24

HE WAS SLEEPING WHEN HE WAS AWAKENED BY THE SMELL of water. They were topping a rise now, and off to their right, miles distant, were buildings the size of aircraft hangars, alight with blue lights, and just beyond them the dark of Lake Superior, and here the plains fell away entirely, and the undercrust of earth, the first of the greenstone, ran jagged and magisterial along the coast, pine covered, and they climbed again, the highway leading right into it, this other world, as if they were passing through some gateway, through the neck of some bottle and into a world old, and pure, and uncompromising, a land of fierce life, where pines, somehow, grew right out of cracks in stone, thousands of them, and the animals came out in the open, here, now, up ahead, in their headlights, a white-tailed deer crossing the highway, and Max cursing and the car tossing them forward as it slowed, and the deer loped to the far side, and a snow fence there, fully six, eight feet high, and as if on wings, the deer leapt, to clear the fence, and there was that moment when it seemed to hang over the fence, something magical there, eternal, because in it was some grace of motion, exquisite, not human, yet remembered from some time before memory, and was gone again.

“Would’ve hit the damn thing if I hadn’t been watching,” Max said.

“What?” Janie said, waking.

“Just a deer,” David said.

Janie put her face to the window in back.

“I missed it.”

“You didn’t miss anything, honey,” Max said.

They reached Ely a little after midnight, the town not much in the off-season, just so many pole barns, and low, two-story buildings with the names of outfitters emblazoned across them, Beland’s Wilderness Canoe Trips, Canadian Border Outfitters, Pipestone Outfitting, Rom’s Canoe Country Outfitters, and the streets for the most part broad, and here and there a car parked up to one motel or another, always the blue or amber sign there, Vacancy, and they pulled up in front of the last on Main, and Max said, Wait a minute, and went inside, and was back moments later, and when they got out of the car, now the night around them was not plains darkness, but woodlands darkness, something different, which you could feel, almost as if with your hands, the air rich with the scent of pine, and cool, pure water, and wood smoke.

In their unit were two beds, and without any discussion, David lugged out his Korean bag, and Janie, in some half-sleep, crawled into one bed, and Max in his clothes lay on the other and pulled the spread over him, and even as David was passing into that other world of sleep, Max said, “Good night, kiddos,” and David pulled the bag up under his head, just then, somehow, in his half-sleep, just a boy all over again, and all hope and brightness of the world ahead of him, untarnished.

And loved, yet.

And like that he slept, and slept deeply.