"Let's check it out," Sloane said.

"Why don't Willie and I go first. That way you can cover us with the rifle."

Sloane chambered a round. "You're covered."

They moved in cautiously. As the bow nudged shore. Raye and Cork stepped out. Everything was lightly layered with snow, and the snow was crisscrossed with animal tracks, mostly those of birds and rabbits. Cork went to the tent and pulled back the flap. Two sleeping bags were laid out inside, both empty. He headed to the lightning-struck pine and studied the tracks around the shredded remains of a pack.

"Food," he said over his shoulder to Raye. "Looks like bears got to it."

But bear tracks were not the only tracks he saw there. He examined the rope that had at one time held the pack suspended from a high branch of the pine. The end had been cleanly cut with a knife.

"Was this bears, too?" Arkansas Willie asked behind him. He was staring down at a lump of snow sparkling at his feet.

Cork stepped up next to Raye, knelt, and brushed the snow away, revealing eyes as lifeless as agates. He carefully cleared the snow from the rest of the body. Over the dead man's heart, his blue flannel shirt was hard and black with frozen blood.

"Not a bear," Cork said grimly. "Unless someone taught it how to fire a gun."

He moved to a second lumping of snow next to the circle of stones that formed a fire ring. The snowfall hadn't covered the body entirely, and one arm lay exposed like a severed limb on a white sheet.

"Another one," he said, wiping the snow from a face dull and white as lard.

"How long have they been dead?" Arkansas Willie asked.

"Hard to tell. A while."

Cork waved the others to shore.

"Louis, you stay in the canoe," he called.

Sloane entered the camp and stood beside Cork.

"Two bodies," Cork told him. "Caucasian males. Multiple gunshot wounds to the chest on both. Dead ... a while."

"Today, you think?"

Cork shook his head. "Snow's completely covered them. Maybe yesterday."

"Think they have anything to do with Shiloh?"

"All the death we've seen up here has to do with Shiloh. Let me show you something else." He led Sloane to the shredded pack. "She's been here. Look, same small boot tracks as at the cabin."

The tracks led from the shore to the pack, where they were mixed with the tracks of the bear. Boot tracks also led back to the shore, in the same unerring line that had been followed in.

"Food," Cork said. "She was after food. Cut down the pack from the tree and either took what she wanted and left the rest or she was surprised by the bear and had to leave it."

Sloane looked at the evidence. He slung the rifle over his shoulder, knelt, and picked up some snow. The warmth of his light brown palm turned the snow quickly to water that trickled through his fingers.

"How long ago?" he asked.

"The sun's had time to melt the edges of the prints, so I'd say a few hours."

"Shit!" Arkansas Willie doubled over a moment. "Good Lord, here it comes again." He hurried to the canoe, grabbed his pack, and raced to the cover of the trees.

After Willie had gone, Stormy called quietly, "Cork." He stood near the shoreline, beckoning.

When Cork reached him, he saw what Stormy saw. At the edge of the water, near Shiloh's tracks, were the tracks of the other.

"He's been here, too," Cork said.

"Prints are clear," Stormy pointed out. "Edges clean. The sun hasn't had time to melt them. He was here after her. And not that long ago."

Sloane said, "We should move out quickly."

"What about taking their canoe?" Louis suggested.

Cork stepped to the dead men's canoe. "Good idea, Louis, but we can forget it. He took care of this one, too."

Arkansas Willie emerged from the woods looking ashamed. "Sorry."

"Not your fault," Cork assured him. "Up here, it happens. But if you can, hang on a bit. I think we're almost there." He nodded toward the Deertail, a wide drift of silver in the morning sunlight that led into the pines a hundred yards down the shoreline. "He thinks he took care of us. He thinks he's home free. But we're about to nail that son of a bitch, Willie. We're about to nail him good."

39.

SHE ATE THE DEAD MEN'S FOOD.

Long before she reached the place where she knew the bodies lay, she'd begun to think about the bag that hung from the tree branch. She'd never been so hungry. Her stomach curled in on itself as if desperately searching the emptiness there. She felt weak as well. The hunger she could live with, but the weakness scared her. It would slow her down, and she had to keep moving. She didn't know how he'd do it, but she knew the man who called himself Charon would find a way to follow her.

