Chapter 47
Adam Beyer and I sat with the dead men for a couple hours.
I left them where they lay, knowing that when the sheriff’s people arrived, they’d want to process everything as a crime scene.
The only thing I did was my best to keep the blackflies from swarming over the bodies.
Although I was greatly curious about what was in the pack, I didn’t touch it.
I was sure that soon enough I’d learn the source of all the tragedy that had taken place.
We didn’t talk much. Adam’s never been a particularly verbose guy, and I was processing everything from the moment I entered the Boundary Waters to the spilling of all the blood at Lost Man Lake.
I’d come into that wilderness, that place I’d always thought of as sanctuary, and I’d become a player in some of the worst things I could imagine.
What was the Creator’s purpose in all this?
I forced myself to look at Ollie, whose head I’d tried to sever from his body.
It was the cruelest thing I’d ever done.
I suppose I could have justified it by continuing to tell myself that I’d acted in self-defense.
But the truth was that it felt good to swing that paddle.
It felt as if the whole purpose of my involvement was to bring me to that moment of utter killing abandon.
I have often thought of myself as ogichidaa.
It means warrior in the language of the Anishinaabeg.
But it has another, similar meaning: one who stands between evil and his people.
This was the aspect of my being that, after many years, after many violent encounters, I’d come to embrace.
As I stared at Ollie, unable to look away from that great, gaping wound I’d inflicted, I wondered if this was the plan of the Great Mystery all along.
That because I was a warrior, my soul was already tainted, and I was the one whose dark wolf was meant to feed.
We heard the sound of the engine long before we saw the floatplane fly over the island and across the channel.
It was a de Havilland Beaver. It circled and then came down on the lake and taxied up beside Adam’s Super Cub.
Three people exited—Sheriff Marsha Dross; Deputy George Azevedo, who was the department’s major crimes investigator; and Dr. Karl Renwanz, the Tamarack County coroner.
The pilot stepped out and stood on one of the pontoons.
I saw that it was Jane McClure, a pilot for the Forest Service and a veteran of many search and rescue operations.
She stayed where she was. Maybe it was just to be sure she wouldn’t contaminate the scene, although more likely she’d seen what was on the shore and wanted to be well away from the carnage.
Dross and the other two waded from the lake and came to where the ground was saturated with the Kennedy brothers’ blood.
Azevedo, a many-years veteran of law enforcement, took a good look at Ollie’s body, at the nearly severed head, and whispered under his breath, “Jesus.” He looked at the paddle with its bloody blade that lay on the ground beside me, then looked at me. I nodded.
“Not where we expected to find you,” Dross said.
“It was a long and winding road,” I replied. “They were never going where they thought they were.”
“You okay?”
“Not sure.”
“You, Adam? You okay?”
“Not a scratch on me, Sheriff. But it was pretty hairy there for a while.”
Dross eyed the two dead men. “The Kennedy brothers. Patrick,” she said, indicating Stan. “And Michael,” with a gesture toward his brother.
They had real names. They weren’t just two-dimensional, clownish images of men.
“Doc,” the sheriff said, and our county coroner began to go about his work.
“I’ve let your family know,” Dross said.
“Rainy; Jenny; Waaboo; your sister-in-law, Rose; and the two boys are at home. Stephen; Daniel; and your brother-in-law, Mal, are with a team searching way south of here. We’ve radioed them as well.
Late yesterday, one of the search parties stumbled onto Cordell Bishop and two other people you and the Kennedy brothers crossed paths with. ”
“Tucker Jackson and his daughter, Leticia. Are they all okay?”
“They were medevacked out and everyone’s doing fine.”
Azevedo waded to the Beaver, retrieved his camera, and began snapping photos of the scene.
“There’s a dead man on Big Woman Lake,” I said. “Courtesy of the Kennedy brothers.”
“I think I know who it might be,” Dross said. “A man named Blake Carver. He was supposed to exit the Boundary Waters yesterday but never showed. His family called it in. We found his Jeep still parked in the lot at the entry point.”
“A family man,” I said.
“He’s a minister. Was a minister. In the Boundary Waters on a spiritual retreat.”
“He approached those two men with kindness in his heart. And look where that got him,” I said.
Dross studied me. “We need to get you out of here. Adam, will you fly him?”
“Sure.”
“We’ll get full statements from you both later.” She looked at me again, this time with compassion I could see but couldn’t respond to. “You need a bath, a good meal, and a good sleep.”
She was right. But I needed a whole lot more than that.
Rainy was waiting for me at the seaplane base on Iron Lake, where Adam Beyer moored his Super Cub. I stepped onto the dock, and she swept me up in her arms.
“I prayed and here you are.”
“Prayed to God?” I asked. “To the Creator? To Ares?”
She stood back and looked at my face without understanding. “Ares?”
“God of war, right? That’s what it was, Rainy, a war zone.”
“You survived. Come,” she said, taking my arm in hers. “Let’s get you home.”
How many times while I was out there with the Kennedy brothers did I imagine being home? But the idea felt different to me now. It felt as if I was going to bring something unholy into a place that had always been like the vault of my heart. I held back.
“What is it?” Rainy said.
“I need to see Henry.”
“It’s late, Cork.”
“I need to see Henry,” I said again.
“All right. We’ll go.”
By the time we stepped from the path that led through the forest to Crow Point, it was late afternoon. The shadows of the pines stretched in front of me, one more darkness I would have to navigate. I was surprised to find Prophet waiting there.
Prophet is a powerful-looking man with a violent past, so much so that he has to fly under the radar of law enforcement.
He came to Crow Point hunting Henry Meloux as he would an animal of prey.
The Mide set him on a different path, and now Prophet has become the old man’s constant companion and disciple.
“He’s expecting you,” Prophet said.
Of course, I thought. Part of the magic of the old man.
Prophet studied my face, looked deeply into my eyes. “You’ve been to hell,” he said simply.
He knew because, like me, he was ogichidaa and had been there, too.
He started toward Meloux’s cabin, and Rainy and I followed.
I’d crossed the meadow on Crow Point hundreds of times over the years, walking toward the ancient cabin I’d visited since I was a child, where the man who’d guided me so often and so well always knew I was coming and was always waiting for me.
This time, before we reached the cabin, I held back.
“What is it?” Rainy asked.
“It’s wrong, me being here. I feel like a rattlesnake in a church.”
“You can turn back,” Rainy said. “Or you can face yourself.”
To tell the truth, I was suddenly afraid of Henry, of what he would tell me.
Although he was the one who’d suggested that I might be the wolf in the visions, a vision and the actuality of it are different things.
Here I was, that ugly creature he’d predicted I could become, a beast steeped in the blood of a man I’d slaughtered.
How does anybody return from that kind of transformation?
“Whatever it is you’re afraid of, Henry will understand,” Prophet assured me.
I went ahead, and when I entered Meloux’s cabin, he was seated at the birch table he’d made for himself decades ago. He looked up at me as I stood in the doorway, the sun at my back, my face in shadow.
“Corcoran O’Connor,” he said. “You look like shit. Have a seat.”