Didn’t see it coming, did you, dummy?
She’d left two weeks ago and took their three-year-old daughter, Kit, off to army day care somewhere in Europe.
She said he could come along and take care of Kit. He said she could quit the army and stay home. So it stuck there between them. Their daughter watched nervously as Mom and Dad agreed to take an informal time-out, removing their rings and storing them in the top drawer of the bedroom dresser.
His reaction to the standoff was to exile himself from people he knew and retreat into the North woods. He’d purge himself with fresh air and hard work. Specifically, Broker volunteered to close down his uncle Billie’s outfitting lodge at the end of the canoeing season.
And now, as he greeted the ice-water dawn, the subject was still fragile as glass. Carefully, he held it by the stem and tucked it away.
So.
Uncle Billie and his golf clubs had hopped a Northwest Airlines flight to Broker’s parents’ condo in Arizona. Broker had hung a closed sign across the driveway of the small resort he owned in Devil’s Rock, north of Grand Marais, on the Lake Superior shore. Then he’d driven down Highway 61 to Illgen City, turned on Highway 1 northwest to Ely, in the Minnesota Iron Range. Arriving at Billie’s Lodge, he found a list of instructions next to the telephone. The canoe trip was at the top.
Broker had looked over the permits and perused the clients’ backgrounds. He’d be playing wilderness guide to Milton Dane, a lawyer; Allen Falken, a surgeon; and Hank Sommer, who called himself a writer. All three were from the Twin Cities area.
Broker told himself guiding was no big thing, that he’d done it lots of times.
But that was more than twenty years ago.
In the intervening time the canoes had been upgraded from aluminum to lighter Kevlar and fiberglass. The freeze-dried food and camping gear were much improved. But otherwise, the drill was the same. He studied the itinerary, selected the proper maps, and packed for a party of four, going in by canoe to shoot a moose among the lakes of the Boundary Water’s Canoe Area, BWCA for short.
And now it was the third morning of the trip.
Broker blew on his chilled hands and rubbed them together. He’d gone to bed breathing in damp lake water, lichen, and pine needles moldering on granite bedrock. A mild rain had tapped on the tent walls and eased him off to sleep. Now a loud winter silence replaced the patter of raindrops and his breath clouded in the chill air.
Hank Sommer bumped him as he rolled over in the narrow tent and snored. He lay on his back, half out of his sleeping bag, with his mouth open. He had buckteeth and a receding chin disguised under a short, unruly beard. When Broker reached over and jabbed him in the ribs, Sommer rearranged himself and stopped snoring. His cell phone, which had caused so much debate on the trip, was nestled next to his cheek.
It became clear from the start that Broker had been hired to carry the load for Sommer and to paddle his canoe. “Sorry, I’ve got this little medical condition,” Sommer had admitted at the start.
“What medical condition?” Broker had asked directly, since it could affect their travel.
“This, ah, little hernia thing,” Sommer had said, patting his side. So every portage on the way in, Broker had humped the boat and went back twice to haul all the packs while Sommer eased along with just his rifle case and a small shoulder bag.
Allen Falken, the doctor, appeared none too pleased that Sommer had put off elective surgery to go on this trip. But, Allen conceded, it was a routine inguinal hernia, a painless minor bulge. For half the century, men just wore trusses. It should be all right as long as Sommer took it easy.
“How easy?”
“He shouldn’t lift over forty pounds.”
“So if you get a moose, Sommer will take the picture and I’ll carry the meat.”
“Something like that,” Allen had said.
It meant that Sommer was the weak link, so Broker wanted him in his canoe in case anything went wrong. Besides, he was curious. Sommer was a Minnesota fiction writer and Broker-strictly a non-fiction guy-had the feeling he should have heard of him. But he hadn’t. He figured Sommer wanted to shoot a moose so he could write about it.
Broker was doing some hunting himself, but not for a trophy moose. Running from his marriage, he spent the days scouting the treelines and lakes half hoping to catch a younger, more resilient reflection of himself.
And he wasn’t alone. By day three it was clear that marital discord paddled with them as Sommer conducted a nasty long-distance feud with his wife on his cell phone.
As they canoed deeper into lake country, Broker overheard enough of the terse conversations to gather that Sommer and his wife were fighting over money.
Onward.
Right now Broker needed a fire and a pot of coffee, so he shivered into trousers, a fleece sweater, and a pair of old tennis shoes. Carrying his stiff boots, he unzipped the tent and hunkered outside.
Well, he’d wanted the rain to stop.
And nothing stops water like ice.
The campsite, and probably all 140,000 square miles of the BWCA, wore bridal white. Brocade, lace, floss, and fluff-the tents, the gear, the hulls of the two canoes, every pine needle, clump of moss, and boulder were gilded with frost.
He watched his breath condense, then tatter off gently in the still air; he estimated the temperature at 34 degrees. He was not distracted by the beautiful fantasy spun in the trees. They were still twenty miles from Ely traveling on water cold enough to kill them.
But Broker had to grin. Even with hypothermia as a risk, Sommer’s cell phone became an issue with his buddies because it violated the first rule of the wilderness, which was: You are on your own. Allen and Milt wanted a clean break with the hyperconnected world they’d left behind. Sommer wasn’t impressed by such purist conceits. Older, crusty, he’d pointed out that he’d once spent a year sleeping on the ground, and he’d muttered a few profane references to the 101st Airborne and 1969 and a place Allen and Milt had never heard of called the Ashau Valley, and he would bring his goddamn cell phone, thank you very much.
So.
Broker toed a hoary clump of grass. Maybe the sun would come out and melt this fairyland. And maybe it wouldn’t. If this cold snap continued they’d have to be careful.
He stirred the banked coals in the fire pit, added tinder, and built up the fire. Then he placed his boots near the flame to thaw. He walked a hundred yards into the brush to where he’d hoisted the food packs on the branch of a tall spruce beyond the reach of prowling black bears. He carried the packs back to the campfire and set out utensils and ingredients for breakfast.
You could still drink from the lakes along the Canadian border, so he took the coffeepot to the shore, poked through a wafer of shore ice, and filled it. Then he scooped up a handful and brushed his teeth. A few minutes later he had a blue flame hissing on the small Coleman camp stove.
He stretched, rotated his neck, and gauged the stiffness in his back and shoulders from two days of paddling and portaging. Starting to show streaks of gray in his forty-seventh autumn, Broker still looked like he could knock a man down or pick a man up, and like he wouldn’t talk about it either way. His dark, bushy eyebrows met over the bridge of his nose, his eyes were quiet gray-green, and he wore his thick, dark hair trimmed just over his ears. At six feet tall and 190, he was ten pounds over his best weight. A few more days on the trail would pound down the kinks and trim off the flab. But he had to admit, as he scanned the white solitude, that he was starting to feel his age. For the last two years his chief workout had been chasing his daughter around.