The Marsh King's Daughter(23)



But Gitche Manitou tested my patience, as the gods sometimes do. The first two snares we came to were empty. In the third, the rabbit was already dead. My father slipped the noose from the rabbit’s neck, reset the snare, and dropped the stiffened rabbit in his sack. He pointed toward the darkening sky. “What do you think, Helena? Shall we keep going, or turn back?”

By now the Evening Star had been joined by many others. It was cold and getting colder, and the wind was blowing like it was going to snow. My cheeks ached and my teeth chattered and my eyes watered and I couldn’t feel my nose. “Keep going.”

My father turned without a word and continued down the trail. I stumbled after him. My overalls were wet and stiff and I couldn’t feel my feet. But when we came to the next snare, I forgot all about my frozen toes. This rabbit was alive.

“Quickly.” My father pulled off his gloves and blew on his hands to warm them.

Sometimes when a rabbit was caught in a snare by its hind leg as this one was, my father picked it up and swung its head against a tree. Other times, he slit its throat. I knelt in the snow. The rabbit was limp from fear and cold, but it was definitely breathing. I slid my knife from its sheath. “Thank you,” I whispered to the sky and the stars, and drew my blade swiftly across the rabbit’s neck.

Blood spurted from the wound, sprayed my mouth, my face, my hands, my coat. I yelped and scrambled to my feet. I knew right away what I did wrong. In my eagerness to make my first kill, I had forgotten to stay to the side. I scooped up a handful of snow and rubbed it over the front of my jacket and laughed.

My father laughed with me. “Leave it. Your mother will take care of it when we get back.”

He knelt beside the rabbit and dipped two fingers in its blood. Gently, he pulled me toward him. “Manajiwin,” he said. “Respect.” He lifted my chin and drew his fingers across each cheek.

He started down the trail. I picked up my rabbit and slung it over my shoulder and followed him back to the cabin. My skin crinkled as the wind dried my stripes. I grinned. I was a hunter. A warrior. A person worthy of respect and honor. A wilderness man like my father.

My mother wanted to wash my face as soon as she saw me, but my father wouldn’t let her. She roasted my rabbit for dinner after she cleaned the blood from my coat and served it with a side of boiled arrowroot tubers and a salad of fresh dandelion greens that we forced in wooden boxes in our root cellar. It was the best meal I’d ever eaten.

Years later the state sold my father’s extensive knife collection to help pay for his court costs. But I still have mine.





9





The knife my father gave me on my fifth birthday is a cold-steel Natchez Bowie that currently retails for close to seven hundred dollars. It’s the perfect fighting knife, flawlessly balanced and perfectly shaped for strength, reach, and leverage, with a razor-sharp edge that cuts like a machete and pierces like a dagger.

The knife he used to escape from prison was made of toilet paper. I was surprised when I heard it. Given his proclivity and his expertise, I would have thought he’d opt for a metal knife. He certainly had the time to make one. I think he decided to go with toilet paper because he could appreciate the irony of crafting a deadly weapon from innocent materials. Prison inmates can be incredibly creative when it comes to making shivs—sharpening plastic spoons and broken-off toothbrushes against the cement walls or floors of their cells and studding them with disposable razor blades, sawing metal knives from steel bed frames over the course of many months using dental floss. But I had no idea that you could kill a person with toilet paper.

On YouTube, there’s a video that shows how to make one. First, you roll the paper tightly into a cone shape, using toothpaste as a binding agent similar to the glue in papier-maché. Then you mold your shiv until it’s just the way you want it, building up layers of toilet paper on one end and squeezing for a custom-fit grip. Once you’re satisfied with the result, you let your shiv dry and harden, sharpen it in the usual way, and you have a lethal weapon. Plus, it’s biodegradable. Drop it in a toilet when you’re done with it, and after it softens, you can flush it away.

My father left his at the crime scene. The knife had accomplished its purpose, and it’s not as though he needed to create a scenario of plausible deniability. According to the news reports, my father’s shiv has a six-inch double-sided blade with a hilt and a handle colored brown by I don’t want to know what. That part doesn’t surprise me. Bowies always were one of his favorites.

Aside from the details the police released yesterday about the knife, all that’s known for sure is that two guards are dead, one stabbed and the other shot, and my father and both guards’ weapons are missing. There are no witnesses. Either no one saw the prison transport van crash into a ditch in the middle of the Seney Stretch or no one is willing to own up to having seen anything as long as my father is out and about.

Knowing my father as I do, I can fill in the gaps. No doubt he’s been planning his escape for a long time. Possibly years, the same way he planned my mother’s abduction. One of the first things he would have done was to establish himself as a model prisoner so he could get on good terms with the guards who drove him between the prison and his court appointments. Most prison escapes involve at least some element of human error—the guards don’t bother to double lock the prisoner’s handcuffs because they don’t see the prisoner as a threat, or a handcuff key hidden in the prisoner’s body or clothes is missed during a search for the same reason. Prisoners who are known as troublemakers call for extra security measures, so my father would have made sure he wasn’t one of them.

Karen Dionne's Books