He carefully scanned the island where her father was atop the bluff, scoped another island farther south, and finally directed his eye to the island where Jenny hid. She flattened herself on the ground with her arm wrapped protectively around the wicker basket crawling with flies. Inside, the baby’s fussing was becoming more pronounced. She prayed he wouldn’t begin to cry. They were shielded by a very porous wall of underbrush. Jenny could see the hunter and knew that, with his magnified vision, he could see her, and any movement at all might be her undoing. The scope swung gradually until it held directly on the spot where she lay. She stared, and the black eye of the rifle barrel stared back. The baby squirmed, his little arms batting at the blanket that covered the basket. Jenny began to sing in a whisper, “Hush, little baby, don’t say a word. Papa’s going to buy you a mockingbird.” The man lifted his face from where he’d laid his cheek against the rifle stock and studied the island with his naked eye. Had he seen the raft? If he came for her and the baby, what would she do? Her mind began to search desperately for a fallback plan.
The hunter put his cheek to the stock again and continued his scan of the area. Finally he lowered the rifle, turned, and disappeared into the devastation at the base of the outcrop, heading in the direction of the makeshift shelter.
As soon as he was gone, Jenny grabbed the basket and bolted for another hiding place, fleeing the swarm of insects threatening to drive her mad. In her haste, she caught her foot on a snag and went sprawling. The basket flew from her hand. The baby spilled out onto the ground. He lay a moment, staring up at the sun as if dazed; then he let out a wail that could have been heard in Greenland.
Jenny shot a look toward the island across the channel. The hunter broke from the cover of the fallen timber, eyes on the place where the baby lay. He lifted his rifle, and he sighted.
TWENTY-TWO
Fourteen thousand islands,” Mal said. “Who owns them all?”
“Some of them belong to our people,” Amos Powassin replied.
“And most of the others are what’s called Crown Land,” Bascombe said. “They belong, technically speaking, to the monarchy of England. But they’re overseen by the provincial governments, who set them aside for preservation. That’s why most are uninhabited. Pretty much, you can’t build on them. Which is a good thing, I think. To my mind, this whole area ought to remain wild forever.”
They’d returned Cherri Allen to her home on Windigo Island. Those remaining in the boat—Rose, Mal, Stephen, Bascombe, and Amos Powassin—had headed north and were now in the devastated area, weaving among islands where trees lay fallen like blades of mown grass. It was a terrible sight, and although he was blind, Powassin seemed to sense it.
“I can feel the change here,” he said sadly. “Something magnificent has been wounded.”
“It all looks dead,” Stephen said.
“No.” Powassin shook his head, then repeated, “Wounded. The energy of life is still everywhere. I can feel that, too.”
“I don’t understand, grandfather,” Stephen said.
“Don’t understand what?”
“Why Kitchimanidoo would do this kind of thing to a place so beautiful.”
“And who is Kitchimanidoo?” the old man asked.
Stephen seemed surprised by the question. “The Creator, grandfather. The Great Mystery.”
“Sometimes us Shinnobs get lazy in our thinking, Makadewagosh, and we think of Kitchimanidoo like a human being, some kind of powerful old man, maybe. An old fart shoots sparks and magic out of his fingers, like one of them wizards in a Harry Potter movie.” The old man laughed at the image he’d created for himself. “Know what I think? I think Kitchimanidoo is not the Creator but the possibility of creation, all creation, good and bad. You understand?”
“I’m not sure,” Stephen said.
“In all good is the possibility of evil, and in all evil the possibility of good.”
“So,” Stephen said, mulling it over carefully, “a thing that seems good at first might be bad in the end?”
“Or the other way around,” the old man offered.
“So there’s the possibility of something good in all this destruction?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying. Who knows what Kitchimanidoo is capable of? You, me, we’re just humans. In the big picture, we don’t see nothin’. And Kitchimanidoo is the big picture.”
Stephen was quiet after that. They all were. And for a long time the only sounds came from the engine grind and the propeller churning water.
“If I’m correct in my judgment of distance,” the old man finally said, “we should be approaching Bishop Point Island.”
“You nailed ’er, Amos,” Bascombe said.
“Point the bow of this tub west,” the blind man said.
“Toward Outer Bay?”
“For a bit, then we’re turning north again.”
“You’re the captain,” Bascombe said. He consulted his GPS and carefully swung the launch left.
“Long time since I visited Neejawnisug,” the old man said. “In the old days, it was a place our young men often went for giigiwishimowin.”
“Their vision quest,” Stephen said.
The blind man seemed surprised. “You know about this old Shinnob ritual?”
“A little over a year ago, after my mother died, Henry Meloux guided me on my vision quest.”
The old man nodded. “No wonder you’re so sensible. Wish I could convince more of our young men here to give the old way a try. They think ownin’ a gun or maybe a fast boat is what makes ’em a man. I think it’s about time we headed north. You ought to see an island with a cliff face white as pigeon shit.”
Bascombe laughed. “I do.”
“Run along the left side. Real careful. Lots of hidden rocks. And with that storm, maybe some snags, too.”