So she steeled herself. And when the jut of land with its lightning-struck pine-just a stone's throw from the Deertail River-came into view, she made for it with all the strength she could muster.

The sun hadn't yet risen above the trees and the camp lay in the cold blue shadow of the forest. Fate had been kind, in a way. The snowfall had covered the bodies. Almost. She tried not to look where the dead men lay, graveless, sheeted in a cloth the sun would soon strip away, but her guilt betrayed her. She stopped in horror when she saw that some quirk of nature had kept one man's outstretched arm bare. It was almost as if he were reaching out to her from a place that should have been hers. She fought back tears, fought back the weakness of her legs, and forced herself toward the pine with its long lightning scar and its hanging bag. She cut the rope wrapped around the tree trunk and the bag dropped heavily. She was on it like the creature she was, a starved animal. She found plastic bags containing freeze-dried stew, powdered eggs, jerky, pancake mix, and dried fruit. Her mouth watered so fast her jaws ached. She nearly screamed with delight when she pulled out a plastic jar of peanut butter and a big Baggie full of white bread.

She had the peanut butter and the bread in her hand when the black bear entered the camp. The wet snuffle as the animal investigated the tent made her turn suddenly and startle the bear. The animal rose up on its hind legs, let out a menacing woof that shook the silence of the camp, and clawed the air in her direction. She clutched the bread and the peanut butter as she backed away. The bear dropped to all fours, shuffled to the bag, and began to rummage. Shiloh bolted for her canoe and hit it on the run. The little craft shot into the lake. She nearly tipped it, but she never let go of the food. She scrambled to the stern, dropped the food into the hull, grabbed the paddle, and dug at the water hard, not daring to look back until she was fifty yards from shore. When she did look back, she saw the bear seated on its haunches, breakfasting noisily on the rest of the dead men's food.

The bread and peanut butter seemed like a feast. She was sure she'd never tasted anything so good. Afterward, as the current of the Deertail swept her away from the big lake, she sat back a while and let the river carry her. The sun was high now, and warm, and she felt as if she'd come out of a long, dark tunnel into the light. She finally let herself consider her dream the night before. Stiff, hugging herself for warmth, drifting in and out of sleep, she'd been visited again by the Dark Angel.

This time she'd been in a shower, a small stall full of steam with hot water flowing over her, cleansing her. She felt safe. She'd let her fear wash away, let herself relax. Then, turning, she'd seen the Dark Angel, its faceless form coming at her through the steam. She pressed herself back against the wet tiles; in the small stall, there was nowhere to escape. She awakened with a scream trying to tear itself from her throat.

The Dark Angel had been a part of her dreaming all her life. Dr. Sutpen-Patricia-had been very interested in this faceless figure of terror. In the course of the therapy, she'd finally guided Shiloh back to the night when the Dark Angel first entered her life. That had been the night Marais Grand was murdered.

Shiloh had been awakened from her sleep. Her room was in the center of night, a place of dim shapes and deep shadow. The night-light in the hallway misted the door and the carpet with a dull yellow luminescence that sifted toward her bed like the creep of a moonlit fog. She rubbed the sleep from her eyes, enough to see that the man crouched by her doorway was really only the rocking chair. She lay back down, let her eyelids start to close. Then she heard it again, the sound that had awakened her. An angry voice somewhere downstairs. It frightened her. It was not her mother's voice. It was no voice she knew. Her mother's voice was there, low and crooning, the way she sounded when Shiloh was scared and her mother held her and whispered everything was all right. But the angry voice didn't sound all right.

She slid from the covers. The tile of the floor was cool beneath her feet and made her think of Hershey's bars, cold and hard from the refrigerator. In the hallway her shadow, cast by the night-light, crept beside her along the wall. At the top of the stairs, she stopped and listened. Below, the great living room spread out so large she couldn't see the walls. The floor was red tile covered with a thick, ruby Oriental rug. The room looked empty. But the angry voice was there, just out of sight. Her mother had stopped crooning now. The voice Shiloh didn't recognize suddenly vaulted into a shriek. Her mother gave a little cry: "No!" She stumbled into view and fell near the bottom of the stairs. She didn't look up, but Shiloh could see her face, could see the red on her skin that was like the tile on the floor. And then the Dark Angel appeared. Dressed all in black, the figure carried a golden sword streaked with red. The Dark Angel swooped toward Shiloh's mother, who raised a feeble arm. The golden sword descended. Again and again it struck, until Shiloh's mother no longer tried to fend off the blows, until the red tile glistened with a deeper, wetter red.

