”

She smiled, and to her great surprise, the baby responded with a beautiful, gapped smile of his own.

The powerful engines cut out, and she knew the hunter had landed. It was only a question of time now before he found them. She took deep breaths and tried to prepare herself.

The sound of rocks being dislodged on the slope of the wall below brought her rigid. Too soon, she thought. How could he have found her hiding so quickly? She reached out and took the largest of the stones she’d gathered. She laid the baby down carefully and crouched. The sound was very near now, almost to the top of the wall.

One chance, she thought. I’ll have one chance. Please, God, let me hit my mark.

She heard labored breathing on the far side of the rock that shielded her. She took one final breath, stood, and prepared to fling the stone.

“Dad!” she cried.

“Down,” he said, motioning frantically with his hand. “Get back down.”

Jenny dropped into the shadow of the rock, and her father joined her there. He looked at the baby.

“What happened?” he asked.

“I tried to run and tripped. He went flying. I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right.” He saw the pile of stones she’d prepared. “Good work,” he said.

“They won’t stop him.”

“With only one rock, David stopped Goliath.”

“When did you become such an optimist?” She smiled, then she glanced past him and looked horrified.

“What is it?” He turned where she looked. “Shit,” he said.

There was no way to miss it. A trail of bloody footprints up the rock, leading right to the place where they lay hidden.

“Your poor feet,” Jenny said.

He studied the torn flesh of his soles and shook his head. “I didn’t feel a thing. Adrenaline.” He eyed the bloody prints he’d left. “Well, that’s bound to make it a whole lot easier for our mystery man to find us.”

“Any suggestions what we do now?”

Her father crawled on his belly to where the wall dropped to the lake, thirty feet below. He spent a moment in thought and looked back over his shoulder.

“Think you can swim with that little guy in tow?”

“Yes, but how do we get down there?”

“Not we. You two. Take your T-shirt off and tie the tail in a knot so that you’ve closed up that end. Take the belt off your shorts and slip it through the arms of your T-shirt. Put the baby into the shirt, and loop the belt over your shoulder, with the baby against your side. It’ll be like a knapsack, and it’ll leave your arms free to climb down this wall with the little guy. There are enough handholds that it shouldn’t be that difficult.”

“What about you?”

Her father crawled back and picked up a stone from the pile she’d created. “I’m going to do my best to keep our mystery man occupied.”

“Dad—”

“Do you have a better idea?”

She tried to think, but came up empty.

“All right, then,” he said. “Get that shirt off.”

She did as he’d instructed, and when she’d created the little carrier, she eased the baby inside. Cork helped her loop the belt over her shoulder so that the baby rode against her side loosely but securely.

Her father held her briefly, then said, “Go.”

And once again, she left him to his own fate while she tried to save the child.

Cork watched her descend the wall. She moved slowly, carefully. When it was clear to him that she would make it, he returned to the rock where Jenny had hidden, and he began gathering more loose stones, the only weapons he had against the man with the scoped rifle.

“David and Goliath,” he said quietly and shook his head. “Right.”

He flattened himself against the top of the ridge with a view of the trees and the tiny clearing directly below. He couldn’t yet see the hunter, but he knew the man was coming. And he was pretty certain of the outcome of their meeting.

How many times in his life had he counted himself dead only to have God or Kitchimanidoo or the fates intervene?

“It ain’t over till it’s over,” he said quietly.

And the man appeared.

He didn’t rush into the clearing. He stood at the edge of the trees, his body shielded by the trunk of a spruce. He studied the clearing, then slowly his gaze rose, following, Cork guessed, the line of bloody footprints up the sloping face of the rock wall. The hunter raised his rifle and scanned the top of the wall with the scope. Like a turtle, Cork drew back his head into the shadow of the rock that hid him. He waited and listened. A moment later, he heard the sound of boots scraping rock.

He risked a peek. The hunter was climbing, the sling of the rifle hung over his shoulder. He was thirty yards below. Cork considered letting him come closer so that he would present an easier target for the stones. But unless Cork got the granddaddy of all lucky throws, the stones wouldn’t stop the man. Best, he decided, to keep him from climbing in the first place.

Cork stood up and threw the first stone. It landed wide by a foot. At the sound of it hitting, the hunter pressed himself to the wall and, in a frighteningly fluid motion, slipped the rifle from his shoulder, laid his cheek against the stock, and fired. If Cork hadn’t reacted with great instinct, his head would have exploded like a melon. He spun into the protection of the rock and filled his empty hand with another stone. He heard the skittle of the hunter scrambling across the face of the wall, trying to put himself out of range of Cork’s throwing arm. Cork stood again and got off another stone. This one caught the hunter in the ribs. The man grunted in pain, and a small thrill of victory ran through Cork.

The hunter quickly maneuvered to fire again, but in the quiet of that moment before his finger squeezed the trigger, the baby cried out from the wall where Jenny had descended. The hunter’s eyes shifted from Cork in the direction of the baby’s crying. It made Cork think of a hawk that had spotted a field mouse. He flung another stone and it bounced off the hunter’s shoulder, but the hunter was no longer interested in the man throwing stones. He slung his rifle and reached up a hand to climb to the top of the wall.

Cork figured it was now or never, and he tensed himself for a suicide dash at the hunter.

But another sound caused both men to go still again: the engine whine of a powerboat approaching. Cork saw a launch swing into the channel from the south. It was dark against the sparkle of the sunlit water and hard to see clearly. Even so, he could make out several passengers, both male and female. Whoever they were, they were a godsend. They must have spotted him, because they came straight for the little island. As soon as the launch came into view, the hunter scrambled down the wall and sprinted into the forest. Cork watched until he saw the cigarette boat shoot north and he was sure the hunter had fled.

The baby was still crying. Cork hobbled to where the wall fell straight down to the water. In the lake, Jenny was holding the child and stroking as best she could for another island several hundred yards distant.

Cork shouted, “Jenny, come back! He’s gone!”

She paused and cried above the baby’s wails, “What?”

Cork kept it simple. He called out, “We’re saved.”