The fire crackled and smoked, filling the air with warmth and the enchanting scent of pine. It brought the survivors of the storm together as the light of day faded. They were tattered and wrinkled but happy to be warm and dry. Bill’s arm was bound in a sling that held it in a V hard against his chest. It was enough to reduce the pain to a dull ache that only hurt when he moved his upper body.
Conversation started slowly as Pender and Annette prepared the meal, Pender tending to the fish, Annette the hash browns, corn, and fire. The questions and answers came stiff and awkward at first, but they were bound together by the heat of the fire and the tribulations of the day, and the group loosened up quickly.
Gus and Bill praised Annette’s fire-making skills. Neither of them thought they could get a good fire going with damp wood, not without using petrochemicals. They even complimented Pender on the aromas coming from his skillet. Annette told them that he was a restaurant authority, knew all the great chefs, and what they were smelling was his own personal blend of spices and herbs. The fishermen nodded politely to Pender, then looked away. There was plenty of tension to go with the warmth.
Bill and Gus were from a Minnesota mining town in the Mesabi Range. The Iron Range they called it. Bill managed a fleet of huge mining trucks and loaders, machines with engine compartments the size of an office, tires taller than a basketball player. Gus was the lead diesel mechanic for the company that kept the machines running, twenty hours a day, six or seven days a week. In better times, anyway. In the wake of the financial collapse, work in the mines had dropped off a cliff. Gus could get as much time off as he wanted; there were lots of good mechanics hungry for work. Bill was still full time, but business was so slow an extra few days of vacation was no big deal.
They talked about the halcyon days of the bubble economy. Machines running flat out, 22/7 some weeks. Changing out a behemoth 2,500-horsepower engine overnight, a feat more remarkable than an Indy pit stop.
Gus dominated the conversation with his booming voice and endless bravado.
They had been coming to the Boundary Waters to canoe and fish since they were kids. The two of them with their dads back then. Then in high school, the two of them and the other two guys, the ones who went home instead of chasing Pender all over Quetico.
“You must have been really pissed,” said Pender, squinting at Gus through the smoke of the fire, talking about them chasing him, a small smile playing at his face.
“Yeah. Definitely. We try to help you and you do that to us? What the f—.” He stopped himself before the obscenity came out. “Sorry,” he said to Annette.
“Oh, don’t worry,” she smiled. “I heard all three of you say that one, and lots more, too.”
“You were there?” Bill asked incredulously.
She nodded. “Yes, I could hear you from the other lake almost. I thought there was a murder going on.”
“We didn’t see you,” said Gus.
“I thought it might be smart to stay out of sight until I could figure out which ‘motherfucker’ was the bad one.” She smiled again, enjoying their discomfort.
“Were you two traveling together?” Bill asked. The two fishermen were confused.
“Not then,” said Annette. “We were meeting nearby. Sort of a date. Pender was a day late. Surprised?”
“I’m surprised you were meeting him at all. He doesn’t make a great first impression, if you know what I mean.” Bill shrugged, like he was kidding, but with a little edge.
“Well, before he became an ax murderer, he was a pretty special guy.” Annette looked at Pender as she said it. “Actually, he still is, but we try to keep sharp objects out of his hands.”
Annette flashed a saccharin smile at Pender.
“That does it,” said Pender. He moved his skillet to the side of the fire grating and walked to his food pack. He returned with his last bottle of wine, a Washington red in a collapsible plastic bladder. “Rinse out your cups, everyone. This elegant beverage is going to be the last good thing that happens to us for a while.”
Minutes later, as the four sat down to a sumptuous feast, Pender poured the wine and made a short speech. “Gentlemen, please join me in saluting the woman who saved my life today and maybe yours, too.” The three raised their glasses to Annette. She blushed.
As the night chill set in and the fire glowed low, the conversation turned serious.
“We’ll try to patch your boat,” said Annette. “But even if the patch works, you’ll have trouble getting down the Maligne with one paddler. You might do better to travel with us. We’re heading north tomorrow. There are only two portages to get from here to French Lake. There will be vehicles there and a phone if we need it. It’s a twenty-minute drive to Atikokan, and there’s a hospital in town.”
Gus and Bill talked about it for a few minutes, wishing there was a more direct way home but realizing they had no chance alone. “We’re with you,” said Gus.
They talked logistics for a while. In the morning, Annette and Gus would patch the crack in the big canoe. Pender would get a fire going and make breakfast. Bill would check their wet gear and try to get the tent ready for packing.
“We’ll have to dry your gear as we travel tomorrow,” Annette said. “It’ll still be wet in the morning. Tonight you two can share a pad and sleeping bag, and Pender and I will do the same.”
