Chapter 15
The exit off Shrike Lake leading to Paternoster is a tough paddle.
Not at first. At first, you go through a series of placid pools, before coming to a line of cascades that requires a portage of seventy rods, or about a quarter of a mile.
The path is rocky in some areas, marshy in others.
I made the portage, then put in on the Otter River, which feeds out of Paternoster, into Shrike, then into Little Sister, and eventually joins the Kawishiwi River.
The current on that section of the Otter is strong, requiring a good deal of effort to paddle against it.
But I put my heart into each stroke because somewhere ahead of me was Cordell.
I finally came out on Paternoster, which is Latin for “Our Father.” It had been named by the early voyageurs, who were mostly of French descent and Catholic.
I have no idea why they chose that name.
The lake is large and, like many of the lakes in the Boundary Waters, fills in faults created during volcanic activity thousands of years ago.
But at the northeast tip is an arm of the lake that cuts due north through a narrow bay.
It’s called Devil’s End. If you wanted to go all the way to the Quetico on the Canadian side of the border, that’s the route you’d take.
I thought about Dillon and Declan Kennedy, both of whom had been Canadian citizens.
I thought that if they were worried about getting caught after torturing Wollersheim to death, reaching their home turf by way of the Boundary Waters wouldn’t be a terrible plan.
I suspected that the goons who’d hired Cordell wanted him to take them on the same route he’d followed with the two Kennedy brothers.
If I was correct, Devil’s End was the likely choice. So I headed that way.
The bay lies inside an oval-shaped bowl of Ely greenstone.
To enter Devil’s End, a canoeist must pass through a high-walled, narrow corridor of rock known as Devil’s Door, so called because lots of talus fallen from those walls lies just beneath the surface.
A fast, tricky current runs through the corridor, which makes it difficult to navigate around those submerged rocks.
For the unwary, this creates a good possibility of doing significant damage to the hull of a canoe.
At the far end of the bay is a stair step of water called, not surprisingly, Devil’s Cascade.
Circumventing the cascade requires a long, steep portage that parallels the river.
At the base of the cascade is the final campsite on Paternoster.
If Cordell’s group was heading toward Canada, I thought that after hours of difficult paddling, they might have decided to rest at the campsite for a while before tackling the portage.
As soon as I hit Paternoster, I could see the rock outcroppings that formed the walls of Devil’s Door a mile distant.
I could have canoed directly through the passage and into the bay, but in light of the evidence that something deadly was going down, I didn’t want to relax my guard.
If I came onto the bay too quickly, there might well be a couple of yahoos waiting to greet me with their firearms. In my canoe on the open water, I’d be a sitting duck.
Instead, I made a landing on the open-lake side of Devil’s Door, secured my Wenonah, and took off on foot. I climbed the steep, rocky slope to the top of the eastern side and, keeping low, made my way to a perch a hundred feet above the water, where I could see all of Devil’s End below me.
The final campsite was on a broad point of land covered with a grove of mixed birch and evergreen.
It was a couple of hundred yards from where I lay with my binoculars.
I focused the lenses. Two canoes were drawn up on a wide, flat rock at the tip of the point.
A couple of tents had been erected among the trees.
At first, I didn’t see any sign of the men who put up those tents. Then I spotted Cordell.
He was bound with his back to the trunk of a fir well behind the tents, which hid him from anyone who might canoe past. His head was down, chin on his chest. He didn’t move.
I considered the dark possibility that he was dead but pretty quickly put that thought aside.
He was bound. Would anyone bother to tie up a dead man?
Then I heard voices approaching.
I was near a couple of boulders on the rim of the bowl.
I quickly scooted behind them, out of sight.
The boulders lay together, touching but with a small gap, window-like, at their bases that allowed me, if I lay flat, to look between them.
I saw two men appear, mounting the rock wall twenty or thirty yards from where I lay.
They stood looking down at the bay below.
“Goddamn him,” one of the men said.
He was big, in both height and girth, but much of his size appeared to be fat. He wore a forest-green Tilley hat whose broad brim shaded his face so that I couldn’t see his features clearly.
“Told you to go easy on him,” the other man said.
This was a smaller man, leaner, wearing a blue ball cap. He took a couple of steps toward the edge of the cliff and leaned over.
“Asshole,” the first man said. He studied Devil’s End and the walls of the bowl in which the water lay. In the morning sunlight, the surface was as smooth and shiny as a sheet of new steel. “We’ve been looking all morning. I still don’t see any goddamn asshole.”
The second man turned his head my way. I spotted a logo on the brim of his cap. I took a chance and carefully lifted my binoculars. A blue jay and a red maple leaf. Because of the Minnesota Twins, I follow baseball pretty closely. I knew that logo. The Toronto Blue Jays.
“If you hadn’t killed him, we might know exactly where to look.”
“I get a feeling the Indian knows. I’ll work on him again.” The big, heavy man eyed the bay some more, then scanned the rock walls of the bowl in which it lay. “Devil’s asshole,” he said and spit.
The two men began walking north along the rim, away from me, then turned east and disappeared into the pines that grew on the outside slope.
They didn’t say names, but because of their physical characteristics, I immediately thought of the comedy duo Laurel and Hardy, whose antics on screen had made me laugh till I cried when I was a kid.
Oliver Hardy was big and often overbearing.
Stan Laurel was slight and usually bullied. I dubbed the two men Ollie and Stan.
I wasn’t sure what they were talking about exactly, but I knew of the formation on the bay that’s known as Devil’s Bottom.
It’s a vertical rend in the eastern wall that, as you pass beneath it in a canoe, appears to resemble a human butt with a crack running down the middle.
But a devil’s asshole? That was a new one to me.
At least I knew that Cordell was still alive.
When the men were well out of sight, I crawled back to where I had a view of the campsite below.
I saw Cordell’s head come up slowly. He looked out where the water lay beyond the trees, then lifted his eyes to the rim of the bowl as if searching for something there.
I decided to take a chance. I stood up fully and waved my arms. He turned his head in my direction.
I couldn’t see his face, but I could see a change in his body, as if it had been empty but now had life in it again.
When I was sure he’d seen me, I lay down and waited.
A few minutes later, the men appeared, making their way down into the bowl along the same portage canoers used to bypass the falls.
They went directly to Cordell, who’d once again let his chin drop onto his chest. The two men spoke, and although I could hear their faint voices, I wasn’t able to catch what they said. Cordell made no response.
The man in the Tilley hat picked up something. Through the binoculars, I saw that it was a metal drinking cup. He went to the lake, dipped the cup, returned to Cordell, and splashed water in his face. Cordell slowly lifted his head.
The man spoke, loud and harsh, and, among the many words I couldn’t make out, I heard “Goddamn Indian.” Then he hit Cordell in the face with his fist. Cordell’s head snapped to the right, and his chin dropped again onto his chest.
The man in the Blue Jays ball cap said something to his partner, who said something in return, and some mutual shoving took place.
I thought maybe it would break into a brawl, but the small, ball cap guy—Stan—held up his hands, either in surrender or in a call for calm.
They both eyed Cordell again, then the big man in the Tilley hat—Ollie, as I’d dubbed him—went into a tent and came out with a bottle.
He poured some of the contents into the cup he’d dipped in the water of Devil’s End and took a long drink.
He held up the bottle in offering to his partner, who shook his head.
Both men sat down on logs near the fire ring. The one with the bottle kept on drinking while the other talked to him in a voice too quiet for me to hear.
Something deep inside me had begun to stir when I saw what they’d done and were continuing to do to Cordell. Something angry. Something primal. Something hungry.
I whispered to myself, “Wolf Clan.”