Chapter 34
We returned to the campsite with a northern a good eighteen inches long. I filleted it, then grabbed a tent bag and told Stan to get a fire going.
“Where are you off to?” he asked, eyeing me warily.
“I’m going to find us some mushrooms.”
He looked pleased at that prospect and turned to building the fire.
Once I was alone in the woods, I was tempted to bolt, to abandon the Kennedy brothers, who would probably wander the wilderness aimlessly until they died of hunger.
But the other prospect was that some unsuspecting canoeist would fall victim to them, and I didn’t want that on my conscience.
Also, I’d given my word, and as hokey as it sounds, that means something to me.
I could have done nothing foodwise for the Kennedy brothers, made them suffer from hunger, but I needed to keep up my own strength. Anticipation of a meal of fish and sautéed mushrooms already had my mouth watering.
Early June is a great time to hunt mushrooms in the North Country.
Chanterelles and lobsters abound. I’ve even found chicken of the woods, though those particular fungi usually come out a bit later.
Within an hour of beginning my hunt, I had a good dozen mushrooms, a mix of chants and lobsters.
No chicken of the woods, however. I was about to head back to the campsite when I stumbled across several morels poking up from the ground at the spongy base of a birch tree.
Morels are the gems of the mushroom world, and when sautéed, their firm flesh tastes like buttery steak.
But there’s a dark side to morels. Unless you cook them thoroughly, they can cause significant gastrointestinal problems, diarrhea and such.
I plucked the morels, then gathered some plantain leaves, which, when eaten raw, taste somewhat like spinach though a little on the bitter side.
The sun was just setting, dusk not far away, a time I’ve always found particularly soothing in the wilderness.
The light is diffused and the colors of the woods seem especially pure.
It feels to me as if the day is offering one final glory just before it yields to night.
I’ve heard that professional photographers call this time the “golden hour.” People who don’t know the forest may think dusk is the time that the creatures of the woods crawl back into their nests or burrows or dens and prepare to sleep.
But the forest never sleeps. Dusk brings out all the crepuscular animals—bear, moose, deer, bobcats, owls, nighthawks, bats—that hunt or forage in the twilight or in the night.
I made my approach back to camp along the path that cut through a growth of staghorn sumac and led to the pit toilet. As I neared, I heard the brothers talking. Arguing actually. I held back, hidden by the sumac.
“You did what?” Ollie said.
“I promised him.”
“The hell with promises. Remember what’s at stake here?”
“I do, and that’s why I promised,” Stan replied. “We need to get out of these woods, and he’s the only one who can help us do that.”
“Hell, we came across those people today. There’ll be more. So, we jump the next ones and they lead us out.”
“We’re not going to do that.”
“Because you promised? Since when did a promise mean anything to you?”
“Listen and listen good. You try something, try to get that gun back, I’ll help this guy hog-tie you and we’ll leave you behind. My promise to him ends when we get out of these woods. You want to beat the hell out of him then, be my guest. In the meantime, we’re doing everything he says.”
I could see them through gaps in the brush, Ollie big and menacing, Stan smaller but standing firm. They’d faced off like a couple of teenagers getting ready to rumble, glaring at each other. I could see Ollie’s fists clenched into hard balls, and Stan with his chin out as if daring him.
But they were brothers. And Ollie relaxed and the fists became simply hands and Stan breathed a sigh of relief. And they were good.
I made some noise to alert them to my coming.
“Struck gold,” I told them and dumped my haul on the ground at their feet. “Fish and wild mushrooms and a salad of plantain leaves. You’d have to pay a lot for a meal like this in a fine restaurant.”
Stan looked amazed and grateful. Ollie eyed my harvest warily.
“How do we know you’re not going to poison us?” he asked.
“You don’t.”
I gathered up the ingredients for our supper and got to work.
I sautéed the mushrooms. Not all of them. I kept a few slices of the morels out of the skillet, hidden under the plantain leaves. I grilled the fish, then put together a tin plate with fish, mushrooms, and plantains and offered it to Stan.
“Wait,” Ollie said, grabbing Stan’s arm as he reached for the food. “You eat first,” he said to me.
I sat and ate the mushrooms and the fish. When I’d cleaned the plate, Stan turned to his brother and said, “There. Satisfied?”
I put together another tin plate for Stan.
But when I dished up the plate for Ollie, I slipped the slices of raw morels in with the cooked mushrooms and stirred them all together.
