down from the fallen pine. At the tumble of logs from the destroyed back wall, he peered through the opening where he’d first spotted the dead girl in a pool of blood. A splash of bleached-white light illuminated the area. He saw clearly the pooling of dried blood, but the woman’s body was no longer in it.
He found the cigar box with the candles and lit one with a kitchen match. He searched the cabin thoroughly, looking for the firearm he hoped like hell he might find. When he’d satisfied himself that the woman had none, or if she had it had been taken, he blew out the candle and headed back outside. In the moonlight, he located again the clothesline he’d discovered when he first explored the area. He cut the nylon where it was knotted around the aspen saplings, coiled it, and started back toward the shelter to rejoin Jenny and the baby.
Before he reached the little cove, he turned and took a last look at the ruined cabin. He felt tired beyond belief, heartsick with an aching weariness that came from the understanding that he was deep into another chapter of his life that would probably be inked in blood.
Half an hour after her father walked away, Jenny left the baby sleeping in the shelter and climbed the outcropping, where she sat among the ragged, twisted cedars that remained. Tough little trees, she marveled. They’d wedged their roots into the crevices and held tenaciously to what seemed solid rock. They reminded her of Manidoo Gihiiganze, what many white people called the Witch Tree, a gnarled cedar that had been growing for centuries out of the bare stone above Lake Superior near Grand Portage and was sacred to the Ojibwe, sacred in part because of the impossibility of its location. Many things existed where they should not, she thought, and she considered the baby’s mother, alone on this island. How long had she been here and why had she come? Was this place refuge or prison? Had the man in the powerboat been friend or keeper?
Anishinaabe blood ran in Jenny’s veins. Her great-grandmother had been true-blood Iron Lake Ojibwe. Her father was a man of very mixed heritage, with strong ties to both the Anishinaabe and white communities in Tamarack County, where he’d lived almost his entire life. Jenny, however, had been raised with a decidedly Anglo sensibility. She never denied the Ojibwe part of her ancestry, but neither did she much celebrate it. She’d been to powwows, but they remained exotic to her. She was more at home with a folk festival or a poetry slam. She had friends from childhood who were Ojibwe, but with her they’d usually shared their lives on other, more general levels. Still, alone atop that rock, bathed in moonlight, she closed her eyes and tried to imagine herself as the young woman in the cabin, focusing not just on the slender thread of Ojibwe blood that precariously bound them but also on the more common grounding of their gender.
She experienced two incredible emotions. First was an overwhelming, almost consummate joy that came from the company of the child. She recalled the feeling when the baby had sucked at her breast, how unifying it seemed and how she’d never experienced anything quite like it before. And second, she felt a deep isolation, a loneliness whose origin she couldn’t explain.
She opened her eyes and saw a small, flickering light in the cabin. Her father, she figured, searching for a gun. In the dark of that isolated island, even a small light made a great impression. She turned her eyes toward the southwest. The stars there came right down to where sky met earth.
As she stood watching, she realized that some of the stars were moving. A boat. Not the powerboat, which had run without lights and had moved with reckless speed. Maybe a houseboat? Oh, God, if she could just signal it. She thought frantically but came up with nothing. If only they’d prepared wood for a fire, something she could set a match to.
She heard the rational voice in her head speaking words her father might have spoken, and she watched the lights vanish behind the blind of other islands.
She returned to the shelter, fighting the urge toward discouragement, a fight made easier whenever she saw the baby. He was awake, but not crying. He lay caught in a netting of moonlight that fell through the cracks in the evergreen boughs above. He looked at her silently as she knelt beside him, his dark little eyes intense. She reached out and took his small hand. He gripped her thumb with a strength that surprised her.
She’d almost had a baby once. And when she didn’t, she’d worked very hard at not imagining what that might have been like. She’d struggled to close the wound in her heart.
“Don’t you worry, little guy,” she said gently. “I won’t let anyone hurt you. I promise.”
She took him in her arms and carried him out of the shelter and stood looking down at the little white moon of his face, and she couldn’t help but smile. She heard a cricket chirping somewhere near, the first sound of life from the island since the storm.
“See?” she said to the child. “Everything will be just fine, don’t you worry.”
She heard underbrush and branch breaking not far away. She turned, knowing it was too late to hide, and she waited. Her father appeared and seemed surprised to see her in the open with the baby.
“How’s he doing?” he asked.
“Just fine,” she replied. “We both are.”
“Wonderful,” her father said. “Now let’s get the hell out of here.”
THIRTEEN
Cork searched the shoreline until he found two snapped trees suitable to his purpose. They were poplar, the broken sections eight inches in diameter. One was roughly ten feet long, the other six. He’d have preferred them to be more or less the same length but knew he had to make do. He hauled the trunks to the rocky cove in the lee of the outcropping and worked by the light of the moon. Using the hunting knife, he cut away as many of the branches as he could and put the trunks side by side. The fit was far from perfect, but it would have to do. He cut the fifteen feet of clothesline cord he’d taken from the cabin into two equal sections and lashed the broken trees together. The result was a long raft just barely wide enough for the baby and some of the items from the shelter. He dragged his construct into the water and was satisfied with its buoyancy. When he was finished, he returned to the shelter.
Jenny had prepared things there. The stove was closed and latched. The blanket was tied in a bundle with the most necessary things inside—diapers, formula, bottle, some canned goods.
“Ready?” Cork asked.
“Do we really need to do this?”
“Maybe not, but I don’t want to take any chances. Do you?” He pointedly eyed the baby she held.
“No,” she agreed.
“Bring the little guy. I’ll get the other things.”
The moon was directly above them, and they walked in puddles of their own shadows. Crickets chirped all around now, a hopeful sound, Cork thought, as he led the way to the cove.
When Jenny saw the raft he’d built, she said, “That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“Dad, that won’t hold us.”
“Not us, but it will hold him and the other things. You and I are going to swim.” He pointed across the channel to the little island with the stand of trees still intact. “I figure it’s maybe a couple of hundred yards, that’s all.”
He made it sound like no big deal, though he knew there was great potential for danger. If the baby got fussy or restless and kicked around a lot and ended up in the lake. If another storm whipped up out of the blue and caught them in open water. If the cigarette boat returned while they were making their passage.
Jenny said, “And if he falls in? Or if that guy comes back in the boat while we’re crossing?”
He laughed, despite himself and their precarious situation, because Jenny, in her own thinking, was right there with him, neck and neck.
“All right,” he said. “I admit it’s got its risks, but I don’t have a better offering at the moment. Are you game, or do we stay here and wait it out and hope cigarette boat man doesn’t come back looking for us? You have an equal vote in this.”
She rocked back and forth as she held the baby. He’d fallen asleep again, cradled in her arms. Cork was a
