hair, the slender nose- but Henry thought her mother must have been terribly beautiful. She didn’t speak like Lima. There wasn’t the odd roll to her language. She sounded little different from the whites Henry had known all his life. He wondered about that.
“I’m sorry,” she said suddenly. “Sometimes I go on and on. You’re tired, I’m sure. You probably want to sleep.”
Henry wasn’t tired, and he liked hearing her talk. But he felt tense and awkward and had a pressing need to escape for a while.
“Yes, I am tired,” he said. He closed his eyes.
He did, in fact, sleep. He woke as he heard the engine throttled back and felt the plane descending. They landed on a lake surrounded by forest, and Wellington guided the plane to shore, where a small cabin and dock had been built. The men got out, then Maria and Henry. A scruffy man who looked Indian in his features greeted Wellington, and they talked briefly, then set about refueling the plane from a metal barrel. Maria spoke to her father, who pointed toward an outhouse near the cabin. Henry walked into the woods and relieved himself. In a few minutes, they were in the air again.
It was late afternoon by the time they finally glided to rest on the shore of an immense lake contained on three sides by steep ridges. They unloaded the equipment and set up their tents. There was one for each of them. Lima and Wellington set up their own tents, located next to each other. Henry put up Maria’s. She asked for it to he as far from her father as possible because she said he snored terribly. Henry erected his own tent a bit away from the others. By the time he’d finished, the treetops had punctured the sun, and it was sinking fast. Henry canvassed the area for wood and quickly built a fire. Wellington opened a big tin of soup from the supplies that Lima had brought and heated it directly on the coals. Shortly after dark they all crawled into their tents.
Henry lay awake that night, and though he was in the middle of a vast Canadian wilderness, the sounds he heard were as familiar to him as his own breathing. The chirr of crickets and tree frogs. The creak of branches stirred by the wind. The lap of the lake against the shoreline. The smell was like home, evergreen pitch and clean water. But he was as far from home as he’d ever been, and he felt it. This was not like the government boarding school where the trees were spare and the land was flat and cultivated and smelled of manure. This was a different distance. He had the sense that he’d embarked on a long journey, without any idea of his destination.
TWENTY-FIVE
At first there was routine to the days.
After breakfast, Wellington and Lima took off with their packs full of instruments. Sometimes they used the collapsible boat they’d brought in the plane, which they called a Folbot; sometimes they struck out on foot. Always they headed toward the ridges. Usually they were gone until late afternoon, often until almost dark.
Henry’s principal job was to feed the expedition and see to the safety of the camp-and Maria. Henry didn’t wonder that Lima trusted him to be alone with his daughter. He understood clearly that Lima thought of him as little better than a stock animal-a horse or an ox, say-something to be worked hard, put up for the night, and forgotten. That his daughter might look at Henry in a different way probably never occurred to Lima. That was fine with Henry. On the plane he’d been intrigued by the young woman. When he discovered that she was his responsibility, he was no happier with the arrangement than she. Lima forbade her leaving camp unless Henry accompanied her. And Henry was forbidden to leave her alone. He was eager to explore the area and to hunt game, but when she walked in the forest, Maria made more racket than a wounded moose. Henry hated taking her with him. For several days he confined himself to camp. He dug three pit toilets-one for the white men, one for Maria, and one for himself-and constructed rudimentary seating for each using a sturdy section of limb lashed to supporting Y branches. He built a shelter suitable to eat under when it rained. Much of the rest of his time was passed fishing for walleye and trout from the lake. Maria spent the bulk of her time reading or writing in her journal and looking bored or unhappy.
“I’m sick of fish,” she declared on the fourth day, after her father and Wellington had left. “And I’m sick of sitting.” She squatted on a flat rock, half hidden by leatherleaf, at the edge of the water, and she looked across the lake at the tallest ridge. “I’m hiking up there today.”
“There are wolves,” Henry said.
It was true. He’d heard the howl of a pack at night. Mostly, though, he said it to scare her.
“Wolves don’t hunt in the day. And they won’t attack unless they believe you’re sick or infirm.”
“You read that in one of your books?”
“As a matter of fact.”
Henry had his hands in a bucket full of leeches he’d collected for fishing. “If they’re hungry, wolves will attack a bull moose in broad daylight. They’ll tear it apart.”
“I don’t believe you.”
Henry shrugged.
“I’m going.” She put down the book she’d been reading and stood up.
“I’m not ready to go,” he said.
“I don’t care.” She stomped off, following the shoreline.
Henry sighed and waited. When she was out of sight, he took up his rifle and followed, keeping himself hidden.
Henry expected her to tire quickly, but he was surprised by her endurance. The lake snaked for more than two miles to the west and Maria followed the shoreline at a steady pace. She stopped several times to drink from small streams and once to relieve herself. Henry looked away. By noon she’d reached the base of the ridge. She paused for a while, taking the measure of the height and looking, Henry supposed, for the best route up. Finally she began her ascent.
Henry gave her a little head start, then slung his rifle over his shoulder and started up himself. He stayed a couple of hundred yards west of her and downslope, keeping to the scrub jack pines and black spruce whose roots dug tenaciously into the cracks in the rock. The bare stone often had a thin skin of slippery green-gold lichen, making the climb more treacherous. The crest of the ridge was a good three hundred feet above the lake. Maria clambered up quickly and steadily. Between his own climbing and his tracking of Maria, Henry had his hands full.
In twenty minutes, Henry neared the top. Maria wasn’t far below and he pushed hard to be there ahead of her. He positioned himself in a copse of aspen whose leaves in that early autumn were gold as new doubloons. Maria stood on a jut of gray rock, smiling in the sunshine, looking at the scene below her. The ridges that cupped the lake lay at the meeting of two topographies. South, the land was folded in a series of rugged hills; north, the forest ran flat all the way to the horizon. The deep ravines of the hills were lined with ragged outcrops that erupted from the earth like fractured bone through flesh. It reminded Henry of Noopiming, the woods that Woodrow had taught him to love.
Maybe it was the beauty of the scene and the way it lightened his heart, or maybe it was because he saw that Maria had been moved by it, too; whatever the reason, he found himself walking toward her, purposely making just enough noise that she would hear. She turned and did not look happy.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“What I’m paid to do.”
“You followed me. I should have known.”
He wanted to say something to her, something soothing, but the words wouldn’t come. “I’m sorry,” he finally said. “I’ll wait below.” He turned away.
“No,” she said to his back. Then more gently, “Stay.”
They stood together, for a long time silent, drinking in the magnificence of what lay before them.
“Why don’t you want me with you when you go into the woods?” Maria asked.
“You make too much noise. You scare the game.”
“I don’t mean to. You could teach me how to be quiet. I learn quickly.”
He liked the sound of her voice. It reminded him of water pushed by wind.
“Why did you come?” he asked.
Instead of answering she said, “Do you have family?”
