Chapter 12
Dawn came with a perfectly clear sky. The eastern horizon was amber as we began to break camp. The tents had dried overnight. The boys were still complaining about heading back out too soon, but they pitched in and did their share.
We didn’t make a hot breakfast but dined instead on granola bars and dried fruit. Stephen and the boys had doused the campfire completely, and we finally stood together at the canoes, with the sun just beginning to top the trees on the far eastern shoreline of Shrike Lake.
“You’re sure about this,” Daniel said.
“I’m sure,” I told him.
“As soon as we have cell service, we’ll call the sheriff’s office, let them know what we’ve found,” Daniel promised.
“Which still isn’t much,” Stephen pointed out. “All we have is a lot of speculation.”
“Spoken like a lawyer.” I managed a smile.
“I want to stay,” Stephen said.
“We talked about this. You need to make sure the boys are safe.”
“If Marsha won’t send anyone, we’re coming back for you,” Daniel said.
“Damn straight,” Mal said.
I couldn’t object to that. But I said to Daniel, “If you do, bring some firepower, okay?”
“Ten-four, Cork.”
Waaboo looked into my eyes with concern. “The wolf, Baa-baa,” he said.
“I’m not afraid,” I told him. “I’ll be fine.”
I saw them off, the five of them in two canoes, their backs to the morning sun.
Then I got into the remaining canoe, my old Wenonah, and headed northeast toward the last campsite on Shrike, a lake that had been named for a bird of prey.
The shrike impales its food—large insects, small rodents, frogs—on the thorns of trees or barbed wire while it feeds.
For this reason, it’s also called the butcher-bird.
The shoreline is jagged with inlets where points of land jut out like the thorns on a bush that are perfect for a shrike to impale its prey.
As are many lakes of the Boundary Waters, Shrike Lake is basically aligned southwest to northeast. At the far northeast end, there are two ways to exit.
One leads due east, an easy paddle along the Otter River to a small, lovely lake called Little Sister.
The other, a longer, more difficult portage—several cascades and hard slogs through marsh—leads west along the Otter flowage through a series of connected pools to a challenging upstream paddle that takes you at last to a lake called Paternoster.
The final campsite on Shrike Lake lay between those exit points.
The morning sun was still low and bright on the eastern horizon, and blinding bullets of light ricocheted off the lake surface as I paddled so that it was difficult to see well into the distance.
Considering the evidence that something pretty foul might be going down, I didn’t want to relax my guard.
I’d brought my binoculars, and I stopped occasionally and scanned the lake for any sign of Cordell and his group.
I could have headed directly to the campsite, but if someone was watching, maybe with a firearm, I’d be an easy target.
Instead, I circled slowly, keeping as much as possible to the shadows of the trees along the shoreline.
I passed the exit to Little Sister Lake, a smooth outlet of water, and was a few hundred yards from the last campsite when I spotted smoke.
Through my binoculars, I could see the fire pit, the source of the smoke, but nothing else.
No sign of whoever it was that had built the fire.
Which pissed me off no end. You don’t leave a fire unattended in the Boundary Waters.
Or in a forest anywhere else for that matter.
I knew Cordell would never have allowed this.
And that added a whole new weight to the burden of worry I was already carrying.
I came at the campsite warily and confirmed that it was empty.
But I couldn’t leave without dousing that fire.
I pulled to the shoreline, stepped from my canoe into the shallow water of the landing, and drew the bow up onto the gravel of a narrow opening between rock outcrops.
The fire had burned itself nearly out, only a few flickering flames were left, but they were enough to send blue-gray smoke drifting out across the water.
I’d brought a canteen, and I used what was in it to kill the fire.
Then I filled it from the lake and poured more water over the char until I was sure there was not an ember left.
Finally, I took a good look at the campsite.
It was Cordell’s group, I was sure. The area was trashed, with some gear still lying around.
Near the cut logs used for sitting by the fire were the plastic tips of several White Owl cigars.
