The Snowfly (53 page)

22

I wanted to find Raina Chickerman and confront her once and for all. No, it was more than that. I
had
to find her and force an explanation. I told myself this was all I wanted, but it wasn't until I reached the river that I realized I had two rods in tubes, four reels, and a passel of flies and that maybe all this was about something else, moving shadows in deep water. I didn't consciously remember grabbing my gear, but I had. The old man had warned me that trout could turn perfectly sensible human beings into deeply troubled wanderers—his point, if not his precise words. There was more to this than Raina.

The snowfly had hooked me. The hooking was different than that which Sturdivant suffered, but it was just as real in its hold on me. I saw now that the snowfly got people in different ways. Angus Wren was as obsessed as Sturdivant, only from the other pole. The effects of the snowfly were insidious.

I chastised myself for not leaving a note for Ingrid, but knew if I had taken the time to write, or waited for her, I would never have gotten out of the house. The truth was, I didn't want to be talked out of it.

It was twilight when I neared the river. I had walked hard and taken no rests. It was possible to make good time because the DNR and USFS had roughed out a trail part of the way. Eventually hikers and campers would have neat little paths all over the backwoods. I hated the scheme because paths were sidewalks and people needed places to go where there were no sidewalks. At the moment, however, I was glad to have easy going. I had not forgotten the difficulties of my last expedition in the No Trout River. I knew that once I got to the river, I would need to be cautious. Now Raina Chickerman was ahead of me and all of this augured trouble.

I pulled up short and used the remaining daylight to set myself up. I was no soldier, but I had learned a few grunt tricks in Vietnam. Lurps sometimes spent a month in enemy territory gathering information. Their specialty was invisibility and I was determined to emulate them.

Wire could save your life or take another's. I kept two rolls in my pack, small gauge, high tensile strength, hard to detect. The approach was low tech and effective. I strung two circles of wire around my position, one perimeter twenty yards out and the second one at ten yards, then stretched the ends of the wires back to me. The loops were strung low, about six inches off the ground, terminating at forked sticks on either side of my pack. I tied each wire to one of the cups from my thermos and put several double-ought buckshot in each. If a wire was tripped, I would hear a rattle and it would alert me. I would sleep dressed and sitting up against my pack. Nobody would surprise me this time. I stuck several pine branches in the ground behind the pack to obliterate my silhouette and rubbed swamp muck onto exposed skin and into my hair to keep off mosquitoes and kill any sheen. Invisibility was about making the smallest imprint possible. This time I meant to have every edge possible and I was confident that I was secure when I settled in for the night.

I should have remembered an interview I'd once had with an Air Force pilot, a major who had flown combat in Korea and was doing it again in Vietnam. All pilots were taught a special form of hand-to-hand combat, a blend of judo and karate and street fighting, invented to keep them alive if they were forced down on enemy turf. I had asked how proficient he was.

“They teach you just enough to get you killed,” he said.

 

•••

 

At night in the forest, insects land on your face and you swat them away. It's reflex. The next morning you don't remember.

I was in deep sleep when I swatted and hit something both hard and coarse, hard and coarse and hot and wet, something that snarled and froze me in place.

My first thought: The fucking wires didn't work.

My second thought: Play dead.

My third thought: This could be an easy role. And a short one.

The snarls came and went like a distant freight. I thought of the Doppler effect. I looked into glistening red eyes under a white moon and felt undiluted terror. I tried not to breathe, struggling to will oxygen into my lungs through my skin, then I remembered I was caked with swamp muck. I could think, but I couldn't reason, my logic pancaked by pure adrenal flow, time suspended. I wanted the moon to dislodge, fall, kill us both. I did not want to die as a component in an anonymous food chain. After death it would be acceptable, pure microbiology. Before death, I wanted to scream.

Somewhere beyond the steamy snout and reeking breath, I heard a scratchy voice, whispering, a voice vaguely familiar, comforting because it was human, threatening because it was something else. I knew I had heard it before.

“Dammit, Betsy. How many times I gotta tell you? Don't play with your food.”

These words I heard as a murmur, a breeze over dry leaves, but they were answered by a sharp tonal shift and a shower of gluey drool. The beast pulled back several inches, bared jagged fangs, the ivory glowing pale blue in the moonlight.

