Islept like a log that night. Literally. Flat on my back. No tossing and turning for me. Even rolling over was a pain. My legs were not only stiff from all that upstream running but sore as hell from banging into rocks. I’d doused the abrasions with hydrogen peroxide, laved my shins with Neosporin, covered the worst scrapes with monster Band-Aids, then popped a couple of Percodans and a tetracycline. I still couldn’t sleep.
“You’re gimpy, pal,” Ben said the next morning as I limped out of the tent. “‘Slowly he turned, step by step . . . ’ Maybe we ought to call it quits. There’s a takeout spot a few miles downriver.”
“I’ll be all right,” I said. “My shins look like chopped liver and my muscles are a little stiff, but I took an antibiotic and a muscle relaxant. Half a mile of paddling and the kinks will work themselves out. They’ll record it in the medical annals as just another case of ‘Physician, heal thyself.’”
“You’re the doctor. Anyway, we’ve got an easy day ahead of us. The fishing sucks for the next ten miles—mostly hatchery trout—so we can blow right through, dodging rafts and drift boats all the way. There’s a swank new resort down there by the takeout—Septuagesima Island, right across from Stony Creek—and they hammer the water for five miles either way.”
“As in Septuagesima Sunday?”
“Yeah, seventy days before Lent. I guess one of the early French explorers discovered it on that day. Duluth or one of those guys back in the sixteen hundreds. They must have had a chilly time of it, that time of year.” He poured me a cup of joe. “Those old voyageurs wouldn’t recognize the place now. Teeming with fat cats and their ladies, $500-a-day river guides, whole herds of exotic critters from the Himalayas and Siberia—Marco Polo sheep, musk oxen, argali, snow leopards, even Asiatic brown bears, if you’d care to take one home as a ‘trophy.’ They call it Shikaree Lodge. ‘Thugee’ would have been a better choice. They charge 20K for a Marco Polo. I did some carpentry work there in the mid-’80s when the lodge was just opening. You’ll never guess who built the place.”
“I give up.”
“Your old squeeze Cora Stoat. Her third husband was Lancelot Shrubb, a rabid big game hunter, a big bucks oil man from Texas in more ways than one. She built the lodge for him as a surprise, stocked it with critters suited to the climate, and presented it to him on their fifth wedding anniversary. He was surprised, all right. On his first day afield a Siberian tiger had him for lunch.”
“Serves him right for messing with my Cora.”
“Anyway, with the Big Bwana gone she turned it commercial. With a capital ‘C.’ You’ll know what I mean when we get there.”
Indeed I did. A few miles downstream we saw the first evidence of Shikaree Lodge—an electrified game fence, twelve feet high and topped with razor wire, that was meant to keep the wildlife on Cora’s property. Signs warned hunters to keep out under threat of the direst penalties. The signs were better spelled than Curly’s similar warning of fifty years earlier.
The fence crossed the Firesteel, barring our way, and disappeared deep into the woods of the west bank. There was a gate in the fence to allow river traffic through, and a guard shack on the east bank. A guard ambled out of it as we approached, a tall beefy guy in a rent-a-cop outfit. He carried a shotgun—a ten-gauge streetsweeper, by the look of it. He gestured us in to the shore.
“Sorry, fellas,” he said as we pulled up, “but I gotta check you guys through—names, destination, time of entry, that kind of bullshit. There’s another gate at the far end to check you out.”
“Is it legal to bar access to a public waterway?” I asked him.
“Beats me,” he said “I only work here. But it’s the boss’s orders and I guess she’s cleared it with the DNR. We’ve got a lot of valuable wildlife on the premises, some of it endangered species, and she can’t afford to take no chances with poachers.”
“She?”
“Miz Cora,” he said absently, as if everyone in the world must know her. He was looking down into the canoe and had spotted the gun cases. He shook his head. “I’m afraid I’ll have to confiscate your firearms, gentlemen. And the dog, too. They’ll be returned to you when you leave the property.”
“I’m afraid not,” I said. “The dog is perfectly well behaved, solid to wing and shot, and what’s more there’s a priceless weapon involved—a rare English double worth more than $100,000.”
He looked at me with new respect. “Your gun won’t get hurt or ripped off, sir. We’re bonded. Insurance up the ass.”
“Up yours, my good man,” I told him. I was getting hot. “No offense intended. Let me speak to your supervisor—no, better yet, let me speak to Cora herself. She’s an old friend of ours.”
He popped a cell phone from his hip, flicked it open, and punched a number. “May I have your name, sir?”
“Doctor Taggart . . . . No, tell her it’s Harry Taggart from the fall of 1950, along with Ben Slater. Tell her we’re the guys who sunk her daddy’s Gar Wood.”
He turned his back and walked up toward the shack, talking so we couldn’t hear him. I caught a few words nonetheless. “ . . . couple of old farts down here . . . rich fuckers . . . wanna talk to the Queen Bee . . . ”
He nodded, waited, then snapped to attention and talked some more. He nodded a few more times, deep bows of respect, disconnected, and walked back down to us.
“She’ll be here in a few minutes,” he said. “Why don’t you guys come on up to the shack, have a cuppa coffee while you’re waiting? Bring the pooch too. I’ve got a Lab myself.”
I looked at Ben. He shrugged—why not? We went.
