Northwest Angle

around the curve just ahead.

By the time Jenny had done all she could, the sun was low in the sky. She sat, very tired, and watched the sleeping child. Neglect was sometimes the inevitable result of teen pregnancy, she knew, but this child had obviously been loved and well cared for. She wondered how anyone could do the things someone had done to the child’s mother. It could have been cruelty, pure and simple. The sad reality was that some men fed on that. Or, she considered, it could have been that they wanted something from her she wouldn’t or couldn’t give them.

“Like what?” she asked aloud.

Even to begin to speculate on that one she would probably have to go back to the cabin and have a really good look around. And she had no intention of doing so.

The evergreen boughs cast a shadow over the baby, but not completely. There were places where the needles didn’t quite mesh, and waning sunlight came through and fell on his face in soft tangerine splashes.

“She was so young, your mother,” Jenny whispered to him, and she heard in her voice the imbroglio of sadness and anger. The young, she knew, were often the victims of the worst cruelties.

Because the girl had been naked, Jenny wondered if she’d been raped. And that possibility sent more ice into her blood. She didn’t want to be anywhere near whoever had been there, whoever might return.

The baby began to stir. Jenny took the cooking pot to the shoreline only a few yards distant and filled it with lake water. She lit a burner and set the pan on the stove. She made up a bottle of formula and set it in the heating water. By that time, the baby was fully awake and fussing.

She picked him up, sat herself on the blanket, and cradled him. He was, despite his cleft lip, a lovely child, with fat cheeks and a broad little nose. He looked up into her face, and his dark eyes seemed to be searching for understanding. He’s wondering who I am, this stranger who smells nothing like his mother, Jenny thought. He lay quiet in her arms. She felt his breath break upward against her neck, and his heart beat against her own heart. He reached up a tiny hand and touched her chin.

Jenny wondered how long the girl had been dead. How long had the child gone without food, without touch?

She cooed to him. “There, there, little one. Don’t be afraid. I’m here for you. I’m here for you. No one will hurt you, I promise.”

After the baby fed, he slept again. Jenny was hungry, starved in fact, and she opened a can of Spam and a can of pineapple slices. She diced them together in the same pan she’d used to heat the baby bottle, and she fried the concoction over the burner of the Coleman. The result was outrageously delicious.

In the middle of cleaning up afterward, she stopped suddenly and listened. The wind had returned, but gently so, and the lake water shushed against the shoreline so that she wasn’t certain she’d really heard anything. She checked the baby, then left the little shelter and climbed to the top of the rock outcropping, where a few of the cedars, though ragged, still miraculously stood. The sun was just setting, and the islands to the west wore peach- colored halos; their faces were going dark. In the shadows, the water was silver-black. The lake surface rolled in the breeze, and all that floated there—trees and parts of trees and God alone knew what else—lifted and fell as if on the chest of a breathing thing. In the dimming light, it all seemed to be part of one living organism, one great, wounded creature. She listened again and heard only the water and the soft sigh of the wind among what remained of the cedar branches.

She looked toward the far end of the island, where she could see the damaged cabin amid the rubble. Behind it rose the small, bare hillock where she’d stood that afternoon and had called in vain for the baby’s mother, a young woman who could not answer and was past caring. She was tired, and that moment seemed long ago now.

She was about to leave the outcropping and return to the shelter when she took a last look at the lake, and she froze. There was movement in the water, movement out of sync with the easy rise and fall of the swells. Something, she couldn’t tell exactly what, was approaching. It came purposefully, propelled by a mechanism that, at the moment, she couldn’t discern. It was long and dark in the water, with a wide splay of what might have been antlers at the head. A buck? she wondered. But the body seemed much too long, so perhaps a moose. The creature pressed on, and as it neared the island, she realized with a sickening jolt what exactly she was looking at: a section of shattered tree, and the antlers were branches, and what propelled it was a man.

She dropped to the ground and lay on the hard cap of the outcropping, watching the figure swim the log toward shore. In her mind flashed the horrible image of the naked girl who’d died so brutally less than a quarter of a mile from where she lay. She was dreadfully afraid for the baby. And she felt her own maddening helplessness in the face of all the terrible possibility ahead.

The man let go of the log and slogged ashore. In one hand, he held a long, thin object that Jenny was certain had to be a rifle. He was a good hundred yards from where she lay, and because of the distance and the dim light, she couldn’t make out any detail except for the firearm he carried. She waited, barely breathing.

He stood a long moment, as if catching his breath, then began to walk the shoreline in the direction of the cabin.

From below and behind Jenny came the sudden bawling of the baby.

The man stopped and turned.

NINE

Any fear Jenny had ever felt before was now dwarfed by her panic. She slid from the top of the outcropping and frantically descended. She slipped into the shelter and lifted the baby in her arms. He quieted almost immediately, but Jenny was certain it was too late. Her eyes shot toward all the items she’d brought from the cabin and settled quickly on the hunting knife that lay next to the Coleman stove. She grasped the black hard- rubber handle, brought the blade up, and readied herself. She wished it were a magnum handgun she held, but the five inches of razor-sharp steel would have to do.

She waited a long time. Finally, with a measure of blessed relief, she began to think that maybe he’d changed his mind, though why in God’s name he would do that she couldn’t have said. Just as she was about to let herself relax, she heard the brittle crush of underbrush outside the shelter. Her heart became a hammering fist. She held the baby against her chest, thrust the blade in front of her, and tried to steady her shaking hand. She would do whatever was necessary to protect the child and herself. She knew it without a whisper of doubt. She would kill this man.

Through the mesh of the drooping pine boughs, she saw the tall shape approaching. He came from behind the outcropping, from the darkening of the eastern horizon at dusk. She heard the squish of his boots still soaked with lake water and the draw of his breath from the effort of climbing through the debris. She caught a glimpse of the long black barrel of the rifle gripped in his right hand. She saw his left hand reach forward and pull aside a low- hanging bough. She crouched half a dozen feet away ready to spring at him.

He bent and entered.

Later, Cork would recount how his daughter had nearly killed him. How, when the bawling child had led him to her, she’d been like a tigress. How the blade of that marvelous Cutco knife was poised to carve out his heart. And how, at the last moment, she’d recognized him and had melted in tears of relief.

The child, however, had screamed bloody murder.

“I thought you were— I don’t know,” Jenny cried when she was finally able to speak. “I thought you had a rifle and were going to kill us.”

“A rifle? You mean this?” He held up the staff in his hand, a thin, sturdy maple limb. “I’ve been using this to shove away debris when I swim. And I’ve been swimming most of the afternoon looking for you.”

He spoke in a rasp that was barely above a whisper, and Jenny asked, “What happened to your voice?”

“I think I strained my vocal cords calling for you all afternoon. I’d’ve yelled when I came ashore here, but I don’t have much voice left.”

“How did you find us?”

“Us?” Cork shook his head in disbelief at the screaming baby clutched to her breast. “How did you become