Trickster's Point

CHAPTER 4

Cork drove north out of Aurora, along the shoreline of Iron Lake. Dark had fallen completely. At the edges of the headlight glare, the trees-pine and spruce and birch and poplar-were like stark walls hemming him in. Although he’d tried his best to hide it from his children, he was worried. Not only had someone killed Jubal Little but they’d also done their best to make it look as if Cork was guilty of the crime. The evidence was slight at the moment, and nothing that would convict him, if it came to that, but he had no idea how carefully the murder had been planned and what other evidence might have been created or planted that would point his way.

After several miles, he turned off the main highway onto a gravel county road, which he followed until he came to a double-trunk birch tree off to the right. The tree marked the beginning of the long trail that led to Crow Point, where Meloux’s cabin stood. Cork parked his Land Rover, pulled a flashlight from his glove box, got out, and locked the doors. If there’d been any kind of decent moon, he could have seen his way without the flashlight, but the overcast was solid and the night pitch black, and he flipped the switch and followed the bright, slender beam into the woods.

The hike was less than two miles, much of it through the Superior National Forest, on a footpath worn over the years by the feet of many who, like Cork, sought out the old man for advice and healing. Henry Meloux was a Mide, a member of the Grand Medicine Society. Although in his nineties, he was a tough old bird full of wisdom, compassion, humor, honesty, and, very often, gas. Cork had been in the old man’s company when Meloux let loose farts that could have felled a moose.

Cork had been along the footpath hundreds of times in his life, and it was always a journey he made with a great deal of expectation. Meloux knew things. He understood the complexities and conundrums of the human heart. He had his finger on the pulse of all that occurred on the rez. He knew about the natural world, what healed and what harmed. And he was in touch with the realm that could not be seen with the eye, the realm of the manidoog, or spirits, who dwelled in the vast forests of the great Northwoods.

What exactly Cork hoped to receive from Meloux on this trip, he couldn’t say. But in the past, whatever the old man offered had almost always turned out to be pretty much what Cork needed. And that was one of the reasons he was making his way through the woods on that dark night.

The other reason was Rainy Bisonette.

Rainy was Meloux’s great-niece, a public health nurse who’d come to Crow Point more than a year earlier to care for the old man during a mysterious illness. She’d come hoping as well to learn the secrets of healing that had been revealed to Meloux across his lifetime. She was headstrong, and she and Cork had had a rough time of it at first. That had changed. These days, Rainy was usually the reason Cork made this journey.

The air smelled of late fall, the wet-earth odor of leaves decomposing. This time of year always reminded Cork of death, and not just because winter was hard on the horizon. Autumn was the season in which his father and, much later, his wife had been lost to him, both taken through violence. Now, in this same season, Jubal Little was gone and, like the others, gone violently.

Cork was deep in thought and thoughtlessly following the beam of the flashlight when he became aware of a tingling at the nape of his neck and along his spine. He snapped back into the moment and had the overwhelming sense that he was being tracked. Someone was following him, or perhaps pacing him on one side of the trail or the other. He couldn’t say why he felt this. Had he heard the tiny, bonelike crack of a foot snapping a twig on the ground, or the sound of a body sliding through brush? He stopped and swung the light into the woods all around, then shot it down the path behind him. Nothing. He listened intently, but that, too, proved useless.

He wondered if his imagination was running wild, if he was simply being paranoid. On the other hand, someone that day had tracked him and Jubal in the woods without either of them knowing. Someone had been able to commit murder and slip away without being seen or heard. Was this person right now watching Cork from some dark vantage? Was another arrow, soundless in its flight, about to hit its mark?

“Jesus, Cork,” he said out loud. “Get hold of yourself.”

In the wet, heavy air of the enormous dark, his voice sounded weak, offering him little comfort.

