The Marsh King's Daughter, page 8
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-mâché. 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.
It’s a hundred miles from the Marquette Branch Prison to the Luce County courthouse where my father was arraigned, so they logged a lot of driving time. Psychopaths like my father can be very charismatic. I imagine him chatting with the guards, figuring out what interested them, engaging them little by little. Just like he tricked my mother into trusting him by telling her he was looking for his dog. Just like he played on my interests when I was a child to turn me against my mother so subtly and thoroughly, it took years of therapy for me to accept the idea that she cared.
I don’t know how he got the knife out of his cell and into the prison van. He could have hidden it in the seam of his jumpsuit up high near his groin where the officers would be less likely to pat him down. Or he could have concealed it in the spine of a book. This is where a smaller knife would have been considerably more practical. But one thing people have to understand about my father is that he never does anything halfway. Another thing they have to understand is that he’s a patient man. I’m sure he let any number of escape opportunities go by until all of the conditions were right. Maybe one day the weather was bad, or the guards were unusually grouchy or unusually attentive, or the knife wasn’t quite finished to his satisfaction. It’s not like he was in a hurry.
Yesterday, the stars aligned. My father successfully smuggled the knife out of his cell and hid it in the crack of the seat in the back of the prison van. He waited until the return trip to make his move because the guards would be tired from a long day on the road and because it would be harder for searchers to follow if he escaped shortly before sundown. Also because they’d be traveling due west on the way back, and everyone knows how distracting it can be to drive straight into a sunset.
My father slouched in the backseat while he pretended to doze. He knew the route well enough to follow it with his eyes closed, but my father never leaves anything to chance, and so every couple of minutes he cracked open an eye to track their progress. They passed the turnoff to Engadine, drove past Four Corners and up a hill and through the tiny town of McMillan, past a handful of houses and the old McGinnis farm and down the hill to King’s Creek. Up another hill and past the abandoned pottery studio and cabin built by a hippie couple in the 1970s, past the Danaher Road, down one more small hill and up another and then down to the marshy area west of the Fox River Bridge at last. Seeing the marshland made my father’s pulse race, but he was careful to hide it.
They drove through Seney without stopping. Maybe the driver asked the other guard if he needed the bathroom; maybe he kept going assuming his partner would speak up if he did. My father wasn’t granted that luxury. This time he didn’t care. He shifted in the backseat, slid forward ever so slightly, faked a snore to cover his movement. He reached into the crack of the seat and slid the knife from its hiding place. Cupped it between his handcuffed hands with the blade pointing toward him so he could strike from above, and slid forward even farther.
Ten miles west of Seney, right after they passed the Driggs River Road that parallels the river and leads into the heart of the wildlife refuge, my father lunged forward. Possibly he roared like an attacking soldier, possibly he was quiet as an assassin. Either way, he plunged the knife into the passenger guard’s chest, driving the blade deep into his flesh and penetrating the right ventricle and cutting the septum so the guard died not from blood loss but from the blood pooling around his heart, compressing it and causing it to stop.
The guard was too surprised to yell, and by the time he realized he was dying, my father had grabbed his gun and shot the driver. The van veered into the ditch, and that was that. My father confirmed both guards were dead, patted them down for the handcuff key, climbed into the front seat, and clambered out. He looked up and down the highway to be sure there were no witnesses before he stepped out of the cover of the van and headed directly south, trampling the stretch of grass between the road and the trees so the searchers would know which way he was heading.
After a mile or so, he waded into the Driggs River. He walked down the river a short distance and came out again on the same side because the river was too deep to cross without swimming, and because he didn’t want to make it too hard for the searchers to follow until he convinced them the wildlife refuge was his destination. He left a bent fern here, a broken branch there, a partial footprint, laying down a trail that was just challenging enough for the searchers to think they were smarter than he was and they’d catch up to him before nightfall. Then at the moment of his choosing, he evaporated into the marsh like the morning mist and disappeared.
That’s how I figure he did it. Or at least, that’s how I would have done it.
—
WE’RE A MILE from the first cabin I want to check when Rambo whines in the particular way he has that tells me he needs to be let out. I don’t want to stop, but when he starts digging at the armrest and turning circles on the seat I have to pull over. I’ve noticed lately that when he has to go, he really has to go. I don’t know if his problem is age or a lack of exercise. Plotts live between twelve and sixteen years, so at eight, he’s getting up there.
I reach inside the glove box and stick the Magnum in the front of my jeans. As soon as I open the passenger door, Rambo is through it like a shot. I walk the edges of the road more slowly, looking for signs that a person has been through. Nothing as obvious as a piece of orange cloth stuck to a branch. More along the lines of a footprint from a laceless tennis shoe. My father used to tell my mother and me that if anyone ever showed up unexpectedly on our ridge, we should wade out into the marsh grass and roll around in the muck and stay still until he told us it was safe to come back. I’m sure by now my father’s prison jumpsuit is similarly camouflaged.
Judging by the lack of trees and the density of the underbrush along the road, I’d say it’s been ten years since this area was clear-cut. The only things growing now are blueberries and tag alders. The brush piles the loggers left behind along with the ready food source make this prime bear country. No doubt Rambo thinks this is why we’ve come.
