light the drifts appeared lit from inside.
“I’ve been in these particular woods for three years and not seen them yet,” the foreman said. “I’ve heard them, I’ve messed my boots in their scat, I’ve seen what they can do to a caribou weighing four hundred pounds. But I’ve not set my eyes on them.” He spoke as much to himself as to Grimm. “But if they’re this close to camp —” His voice trailed off and he shook his head. “We’re not talking about hugags or agropelters here.” He closed his eyes hard against the wind and when he opened them the moon was gone, swallowed by clouds.
He turned to Hosea. “You want the wolves why?”
“The bitches are in estrus, their glands are spilling with curatives.”
“I wouldn’t believe it if I’d never seen some of those potions you peddle.”
They hiked another quarter mile along the palisade’s edge, hoping for a better view of the river. They stood against trees not four feet from the precipice, the wind rising to their faces. They were silent now, waiting for the clouds to pass or the morning light to rise. The foreman already knew he would send for the dogs down in Two Harbors. He knew, also, that any wolf sign closer to camp would sharpen the auguries forming in the minds of the men.
There was no longer any reason to be standing on that cliff with Hosea Grimm but that he wanted to see the pack. So they waited. He knew the hour to be near five, the time of day he usually rose from his bunk and stepped outside to piss.
“There!” Hosea Grimm whispered, clutching the foreman’s shoulder. “There, below the falls.”
The foreman craned to see but found only dark.
“There again. Christ. Christ, yes.” Hosea Grimm lifted the Winchester to his shoulder and aimed downriver.
Still the foreman searched, pleading silently with the morning for light. But none came.
And then the flash of the gun, the concussion traveling up and down the gorge, trapped.
By the time they reached the lower falls the morning light was up. The clouds that had engulfed the moon stuck, so the day broke grainy and dim. But no matter, all the light in the world would not have illumined the wolves. Nor any tracks nor any sign at all.
“Fools persist,” the foreman said. “I lost a night’s sleep for what?”
“A vigorous hike is good for body and mind,” Hosea countered. “Cold air clears the lungs.”
“I get plenty of cold air, to say nothing of hiking around these woods.” The foreman checked his pocket watch. “This damn watch. It’s froze up on me.”
Hosea Grimm checked his own. “It’s nearly seven thirty. I’d best turn for town. Who knows what the peaked will require today. Yesterday it was Mats Barggaard with a nosebleed.”
“What did you prescribe?”
“Spiderwebs. A ball of spiderwebs.”
The foreman smiled. “I wouldn’t believe it if I hadn’t heard about the ox shit you slathered all over that boy’s back after he fell into his family’s stove.”
“It worked — both the dung and the spiderwebs.”
“Tell me, with what would you remedy a frozen timepiece?”
“For that you’ll want Joshua Smith. He’ll be passing through before long.”
The foreman took a deep breath. “Sorry you didn’t get your wolf.”
“I’ll get one yet.”
“I believe you will.”
Hosea offered his hand. “I’ll see you in town.”
“Soon enough.”
As the two men parted ways on the river, an unkindness of ravens decamped from the high boughs of a white pine and flew up the gorge. Their cries were horrible and their moving shadow cast yet another shade on the snow.
Hosea Grimm turned back to the foreman and shouted across the river, “What did I say about the ravens?”
The ice road cut through the tallest stand of white pine along the river. Before the upper falls, the road veered south and plunged into Gunflint. The next morning Trond Erlandson sat his horse on the crest of the road looking onto the morning over the lake. A mile offshore the vaporous open water cemented his doubt. It clouded the sunrise. He looked down the shore for Isle Royale, but it was gone in the sea smoke.
He had once been a peaceable man — not given to the agitation that
was so much a part of his daily routine now — and the vista, though it complicated things, reminded him of that quiet part in him. When he had first arrived in these wilds, now thirty years ago, he’d looked on the country — in all its enormity and ungoverned beauty — as if it were his own private opportunity. Though he had worked tirelessly and with unchecked vigor, all he had to show for his labor was his authority. And his responsibility. He took neither lightly. He spit a stream of tobacco juice into the snow and spurred the horse forward.
In all that cold the leather saddle creaked with the first stride. The horse sidestepped into the soft snow on the edge of the road and began his cautious descent. Some few paces down, the wind paused and when it did the horse paused, too, and the foreman craned his head toward the river. He heard the water coursing under the ice and over the falls and into the Devil’s Maw. He cursed it and spit in its direction. Were it not for the falls and that hole in the river he could have rafted the harvest down to the mill instead of hauling it on the treacherous road. The horse stepped again without prodding and in half an hour Trond heard the whine of the mill and saw the mountains of stacked pine in the mill yard.
Instead of hitching his horse outside Grimm’s, he stabled him at the livery to be blanketed and fed. Before leaving the horse he took his Winchester from the saddle scabbard and unloaded it and put it over his shoulder. He asked the livery keeper to water the horse, too, and he patted the Appaloosa’s mottled hindquarters and walked to Grimm’s.
By any definition Grimm’s store was more than an apothecary — if it was an apothecary at all — though that was what the signboard above the door advertised: grimm’s apothecary. The first time Trond Erlandson entered the store had been in the late spring of 1894, a few months after it opened. His piles had become insufferable and he submitted to his embarrassment and sought counsel. Grimm prescribed oakum, to Trond’s dismay, but it worked. He’d been a reliable customer since.
The store was as much a testament to Grimm’s eccentricity as it was a place of commerce. When Trond entered that midwinter morning, the whole of his beard was coated with ice stained amber from the snoose dribble. For as often as he frequented Grimm’s apothecary, and as fond as he was of its proprietor, Trond did not feel, now more than a year after his first visit, any closer to knowing Hosea Grimm.
The door closed behind Trond Erlandson, sucking much of the heat with him. He stomped his feet and took off his mittens and hat and nodded at Rebekah, who darned socks in a chair beside the box stove. There was a basket of socks on the floor beneath her. Hosea himself stood behind the counter, his felt derby squarely on his head, his apron starched and hanging to his ankles. The store was, as always, impeccably clean. At this hour there were no other customers.
“Trond, my good man. Every time I see you you’ve ice on your face.”
“Thirteen mornings in a row below zero,” Trond said, stepping forward and cupping his beard in his hands. He stood above the spittoon and waited for a moment while the ice melted, dripping into the slurry. “I see you survived yesterday’s hike out of the woods.”
Hosea stood before the beakers and vials and canisters lining the shelf behind him. “I guess I’m hardier than all those frozen moose.”
“That’s why I’m here,” Trond said. “Will you show me that advertisement again?”
Grimm checked a pair of drawers behind the counter before he found the week-old Two Harbors
The headline read, world’s biggest dogs! Two droopy-faced hounds were drawn muzzle to muzzle, looking not unlike the foreman’s St. Bernard. Trond read the rest of the ad: russian ovcharka watchdogs, beasts of the bravest order, fear nothing and no one.
