Page 84 of God’s Country

Ollie stared at where his brother lay, stared as if stunned. And in that moment, he was not looking at me.

Stan had given me the chance I needed. I still had the paddle in my hand. I took a long step forward and swung. The paddle blade connected with Ollie’s neck, slicing into the artery there. Blood spewed forth in gushes. Ollie dropped the gun, grabbed at his gaping throat, and looked at me as if he couldn’t believe what was happening. He fell to his knees, blood dripping from between his fingers, staining the ground. Then he collapsed. For another minute or two, I watched as his heart pumped the life out of him.

Adam had gone to Stan and was trying to stanch the flow of blood from his chest with direct pressure. “I’ll take it from here,” I said. “You radio this in.”

Adam hurried to his Super Cub, and I pressed the heels of my hands hard against the place where the bullet had entered and blood was soaking Stan’s shirt, but I could see it was doing little good.

“O’Connor…” Stan rasped. “I had to… I made you a promise.”

“I know.”

He grabbed my arm. “Promise me.”

“Promise you what?”

“My boys… tell my boys.”

“Tell them what?”

“I… I… wasn’t a bad man.”

“I’ll tell them. I’ll tell them how you saved me. I promise.”

The ghost of a smile touched his lips. “And you… you’re a man… who keeps his promises.”

I could have tried CPR, I suppose, but what was the point? He’d lost so much blood and we were hours from a hospital. And if you have to die, God’s country isn’t a bad place to begin your walk on the Path of Souls.

Adam returned. He looked down at where Stan lay, dead now.

“I saw just the one guy,” he tried to explain. “And we’re miles from where everyone else is searching. I didn’t think…”

“It’s okay. From the start, this was all going to end here and end badly.”

“How do you know?”

I looked at the two brothers, who lay with their bodies almost touching. And I said to Adam the words Henry Meloux had once said to me, “Every falling leaf comes to rest where it was always meant to be.”

CHAPTER 47

Adam Beyer and I sat with the dead men for a couple hours. I left them where they lay, knowing that when the sheriff’s people arrived, they’d want to process everything as a crime scene. The only thing I did was my best to keep the blackflies from swarming over the bodies. Although I was greatly curious about what was in the pack, I didn’t touch it. I was sure that soon enough I’d learn the source of all the tragedy that had taken place.

We didn’t talk much. Adam’s never been a particularly verbose guy, and I was processing everything from the moment I entered the Boundary Waters to the spilling of all the blood at Lost Man Lake. I’d come into that wilderness, that place I’d always thought of as sanctuary, and I’d become a player in some of the worst things I could imagine. What was the Creator’s purpose in all this?

I forced myself to look at Ollie, whose head I’d tried to sever from his body. It was the cruelest thing I’d ever done. I suppose I could have justified it by continuing to tell myself that I’d acted in self-defense. But the truth was that it felt good to swing that paddle. It felt as if the whole purpose of my involvement was to bring me to that moment of utter killing abandon.

I have often thought of myself as ogichidaa. It means warrior in the language of the Anishinaabeg. But it has another, similar meaning: one who stands between evil and his people. This was the aspect of my being that, after many years, after many violent encounters, I’d come to embrace. As I stared at Ollie, unable to look away from that great, gaping wound I’d inflicted, I wondered if this was the plan of the Great Mystery all along. That because I was a warrior, my soul was already tainted, and I was the one whose dark wolf was meant to feed.

We heard the sound of the engine long before we saw the floatplane fly over the island and across the channel. It was a de Havilland Beaver. It circled and then came down on the lake and taxied up beside Adam’s Super Cub. Three people exited—Sheriff Marsha Dross; Deputy George Azevedo, who was the department’s major crimes investigator; and Dr. Karl Renwanz, the Tamarack County coroner. The pilot stepped out and stood on one of the pontoons. I saw that it was Jane McClure, a pilot for the Forest Service and a veteran of many search and rescue operations. She stayed where she was. Maybe it was just to be sure she wouldn’t contaminate the scene, although more likely she’d seen what was on the shore and wanted to be well away from the carnage.

Dross and the other two waded from the lake and came to where the ground was saturated with the Kennedy brothers’ blood. Azevedo, a many-years veteran of law enforcement, took a good look at Ollie’s body, at the nearly severed head, and whispered under his breath, “Jesus.” He looked at the paddle with its bloody blade that lay on the ground beside me, then looked at me. I nodded.

“Not where we expected to find you,” Dross said.

“It was a long and winding road,” I replied. “They were never going where they thought they were.”

“You okay?”

“Not sure.”