“If you two lay off the kinky sex tonight, I might make pancakes for breakfast and some genuine Starbucks coffee,” said Pender.
Gus twirled a finger in the air in sarcastic celebration. Bill grunted, becoming more uncomfortable with each passing hour. Annette stared off into space.
“You look far, far away, ma’am,” Gus said.
“It’s Annette, okay?”
He nodded.
“I’m just thinking that tomorrow will be a day of tests for us. We’ll leave this lake and take a creek through a bog. It could be fouled with blowdowns. Then we’ll see if the portage into the next lake is passable. That’s the lake we want to camp on.”
After a long silence, Bill asked Pender about his experience in the bush. “We know Gus and I have been coming up here for thirty years, and we know Annette is a guide and master woodsman. What about you?”
“Me? Oh, hell. I’m just a tenderfoot. I can read a map and a compass and catch a fish now and then.”
Annette laughed. “Don’t fall for his crap. He’s been soloing up here for twenty years, and he was a soldier in Vietnam.”
“Don’t think your Vietnam experience is going to be much good up here,” said Gus.
“Came in handy a few days ago,” Pender replied.
“Easy, boys,” said Annette. “We’ve got a long way to go, and we need to do it together.”
The fishermen nodded to her. Pender smiled.
Pender spent a fitful night of not-quite-sleeplessness, dozing for short periods, his sleep so shallow he was roused by the slightest noises, the call of a loon, a deep sigh from Annette, Chaos stirring. He moved frequently, from his side to his back to his other side, to try to ward off a backache. Sometimes he pulled his legs up into a prenatal curl. Sometimes he straightened out. Sometime in the middle of the night, Chaos gave up trying to cuddle against him and moved to the other side of the tent.
He didn’t dream when he dozed, but he did during his waking minutes. His dreams were short vignettes flipping through his consciousness like a pulsating strobe light. Trees snapping in the wind. Kissing Annette. Patrick O’Quinn on his deathbed. Paddling on a mirror-smooth lake as if in a dream, the sky reflected in the water like a photograph, the Canadian Shield silent and still, a moment so perfect it was like seeing life begin. Evelyn’s face, twisted and cruel. Gus charging him, red-faced with anger. Pender now wishing maybe he hadn’t taken their boats. Group vice president Charles Jamison Blue doubled over, holding his gut, his aura of arrogance crushed by a single blow.
He marveled briefly that nary a single slide in his succession of images was about Peg. Thirty years and not a single memory for the sleepless-night hit parade. He was just as sure she never thought about him either. He could barely remember what she looked like, could just barely conjure an image of her walking toward him in the morning as she went to work. He could see her silhouette, her brisk steps, her tasteful clothes, but her face was just a shape, undefined. Jesus, what a waste of a lifetime.
It was a damp, chilly night, the humidity hanging on them like a wet cloth. At 4:00 Pender could feel his nose plugging up as if he had a cold. At 5:00 he gave up, dressed, and went outside, suppressing grunts as he forced his aching back and cramping legs to work.
He crawled into a wilderness encased in a dense fog. He could see maybe five feet in front of him. Then the world faded to nothing. His flashlight was useless, converting the wet air to a single blinding reflection of light as opaque as a brick wall. The fog was so disorienting he used his compass to reach the fire ring. Chaos followed him, full of energy but slowed by the fog and the tangle of downed timber.
Pender boiled water on a gas stove, waiting to start the wood fire until the others got up. He lay on the ground and went through his stretching exercises, trying to get ease of motion back in his body. He sat on a log when he was done. Chaos sat in front of him and put his chin on Pender’s knee. Pender smiled, put both hands on the dog’s head, scratching behind both ears. Chaos erupted in a canine smile of pure ecstasy.
“You’re a good guy,” Pender whispered to the dog. Then he bent over and hugged him.
In the tent, Annette woke and dressed. She had felt Pender leave, had sensed his discomfort all through the night. As she oozed in and out of slumber, she dreamed of Christy and her granddaughter, dreamed of her oldest daughter, Anne, so far away, dreamed against her will of her own death in the derecho and her loved ones learning to live without her. She dreamed of seeing them again, of scaling mountains of downed timber to get to them. She dreamed of Pender and her as college kids, wondered what he saw in her, then and now. She dreamed of Gus getting into it with Pender, Pender beating him to a pulp, her having to testify against him.
As she dressed, the image of Pender and Gus squaring off came back to her. Gus wore his resentment on his sleeve, but Pender’s was subtler, a streak of anger bubbling just beneath a crust of ironic humor. He was a man of deep passions, trying to deny them, a complex organism of many disparate parts, all boiling within him, their steam erupting now and then to relieve the pressure inside. Could he ever find peace? she wondered.