“Roger,” Bascombe said.
He cut the engine, and the launch cruised slowly between the island with the pigeon-shit cliff and another island just to the south. When they came out of that passage, all Rose could see was island after island with a labyrinth of channels running between them.
“How does anyone keep from getting lost here?” she asked.
“In the old days, they didn’t,” Powassin said. “That’s why our people were able to hide the children here.”
“But you know the way, and you’re blind,” Stephen pointed out.
“I learned the way early, and in those early days I came here often. It’s a special place. A powerful place.”
“Where now?” Bascombe said.
He’d no sooner spoken the words than they heard a sound like a firecracker exploding.
“What was that?” Rose said.
“Sounded like a gunshot,” Bascombe said.
“A rifle,” Powassin said. “A big rifle. In that direction.” The old man pointed ahead and to the left.
“Cork?” Rose said.
Mal shook his head. “I don’t think he took any kind of firearm with him.”
“Hunters?” Stephen said.
“Nothin’ in season,” Powassin replied. “Then again, maybe what’s being hunted hasn’t got a season.”
Bascombe said, “I think we should have a look-see.”
And he eased the throttle forward.
TWENTY-THREE
Atop the bluff, Cork had hunkered behind a blind created by the trunk and branches of the fallen aspen. He’d waited patiently for the hunter to appear on the outcropping where the few ragged cedars still stood. His clothes had begun to dry, and his muscles had begun to cramp, and when the hunter didn’t show, he’d begun to believe he’d been miserably off target, miscalculated completely. All his predictions about the man’s behavior had been wrong. He was afraid that being wrong could lead too easily to being dead.
He should continue to wait, he knew, to be patient, to trust his instincts. That’s what his years as a hunter had taught him. But things were different when the life of his daughter and an innocent child wer
e at stake. Where he hid, he had a view of only the upper half of the cedar-topped outcropping. If the man chose not to climb that promontory, Cork realized he might not even see the hunter. He battled with himself over the urge to get up and stand at the edge of the bluff for a clear view all the way to the waterline. What held him back was the stubborn certainty that the hunter, when he reached the end of the island, would climb the height for the view it would give him. That’s exactly what, in his place, Cork would have done.
Then he heard the baby scream.
He leaped up and looked north. At three hundred yards, he couldn’t see much. He dashed to the edge of the bluff, where he had a clear view of the base of the outcropping and the little beach on which the dinghy lay crushed. He saw the hunter standing there, sighting his rifle. He followed the line of the barrel and spied the distant image of Jenny scrambling madly at the edge of the trees. He realized the hunter was probably drawing a bead. He gave a shrill whistle, earsplitting, waved his arms wildly, and screamed, “Up here, you son of a bitch!”
The hunter turned his head. Quicker than Cork had ever seen a man move, he swung the rifle, and the scope was dead on Cork.
Cork hit the ground and heard the shot in the same instant. The bullet snipped the branches of the fallen aspen behind him. He rolled left and lifted his head, risking a glance to see where Jenny and the baby might be. On that far little island, he saw nothing. He threw a look toward the base of the outcropping. The hunter, too, had vanished.
Cork wasted no time. He knew where the man was headed: back to the cigarette boat, which would shoot him across the channel to Jenny and the baby. Cork turned and stumbled through the devastation that littered the back of the bluff, desperate to reach the lake, knowing he was in a race he had almost no hope of winning.
Jenny swept the baby into her arms and, without a glance back, bounded deeper into the trees. She heard the distant crack of the rifle and tensed for the impact of the bullet, but nothing happened. She kept running while the baby screamed into her breast and his little arms flailed madly.
But where to go?
She reached the tiny clearing where they’d bedded for the night. God, how long ago that seemed, those hours of quiet, of sanctuary. She looked up the rock wall her father had scaled several times in the night to keep his vigil. Where was he now? She wished they’d never formed this plan of separation. What had they been thinking? Didn’t they have a better chance together than separated? Alone with the baby, she was helpless against a hunter and his rifle.
For the briefest of moments, she had a deep, gut-wrenching temptation: Leave the baby. Without the baby, she could run. She could swim to another island. She could hide herself. The screaming baby would become a decoy while she escaped. What was this child to her, after all? A foundling, nothing more. She had no responsibility for him. If she hadn’t stumbled on him, he would have been dead by now anyway. Leave him. Leave him to the thread the fates had already spun for him.
But, with almost no effort at all, she put that temptation behind her. She knew that, whatever the outcome, the thread of her own fate was now bound up with the child’s. They would both live or they would both die together.
With a fiery strength of purpose, she hit the rock wall and began to climb, clutching the baby to her with one hand and clawing her way toward the top with the other. She had no idea what she would do when she got there, but she knew that the hunter, if he wanted his prey, would have to climb, too. At the very least, she would buy time, and at the moment, time seemed to be the only hope she had.
As Cork descended the back side of the bluff, he discarded his shirt and sneakers and even the knife, anything that might hold him back in the water. When he hit the lake, he was down to his black Lands’ End swim trunks. He made a long, arcing dive into the green-tea-colored water and began stroking as if hellhounds were nipping at his bare feet.
