History of Wolves(26)

The minute the canoe touched water, it moved on its own. Every stroke with the paddle was almost excessive. There wasn’t a ripple on the lake, not a wave. You could see clear to the bottom. You could see bluegill rising, lily pads sinking under the prow. You could see air bubbles winding away in a trail behind the boat. At the far end of the lake, I pulled the canoe ashore, bent down, and rolled it up to my shoulders, my head inside the hull. It took me a second to get the balance right before I set off on the rocky portage.

The next lake over, Mill Lake, was much larger than ours, its shore studded with RVs and pickups at the national forest campground. Speedboats wrecked the surface, leaving behind thirty-foot troughs. They didn’t slow down when they saw me coming. They were in a hurry to get to the next fishing spot, engines gunning, green awnings rippling as they passed. I was surprised to see a woman in a red bikini bumping in an inner tube behind one of them. The water was still pretty cold. She screamed hello to me over the roar of the engine, but I didn’t try to respond. The boat flew by too fast.

I kept paddling. After another half hour, clouds hunkered down over the treetops, and a breeze nicked the lake’s surface, giving it the look of old skin. At that point, all the weekenders headed in, fearing a return of bad weather. They were always confusing clouds with danger, seeing all clouds as interchangeable. They turned the lights on inside their RVs, making two o’clock look like dusk.

I wound my way through the little stream that connected Mill Lake to Lake Winesaga.

From there, Winesaga lay in front of me like an arrow—long and narrow, pointing north. The reservation was on the far end. When I’d been there last, years ago to get muskrat traps with my dad, the reservation had been just a few buildings. It had one paved road and maybe a dozen mobile homes, a pack of roaming Lab mixes. Now, as I drew closer to shore, I saw that all the dogs were behind chain-link fences. There was a Dairy Queen, a parking lot the size of a football field, and a stoplight. The new casino on the highway had done well. I saw a Heritage Center made from prim, narrow logs and a fish-shaped sign that said MINO-O-DAPIN! Welcome.

I beached the canoe and shunted it discreetly under a balsam fir. Then I set off down the asphalt streets, which disintegrated into the front lawns of prefab houses. All of them: white, aluminumsided. All of them: bookended with porches and two-car garages, crowned with satellite dishes, fronted with pickup trucks.

The reservation seemed deserted but for a group of boys who came out of the woods in their bright Sunday school sweaters. They carried Popsicle-stick crosses they were using as guns. “Pow,” said one of them. Another held up his cross and shouted, “Stay back, Leviathan.”

“Hey, you know where the Holburn place is?” I held my ground. “Pete and his kid, Lily.”

By then, she’d already missed four days of class.

“Why should we tell you?” one of the boys—their Leviathan-hunting leader—asked.

“I’ll give you money. I’ll give you a dollar each if you tell me where her house is.”

They paused for a moment. Then they agreed as if by telepathy, barely lifting their shoulders.

“Down that way.” One of them pointed to an overgrown gravel road at the end of the paved street. So I handed over my mother’s bills, flat and warm from two days in my pocket. The moment they were paid the boys turned on me. They held up their crosses and harangued me: “What do you want from Lily the Polak? She’s a wee-wee sucker homo freak. You a homo, too, or something?”

I sighed. I’d fielded this question from boys like these all through grade school. It was often the worst accusation eight-year-olds could muster, and I was amply prepared from years of being taunted on the playground. “A Homo sapiens?” I asked, suggestively.

They shrugged, uncertain.

“I am. Yes.”

“Barf! Gross! Yuck!” they squealed.

They were delighted, though.

I left them gagging themselves with their Popsicle-stick crosses and headed down the road where they’d pointed. I walked for a while through switchgrass and mud before I saw a rustedout trailer in the pines. I didn’t approach Lily’s house from the front. I went around back, where the grass was unmowed and woods encroached. Fir and more fir. But there was a swept concrete patio under a faded blue awning, and when I looked in the back window, I could see dishes stacked neatly in the drainer. I could see a Formica table with the chairs pushed in, a lit fish tank whirling with bubbles. It was an old trailer, but tidy and aspirational, with a new carpet sample on the floor and a crocheted blanket over the tiny bench couch. I saw the pink scarf Lily stole from the lost and found—tassels trembling in a draft—on a hook by the door. As I watched it move in the breeze, I realized the hook was in fact a horn, centered on a mounted deer head.

The thing had its wide mouth closed, its white nostrils flaring.

From behind me a man’s voice said, “Lily?”

I turned. Someone lay in a lawn chair in the shade under a far fir. “Lil, you back?”

It was Mr. Holburn, and as I watched, he took a deep breath and pushed himself up straighter in the frayed nylon chaise. I tried to think of something to explain myself—I’d been picking early Juneberries, I’d lost my way—but then I saw the tallboy in his hand, the pile of empties overturned in the moss. It was Sunday afternoon, Memorial Day weekend, so it probably didn’t matter what I said. He wouldn’t remember once I left.