“Gonna eat, eat. We ain't got all night.”

Carni,
Latin for “meat,” an amorphous and all-inclusive term.

The jaws closed sharply. Clack-clack.

I tried to say something, but gagged instead. Dry heaves. I fell forward, prostrate, prayerlike, a Muslim bowed toward Mecca, gasping for breath.

A hand clasped my throat, bony and callused, probing roughly.

“Don't feel wet. She rip your throat? She gets excited, see? Fancies herself a man-eater, but near as I can tell, it's mostly wishful thinking. Used to be a regular pain in the ass, but she's old now. Hell, we're all old. Got the lumbago in her hips. She can't chase things down the way God intended. But you were settin' smack in her favorite place so I speck she thought God Lupus left you as a gift.” While the man cackled at this, I was recovering my wits. “Look at a wolf and what d'ya see?” he went on. “Dog, most would say, woof-woof. Nope. Four-legged man. Wolves think. Sometimes Betsy just sits and ponders, like there's a whole bunch she ain't quite worked out yet, though this is mostly spec-a-lation on my part.”

Wolf.
The dry heaves returned.

“You hurt?”

“Not so you can see,” I said weakly.

The low moon was fading to pale blue. The eastern sky hinted color, but it was still mostly dark. The wolf sat nearby, watching me, panting silently, her tongue extended and bouncing.

“Didn't know they had wolves here,” I said.

“
They
don't. Don't nobody
got
wolves. More like the cat thing, y'see? Not pets. Companions by
their
choice. She showed up one mornin' and stayed. I can't say why on either count. We get on each other's nerves at times and that's a fact. She can be worse than a wife.”

The animal suddenly darted over to me and I stiffened. Her muzzle was down and she sniffed tentatively. I couldn't look into her eyes. She slurped my chin and sat down beside me.

“That's a wolf for ya,” my savior said. “She's just tryin' to say howdy.”

My benefactor said his name was Harkie. He had a huge, protruding nose, long and pointy to the extent that I couldn't help but stare. It took thirty minutes to walk uphill to a dwelling I would generously describe as a hut. It was more like a pile of limbs with a space inside, twenty feet by ten, with black tar paper draped over the place. It was full of holes and gaps and looked like it would collapse if a butterfly flew past.

“Just Harkie,” he said. “One man, one name, all alone and liking it that way. Been here. . . .” He closed his eyes. “Hell, time don't mean diddly to Harkie. Space counts, not time. Liked it here once, but Harkie's thinkin' it's time to move on. Too crowded.”

“Crowded?” We were in the middle of nowhere.

“First some split-tail, now you. People runnin' all over the damn place.” He was thoroughly disgusted.

“Did she have black hair?”

“Had a black heart is what! Drew down on me with a sawed-off scattergun, she did, and Harkie just trying to conversate,” he added. “Gets rusty with only a wolf to practice on.”

“She was armed?”

“Does that asshole Fee-dell like cigars?”

It had to be Raina Chickerman.

“Where'd she go?”

We were halfway up a tall ridge. The river below looked pale orange. Harkie jerked his head north toward Lake Superior. “That way, maybe. I didn't pay her much mind.”

“You talked to her?” I asked.

“I already told you, that one didn't want no talk,” Harkie answered. “Nor nothin' else, I speck. Glad she moved on. She crowded Harkie's space and got the wolf considerable twitterpated.”

Harkie fed me overcooked, tight-grained slices of dark meat and small potatoes, everything fried together in lard in a huge black skillet. The smell of the cooking made my mouth water. The fire was inside the heap of branches that served as his hut. A metal pipe and scoop were propped over the fire to capture smoke. It was a hovel.

I took a good look at the man. He was scoliotic and weather-beaten, with deep creases in his skin, which had the texture of saddle leather. Cracked fingernails, caked with dirt, the antithesis of fastidious. He looked old and frail from a distance, but his arms were knots of hard muscle and I had no doubt that he could handle just about anything. Especially if he had a weapon to pound somebody with. Every time he spoke I was sure I knew his voice. I looked at my host, closed my eyes and listened, and wondered if he had been my assailant years before on the river. If so, why was he breaking bread with me now? I was reminded of Collister's description of York Gentry's “ungodly big nose”—like an anteater's, he had said.

