A Superior Death

enjoy one more week of the game.

All morning clouds had been building in the west. White cumulus laced Greenstone Ridge, peeking up over the wooded slopes of Mount Ojibway. As Anna shoved the kayak out into the calm waters of Rock Harbor, she eyed them with concern. Afternoons were no time to start out onto the lake, but the north end of the island, ripped to a stony fringe by glaciation, provided a lot of sheltered coves and harbors. If she could get around Blake’s Point before the water got rough, she could run for the shelter of Duncan or Five Finger Bay.

Anna put her energy into paddling. Between the dock at Rock Harbor and the end of Merrit Lane, she saw nothing of the scenery: she was making time, covering ground. At the tip of Merrit, her little craft held safe between the buffers of Merrit to the southeast and the last of Isle Royale to the northwest, she stopped to rest. Strain burned hot spots into her right elbow and her deltoid muscles where they crossed from arms to back.

Weather moving in from Thunder Bay had reached the island. Out in the lake waves rolled, cresting white with foam. Passage Island, four miles out, had vanished in an encircling arm of fog. Overhead the sun still shone but soon it, too, would be wrapped in cloud.

For long minutes Anna sat in the kayak debating the wisdom of continuing. On the one hand, if she got careless or overtired, she could end up providing a lot of search-and-rescue rangers with a healthy chunk of overtime pay for combing the ragged shores for her body. On the other hand, she could return to Rock and face another grating evening listening to the political maneuvering and gossip inherent in a closed community, and another night mildewing in Pilcher’s floating pigsty.

It was not a tough decision. Anna pulled up the waterproof sleeve that fitted into the kayak like a gasket and snugged it around her waist with a drawstring. If she was careful she would probably be safe enough, but there would be no way to stay completely dry.

For another minute she sat in the lane, her paddle across the bow, while she ate a Snickers bar. Never once had she experienced the sugar rush of energy other people swore by as they downed their Cokes and Hersheys before slamming fire line or hiking that last twenty-five-hundred-foot ascent at the end of the day, but it was as good a reason as any to eat chocolate.

Out in open water Anna found the waves were two and three meters high. The sheer immensity of the lake had warped her perspective. The wind turned from fresh to bitter. It snatched up droplets, hard as grains of sand, and rasped them across her face, exacerbating her sunburn and making her eyes tear.

Keeping the nose of the kayak directly into the wind, she dug her way forward. Water carried her up till the kayak balanced high on an uncertain escarpment. Around her were the ephemeral mountain ranges of Lake Superior. As one can from a hilltop, she saw the island spreading away to the south, bibbed now with a collar of white where waves pouring in from Canada broke into foaming lace against the shoals.

The hill of water sank, fell as if to the center of the world. Mountainous slippery-sided waves rose up past the boat, past Anna’s head, up till it seemed they must overbalance and crash down on her, driving her meager craft to the bottom with the great metal ships like the Glenlyon and the Cox, or the Monarch, her massive wooden hull broken on the Palisades. But the kayak stayed afloat, climbed hills and slid through valleys with a structural certainty of design that lent her courage. She stroked with clocklike regularity, taking deep, even bites of the lake.

Shoulders ached. Elbows burned. Anna pushed herself harder. There were times that hurting was a part of, times the fatigue and the fear were necessary ingredients: fires to burn away the dead wood, winds to blow away the chaff, closing the gap between body and brain.

That night Anna shared a camp in Lane Cove with half a dozen Boy Scouts from Thief River Falls, Minnesota, who couldn’t grasp the concept that it was no longer politically correct to cut boughs for beds and saplings to fashion camp tables.

The following night she spent a more pleasant if less productive night on Belle Isle with two retired schoolteachers from Duluth who visited the island every summer to watch birds.

The next day Anna kayaked Pickerel Cove and Robinson Bay. Backcountry patrol-days in the wilderness-those were the assignments Anna lived for, times it made her laugh aloud to think it was being called “work” and she was being paid to do it.

An hour shy of midnight of the third day she finally slid the kayak up onto the shingle at Amygdaloid. The western sky was washed in pale green, enough light to see by. Overhead stars shone, looking premature, as if they’d grown impatient waiting for the sun to set and had crept out early.

It was June 21, Anna realized. The longest day of the year. For a few minutes she sat in the kayak, steadying the little vessel by bracing her paddle against the gravel. Her muscles felt limp and warm. Her butt was numb and her legs were stiff from their long imprisonment. There was a good chance she would fall over when she tried to extricate herself from the boat she had worn like a body stocking for the last eight hours.

“Need some help, eh?”

A squat round-bodied man stood above her on the dock. He had a Canadian look. The closest Anna had come to describing it was “voyageur.” Many of the Canadian fishermen who frequented the island had the powerful, compact build of the voyageurs she had seen pictured in woodcuts from the trading days. More telling: he spoke with a distinct Canadian accent.

“Couldn’t hurt,” Anna replied.

Landing lightly as a cat, he jumped down the four feet from the pier to the shore. Anna untied the drawstring of the waterproof sleeve around her middle. He caught her under the arms, lifted her out of the kayak, and set her up on the dock as easily as she could have lifted the five-year-old Alison.

“Thanks.” Rolling over, she pushed herself up on hands and knees, then eased herself to her feet.

“I’m Jon. Are you the ranger here?” the Canadian asked. He had bounced back up onto the dock to stand next to her.

“Just barely.” Anna hobbled up the dock like an old woman. “I will be tomorrow.”

“Ranger station closed, eh?” Jon followed her off the dock and stood balanced on a rock, his hands in his pockets, watching as she pulled the kayak up onto dry land.

“Yup. Opens at eight tomorrow morning.” Anna retrieved her pack and started up the slope toward a bed made with clean flannel sheets.

The Canadian was right on her heels. “Is it too late to get a diving permit? We want to get an early start tomorrow.”

Anna gave up. After all, he had plucked her out of her boat and saved her an ignominious end to a glorious paddle. “I’ll write you a permit. Give me a minute to unlock and put on some dry clothes.”

He trotted happily down the dock to where a well-worn but clean little cabin cruiser nosed gently against her fenders. Her aft deck was piled with scuba gear: tanks and dry suits, flippers, masks and fins.

“Bobo!” the Canadian called into the cabin window. “She’ll do it.”

Anna let herself into the ranger station. It was too late to build a fire to drive out the damp. She took half a bottle of Proprietor’s Reserve Red out of the refrigerator, poured a glass, and left it on the counter to warm while she changed and wrote the dive permit.

The two men were waiting for her when she reemerged into the office area. Anna lit a kerosene lamp. The station had Colemans but she didn’t plan to spend enough time with the Canadians to make the effort of lighting one worthwhile.

Cold water divers were, of necessity, lovers of equipment. Anna noticed that “Bobo”-the taller of the two but just barely, his round face darkened by a well-trimmed beard- wore a watch that had everything in it but a micro fax machine.

She got the forms from her desk. “Where do you want to dive?”

“The Emperor.”

Anna started her spiel on danger and difficulty, but the one called Bobo cut her off. “We heard the lecture from the ranger in Windigo. We dove the Kamloops today.”

The Kamloops was the most dangerous dive on the island. At depths from one hundred and seventy-five to two hundred and sixty feet, the wreck was beyond the reach of all but the most experienced divers. Or outlaw divers; people who threw caution-and sometimes their lives-to the wind.

“You’ve racked up some bottom time,” Anna said. “Is this going to give you a long enough surface interval?”