The house seemed filled with the sound of heavy breathing. Whether it was her or the Dark Angel, Shiloh couldn't tell. The Dark Angel slowly turned and raised its head. There was no face, only a blacknes where the face should have been. Shiloh shrank back. She could hear the Dark Angel ascending. She turned and ran to her room, ran to her closet, wedged herself into the farthest corner amid her stuffed animals and her shoes. She knew when the dim glow from the night-light blacked out a moment that the Dark Angel had entered her room. Pee soaked her pajamas and spread out on the floor beneath her. She could hear the Dark Angel breathing just outside the closet doorway. She closed her eyes.

She felt the touch of a hand on her cheek, but she dared not look.

"We're angels, you and I," the voice said. "Little innocents."

Shiloh drew back from the touch. Her eyes were still shut as tightly as she could force them.

"I won't hurt you, child."

Slowly, Shiloh opened her eyes and looked where the pool of blackness lay instead of a face. The Dark Angel lifted a finger toward that blackness, a bar across the place where lips should have been. A sign for silence. Then the Dark Angel vanished.

The memory of the Dark Angel had vanished, as well. Except in Shiloh's dreams. Then Patricia had guided her back.

"A dark stocking," Patricia suggested when they spoke about the blackness where there should have been a face. "Or maybe a veil. And the golden sword? The brass poker from the fireplace that was used to kill your mother."

It was odd. The Dark Angel was her mother's killer, but her mother was only memory, and who killed her wasn't as important to Shiloh as discovering that the Dark Angel was, in fact, human.

They'd spoken of other things, of Shiloh's loneliness, her feelings of abandonment, of her disconnectedness.

"Why Shiloh?" Patricia had asked. "When you chose your professional name, why only that one name?"

Shiloh hadn't replied.

"Think about it. No last name. No connection. No family. No history. Just Shiloh."

Wendell Two Knives had said much the same thing in his letters to her. She began receiving them after the tabloids had made big splashy headlines about her arrest and conviction and sentencing for substance abuse.

He was, he reminded her in the first letter, the husband of her grandmother's sister. He'd guided her mother and her into the Boundary Waters once long ago. Shiloh had remembered him and the trip into the Boundary Waters the summer before her mother died. She remembered the canoe. Birch bark. And the quiet of the forest. And all the things Wendell Two Knives had known and shared with them. She remembered how peaceful her mother had seemed, a rare thing. It was a good memory. One of the last.

Wendell invited her to come again. He knew of her problems. The woods, he'd written, had healed her people for generations. Her people. Was he accepting her as Indian even though she'd lived her whole life in the white man's world?

It was weeks before she wrote back, well into her therapy with Patricia and ultimately at Patricia's urging. Wendell replied. They spoke on the phone. His voice was kind, slow, soothing. He told her stories of her mother and her grandmother. Wonderful stories that filled her with longing. He invited her again, told her he knew of a place she could be alone for as long as she wanted, alone to remember who she was. Had she ever been alone? he asked.

"I've always been alone," she heard herself confiding. "And afraid."

"I can help you not be afraid," he promised.

He'd kept his promises, every one. The cabin had been wonderful. The woods had been healing. In her aloneness, after a time, she heard her own voice speaking to her truly.

She asked Wendell for a tape recorder. And she let the voice speak. The truth of her life that she'd turned away from through drugs and sex and a hundred forms of forgetfulness. It all poured out of her. And then her plans began to form. Such wonderful plans for the future that included, now, The People. Her people.

As the current of the Deertail carried her away from the hidden cabin and back to the world, she was excited by the thought of returning. She felt strong in her resolve to carry out the plans she'd created, had dictated carefully onto the tapes, had written to Libbie about. For the first time in her life, she felt truly herself and in control of her destiny.