“Two-name meat,” he said when he gave me the food. “High-speed beef in here, venison out there.” He waved his hand for effect.

The hut was bleak and cluttered with debris. The dirt floor was worn smooth. He'd been here a while. An old red door lay across two sawhorses to serve as a bed. He had some dented utensils, a few tools, two rifles and a shotgun, all in need of rebluing, several fishing rods, all with bait reels. Some candles. Harkie's teeth were jagged and yellow. He speared potato slices with a knife and nibbled inward from the edges.

“You trackin' the split-tail?” he asked.

The wolf came in and sat near him. She was an immense animal.

“I came to fish,” I told him.

I noticed yellowing pike skulls hanging above us; they were eyeless, with sawtoothed jaws, freshwater barracudas. Curled, dried skin stuck to the bone.

“Not my nature to be advicin' strangers, but back in these parts, passin' through's a risky game. Dig in and make your claim or get out. Won't be long till the white buzz comes.” Snow? I wondered. Or the snowfly?

The wolf yawned and pawed idly at him. He gave her some meat and she trotted outside.

“That animal makes me plumb dizzy,” Harkie announced. “One winter she come in, lasted maybe an hour. I had us buttoned up and she like to have wrecked the place tryin' to get out. Wolves got their own ways. Got to remember that. People're different, always tryin' to figure out who they are. Not wolves. They just know and keep true to it. People think too much on things they ain't never gonna figger out.”

It was impossible to guess the man's age, but he moved deliberately and worked the same way, as if he had calculated the precise amount of energy required for every task. And, I was sure, he always kept something in reserve.

“Can't stay and jaw,” he announced. “Harkie's got things to do.”

“Where's my pack?” I'd been too unnerved to notice exactly where we had come from. We had walked uphill and sort of west.

“Harkie's no thief,” he said. “Your stuff would be right where you left it.”

His claim seemed ridiculous, in the face of facts. My benefactor had sundry items he sure as hell hadn't found lying around in the woods. The meat could be explained but not the potatoes, lard, or sawhorses. He acquired these somewhere and I doubted money was involved.

He went outside and I followed him. He was headed toward what I thought would be downriver. I could faintly hear moving water now that I was outside. The wolf snarled and whined.

“You show him,” Harkie said to the wolf. “I ain't your keeper.”

“What's upriver?” I asked before I left.

He didn't look at me. “Beats me. I told you the woman went downstream.” No, he had bunted at that earlier, pretending he had paid no attention. Besides, I hadn't said anything about Raina. He didn't want me headed upstream. Was he protecting her? Nothing would surprise me anymore. I also had a rising suspicion that Harkie was York Gentry, who was thought to be dead. “How's the fishing here?”

“Depends on who does the doin'.” He looked back at me.

“Why didn't your wolf defend you when the woman pulled the gun?”

“Both of 'em's females.”

“Thanks for the chow.”

“Don't come back,” he answered.

The wolf both led and followed me. My gear was where I had left it.

 

•••

 

By day Betsy's eyes were the color of amber, her coat dark, nearly black. I tried to make eye contact, but she kept her distance and clacked her jaws from time to time, enjoying her dominance and my insecurity.

The river was too serpentine to walk with any speed. The banks were overgrown with vines, thistles, pricker-laden berry bushes, and tag alders. I stuck to high ground and walked a sort of S-pattern so that I was constantly weaving back and forth across my intended route. If Harkie was following, I'd have a better chance of spotting him this way. As long as I could see a glint of water in the distance to my left, I could follow the course of the river. Late in the day I moved down to the river, found a promontory, and made camp beneath it. I picked a place with open ground all around. Once again I strung my wire. The wolf came down to the river and watched me drift a fly along the seam of a dark glide. I caught several fish in no time at all. I scraped a hole between two fallen logs and kindled a small fire with minimal smoke. I had the trout gutted and cooking in no time. The wolf noisily sniffed the entrails, which I'd thrown aside, then inhaled them in two gulps and wagged her tail.