I thought to myself that when I caught up with these guys I was going beat them like kettledrums. A hammock hung between two pines.
That was Cordell’s, I was pretty sure. He preferred a hammock to a tent.
Then I heard the low, steady thrum that was the buzzing of a million flies, and turning, spotted a pair of legs protruding from a patch of thimbleberries at the edge of the campsite.
My first horrible thought was Cordell! I grabbed the ankles and pulled the body from the cover of the bushes.
Although the man lay facedown, I knew immediately from the clothing that it wasn’t Cordell Bishop.
Everything the guy was wearing cried L.L.Bean.
I turned him over. Even though he was a stranger to me, when I saw what had been done to him, I felt my stomach give a twist. His face had been beaten so badly it was barely recognizable as human.
His shirt was unbuttoned, and I could see that the skin of his chest was pockmarked with raw burn spots.
Those damn White Owl cigars, I thought. The whole of his upper torso was mottled with bruising.
There was a bullet hole in the middle of his forehead.
After I moved past the first shock of discovery, my cop training kicked in.
He was in full rigor mortis, his muscles and joints stiff. I figured he’d been dead at least six hours, probably more. The bullet through his head was undoubtedly the cause of death. I went through his pockets, hoping to find some kind of ID. But if he’d carried it with him, it had been removed.
They’d been here, Cordell and the yahoos that had hired him as a guide.
Before they killed him, they’d tortured this man, both here and probably at the site where my group had camped the night before.
Why such brutality? Were they just cruel, or were they after something, some valuable item or piece of information this man possessed?
And what about Cordell? What was happening to him when these things were taking place?
At the moment, the reason behind all this didn’t matter. What mattered was finding these men and, if the Creator was willing to help me, saving Cordell.
What to do with the dead man? I didn’t have much choice.
I had to leave him, food for the flies certainly and probably for scavengers of the four-footed variety as well.
By the time any authorities were able to arrive on the scene, except for a few scattered bones, there might be little left of this man.
I turned my thinking toward finding the monsters who’d done this.
Where were they headed next? I hadn’t seen any sign of them on Shrike Lake, so they’d probably exited.
Either they’d taken the easy route to Little Sister Lake or the much more difficult passage to Paternoster.
These guys weren’t seasoned paddlers or campers.
I decided to take the easy passage to Little Sister.
I would have said a prayer that I was going in the right direction, but my trust in the Great Mystery was at a low ebb. I just hoped I’d get lucky.
The last thing I did was untie Cordell’s hammock and put it in my canoe. Although I’d hoped that my search for Cordell wouldn’t take long, I’d begun to think differently. If I was to be in the Boundary Waters overnight or longer, the hammock would be useful.
The Otter River flows into Shrike Lake from Paternoster and exits the lake in a smooth, reed-lined flow that runs just over a mile before it reaches Little Sister Lake.
Red-winged blackbirds flitted among the reeds.
I spotted turtles atop logs at the river’s edge, lounging without a care in the warm morning sun.
Dragonflies darted ceaselessly above the water, going about the everyday business of their lives, whatever that was.
Among the high branches of a jack pine, I spotted an eagle, majestically perched like a monarch surveying its domain.
God’s country indeed, I thought, with bitterness.
I found myself wishing that Mal was in my canoe.
He’d told me that God wasn’t responsible for the terrible things men did to one another.
But I wanted to ask his opinion of a God that would simply stand by and allow what I’d just seen to be done to a creature supposedly made in his divine image.
A God of hope? A God of peace? A God of compassion?
Where the hell was that God when the man was being burned again and again with the red-hot ember of a White Owl cigar tip?
“Every falling leaf,” Henry Meloux once told me, “comes to rest where it was always meant to be.”
I thought about the man whose body I’d just left to the scavengers. Was this the death that had always been meant for him? Was this really the Creator’s plan? What could possibly have been the reason for such a brutal end?
Then, for the first time in almost fifty years, I remembered a sweat I’d done with Cordell Bishop when we were teenagers, a sweat guided by Henry Meloux.