There was only one thing that kept the moment from being perfect. She looked back, knowing the man called Charon was somewhere behind her.

She pulled out the map. The arrows followed the Deertail River for quite a way. She was headed toward something called the Deertail Flowage, where she would portage briefly to a round patch of blue called Embarrass Lake. She hoped she would know what the flowage was when she got there.

She put the map away and let the current carry her. Occasionally she paddled, but the river seemed to know its way and to welcome her as a companion. The sun was warm. She was tired, drowsy, and she closed her eyes. Until she heard the roar, she didn't even realize she'd fallen asleep.

She woke with a start. The canoe was moving fast. Less than twenty yards ahead, in an angry crashing of white water, the river funneled into a long corridor of dark rock. She tried to back paddle, but it was useless. The river dragged her in.

The canoe leaped from under her, then tipped hard to the right. She threw herself in the opposite direction and dug at the water with her paddle. The bow glanced off the sharp edge of a rock half submerged and surrounded by roiling white. She was launched toward a place where the river climbed high and furious as if desperate itself to escape the corridor, and even above the din of the crashing water she heard a scraping that made her certain the canoe was being ripped apart. The world tilted. The bow lifted as if the craft were raising its head in the throes of a noble death. Water poured in at the stern, and she thought for sure she would swamp. Weighted now, the canoe spun sideways and slammed broadside into a huge rock that split the river. She grabbed the gunwales as the canoe began to tip. Then suddenly, miraculously, she swung out, canoe and all, bow downriver, and she was free of the corridor.

She was not out of danger. Great chunks of fractured rock littered the water before her, and around them the river foamed like a rabid dog. She grasped her paddle with both hands and drove the canoe to the right of a long, ragged spine of rock. She hit a whirlpool, fought to stay on the outer edge, and rode the spin for a dozen feet before she broke away. For another thirty yards, the water grumbled under the keel, but its real fury was past.

The river opened up again in a smooth, broad flow. Overhead, a brown hawk rode the thermals along the canyon walls, easy as a dream against the sapphire blue sky. In the bottom of the canoe, water sloshed gently over her boots.

Once again, she'd beaten a thing that thought it had her. She lifted her paddle above her head and let out a warrior's yell. The echoes of it came back to her from the canyon walls like the voices of her ancestors crying her on.

40.

ANGELO BENEDETTI CARRIED HIS FATHER into cabin 7 at the Quetico. When the trembling, white-haired man had been ensconced in a leather easy chair, Booker T. Harris stepped toward him. Harris's hands were clasped behind his back as if they'd been cuffed, and his face glistened with the sweat of a worried man.

"One of my men is dead out there. I want to know why."

Nathan Jackson, who'd stood at the long glass windows that overlooked the lake, fuming silently, threw his hands up in exasperation. "For God sake, Booker, you know why. The son of a bitch is afraid Shiloh's going to help nail his fucking ass for Marais's murder."

"Are we back to that?" Benedetti said. "I thought we were done with it."

Jackson started across the room. "I'm not done until I've put you in the gas chamber."

"Back off, Nathan."

Harris reached out to grasp his brother's shoulder, but Jackson pulled loose.

"The hell I'm going to back off."

Benedetti furiously motioned to his son. "Get me out of here, Angelo. This place stinks of bullshit."

"You're going nowhere." Jackson lurched toward the quivering man in the leather chair, but Angelo Benedetti thrust himself between them, chest to chest with Jackson. Harris grabbed his brother and yanked him back.

"Nathan, for Christ's sake, use your head. Let me handle this."

Jackson wrestled free and glared at Harris. "Oh, yeah. No problem, brother. Go right ahead. Handle it like you've handled everything else here. Got one man killed already and God only knows what's happened to the others out there. Doing a stellar job, Booker. Downtown Saturday night."

A small earthquake seemed to pass through Booker Harris, and whatever had held him in check collapsed.

"Fine," he hollered. "Fine. You want to kill the man, you go right ahead. You've been throwing other people's asses in jail for years-time maybe you had a visit there yourself. For thirty years, you've been dead set on undoing the good things I've done for you. So go ahead, throw it all away. And while you're at it, you can double-kiss my ass, little brother."