Only the Dead Read Online Free Page A

see. He said that several other medicine men came here to Grand Portage to discuss what had happened. And since he disappeared while he was staying at the lake—he was trapping mink and otters down by Cross River—they decided to build a canoe and send it out on the water with things his spirit would need on the journey. They made a small version of an ordinary canoe. I don’t remember anymore exactly what they put in it. Except for one thing, and that was Swamper Caribou’s knife, which he always carried with him in this life. I think it was found inside his hunting cabin, and they thought he would need it on the other side. Finally, they sang a sacred song over the canoe before they sent it out onto the lake.”
    Willy Dupree slowly leaned forward to pick up his glass of water from the table. His hand was shaking badly as he raised it to his lips. He drank greedily. The old man’s Adam’s apple moved up and down under his slack skin. Then he set the glass on the table, his hand still shaking. Once again he leaned back in his chair, breathing hard. A trickle of water ran down his chin, but he didn’t notice.
    “All a man has left is a bunch of memories,” he said.
    “You have your grandson, Jimmy.”
    “That’s true. We have our daily chat.”
    “Do you ever tell him the old stories?”
    “Sometimes.”
    “About Swamper Caribou?”
    “No.”
    “That’s probably best. He might get scared.”
    “What about you, Lance?”
    “What about me?”
    “Does Swamper Caribou scare you?”
    Lance tried to laugh, but it didn’t come out right.
    “Do you want to know what happened to his knife?”
    Lance nodded.
    “A man was putting out nets off Hat Point when he happened to see something floating in the water a short distance away. He paid it no mind, just kept setting out his nets. When he was done, the object had drifted closer, and he got curious, so he paddled over to it. And he found Swamper Caribou’s little canoe, the one the other medicine men had made, although the man had never heard about that. All he thought was that the canoe was much too small to be of any use. But then he discovered the knife. And he could always use an extra knife. No matter what, he couldn’t figure out what it was doing out there on the lake in a little birchbark canoe. Since it didn’t seem to belong to anyone, he picked up the knife and took a closer look. The shaft was made of buckhorn, the blade so sharp that he started bleeding as soon as he touched it with his fingertip. The man decided to take the knife. When he came home, he told the whole story to his wife. She thought that if a knife appeared in that way, it must have come from the spirit world, and she told him to get rid of it. The man promised to do as she said.
    “That very evening, he went over to the lake to throw the knife into the water. But just as he was about to do that, he had a sudden feeling the knife was not merely a dead object. It felt like . . . like a friend. And now he was supposed to throw it into the lake so it would never be found again? He couldn’t make himself do it. But his wife would refuse to have it in the house if she found out he hadn’t done as she asked, so on his way home the man hid the knife in a hollow tree he knew about. Every evening he would go over to that tree and take out the knife. Whenever he held it in his hand, he would get the same feeling that this was more than just a knife. He didn’t know exactly what it was, but he thought it had to be magic, because it had come sailing toward him in a little canoe on the big lake, and it felt like it was alive. So he thought, just as his wife did, that the knife had some connection to the spirit world. And yet he couldn’t make himself give it up.
    “Soon he became so obsessed by the knife that his wife thought he was going out to the woods to be with another woman. She asked her husband if that was what he was doing, and she said she refused to accept a simple no as an