to those who liked him not at all-Cork among them-he was known as Hell.
Hanover had been taking photos of the men hosing down the smoking debris, but now he got into his car, a maroon Taurus wagon parked near the far fence, and came around to where the other vehicles sat.
Lindstrom didn’t seem to notice Hanover’s approach. He was intent on Jo.
“We’ve been on opposite sides of this issue, Ms. O’Connor.” Hard eyes looked at her from under those feathery eyebrows. “And I always believed we could reach a peaceful resolution-”
“Karl,” Jo said, interrupting, “before you say anything more, I just want to point out a couple of things. As the fire chief has said, the cause of all this hasn’t been confirmed. He’s only guessing. And if he’s right, there’s currently no evidence that would implicate my clients, or anyone, for that matter, who might be opposed to you on the logging issue.”
Lindstrom held off speaking for a moment. Hell Hanover stood quietly off to the side, a small notebook in his hand, taking notes. Nobody except Cork seemed to be aware of his presence.
“It’s easy for you, isn’t it,” Lindstrom finally said. “Your business hasn’t been threatened. Your livelihood isn’t at stake. In fact, you’re probably the only one who is benefiting from all this.”
“Easy, Karl,” Cork said.
Lindstrom turned on him. “I’m at a loss to understand why, exactly, you’re here. You’re not the sheriff anymore. You’ve got no business here.”
Before Cork or anyone else could reply, the insistent chirp of a cell phone cut among them. Hanover pulled a cellular from his pocket and stepped away. He listened, tried to speak, then terminated the call. He spent a moment scribbling furiously in his little notebook.
Lindstrom went on, addressing himself to Jo again. “If this is the kind of fight your people want, then this is the kind of fight we’ll give them.”
“Mr. Lindstrom,” Schanno said, “I don’t think you want to make that kind of statement.”
“Just whose side are you on, Sheriff?”
Hell Hanover came back, a look of mild satisfaction on his face. “Wally, that was a phone call from someone claiming responsibility for all this mess.”
“Who?” Schanno snapped.
“Calls himself-or herself-the voice was disguised so it was impossible to tell-calls himself Eco-Warrior. Claims to be part of a movement called the Army of the Earth. The statement read”-he glanced down at the notes he’d written-” ‘The desecration of Grandmother Earth must end. Violence toward anything sacred will not be tolerated. I am the arrow of justice.’ “
“That’s it? All of it? You’re sure?” Schanno asked.
“Grandmother Earth.” Lindstrom cast a cold eye on Jo. “That’s how your clients refer to it, Ms. O’Connor.”
“Words are free, Mr. Lindstrom,” Jo replied. “Anyone may use them in any way they wish. Or misuse them.”
“Chief!” One of the men near the burned shed waved furiously. “Bring the sheriff, too!”
They all followed Murray to the shed.
“What is it, Bob?”
“Smell that? Made me think I’d better check the debris here carefully.”
With the head of his ax, he reached into the charred wreckage of the equipment shed, hooked a burned panel, and lifted.
“Jesus,” Schanno said.
Jo turned away.
An upper body had been exposed, most of the skin burned to char, the muscle tissue underneath visible in visceral red and purple. The heat had caused the eyes to bubble away and the brain to explode out the back of the skull. The lips were burned off completely, leaving a skeletal grin that made the corpse look grimly delighted.
“Welp,” Hanover said as he lifted his camera for a shot. “It ain’t just arson anymore.”
3
HISTORY, IN CORK’S OPINION, was a useless discipline, an assemblage of accounts and memories, often flawed, that in the end did the world no service. Math and science could be applied in concrete ways. Literature, if it didn’t enlighten, at least entertained. But history? History was simply a study in futility. Because people never learned. Century after century, they committed the same atrocities against one another or against the earth, and the only thing that changed was the magnitude of the slaughter.
Except for the particulars dictated by its geography, the history of Tamarack County was little different. The streams, clear and clean since the days of the great glaciers, ran red with the blood of the Dakota as the Anishinaabeg invaded from the east and forced out of the forests along Kitchigami all the people not their own. Although less bloody, the confinement of the Ojibwe Anishinaabeg to a very few reservations was accomplished through threat and deceit and with the complicity of educated people who considered themselves enlightened. The devastation of the land-the clearing of the magnificent white pine forests, the deep gouging of the mine pits on the Iron Range, the dumping of toxins into the crystal water of Lake Superior-was justified as the fulfillment of God’s plan, the “manifest destiny” of America.
Conscience was a devil that plagued the individual. Collectively, a people squashed it as easily as stepping on a daisy.
Or so it appeared to Corcoran O’Connor on that summer morning when smoke hazed the sky and Tamarack County seemed poised for war over the destruction of one of the last good stands of old-growth white pine left in the North Woods.
The Anishinaabe people called them Ninishoomisag, Our Grandfathers. There were more than two hundred acres of them, all over a hundred feet tall, their trunks better than four feet in diameter, some said to be at least three hundred years old. To the Anishinaabeg, they were sacred. For generations, the young men of the Iron Lake Ojibwe had sought out the shelter of Our Grandfathers, and under their watchful eyes had undergone giigwishimowin, the fasting ritual that brought to an adolescent the dream vision that would guide him into manhood. How the great trees had been spared from the rapacious saws of the crews who’d leveled the forests- most of them on a Lindstrom wage-was a bit of a mystery. Henry Meloux, an old Ojibwe medicine man, claimed the trees had been protected by manidoonsag, little spirits of the woods. Although Cork was ever respectful of Meloux’s vast wisdom, he’d heard another, less fantastic, explanation for the trees’ survival. In the days of the early logging boom, timber companies hired estimators to survey the forests and report probable lumber footage before a company bid on the right to log a particular section. For years, the man who’d worked in that capacity for the Lindstrom mill in Minnesota was Edward Olaf. He was mixed blood, half Swede, half Ojibwe. He knew how important Our Grandfathers were to the Anishinaabeg, and he simply lied in his reports about the area, ensuring the great white pines would be bypassed.
By the time extensive forest service surveys made the Lindstrom executives aware of Our Grandfathers, the trees had been included in an area of national forest no longer open to logging. The ban was in place for many decades until 1995 when President Clinton signed into law a bill creating the Energy Salvage Timber Sales Program. The law opened the door to public forest lands full of old-growth timber, among them Our Grandfathers. Karl Lindstrom’s company bid immediately for the right to cut the great white pines, and that bid had been accepted.
The plight of Our Grandfathers brought together an alliance of disparate groups bent on saving the trees. The Sierra Club, the Nature Conservancy, Earth First, the Iron Lake Ojibwe, and a handful of other organizations and unaffiliated individuals had descended on Aurora to protest the proposed logging. Court battles had thus far prevented any cutting from taking place. In the legal maneuvering, Jo O’Connor had been the major voice for the Anishinaabeg. Now, arguments had ended. A federal judge in St. Paul had promised a ruling soon. In the tense quiet, some of the environmentalists had issued statements indicating that a ruling in favor of the logging interests would not deter them from doing what had to be done to preserve Our Grandfathers. Aurora, Minnesota, had seemed on the eve of war. Now it looked like the body count had already begun.