I offered the plate—fish, mushrooms, plantains—to Ollie, who proceeded to wolf down the food so greedily I didn’t think he gave himself the pleasure of actually tasting anything.
I got no thanks from him, but Stan said, “I’m not sure I’ve eaten a better meal.”
“Everything tastes good out here, especially when you’re starved,” I told him. Then I said to Ollie, “Take the fish leavings out and bury them a good distance from our camp.”
“I was going to smoke a cigar.”
“The fish first.”
He looked into the dark as if expecting to see wolves there. “Couldn’t we just throw them in the lake?”
“We could,” I said. “Some do. I don’t. I bury them. Make sure they’re far enough away that bears aren’t going to be drawn into our camp. We don’t want that to happen again, now, do we?”
“Why can’t he do it?” Ollie said, pointing toward his brother.
“He’s washing dishes.”
Which was news to Stan, but he didn’t complain. In fact, he seemed to be taking pleasure in Ollie’s discomfort. “Still afraid of the dark?” he said to his brother.
“Screw you.”
Among the few items the bear had left intact the night before was an empty plastic bag, gallon size. I put the fish guts, bones, and skins in the bag and handed the mess to Ollie. He eyed the dark again.
“Take a headlamp,” I suggested. “I saw one in the Duluth pack. Bring the bag back after you’ve buried what’s inside.”
Ollie found the lamp, banded it to his forehead, turned it on, and step by wary step, entered the woods. I watched the beam of light swing this way and that as he looked for anything that might leap at him from the darkness.
Stan was laughing quietly. “He’s always been afraid of the dark.”
“Odd for a guy that big.”
“When our old man was pissed at him, which was often, he used to lock my brother in the basement. That was after the beating. He’d be in the dark down there because our father would cut off the power to that part of the house.
Sometimes, I’d sneak down to give him some food or something and I’d find him curled up in a corner, scared out of his mind. ”
“You never got that treatment?”
“There was a different punishment for me.” His words were like slivers of ice. Then his voice thawed a bit. “But it was never as bad as what Ollie got. My brother did his best to protect me.”
After all the cleanup had been accomplished and Ollie had returned, he lit up a White Owl.
“You don’t smoke?” I asked Stan.
“Filthy habit,” he said. “I keep telling him it’ll kill him.”
“I’ll be dead long before these things get me,” Ollie said.
“Why?” I said.
“None of the Kennedy men live to a ripe old age. Usually they die of lead poisoning.” He gave a bitter sort of laugh. “Bullets. Get it?”
“Either that, or they die in prison,” Stan added.
Ollie eyed me with a sneer. “Bet all your people die peacefully in their beds.”
“My father was killed by a bullet that clipped his heart.”
Both men looked surprised, and after a long moment, Stan said, “How’d that happen?”
I told them how my father had died as a result of a shoot-out with men who’d escaped from prison and robbed the bank in Aurora. They were trying to get away to Canada, just like the two brothers. I told them how he was shot pulling a deaf woman out of the line of fire.
“So, you lost your old man when you were thirteen? Sucks.” In all the time I’d been with the Kennedy brothers, it was the first note of compassion I’d heard come from Ollie. “Still, he was a cop. What do you expect?”
“Shut up,” Stan snapped.
That put a damper on our conversation. For a while, we just listened to the sounds of the wilderness at night. It was too early in the year for crickets, but there was a chorus of tree frogs and bullfrogs, and a whip-poor-will, and far off, the ghostly sound of two loons calling.
Then we heard the wild thrashing. It was in the woods to the north, coming our way. Ollie leaped up, stared wide-eyed in that direction, and uttered, “What the hell? Another bear?”
The crashing came nearer, accompanied by grunts and moans.
“Jesus, it’s big!” Ollie cried out. “Get the gun! Get the gun!”
The noise stopped for a few moments, whatever had been causing it hidden behind the sumac only a dozen yards away. Ollie stood frozen now, his face in the firelight glistening with sweat. Then the thrashing began again, but this time moving away to the east.
“What the hell was that?” Ollie looked at me, still clearly shaken.
“The Windigo,” I said in a mysterious voice.
“The what?”
“You don’t know about the Windigo?”
“Never heard of it. But it must be big.”
“Sit down,” I said. “I’ll tell you about the Windigo.”
Ollie sat. And in the flickering firelight, I began.