Even as the hours of daylight lengthened in the first week of February, that winter persisted. Thea fed the dogs those days. Each morning and again each evening, after the jacks took their breakfast and supper, she would haul two wooden pails from the mess. Often as not they were brimming with bread crusts and beans, fatback and milk, but the hounds did not seem to miss their fish. They ate with zeal. By the time she crossed the paddock to drop food for the dog staked under the ridge, the bitch had always finished her slop and would be sitting queenlike in the snow. Thea thought their demeanor was suspect and restful, as though their greater, graver purpose required stores of energy and emotion better not wasted.
The sled drivers had taken to carrying rifles in the woods, but each night for a week they returned to camp without game. In the early days of winter, it would not have been uncommon for the teamsters to see a hundred caribou during the hauling hours, so their sudden and complete absence was yet another harbinger of doom: That winter had become its own disease, the woodland creatures had vanished in the sickness.
Even in their mounting despair the jacks still toiled. Each day sled upon sled descended the ice road and pulled into the mill in Gunflint, where the millworkers unloaded the cut. On February twelfth one of the great horses was killed on the ice road, crushed by a careening load of timber. In the same mishap a teamster lost a hand. Soon after one of the crews had a man beheaded on the northern parcel and two days later one of the sawyers passed through camp minus a leg. These were known hazards, though, and the general comportment of the men in the shadows of such calamities was not much changed.
For her part, Thea steadied during those weeks. She became a dynamo in the kitchen, in charge by then of the suppers as well as the baking. Her favorite job was of course feeding the dogs, those two chances each day to stretch her legs and breathe fresh air. Cold as it was. The dogs greeted her and the pails of food and the three of them formed a sort of congregation of lonesome souls.
In the two weeks since the Ovcharkas had arrived there had been no wolf song. Groups of men visited the dogs each night after supper, offering busted ax handles in lieu of rawhide, bringing in their pockets crusts of bread and hunks of meat to reward the dogs. The jacks, after paying the dogs, would stand against the paddock fence smoking their pipes or cigars, offering woodsmen’s philosophies on the nature of such beasts, on the likeliest source of their lineage. One of the men went so far as to offer the great bears of the Yukon as the most likely origin of the breed. None of the others gathered that evening — though preternaturally inclined to ribbing and chiding — would even dispute the possibility. If that winter would not relent, if the men suffered their frozen flesh and injured limbs, if they were reminded daily of the perils of their labor, they were at least more calm in their few hours of leisure each evening, and certainly more comfortable in their slumber.
On the first morning of the third week more snow came. After breakfast Thea hauled her buckets to the horse barn. She dropped the first before the bitch, hammered her water free of ice with a hatchet, then followed the fence line around the paddock to the kennel of the dog. She had named the dog Lodden for his long strands of wiry black hair, and each morning now she would call his name as she crossed the paddock. As she approached his kennel, calling him, she saw that a wide swath of snow trailed away from his roost. She saw also the frozen earth cratered around the spot his stake should have been, saw his leather collar and the length of chain tangled atop the packed snow. She hollered his name into the wilderness, dropped the pail at the opening of his kennel, and hurried back toward the mess.
She was almost jogging as she headed on to the camp office. As she entered, a young man she recognized from the chow line peered over his glasses and onto an open ledger. He looked, no doubt surprised to see her. Before he could greet her she said, “Lodden, Lodden. Hund! Hund! “He came from behind the counter and went straight to the door. He opened it, a whirl of snow came in at his boots. “The dog?” he said. “The new dog? What?” He stepped back in, closed the door. While he donned his coat and hat he asked again, “Did something happen to the dogs? Is that what you’re saying?”
He flew out the door and was gone in the snow before he reached the paddock fence.
Within an hour what few men remained in camp were scattering into the passel of white pine. The bull cook, the brothers Meltmen, the clerk, they all set out into the wilderness, calling for the dog. By the time the jacks returned from their parcels, word of the missing dog had already spread. Whispers above the evening’s stew ranged over the possibilities.
One of the men said, “That weren’t a godly beast. Likely he’s in the Devil’s Maw, making fast with Beelzebub.”
When the searchers returned with lanterns aglow and no word on the hound, the rest of the camp retired with a new set of misgivings.