Annette crawled into the dim fog. She could hear Gus and Bill dressing in the other tent and Pender snapping twigs for the fire. She made her way slowly to the fire ring. They exchanged a warm kiss.
“You had an awful night. I’m sorry,” she said.
“Ah. Sleep is overrated. The only thing I worried about was having this back of mine act up again.”
“How is it?”
“Not bad. Do you think this fog will last long?
“It’ll probably burn off by nine or ten,” said Annette.
Pender nodded. “I had fog like this once, and it was on this lake. I had to dead reckon it all the way to the north end. Lucky for me, the fog was lifting by the time I got in the bog. I always have a hell of a time finding the watercourse in there.”
Annette squeezed his hand. “We’ll probably start out just following a compass bearing today, too,” she said.
Pender served coffee and pancakes for breakfast. Annette and Gus finished patching the damaged canoe and struck camp. They launched before eight, the fog still dense, the air almost viscous enough to drink. Pender and Gus paddled the big tandem canoe, towing Bill in Pender’s solo boat. Annette paddled her own canoe, carrying fishing poles, ready to cast when the opportunity arose. Chaos rode with Gus and Pender so Annette could travel light. The extra speed would let her stop and cast and still catch up. The fishermen’s damp clothes and sleeping gear were draped over the packs in all of the canoes, giving their small armada a ragtag look.
They paddled east-northeast all morning, the fog dissipating gradually at ground level, enough for them to see islands and reefs and the shores of the big lake, but a heavy haze still hung above them, low in the sky like a gelatinous cloud with no beginning and no end.
They made good time. Gus controlled the big canoe from the stern, calling out “Hup!” every eight to ten strokes to signal Pender to paddle on the other side. He adjusted easily to Pender’s paddling style, and they kept up with Annette’s tripping pace even with another boat in tow. They paddled in silence most of the morning, the swish of their paddles and Gus’s “Hup” commands the only sounds, the air around them eerily still.
“This isn’t good,” Annette said, gesturing skyward. “No visibility for rescue planes. I haven’t heard an engine all morning.”
“Maybe this afternoon,” Gus offered.
“Maybe. But it would help if we had some kind of breeze. Everything is just sitting there.”
At the narrows where both Annette and Pender had camped earlier in the week, Annette paused at a few places to cast, then sprinted to catch up. At the next narrows, a four-kilometer stretch where the lake shrank to a river-like width, Annette trolled a crank-bait, working structures in the channel. She caught a walleye and two chunky northerns. Bill and Gus cheered.
“Why would a great woman like that settle for an asshole like you?” Gus called to Pender. Teasing in a guy-humor sort of way.
“Because assholes like you make me look pretty good,” Pender returned.
Gus grimaced, then recovered. “Good one,” he said. Pender nodded, thinking he probably should have taken the ribbing in silence. It was just a joke.
The improving visibility gave the paddlers a dramatic view of the devastation left by the derecho. Every shore was strewn with tangles of prone trees. All of the high points looked like they’d been buzz-cut by a scythe-wielding deity. Trees remained on a few slopes facing the east or northeast, in the lee of the winds, but these were small pockets of sanity in a landscape dominated by psychotic madness.
Annette’s eyes were damp when she called for a short lunch break. An hour or two of high winds, and everything she held dear was in ruins. She was used to fires taking out forests. That was part of the natural force of change in Quetico, just like ice heaves and water erosion and heavy snows. But the fires affected only small parts of the park in any given year. A hillside here, a hilltop there. Once in a while, an entire ridge. But not everything. Not like this. Forestry companies didn’t create devastation on this scale, she thought.
She tried to calculate the recovery time. After a burn-off, thick covers of seedlings cropped up in two or three years, and they grew like weeds, especially jack pines, so in ten years there would be a forest of immature trees in place. In twenty years you wouldn’t know it from an old-growth forest. She wondered if she’d live to see it recover. She was sixty. And this wasn’t a burn-off. The new growth would have to get past the downed trees. It would take them years to rot away. She might be eighty by the time this lake was lined by a juvenile forest. Eighty! She’d be sitting in a rocking chair somewhere waiting to die.
Their respite was brief and quiet. Annette distributed granola bars and her homemade gorp to each person. “Might not fill you up,” she said, “but there are plenty of calories here. Just make sure you drink lots of water and everyone pee before we leave.”
“Okay, Mom,” said Pender.
When they prepared to leave, he stepped into the water to brace Annette’s canoe as she boarded it. “You don’t need to do that,” she said.
“I know.”
She looked at him, her face a question mark.
“It’s a way a man respects a woman. Like opening a door. Everyone knows she can open it herself, but the man doing it for her says something about how he feels about her.”
She blinked, nodded, and paddled away, still trying to figure out who Pender actually was.