He was relieved when he finally broke from the trees and saw, across the open meadow on Crow Point, the welcoming lantern light that shone through the windows of Meloux’s cabin. A cold wind had come up, and it ran through the pines at his back with a sound like the rush of floodwater. He was a dozen yards into the meadow when he heard the voice, and he spun, swinging the flashlight beam as if it were a saber hacking at the dark. As before, it illuminated nothing but forest.

Cork called out, “Who’s there?” knowing, even as he spoke, that it was useless. If it was only his imagination, no one was there to reply. And if someone had actually tracked him this far, why would they reveal themselves now? Yet he was certain he’d heard someone speak.

He retreated from the wall of forest and turned his back to the trees only when he was fifty yards away, a distance that, especially in the dark, would challenge even the best of bow hunters. He jogged the rest of the way and didn’t feel entirely safe until Meloux’s door was opened to him.

Rainy Bisonette was a lovely woman, though not pretty in a fashionable way. She never wore makeup or tried to hide the gray streak in her long, black hair. Her hands were callused and her nails clipped short. Rather than lithe or willowy, she looked strong. Cork thought of her as substantial, although he would never have said so out loud because it didn’t sound at all complimentary. In his own mind, what it meant was that Rainy, in her intelligence, her compassion, her humor, her enjoyment of life, was pretty much everything a man could ask for, and a great deal more. He thought himself lucky to have found her.

Rainy put together coffee in a blue enamel pot. She set it on the iron cookstove at the center of the cabin’s single room. While it brewed, she gave Cork a big piece of corn bread left over from dinner, buttered and topped with blackberry jam that she’d made herself, and that he gratefully devoured.

The room was simply furnished, mostly with things Meloux had made over the years. A table and three chairs of birchwood. A bunk with a thin mattress whose ticking was straw mixed with dried herbs that the old Mide chose for their fragrance and their particular power. A sink with a hand pump, and above it a few cupboards. The walls were hung with items that harked back across all the years of Meloux’s life-a toboggan, a deer-prong pipe, snowshoes whose frames were made of white ash and whose bindings were leather, a gun rack that held an old Remington. There was also, tacked to the wall, a page from an old Skelly gas calendar, July 1957, with a photo of a fine-figured woman in very tight shorts bending over the engine of a Packard to check the oil. It had been there as long as Cork had been coming to Meloux’s cabin. What it meant to the old man, why he’d held on to it all these years, Cork had no idea. It was just another of the mysteries, large and small, that were Meloux.

Meloux sat at the old birchwood table. In his youth, he’d stood nearly six feet tall, but he was smaller now, or looked it. His hair hung long and white over his bony shoulders. His face was like a parched desert floor, sunbaked and fractured by countless lines. His eyes were enigmas. They were dark brown, and there was in them the look of ancient wisdom; yet at the same time they seemed to hold an impish glint, suggesting that the old man, at any moment now, was going to spring on you an unexpected and delightful surprise. He’d brought out one of his pipes, this one a simple thing decades old, carved from a small stone block that had been quarried at Pipestone in southwestern Minnesota. From a leather pouch he took a pinch of tobacco, sprinkled a bit on the tabletop as an offering to the spirits, filled the pipe bowl, and they smoked together in silence. Cork was eager to speak with his old friend, but he was also cognizant of tradition and waited patiently until, at last, Meloux said, “Wiisigamaiingan.”

Which was the Ojibwe name Meloux had long ago given to Jubal Little. It meant “coyote.”

“You’ve already heard?” Cork said. He looked to Rainy, who’d given no indication she knew about the trouble that day. Then he said with understanding, “The rez telegraph.”

Rainy said, “Isaiah Broom came to tell us.”

“News he didn’t mind bringing, I’m sure,” Cork said.

“A lot of Ojibwe were disappointed in Jubal Little, but that doesn’t mean we’re happy the man’s dead.”

“You were with him.” Meloux set the pipe on the table. “Do you want to talk about it?”

He did, of course. Unburdening was part of what had brought him. He told them about the day, told them how he’d stayed those long hours in the shadow of Trickster’s Point as, ragged breath by ragged breath, Jubal Little had lost his hold on life.

