Last Night In Twisted River

Da

And the writer had instantly forgotten the young woman’s name, if he’d ever really heard it. Once, early in the first winter she worked for him, he’d said to her admiringly, “You are tireless.” This was in reference to all the ice-chopping she did-and how many full buckets of water she hauled up from the lake, and left for him in the main cabin. The girl had smiled; she’d liked the tireless word.

“You may call me that-please call me that,” she’d told him.

“Tireless?”

“That’s my name,” the First Nation woman had told him. “That’s who I am, all right.”

Again, Da

Sometimes, from his writing shack, he saw Tireless paying obeisance to the inuksuk. She didn’t formally bow to the stone cairn, but she respectfully brushed the snow off it-and, in her submissiveness, she demonstrated a kind of deference or homage. Even Hero, who stood eerily apart from Tireless on these solemn occasions, seemed to acknowledge the sacredness of the moment.

Da

Then Da

Except for Andy Grant-and those repeat old-timers Da

“Hero and I just love her,” he’d said. “She’s awfully easy and pleasant to have around.”

“Sounds like you’re getting ready to marry her,” Andy told the writer. Andy was kidding, of course, but Da

Later, back in the airboat-but before he started the engine or put the ear guards on the bear hound-Da

IN THE KITCHEN OF DANNY’S HOUSE on Cluny Drive -particularly as the year 2004 advanced-the politics on the writer’s refrigerator had grown tedious. Conceivably, politics had always been boring and the writer only now had noticed; at least the questions for Ketchum seemed trivial and childish in comparison to the more personal and detailed story Da

As always, he began at the end of the story. He’d not only written what he believed was the last sentence, but Da

As always, too, the more deeply Da

Yet Da

It was with little conviction that Da

IT WAS A DECEMBER MORNING IN 2004, after the final (already forgotten) question for Ketchum had been taped to the door of Da

Lupita was used to, if disapproving of, the clipboards and the loose ream of typing paper in the gym, where there was no typewriter; the plethora of Post-it notes, which were everywhere in the house, was a further irritation to her, but one she had suppressed. As for the political questions for Mr. Ketchum, stuck to the fridge door, Lupita read these with ever-decreasing interest-if at all. The taped-up trivia chiefly bothered Lupita because it prevented her from wiping down the refrigerator door, as she would have liked to do.

Caring, as she did, for Da