But sunup found the dog back in camp, blood staining his muzzle and the snow outside his kennel. Only the hide and bones of a caribou fawn remained. The same scene played at the bitch’s stake, for the dog must have rent the fawn and left the hindquarters for his sister. The Ovcharkas found a new and holier place in the minds of the men. Lodden was left to his duties without the hindrance of stake or chain. For the rest of the cold spell he roamed the camp’s perimeter with a beautiful arrogance.
For three weeks during February the temperature still had not climbed above zero, two feet of snow had fallen, the horses had grown coats like bears, but still the camp trundled on. Hosea visited camp often. His leather satchel over his shoulder. He set up a makeshift examining room in the wanigan. Several men had frostbitten fingers or toes or both amputated. Others had black scabs of dead flesh removed from their upper cheeks. Two men had even died by way of the cold; the first of hypothermia, the other of a heart failure way up the northern parcel. Their deaths inspired more dread than sadness, as most of the men knew the calendar well enough to note how much more winter was in the offing.
There were nights during that interminable stretch when the woods above Gunflint on up to Canada were the coldest place on earth. One such dawn broke minus fifty-two degrees. So it was properly strange when Thea woke on the last morning of February to the sound of dripping water. She kicked her eiderdown away and lit a candle in the kitchen. She stoked the scullery fire. Before commencing her morning chores she poked her head out the mess-hall door. For the first time since the ides of January she could smell the horseshit under the snow. During the night a fog had risen, fey and reeking.
In the root cellar Thea collected the morning’s fare: the oats, the buttermilk, the bacon. There were bushels of sprouted potatoes and overripe onions and twenty pumpkins ready to be made into pie. She gathered fifty pounds of potatoes and five pounds of oleo. She had baked the bread the night before, and she removed twenty loaves from the wooden breadbox. She thought if the men were anything like herself, the warm weather on the heels of such cold would induce their greatest appetites.
Indeed, when the men arrived after reveille, they found their seats quickly and ate with gusto. Each was served a rasher of bacon, four slices of bread and oleo, boiled and salted potatoes, a heap of steaming oats, and coffee to wash it down. Fifteen minutes after taking their places at the tables they rose and marched out of the mess hall, their mittens and hats in their hands, their coats and shirt collars unbuttoned. Under a dull sun they climbed aboard the empty hauling sleds and lit their pipes or cigars. Thea went to the door and watched as the horses pulled onto the ice road. She could see the runners plowing through the soft snow. Lodden followed the sleigh to the first bend before reversing his enormous stride and backing toward camp.
She had only finished her tea when the supply sleigh arrived, hauled by two horses worse for the season. The same company that owned the mill owned the timber and two camps — the Burnt Wood River Camp and another in the Cloquet Valley — and the sleigh ran a regular loop between the two, stopping at the commissary in Duluth to reload with each pass. Twice each week the same drivers dropped the stores, both the usual fare and, on Fridays, what passed for Sunday dinner. Oftenest this was herring but on that day it was one hundred pounds of pork chops, a cask of fresh apples, and three gunnysacks of butter nut squash. Thea pinched two of the apples while the brothers Meltmen unloaded the sleigh.
While they worked, Thea took the apples from her apron pocket and fed one to each of the horses.
She was paring the squash on a bench outside the mess hall, the warm sun still hazy above the clouds, when she saw Joshua Smith steer his fine hickory sleigh around the last bend on the ice road. He sat on a seat of crushed purple velvet and wore a mink coat and beaver skin hat. His boots were Anishinabe-style moccasins, covered in beadwork and quills and lined with sheep’s wool. His mittens hung from the cuffs of his sleeves.
“Good afternoon,” he said, then pulled his watch from its pocket and corrected himself. “I should say good morning. Is Trond about?”
Thea understood he was asking for the foreman and shrugged to suggest she did not know.
“Have you got coffee in there?” He pointed at the mess-hall door.
She understood this query, too, and nodded and hurried in. At the stove Thea poured coffee and offered him a cup.
“I thank you,” he said and took a long drink.
She noticed that one of his front teeth was dead.
“I’ve heard rumors of women working the Burnt Wood Camp.” He took another drink. “But I didn’t believe it.” He looked at her directly, his dead tooth dividing an impish smile. “A man could sure use a bowl of that stew boiling up yonder.”
Thea looked down.
He smiled his dead-tooth smile. He said, “You’ve got a thing for quiet, eh? Where are you from, darling?” He cocked his head as if to take stock. “Those cheeks and blond locks, I suppose you ain’t from Africa.” He laughed at his joke. “Norway,” he ventured, “Norge?”
