As we taxied toward shore, I saw a log cottage with a shingled boathouse at the water’s edge and windows glowing gold through the pines. I felt my heart lift at the sight, as if I were returning to a place I’d once visited in childhood and then forgotten. It was a surprising sensation considering how depressed I was.
Charley brought the Super Cub up against the dock beside the boathouse, opened the door, and jumped out. He fastened the floatplane to cleats on the dock. I stepped down onto the riveted metal pontoon, holding on to one of the struts to keep my balance.
A dog came bounding from the cottage, a gray-and-brown German shorthaired pointer with a quick-wagging stub of a tail.
“Hey, Nimrod.” Charley fell to his knees and let the dog lick his face.
I ran my hand along his coarse back while he sniffed my legs. “Good-looking dog.”
“Dumb as a post.” He slapped me on the back, trying to rouse some good cheer in me. “Come on, let’s see what the Boss has got cooking.”
A strip of rough tar paper ran down the center of the dock and led to a paved walkway that seemed out of place in such a rustic setting. The walk climbed in a switchback up the lawn to the cottage. A wooden ramp rose to the porch door.
The cottage was built partly of peeled fir and spruce logs and partly of beams and cedar shakes, and it had a red-shingled asphalt roof and a squat fieldstone chimney from which a wisp of smoke was rising. Yellow light streamed out through the windows onto the forest floor. I heard classical music playing softly from a stereo inside.
“Ora?” said Charley, pulling open the screen door. “We’ve got company.”
The inside of the house smelled of a log fire and of meat cooking in an oven. There were vases with wildflowers in all the windows and books piled everywhere on tables and on the floor. On the walls hung innumerable deer and moose antlers and mounted trout and salmon trophies the length of my leg. The furniture all seemed too short somehow.
“Ora?”
“Hi, Charley. I’ll be right out.”
He frowned at the crackling fireplace. “Isn’t it a little warm to have a fire going?”
“My bones were cold.”
Charley removed his green cap and hung it from a deer-foot coat peg beside the door. His thick gray-and-white hair stood up with the electricity even after he tried to smooth it. “She’ll be right out.”
I gestured at the taxidermy on the wall. “Those are some impressive fish.”
“Ora caught that salmon there. She’s a better fisher than me. Always has been. Of course, it’s harder now for her to get out than it once was.”
I was about to ask why it was harder when the answer arrived in the person of Ora Stevens herself. She rolled into the room in a wheelchair, a handsome woman with deeply set green eyes, high Scandinavian cheekbones, and shoulder-length, snow-white hair swept back behind her ears. She wore a spearmint-colored sweater over a white T-shirt, khakis, and tennis shoes.
Charley knelt down to kiss her pale cheek. “How you doing, Boss?”
“Boss! I wish he wouldn’t call me that.” She held out a hand to me. “Hello, Mike.”
The grip was firmer than I expected. “It’s nice to meet you, Mrs. Stevens.”
“Ora,” she corrected me.
“Mike has agreed to spend the night with us,” he said, not mentioning anything about what had just happened back at the boat launch.
“That’s wonderful. I have a room already made up.”
“I hate to put you out this way.”
She waved a hand. “It’s no bother. We don’t get enough company these days, as it is. Can I offer you something to drink, dear? We have lemonade, iced tea, beer.”
“A beer would be great.”
“I’ll have iced tea,” said Charley. “I guess I’ll show Mike around in case he needs to use the facilities.”
With Nimrod trailing us at every step, Charley escorted me through the cottage. I realized now the reason for the paved walkway and the low furniture. Everything in the house had been arranged to be accessible to Ora Stevens in her wheelchair. The cottage was larger than it looked from outside and was cluttered with all sorts of woodsy knickknacks: animal skulls and hand-carved duck decoys, eye-catching rock specimens, and lots and lots of books. There were several framed photographs lined up along the top of a bureau. I noticed that two young women appeared in multiple pictures. “Are those your daughters?”
Charley nodded. “Anne and Stacey.”
The photo that looked to be the most recent showed Ora standing-no wheelchair in sight-with her arms around both young women. Her hair was darker, as was Charley’s.
“Do they live in Maine?” The question was all I could do to maintain the semblance of good manners.
“Anne does, down to Augusta. I’m not sure where Stacey is these days. She moves around a lot.” He guided me back out into the cottage’s great room.
“I’d love to have a place like this someday,” I said honestly. It was the kind of cabin in the woods I’d always dreamed about.
“We only live here April through November. But sometimes I come up on my own to do some ice-fishing in the winter. It gets damned cold, but if I sleep out in front of the fireplace with Nimrod and a few blankets, I’m all right.”
“How much land do you have here?”
“Twenty acres. Of course it belongs to Wendigo since we’re on a lease.”
“And they’re really going to evict you?”
Charley made a face. “Oh, I expect they’ll give us a chance to buy the land at a price five times what we can afford to pay. After we refuse, they’ll make an offer on the buildings here, knowing we don’t have the money to move them anywhere else. That’s the way it happened when they went into Montana, from what I understand. Wendigo never evicts anybody. They just force you to sell out at their asking price.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Thirty-three years.”
Ora came rolling out with our drinks and a bowl of roasted pumpkin seeds on a tray on her lap. “Dinner will be ready in half an hour,” she said. “Why don’t we go out onto the porch?”
Charley’s mouth tightened. “I thought you felt cold.”
“I’m warmer now,” she said with an unconvincing smile.
Charley and I sat down in wicker rocking chairs, facing the lake, while Ora positioned her wheelchair to one side.
“Supper smells great.”
She smiled. “I hope you don’t mind moose. Charley got about three hundred pounds of meat from a man in town who hit one with his car.”
“Totaled his Subaru,” he said. “Lucky he wasn’t killed.”
“The irony is the poor man is a vegetarian.” Ora gave a sad laugh.
“We’ll be eating moose until it’s coming out our ears,” said Charley. “How many moose have you shot?”
“None, yet.” It was an embarrassing admission for a Maine game warden.
“You’ll get one with brainworm or struck by a car before too long, and you’ll have to put it down.” He was speaking as if I hadn’t just resigned from the Warden Service. “So I understand you shot a bear last week.”
“It was killing pigs. I was hoping to relocate it somewhere up this way, but a farmer wounded it, and I had to put it down.”
“How big a guy was he?” asked Charley.
“Two hundred pounds. But he looked twice that size.”
“Bears always look bigger than they are,” he said. “That’s the problem I have with baiting them during bear season. These dimwit hunters shoot the first bear that comes close to their tree stand. Half the time it’s a yearling cub, thirty-five pounds or so. Then they’re too embarrassed to haul the little thing back to camp, so they stash it behind a brush pile and try for a bigger one.”
“Charley.” Ora gave him a hard look.
