"The next morning he tramped into the woods, a pack over his shoulders, a Winchester in his hand. Newcomers always aroused interest around here, but this man come ashore in orange pants and circus hat the day before set a new standard for strangeness. We couldn't stop wondering about him. Anyway, it was hardly past lunchtime when he walks out of the forest, a tumpline around his forehead, trailing a travois. Tied to the travois was a field-dressed caribou. Two hundred pounds. He brought it to his camp, inverted the travois, and tied it off on a boulder and two trees. Hung the buck from up high. Before he butchered it, he started driftwood fires in both the pit and the cairn. He spent an hour skinning and the time before supper carving the meat off the bones.
"All night he stayed up, stoking his cairn with the green birch wood, smoking the venison. The next morning he walked into the Traveler's, doffed his hat, and went from table to table introducing himself. Charmed the hell out of a bunch of people not easily charmed. Then he invited us all to his campsite that evening.
"You've got to understand, we weren't much more than a dozen fishing families back then. The Indians living up in the wigwam village. A hundred people in all. Every single one of us gathered at Hosea Grimm's campsite for his proffered feast. A giant vat of pemmican. We stood there, spooning the grub, listening to Grimm.
"He told us the Minnesota and Dakota Lumber Company had procured twenty thousand acres of land up along the Burnt Wood. Said the next year a hundred lumberjacks, thirty men to run a mill, thirty more to oversee distribution of the lumber, they'd all be moving into Gunflint come springtime. They'd bring their families and build houses and schools and bibelot shops to sell whatever people would buy. He reckoned the town would quadruple in size. It would take some years to fell the forests. Then the same interests would mine the ore and copper in the hills to the west. They'd build railroads and highways. A harbor breakwater would be needed, and a quay to accommodate the great ships soon to arrive. If necessary, the harbor would be dredged so those ships might sail right to the shore. Times were changing, he said, and he was there to help usher in that change. All he asked for in return was a place among us.
"So, sure, he's got a lot of pots on the fire. And it's true some of what he cooks up stinks bad as moose shit. But he was true to his word. He never took more than was his, and he got us all ahead of the robber barons. We still own this town. We always will. He had something to do with that. He had a lot to do with that."
Odd had listened to Curtis with both ears. It was a story he'd never heard before and since it came from Mayfair's mouth, he had no reason to doubt it. But then he thought of Rebekah, of her life in chains, of the things Hosea had made her do. Odd spit. "I appreciate hearing the story. No doubt it's a testament to something. But I have my reasons for feeling suspect."
"I've never known you as anything but a straight shooter, son. I believe you've your reasons." He turned to face Odd. "Curious as I am, I honestly don't want to know what they are. I'm happier to live in ignorance."
Odd smiled, though nothing was funny. The blind eye was a bad disease in this town. They shook hands and parted without another word.
XIV.
(February 1896)
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.