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Though he spent most of his time on the water, Odd loved the woods too. He knew the wilderness— the paths and meadows, the bear dens and beaver lodges, the blueberry bushes and eagle aeries— as he knew his own fears and desires. From the time he was but seven or eight years old he'd been free to roam. So he did, often alone but just as often with Daniel Riverfish. They were days of freedom, hunting or simply beating the summer heat in the shade of the tall pines, but even in the freedom Odd knew something was missing. He'd always known it. It took him years to understand the void, but when he did it was as if the mysteries of the wood were amplified. He saw in the wilderness a reflection of his motherlessness. It was easiness that was missing; the orphan's onus, never seeming whole. It was as if he ran and hiked through the woods without his feet ever hitting the duff, as though his own ankles never felt the brush of the ferns.
But now it was different. Now, with the horse trailing him up the game path and into the woods, the weight of his task as heavy on his mind as the ax over his shoulder, he felt wholly less alien, as though his purpose gave him life and his prospects with Rebekah gave him a future. The thought quickened his step.
When he reached the top of the hill and looked down over the slope of birches, onto the overgrown barnyard and up at the slice of river the vantage held, he felt a new absence. The sun was high and hot, the birds shrill and all around. The hilltop here was narrow and as he stood there, he felt the sensation of someone watching. He shrugged, hoping to shake the feeling. The horse stepped toward him and when he turned to look at her, he realized that the sensation of being watched was only the sun warming his back. A stand of white pine that had once loomed from the western slope of the hill was gone. Just gone.
He stepped to the other side of the hill and looked down at the blown-over white pines. There were a dozen of them, trees that had grown from the hilltop, subject to the prevailing winds and their own heft, and so begun a slow bowing. Together they'd formed a gentle arc fifty years in the making. And now they were all down, the air above the heap redolent of the pitch oozing from the thousand broken boughs. He stared down on the tangle of trunks and limbs for a long time, as though somewhere in that crude geometry lay proof that his errand was not a fool's. And proof took form, there, the tree that lay atop the pile, its boughs most intact and cloaking the others. He studied the curve of trunk, cocked his head, childlike, curious, first mystified and then bothered that he hadn't thought of this on his own.
Convinced he'd found his keel, he plotted his day's work. In his mind he trimmed the boughs and cut it to length and set the skidding tongs and rapped the horse on the ass. He turned to look at the trail heading back down the hill, judged the bend against the length of white pine in his mind, hauled it down the ghost of the ice road and meandered through the trails to his fish house, caught only a couple of times. He wondered how long it would take to bleed the pitch.
And then he saw himself with the whipsaw and planes, the keel materializing in the molds he'd fashion, he saw a whole winter of building the boat up from the keel, saw the beautiful sheer, the transom with her name hand-carved and lacquered and riding across the lake, with only the memories of them watching from the breakwater in Gunflint, waving themselves good-bye.
"You willing to wait a few hours while I cut, old girl? Get up in the shade," he told the horse.
Then he put the ax over his shoulder and descended the hill to the heap of blown-over trees.
It was past suppertime by the time he'd finished, the task unfolded just as he'd imagined. The white pine ran the length of the fish house now, outside against the western wall so that it might take the afternoon sun. The horse had been returned to the livery; a bowl of venison stew had for dinner at the saloon in the Traveler's Hotel; and now Odd sat on the stoop outside the fish house with a teakettle of whiskey and lake water to rout his thirst.
He sat there all of twilight, watching the gloaming fall, realizing in the deepest part of himself— the least part of himself— that he was watching something holy, this turn of day to night. He finished his drink and packed and puffed his pipe. When he finished smoking he tapped the ash out and got to it.
He covered the barrels in the bed of the pickup with a canvas tarp and covered the tarp with stacks of empty fish boxes. The trail up from the fish house was rutted and overhung with tamaracks, but he managed to get onto the gravel road and into town.
The truck was Hosea's, but Hosea didn't often drive. Aside from the six or eight streets in town and the gravel trail that led three miles up the hill to the Shivering Timber, the roads in and out of Gunflint were mere sleigh roads, fit for dog teams or horse-drawn wagons but not rubber-wheeled flatbeds. Grimm's latest initiative, brought before county commissioners and the state legislature, was to transform the North Shore Trail into a highway built from Two Harbors clear to the Canadian border, insisting that people would come in droves given the chance. He had the big lodges in Misquah and Portage to bolster his argument on the grand scale, and the myriad hunting camps scattered all over the forest on the smaller scale. The ferries that ran all summer from Duluth, the pleasure craft that docked in Gunflint harbor from June through September, the anglers who were willing to hike from Gunflint up to any of a hundred lakes in the bush, all of this had convinced Hosea that given the highway, the area would become a tourist draw.
Odd had already delivered a pair of whiskey barrels at the Traveler's Hotel and now parked the pickup behind the apothecary. He opened the cellar doors. Walked down the stone steps and found the lantern hanging in its spot and lit it and checked there was room in the false floor for the whiskey. Then he went back to the truck and from beneath the tarp removed two more barrels and walked them one at a time down the stone steps and into their hiding spot. He extinguished the lantern and replaced it on the hook. Before he fetched Hosea, Odd packed another pipe and smoked it while he rearranged the tarp and fish boxes.
Grimm stepped out the back door. "There's our boy!" he said.
" Hooch is in the floor."
"Very good."
"Already dropped it at the Traveler's, too."
"Then we're up to the Timber."
"I guess you're all dressed up," Odd said. Hosea wore a seersucker suit with periwinkle-blue pinstripes. He wore white patent-leather brogues and a sharp white hat. His tie was mint green and pinched under his gaunt chin in a collar the color of the pinstripes. "You think those girls'll like you better if you dress like a clown?"
"A clown, you say?"
"Some damn thing."
"Odd, lad, the reason you spend all your time whittling and running whiskey is because you don't take care in your appearance. You've been wearing the same shirt all week. And it's been hot. Maybe if you bathed and put on a hat and a pair of proper trousers, you could get one of the little ladies in town to whittle for you." He winked.
"The little ladies," Odd said, his secret blowing through him like a cool breeze. " Guess I'll worry about that, and about wearing a proper pair of trousers."
"You're my charge is all. I promised your mother I'd raise you right."
Odd stepped to the truck and opened the door. "I'm a grown man. I'll dress how I please."
"Suit yourself," Hosea said, joining him in the truck. He withdrew a pocket flask and unscrewed the cap and sucked a long drink. He offered it to Odd, who took a draft himself.
"Now," Hosea said, "let's get to the strumpets."
The Shivering Timber was an unabashed brothel and whiskey parlor that had evaded the reach of the pious Gunflinters and constables by catering to their weird and secret proclivities. It housed a dozen or so prostitutes and was guarded by two woodsmen brothers from Wisconsin on Grimm's payroll. They were mild-mannered behemoths who abstained from the whiskey and the whores and buried their considerable fortune in coffee