There was still light in the day when Cork reached Mudd Lake. Long and narrow, the lake lay between two high ridges of gray rock capped with a mix of pine and aspen. He found where the Asemaa fed in, and he climbed to a place among the trees on the eastern ridge where he could see anyone approaching along the course of the river. Although the whole way there he’d tried to formulate some kind of plan, he’d come up with nothing that had a ghost of a chance of springing Lindsay Harris free. When he’d been taken, they hadn’t bothered to frisk him, and he still had the old Barlow pocketknife that his father had given him when he was twelve and that he always carried with him into the Boundary Waters. But what good was a small knife against the rifle they had? And how did one man take on a party of three whose purpose, whatever it was, was so important to them that they would kill or die for it?
His clothes had dried, but he still smelled of the rank muck of the marshland. He was hungry but put that need aside as he lay on a bed of pine needles and carefully watched the Asemaa. All the while, he went over and over in his head all that he knew about Lindsay Harris and her missing grandfather, looking for some clue that would help him understand the why of all this.
John Harris—Johnny Do—had been a kind of hero to Cork, funny, smart, ambitious. Cork had looked up to him like an older brother, in a way. But Harris had left Aurora and not returned, and the man he’d become was a mystery to Cork. However, that he’d found the time to make a trek into the Boundary Waters with his grandchildren said something about him, something good.
When Harris vanished, his grandchildren had insisted on being a part of the search effort to locate him. Even when the search had officially ended, they were clearly not prepared to give up on their grandfather. Which said something about them.
It wasn’t much to go on, but there was one possible thread which Cork thought might connect Lindsay’s abduction with her grandfather’s disappearance. Perhaps there was some vital piece of knowledge that both Harris and his granddaughter possessed that was worth all this bloody effort. If that was it, did this mean that Harris had not given it to the kidnappers, and they hoped Lindsay would? And if Harris hadn’t given them what they wanted, did that mean he was dead? And if that was true, what was Lindsay Harris’s life worth?
He spotted them coming, portaging along the river. The tall man was in the lead, carrying one of the canoes. Behind came Lindsay Harris, with the other canoe on her shoulders. The kid came next, visibly limping. The woman with the rifle brought up the rear. She also carried a pack. As Cork lay still with his eyes focused on the approaching party, he heard a faint sound at his back. He rolled over quickly and found that he was being scrutinized by two gray wolves. He didn’t believe there was any reason to be afraid. He’d spotted wolves before in the Boundary Waters and in other parts of the Northwoods, and he knew they were predators that almost never attacked humans. There was something else, too. The side of Cork’s heritage that was Anishinaabe was Ma’iingan, Wolf Clan. These wolves were part of his dodem. And so he gazed at them and they gazed back and he said quietly, “Boozhoo, Nisayenyag.” Hello, my brothers.
The animals turned and slowly trotted away among the trees. Before they were lost completely from his sight, they stopped and looked back. He envied them. They were in their element, and because they had each other and maybe the rest of a pack somewhere near, they weren’t alone. He was also grateful because he chose to think of their appearance as a good sign and it gave him hope.
He returned his attention to the people below. They’d stopped at the edge of the lake and unburdened themselves. They sat on the ground, and the way their bodies sagged spoke of their exhaustion. The tall man handed around a water bottle, and they all drank from it. The tall man spoke to the woman, then rose and pulled something from his pack. The sat phone. He moved away from the others and made a call. Or tried, but probably wasn’t successful, because he looked at the woman and shook his head. He glanced up at the top of the ridge, where Cork lay. Cork pressed himself to the earth, but kept watching. The tall man spoke to the woman, and she rose with obvious reluctance. She handed the rifle to the kid and said something that must have included Lindsay, because they both looked at her and the kid nodded. Then the woman followed the tall man, who brought the sat phone with him.
They retraced their path along the river, then began to climb the ridge, coming up the same way Cork had come. He slid from the edge and crept away a couple of dozen yards and lay himself flat behind the trunk of a lichen-covered pine that had fallen long ago and was slowly rotting back into the earth. In a few minutes, he could hear their footsteps. They stopped not far from where he’d been watching them. He didn’t dare rise to look, but he could hear them clearly as they spoke.
“Let’s hope we get something up here,” the tall man said. There was a long silence, then: “Isaac? Where’s Cheval?” Silence. “Can we get another pilot?” Silence. “All right. We’re at Mudd Lake. We’ll stay overnight, then head north. I’ll check in at noon tomorrow, and let you know where we are. If you’ve got someone else who can fly us out, we’ll figure another pickup point.”
Now the woman spoke. “What is it?”
“The RCMP picked up Cheval last night,” the tall man said.
“Constable Markham?”
“Yeah, Markham.”
“Why?”
“Cheval got drunk and belligerent and Markham arrested him.”
“Is Isaac posting bail?”
“He’s working on that now, but it won’t happen until sometime tomorrow at the earliest.”
“So we keep going?”
“O’Connor is on his way out of the Boundary Waters. He can’t possibly make it before late tomorrow, but as soon as he does, he’ll bring the police back with him. We need to be long gone by then.”
“I wish I’d killed him.”
“Because it would have helped us, or because of your brother?”
“I owe him payback.”
“The balance doesn’t work that way.”
“Mine does.”
“Your brother tried to kill the man. What was he supposed to do?”
The sound of her breathing, fast and angry, carried to Cork. “She better be worth all this trouble.”
“We won’t know until we get her there.”
Cork thought they’d leave then, but he didn’t hear any footsteps.
Finally the tall man spoke, sounding bone-weary. “The weather’s beginning to clear. Means it’ll be cold tonight. We’d better get ready for it.”
Now Cork heard them head away. He lay still for a long time, then slowly raised his head and confirmed that he was alone again. He crept back to the edge of the ridge. He watched as below him the others prepared for the night on the shore of the lake. He looked up and saw that the tall man had been right. The cloud cover was finally beginning to break. In the cleared patches, Cork could see the faded blue of an evening sky.
Like the tall man, he was tired right down to his bones. But he knew he had work to do, and in the quiet of that great wilderness, the closing words of one of his favorite poems came to him:
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.