I cross the road and walk back along the other side. My father taught me to track when I was little. He’d lay out a trail for me while I was off playing or exploring, and then it would be up to me to find it and follow it while my father walked beside me and showed me all the signs I’d missed. Other times we’d walk wherever our feet took us and he’d point out interesting things as we went along. Drifts of scat. A red squirrel’s distinctive tracks. The entrance to a wood rat’s den littered with feathers and owl pellets. My father would point to a pile of droppings and ask, “Opossum or porcupine?” It’s not easy to tell the difference.
Eventually I realized that tracking is like reading. The signs are words. Connect them into sentences and they tell a story about an incident in the life of the animal that passed through. For example, I might come upon a depression where a deer has bedded down. It might be on a little island sticking up out of the marsh or similar high ground so the deer can keep an eye on his surroundings. The first thing I do is look at how worn the depression is, and that tells me how much the bed is used. If the bed is worn all the way to the dirt, it’s a primary bed, which means the deer is most likely coming back. Next I look at the direction the bed is facing. Most of the time a buck will bed down with the wind to his back. Knowing what wind the buck is using with that particular bed lets me pick a day when that particular wind is blowing so I can come back and shoot it. Stories like that.
Sometimes my father would pretend to be the prey. He’d sneak away from the cabin while I waited blindfolded in the kitchen in a chair facing away from the window so I wouldn’t be tempted to peek. After I counted to one thousand, my mother would take off my blindfold and I’d take up the chase. With all of the footsteps crisscrossing the sand outside our back door, it wasn’t easy figuring out which ones were his. I’d crouch on my heels on the bottom step and study all of the prints carefully until I was sure which were the most recent, because if I started down the wrong trail, I’d never find him, and depending on how far he’d walked and how long he had to stay hidden and what kind of mood he was in that day, that could lead to more contemplation time in the well than I cared to spend.
Occasionally my father would jump off the porch into a pile of leaves or onto a rock to make the game more challenging. Sometimes he’d take off his shoes and tiptoe away in his socks or his bare feet. Once he tricked me by wearing a pair of shoes that belonged to my mother. We both had a good laugh about that. Since I left the marsh, I’ve noticed a lot of parents let their children beat them at games in order to build their children’s self-esteem. My father never made it easy for me to track him, and I wouldn’t have wanted him to. How else was I going to learn? As for my self-esteem, the times I was able to hunt down and kill my father kept me grinning for days. I didn’t really kill him, of course, but depending on where he was hiding, the game always ended with a bullet shot into the ground near his feet or into a tree trunk or a branch next to his head. After I won three times in a row, my father stopped playing. Much later my teacher read to the class a short story called “The Most Dangerous Game,” and it sounded a lot like the one my father and I used to play. I wondered if that was where he got the idea. I wanted to tell the class I knew what it was like to be both hunter and hunted, but by then I’d learned that the less I said about my life in the marsh, the better.
—
A COP CAR IS PARKED at the side of the road. Or more accurately, an Alger County Sheriff’s patrol car, one of the new ones they featured recently on the news: white with a black stripe and a black and orange logo on the side, push bars in front, light bar on top. A car so pristine and shiny, it looks like this is the first time it’s been taken out.
I slow. There are two ways I can play this. I can drive past like I have no idea why a cop car might be sitting at the side of the road in the middle of nowhere. Let the officer flag me down, then let the fishing gear in the back of my truck do the talking. Maybe the officer will recognize my name and make the connection to my father when he checks my plates and ID. Maybe not. Either way, the worst the officer can do is send me packing with a warning to go home and stay safe.
Or I can tell the officer I cut my fishing trip short and am on my way home because I heard about the escaped prisoner on the news. Option number two gives me a chance to ask how the search is going, which could be useful. Or perhaps I can keep the officer talking long enough to pick up some helpful police radio chatter.
Then I realize both options are moot. The patrol car is empty.
I pull over and stop. Except for an occasional burst of static from the car’s radio, the woods are quiet. I take the Ruger from the rack over the window and the Magnum from the glove box. Scan the area for movement, then squat on my heels to study the prints in the road. One set. Male, judging by the shoe size. One seventy-five to two hundred pounds, judging by the depth. Proceeding with extreme caution, judging by the spacing.
I follow the prints to where they disappear into the vegetation at the side of the road. Broken ferns and crushed grasses tell me the officer was running. I study the trail he made for a long time and decide that the officer was running toward something he thought warranted investigation, not away.
I sling the Ruger over my shoulder and hold the Magnum with both hands in front of me. My footsteps are virtually silent, thanks to the moccasins I wear when I’m in the bush. Thanks to my father’s training.
The trail leads through a stand of mixed birch and aspen to the top of a steep ravine. I walk to the edge and look down. At the bottom of the ravine is a body.
10
THE CABIN
Soon it became clear to the Viking’s wife how matters stood with the child; it was under the influence of a powerful sorcerer. By day it was charming in appearance as an angel of light, but with a temper wicked and wild; while at night, in the form of an ugly frog, it was quiet and mournful, with eyes full of sorrow.