Her eyes widened and she replied in Norwegian, “I am from Norway.” And then, recalling her English lesson upon leaving Hammerfest, she continued in English, “I am new in America.”
To her surprise and relief he responded in Norwegian, introducing himself as the watch salesman Joshua Smith, down from Duluth. He informed her that Trond expected him and repeated his request for a bowl of stew. She moved slowly to the pot on the stove and fetched the stew, deciding as she crossed the hall that despite his dead tooth, Smith was handsome in a way none of the jacks was. His handlebar mustache exaggerated a rakish smile and those eyes of his were wide and devilish enough to cast spells.
He ate standing, loosening the buttons on his shirt. She was used to the jacks and their absence of manners and Smith cut a marked contrast. He dabbed the corners of his mouth with a handkerchief after each bite, there was no slurping, no licking the bowl once the meat and vegetables were eaten. He did not belch when he set the bowl on the tabletop. Without asking, he took a tin cup and went to the cistern and dipped a cup of water. When he finished drinking he used the ladle hanging from the lip and dipped himself another. With every movement he became more at ease in the room.
When he said, “The cold will be coming right back,” again in Norwegian, Thea could not help herself and asked, “How do you know?”
Smith replied, “The winds are already bringing it.”
After dinner he set out his wares: watches and knives and small canisters of curatives and powders. He offered cigars, advertised as finer than the rolled-up dogshit they were peddling in the wanigan, and pipe tobacco imported from Zanzibar. He laid out boxes of chocolates and horehounds. When the jacks leaned in and whispered about hooch, he pulled his coat aside to show pockets with hidden half pints. He passed the bottles with a magician’s sleight of hand, recouping quarters and dollars with equal cleverness. Standing behind a table in the mess hall, a green felt cloth covering the pine boards, sporting a suit of worsted wool and having traded his beaver-skin hat for a black stovepipe, his mustache styled with bear-fat pomade, his pince-nez magnifying his huge brown eyes, he looked like he could have sold a whip to an ox.
Clearly the jacks were in a buying mood, and Smith did a steady business. Even as he haggled in four different languages, even as he extolled the virtues of his fine Spanish blades and Swiss timepieces and pocketed the loggers’ earnings, Smith managed to keep an eye on Thea. In her own way Thea made a sly study of Smith, too.
After Trond bought the last pocket watch, after Smith loaded his unsold goods back into his haversacks, after the jacks adjourned to the bunkhouse, Smith and the foreman and the bull cook and a pair of company men up for the weekend dealt their first game of seven-card stud. They uncorked a bottle of Canadian rye and passed it around the table
Abigail Sterle’s croup had worsened, so after supper the Meltmen brothers brought her to Hosea Grimm’s for care. Thea worked all through the evening hours, doing the job of four herself.
Thea’s hands were wet to the wrist in beaten eggs when she drenched the last of a hundred pork chops in the wash and rolled them in cornmeal. She could hear the Saturday-night accordion and merrymaking from the bunkhouse. The poker game was winding down. Smith’s back was to her, but every other hand he’d turn and leer. A second bottle was being passed around, and a cloud of cigar smoke hung over the table.
Thea wedged the last pair of pork chops onto the baking sheet — the sixth sheet, each of them loaded — and wiped her hands on her apron. As she did, the card game concluded and the players donned their coats and hats. Smith, his mustache losing its shape, gave her a last drunken grin as the men filed out. She stored the pork chops and stood alone in the mess hall. Exhausted, she thought about retiring for the night but then thought better of it and decided to make the next day’s pies. So she boiled water for tea and kept working.
She had already spread the dough and lined the pie tins and mixed the apples and brown sugar and cinnamon when she stepped outside for a breath of fresh air an hour later. The snow had stopped and a full, bright moon hung on the edge of the sky. The bunkhouse had grown quiet but for a few last revelers skylarking outside the door. Smith was right, that hell of cold had blown back in. She hugged herself and turned to go in for the night when she saw a strange sight.
One of the draft horses was being led into the middle of the paddock, snorting plumes of cloudy breath into the night. The handler was nearly invisible in the shadow of the horse, but it was not the barn boss, she knew, for the man pulling the bridle stood at the horse’s shoulder and the barn boss was no more than five and a half feet tall. When the man and horse reached the trough, the handler turned to leave, but only after hobbling the horse. Satisfied, the man loped back to the barn.
