stand of mixed hardwoods. The canoes were tipped with the hulls to the fire. Louis spread one of the strips across the first of the damaged hulls. The ax blade had been swung twice, making an X near the bow. Louis trimmed the strip with a knife so that it covered the entire area with a couple inches to spare. He’d told them he needed an awl. Uncle Wendell, he said, used a migos, an awl made of deer bone. Cork offered his Case knife, which had a reamer/awl among its many blades. Louis also said he’d need something like thread to sew the birch-bark patch to the hull. Cork never entered the Boundary Waters without a small tackle box and collapsible rod. He dug the small tackle box from his pack and offered Louis nine-pound-test fishing line.
Louis tried to punch the awl through the Kevlar without success. The rend in the hull had weakened the integrity of the material and the whole area simply gave as he pushed. He looked up at the men, wounded with defeat.
Arkansas Willie sat down heavily. “Guess that about corks it.”
Stormy reached toward his son. “Give me the knife, Louis.” He took the knife and nudged the tip of the awl into the coals at the fire’s edge. He put on a glove. After a minute, he pulled the awl from the coals, pressed the red-hot tip gently to the canoe, and melted a deep indentation near the rend.
“Hold this against the inside,” he said and gave his son a flat chunk of wood. Sloane and Cork held the canoe on its side while Louis braced the wood chunk against the Kevlar hull. Stormy gave the awl a whack and punched a clean hole right through the melted indentation. In this way, within half an hour, Stormy and Louis had the damaged area outlined. Cork straightened a fishhook and tied on the fishing line. Stormy pressed the patch to the hull and held it in place. Louis worked from inside the canoe and Raye from the outside, pushing the straightened hook and line through the holes and the bark.
After they’d secured the patch in this fashion, Louis took hold of the cooking pot he’d placed earlier on the fire. The pot contained pieces of pitch-covered spruce bark he and his father had gathered while Cork and Sloane were cutting the birch-bark strips. Louis had made a sack from the mesh inner pocketing of Cork’s down vest, filled the sack with the pieces of spruce bark, and sunk the whole thing in water to boil. The pitch lifted from the spruce bark, filtered through the mesh sack, and rose to the surface of the boiling water where Louis carefully skimmed it off with a spoon. He placed it in another, smaller pot, which he put on the fire as well. While that mixture boiled, he ground some charcoal powder from partly burned cedar chips and added that to the liquid pitch. The powder, he said, would help the resin mixture to firm up after it had been applied.
He told his father he needed a cijokiwsagaagun, a small spatula for spreading the resin mixture over the seams of the birch bark to seal it. Stormy split a birch branch and whittled a small, flat blade. Louis took the liquid resin mixture and, using Stormy’s makeshift spatula, carefully applied it to the edges and awl holes of the birch bark to seal the patch.
When they were done with the first canoe, they all stood back and studied it in the firelight. Willie Raye’s long face seemed to have grown longer with weariness. “Do you really think it’ll work?” he asked.
“I think it’s got a hell of a chance,” Cork replied. “Birch bark is watertight. And Kevlar is basically a resin derivative, so Louis’s pitch blend has a reasonable chance of making a good bond. And if it doesn’t, what have we lost but a little sleep?”
“And we’d have lost that anyway,” Sloane added.
Stormy put his hand on his son’s shoulder. “Louis, you’ve done a good job.”
The boy smiled at his father’s praise, and he looked down, embarrassed by the attention of the other men.
“How about some coffee before we start the next one?” Sloane suggested.
He made the brew and they all took some, including Louis, and they sat around the fire. Cork was tired to the bone and could see it in the faces of the others as well. They’d had a long, hard paddle. Two men had met brutal deaths. And it had come down to this: The life of the woman they’d come for might well depend on a couple of thin strips of birch bark. But Cork felt a quiet pride at that moment, in the company of these men and the boy. For despite the terrible odds against them, they had not backed down.
“If you’re right, Cork,” Sloane said, finally breaking the good quiet that had come with the coffee, “and Shiloh got free, where would she go from here?”
With his index finger, Cork snagged a bit of ash that was floating on the surface of his coffee. “I’ve been thinking about that. Louis could probably back me up, but I’d guess if she knows anything at all, she’s headed for the Deertail River. It would begin to complete the circle back to the place we put into Boundary Waters yesterday. The river heads southeast, ultimately to Lake Superior.”
“Wouldn’t she have passed us on our way here?” Willie Raye asked. “I mean, wouldn’t we have seen her?”
Cork shook his head. “In this weather, with all these islands, we could miss the Queen Mary going by.”
“So,” Sloane went on, “she makes this river, the Deertail, then she’s home free?”
Cork swung his gaze to Louis.
“Animkiikaa,” Louis murmured.
“I don’t know what you said,” Sloane told the boy, “but it don’t sound good.”
“It means ’thunder,’” Louis said.
“On a white man’s map, you’ll see it called Hell’s Playground,” Cork said.
Arkansas Willie asked, “What is it?”
“As bad a stretch of rapids as you’ll find anywhere in the Boundary Waters,” Cork replied. “Class four. Deafening when you’re near it.”
“Wouldn’t she know about Hell’s Playground?” Sloane asked.
“If she’s got a map,” Cork said. “And if she knows how to read it.”
Willie Raye rubbed his hand across his mouth in a nervous way. “If she doesn’t know and she gets herself into them…” He couldn’t finish his question.
Sloane set his cup down. “Maybe we’d better get started on the other canoe.”
They all moved toward the work, all except Arkansas Willie Raye, who doubled over suddenly and hobbled desperately toward the trees.
36
Shiloh kept the fire small. A compromise between fighting the cold and risking that the stranger, should he find a way to follow her, might see the blaze. She hauled the canoe well away from the shore of the island and covered it with evergreen boughs. She built the fire in the lee of the canoe and bent close to warm herself.
She had no food. Everything she had, she’d brought in her pockets. Matches, knife, map. But she didn’t care that she couldn’t eat. She was alive. God almighty, she was alive.
She’d climbed the slippery rock wall ahead of the man who called himself Charon, hoping he’d fall. He didn’t. He was agile as a mountain goat, even with the heavy pack on his back, and he was never farther from her than arm’s reach. She made it to the top first, a few seconds ahead of him. He mounted the wall and stood poised there, the floor of the forest below him on one side, the long narrow lake Wendell called Nikidin on the other. She turned to face him. And what she saw behind him made her eyes go huge.
He glanced at her face, saw the surprise there, and spun around to confront-
A gray wolf.
The animal was tensed as if to leap at him, focused on the stranger with a fierce intensity in its yellow eyes, its teeth bared. A threatening growl rumbled in its throat.
Charon went for his gun. As his hand disappeared into his vest, Shiloh lunged at him, pushed into him with all her strength. She would love to have shoved him so that he fell to the forest floor, but her vantage point gave her only the option of the lake. As he plunged into the water a dozen feet below, Shiloh turned and fled up the trail along the ridge.
The trail led eventually to the cabin, but she didn’t stay with the trail. After fifty yards, well out of sight of the place where the stranger splashed, struggling to climb from the lake, she hid herself. Her gut said to put distance between them, but she’d lived with fear long enough now not to be shoved around by it foolishly. She pressed herself flat on the wet ground behind a low growth of blackberry vines. Two feet to her right, the ground ended in a