The wind was with him on this crossing. The swells as they swept forward carried him on their crests. It didn’t matter. Jenny and the baby were alone on that island, and if he’d had to swim through a lake of hellfire to get to them, that’s what he would have done. Each time he tipped his head to breathe, he listened a fraction of a second for the sound of the cigarette boat’s powerful twin engines.
As he swam, his brain went swiftly over the elements of the situation. The island where the girl had died was a quarter mile long. It was an impossible landscape to cross quickly. Even if the hunter kept to the shallows and skirted the devastation on the island itself, the shoreline offered its own obstacles. The man with the scoped rifle would not have an easy time returning to his launch.
Cork stroked hard and decided to believe that he had a good chance of making it to Jenny first.
He was three-quarters of the way there when he heard the engines. He didn’t hear them on the air. It was the lake that carried the sound to him when his whole head was submerged. The dull, unmistakable drone of propellers churning water. He didn’t pause for even an instant but kept digging at the lake with his cupped hands, shoving distance behind him. His breath came in gasps, and his lungs were ablaze. His legs were made of hot lead. Yet he drove himself harder.
He felt the wet, velvety touch of lake weed on his chest and, looking up, saw that he was only a dozen yards from shore. He glanced north, just in time to see the cigarette boat swing into the channel. With five more strokes, Cork was ashore and running for cover. The cigarette boat was still a hundred yards out, closing fast.
He didn’t know for sure where Jenny was, but he knew where they’d spent the night, and he made for that tiny clearing. If she wasn’t there, he hoped she would be above it, seeking high ground, which in his own thinking was now the only possibility of an advantage they might have. If the hunter had to come up after them, maybe they could find a way to keep him at bay. It was the thinnest of hopes, but it was something.
* * *
She’d rocked the baby, sung to him, and soothed him until at last his crying had subsided into little hiccups.
“It’s all right, little guy,” she cooed. “Everything’s all right.”
Though it wasn’t.
She lay against the only cover the top of the stone wall offered, a rock that stuck up like a solitary molar three feet above the rest of the formation. She’d heard the cigarette boat enter the channel, and she tried desperately to figure what to do next. She scanned the top of the wall and saw loose stones, fractured by the melt and thaw of countless winters. Reaching out carefully so that she wouldn’t startle the baby, she gathered as many of these stones as she could, piling them into a small arsenal within easy reach.
She whispered, “If he comes, we’ll stone him. If that doesn’t work”—she eyed the precipice a few feet away—“we jump and take our chances. What do you say, little guy?”
She smiled, and to her great surprise, the baby responded with a beautiful, gapped smile of his own.
The powerful engines cut out, and she knew the hunter had landed. It was only a question of time now before he found them. She took deep breaths and tried to prepare herself.
The sound of rocks being dislodged on the slope of the wall below brought her rigid. Too soon, she thought. How could he have found her hiding so quickly? She reached out and took the largest of the stones she’d gathered. She laid the baby down carefully and crouched. The sound was very near now, almost to the top of the wall.
One chance, she thought. I’ll have one chance. Please, God, let me hit my mark.
She heard labored breathing on the far side of the rock that shielded her. She took one final breath, stood, and prepared to fling the stone.
“Dad!” she cried.
“Down,” he said, motioning frantically with his hand. “Get back down.”
Jenny dropped into the shadow of the rock, and her father joined her there. He looked at the baby.
“What happened?” he asked.
“I tried to run and tripped. He went flying. I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right.” He saw the pile of stones she’d prepared. “Good work,” he said.
“They won’t stop him.”
“With only one rock, David stopped Goliath.”
“When did you become such an optimist?” She smiled, then she glanced past him and looked horrified.
“What is it?” He turned where she looked. “Shit,” he said.
There was no way to miss it. A trail of bloody footprints up the rock, leading right to the place where they lay hidden.
“Your poor feet,” Jenny said.
He studied the torn flesh of his soles and shook his head. “I didn’t feel a thing. Adrenaline.” He eyed the bloody prints he’d left. “Well, that’s bound to make it a whole lot easier for our mystery man to find us.”
“Any suggestions what we do now?”
Her father crawled on his belly to where the wall dropped to the lake, thirty feet below. He spent a moment in thought and looked back over his shoulder.
“Think you can swim with that little guy in tow?”
“Yes, but how do we get down there?”
“Not we. You two. Take your T-shirt off and tie the tail in a knot so that you’ve closed up that end. Take the belt off your shorts and slip it through the arms of your T-shirt. Put the baby into the shirt, and loop the belt over your shoulder, with the baby against your side. It’ll be like a knapsack, and it’ll leave your arms free to climb down this wall with the little guy. There are enough handholds that it shouldn’t be that difficult.”
“What about you?”
Her father crawled back and picked up a stone from the pile she’d created. “I’m going to do my best to keep our mystery man occupied.”
“Dad—”
“Do you have a better idea?”
She tried to think, but came up empty.
“All right, then,” he said. “Get that shirt off.”