Thea noted what she had seen but thought little more of it until an hour later, when the horse began to scream.
No longer filtered by the cold and dark, the wolves’ howls came over the ridge, near and frightening, as though each element of that night — the coldness and darkness and stillness, the moon’s bright luster — had its own voice in the discordant choir of the pack. In camp, the jacks stirred. Some came outside for a smoke or to stare up at the sound as though it could be seen. Thea had been readying herself for bed but lit another lantern in the kitchen when she heard the wolves.
They wailed for what seemed an hour. The jacks returned to their bunks and a silence spilled over the night, eerier in its way than the close song of the pack. It was in that interval of calm that the wolves emerged from the ridgetop pines. The dog, Lodden, greeted the pack even as he retreated to the horse hobbled in the paddock, his hackles and slaver evidence of an outrage a thousand years in the breeding. Lodden moved silently, though, even as the draft horse screamed and snorted and finally collapsed onto the trampled snow.
Though terrified, Thea could not help but be drawn to the commotion. Against her instincts and better judgment, she hurried to the door of the mess hall with a lantern. As she shouldered the door open, the watch salesman Smith met her. In Norwegian he said, “The wolves have come.”
He still smelled of hooch even in all that cold and in that first moment of recognition she was actually happy to see him. She felt her spirits rise. But then he took the lantern from her hand and made a great show of extinguishing the light. He set the lantern on the floor and approached her as if inviting her to dance, took her hard by the wrist and ushered her into the kitchen. He pushed her onto the kitchen table, piecrusts scattering, the horrible screaming horse and growling dogs in the paddock a befitting accompaniment to his meanness.
She tried to kick him as he came toward her, but he grabbed her boot and twisted it off. She opened her eyes and saw his limp face and fierce eyes and that dead tooth. Then she closed her eyes and felt Smith’s hot breath on her neck.
Now there were men yelling in the bunkhouse and barn. The barn boss had set free the bitch and the Ovcharkas circled the horse as eight wolves whirled about the paddock. They moved to their own ancient choreography, their red eyes in the darkness, their thick pelts shimmering like tinsel under the moon. They were silent, but the dogs understood their intentions. Lodden charged a closing wolf, swatted it with his massive forepaw, and bit with two-inch fangs and the wolf wheeled and growled and circled back into the ranks. In the barn, rifles were loaded with shivering hands.
And in the mess hall Thea could not breathe under the drunkard, who held her neck with one hand while he pulled up her skirts with the other. She wanted to cry out but could not, neither for his hand around her neck nor her great confusion. He pressed his hips against her and removed his hand from her neck. As if she had just come up from underwater, she took a gulping breath. But then he ripped her stockings off and she was drowning again.
A desperate yelp came from the night. Lodden chased one of the wolves to the edge of the paddock and broke its hind leg as it attempted to jump the fence. The other wolves continued to circle. At the fence, Lodden set his jaws into the ruff of the injured wolf and sawed into its veins until the blood poured onto the snow. The dog lifted the dead wolf as if it were a pup of his own and carried it across the paddock and tossed it at a trio of its packmates. A warning and boast both. The next wolf Lodden had in his fangs merely rolled over. The dog eviscerated the wolf’s pink belly in a single chomp.
Then the horse was up and bucking, the hobble kicked free. And
the jacks came out of the bunkhouse and barn and started firing at the pack, who would not retreat but seemed unwilling to blitz again despite their hunger.
Thea thought she might faint but was astonished to feel Smith’s wet lips on her ear, to feel the gale of his breath. He clutched her breasts violently, and in that same moment she felt a world of fire in her belly. He grunted with each thrust of his hips, and with each thrust she felt a part of her body leaving her. Like the steam that had earlier that season risen from the jacks in the mess.
In the paddock the wolves were suddenly wise. As another shot rang from the direction of the barn, they turned and ran for the trees on the ridge. Lodden and Freya chased, and before the pack reached the trees the dogs tackled the last straggling wolf and sank their fangs into his throat.
Smith’s end came with a sobering shudder and he looked at Thea for the first time since meeting her at the door. For a moment he seemed confused, as though he did not know where he was, but then he pushed himself up off his elbows and buttoned his trousers. Three more rifle shots hollered through the night.
As he ran out the door, Thea fell from the table onto her knees. She opened her eyes and saw only the darkness of that unholy night.