The coffee wasn’t half bad. Nor were the wildlife photos on the wall: A brown bear slapping salmon out of the Firesteel; a herd of yaks standing belly deep in a Wisconsin blizzard, circled up for protection with their horntips pointing outwards; a shaggy Asian argali sheep with a full curve and a half of horn, battling a pack of Russian wolves.
“Tell me about sinking that speed boat,” the guard said with a wicked, complicitous grin. His name was Tony Mezzoni according to the tag on his chest, chief of what was euphemistically called the Grounds Crew. Ben gave him the rundown, with comic book sound effects. Tony laughed and hitched at his crotch, tears ran down his face.
We were standing outside the shack now, waiting for Miz Stoat. A monarch butterfly flitted past, drifting upstream toward the south. Tony’s eyes lit up. Then the shotgun was at his shoulder—POW! Orange and black confetti fluttered on the breeze.
“Don’t get a chance to shoot much on this job,” Tony apologized. Jake went out and sniffed around, picked up a tattered wing, and dropped it at Ben’s feet. I noticed that there were ragged lanes slashed through the brush surrounding the shack, all at shoulder height. “I love wingshooting. A few ducks blow through now and then, spring and fall, and of course there’s always the robin migration. They taste damn good with pine nuts in a red wine sauce over pasta.”
We heard the truck coming fast, bouncing down the two-track inside the fence. It was a Range Rover just like mine back in Palos Verdes, the same British racing green but filmed with dust instead of sea salt. It slewed to a halt in the dirt. Two women dressed in crisp, tailored safari clothes got out, both slim and well coiffed, and glinting with jewelry to boot. Cora from the driver’s side door, and from the other . . . the Wickedly Wonderful Wanda. They walked toward us, smiling.
“Imagine!” Cora said. “Our knights in shining armor have returned, just in time to save us again.”
“It’s more like grungy sweat suits,” Ben said, grinning. “But what do you want us to save you from this time?”
“Boredom,” Wanda said. “And an elephant in musth.”
Wanda and Cora were both widowed now. They had stayed in close touch since Bryn Mawr, getting together a few times each year for girl talk and shopping, in places like Paris, Milan, Palm Beach, and New York. Wanda had been married for fifteen years to a Philadelphia legal eagle, then divorced him when she caught him sleeping with a client’s wife. She soon signed up for another hitch—this time with a commodities broker from Chicago who’d died a year ago of heart disease (too many pork belly futures in his past?). Cora hadn’t remarried after Number Three’s encounter with the tiger.
We learned all this on the drive to the main lodge, Cora at the wheel. She insisted that we stay the night there at least. Tony and the crew would bring up our gear, and dogs were always welcome at Shikaree. Up close the women showed their age, despite the most artful effects of more than one face lift apiece. The road wound through alternate woods and meadows, on some of which grazed mixed herds of wildlife—huge Indian sambhur fed beside tiny, tan, woolly-coated chiru gazelles from the plateaus of Tibet; English red deer as big as elk rubbed shoulders with bottle-nosed saiga from Mongolia. Alone on a grassy hillock stood a strange, brown, goatlike creature with horns like upright oil drilling spuds and a long black beard that blew back in wisps against a creamy white vest—a markhor, Cora explained, from the steppes of Uzbekistan. Wildlife from the former Soviet Union was a glut on the exotics market these days, dirt cheap except for the shipping costs.
As we neared the lodge we passed outlying guest cottages, some built like dak bungalows from the Indian raj, others styled after Mongol yurts. They were scattered among scenic groves of pine and aspen. Small islands of cedar and juniper dotted the grounds as well, scenting the hot noonday air with spices. There was even a petting zoo for children—baby sheep, fallow deer, wolf pups, and a lion cub among the cuddly attractions. They seemed to be getting along well together. Indeed, the lion was lying down with the lamb.
The main lodge was a dazzler—a miniaturized version of London’s Crystal Palace. All glass and spires and Victorian gingerbread. It was surrounded by a wide moat on which I saw floating Muscovy ducks, emperor geese from Alaska, and slim, graceful black swans with red paddles and bills. “All the way from Down Under,” Cora said. “They’re native to Australia.”
“How do they survive the Wisconsin winters?” Ben asked.
“Oh, we move them to an aviary out back. It’s heated. We have all the ‘mod cons’ here at Shikaree.”
“How much property do you keep fenced?” I asked her.
“Just under 13,000 acres,” she said. “Daddy foreclosed on twenty square miles that belonged to a bankrupt lumber company. It went bust in the Depression. The parcel included Twodoggone Lake, where he built the old lodge.”
“What ever happened to it?” Ben asked.
“Oh, it’s still in fine shape,” Wanda said. “I live there part of the year now, since my husband passed on. Summers mostly.”
“And the Gar Wood?”
“We put it out to pasture after Daddy died. That was in ’64. An aneurysm, but he died happy—fighting his last muskie. The Gar Wood went to Dearborn, I think—one of Henry Ford’s museums anyway.”
She parked in front of the Crystal Palace and we crossed the drawbridge. The lounge area bristled. Its floors and walls were covered with heads, horns, and hides, from wisent to yak to barasingha, Père David’s deer to a full-body mount of the massive Siberian tiger that had done for Cora’s last husband. As we entered, a familiar figure strode toward us—Florinda Wakerobin, as scowling, stout, and sturdy as ever though her hair had gone snow white.
“I knew I’d see you rascals again before I died,” she said. “Only the good die young.”
Then she smiled.
If I’d had the horn with me I could have played “That Old Gang of Mine.”