“Three hours?” Rainy said. “With an arrow in his heart? Oh, Cork, that had to be awful.”

She put her hand over his on the tabletop, the calluses of her palms across his knuckles. He took comfort in that familiar roughness.

“Three hours.” Meloux squinted so that he considered Cork through dark slits. “That is a long time to watch a man die.”

“I didn’t have a choice, Henry.”

“There is always a choice.”

“He asked me to stay.”

“You could still have chosen to go.”

“He would have been alone.”

“But he might now be alive.”

“You don’t know that, Henry.” He spoke harshly but understood it wasn’t Meloux he was angry at. In all the questioning by Dross and Larson, Cork had firmly maintained that he’d stayed because it was what Jubal wanted and because the wound was so terrible he couldn’t imagine the man would live long. In his own mind, however, he wasn’t at all certain of the soundness of his thinking or the truth of his motive.

“And that is something you can never know either, Corcoran O’Connor.” The old man’s face relaxed, and in Meloux’s warm almond eyes, Cork saw great compassion. “Your going or your staying is not what killed Wiisigamaiingan. That was the arrow. There is no way to know what the outcome might have been if you had made a different choice. Shake hands with your decision and move on.”

“Was it an accident of some kind?” Rainy asked.

“No accident,” Cork said. “Someone meant to kill him, I’m sure.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because it was planned. They stole one of my arrows and used it to murder Jubal. Either that or they made an arrow in the same way I do so that it would look like I’d killed him.”

“Who would do that?”

“I have no idea. They were pretty crafty with the arrow, so I’m thinking there may be other evidence they’ve arranged to point in my direction.”

“You didn’t see who shot the arrow?”

“No.” Cork looked to Meloux. “Sam Winter Moon taught me to hunt in the old way, Henry. He taught a lot of men to hunt that way.”

Meloux was clearly already ahead of Cork. “You are a good hunter. You read the ground, and you listen to the air. Yet you did not see the man who shot the arrow. So you want to know who else Sam Winter Moon taught to hunt in the old way. You want to know who could hide himself from you so good.”

“If Sam were here, I’d ask him. But he’s not, so I’m hoping you might know.”

The room was lit with light from a kerosene lantern in the center of the table. The shadows of Cork and Rainy and Meloux fell against the walls, and when Meloux shook his head, his shadow self did the same.

“Sam Winter Moon taught many,” he said.

“Some of them have already walked the Path of Souls, Henry. And some have grown too old to hunt that way. And some no longer live on the rez. I want to know who’s still here. And of those, I want to know who’s good enough to hide from me.”

Meloux had made his chairs long ago. They were sturdy pieces, but so old that they creaked easily under the weight of those who sat in them. Meloux’s chair complained as he leaned back and studied Cork’s face and gave the issue long, patient thought.

“It would not necessarily take such an expert to hide from you,” Meloux said at last. “A hunter is only as good as his mind will let him be. You were distracted today.”

Cork realized that the old Mide, in his mysterious way, had divined an important concern. “Jubal and I had kind of a falling-out, and we were both pretty upset.”

“Over what?” Rainy asked.

“It doesn’t matter. But Henry’s right. I was distracted.”

“So maybe it was not such a good hunter you did not see,” Meloux said.

Cork was disappointed. He’d believed he might have a way of narrowing the field of suspects, but Meloux’s insight cast a deep shadow of doubt over the possibility.

Then Cork thought of something else.

“I believe somebody followed me here, Henry. They were pretty good because most of the way I only had the sense of their presence, nothing really solid to give them away.”

“Most of the way?” Rainy said.

“At the end, when I came onto Crow Point, I’m almost certain I heard a voice say something to me from the woods.”

“Did you see anyone?”

“No.”

In the lantern light, Meloux’s dark eyes burned with a little flame of intrigue. “And what did this voice without a body say, Corcoran O’Connor?”

“Just one word, Henry.”

Meloux blinked and waited patiently.

“Traitor,” Cork finally replied.