The Ravens Read Online Free PDF Page B

Look how he’s destroying our whole world. Why is he doing that?
    Through the window at the other end of the room Lance could see the ice fishermen sitting next to the holes in the ice, waiting for something to bite. Their lines reached down into the depths, and no one knew what they might catch.
    One time he had stood at the deepest spot in the lake, 1,332 feet below the surface, and felt the marrow in his joints start to freeze. During the nearly eight years that had passed since he’d had that dream, Lance had never awakened with even a scrap of a dream in his head. Not even with a feeling that he might have dreamed something but had simply forgotten what it was. For him, sleep was merely a big nothingness into which he disappeared every night. As he sat there studying the model of the five Great Lakes, and as the ice fishermen jigged their lines in the westernmost part of the real Lake Superior, Lance felt his inability to dream like a nutritional deficiency that was eating him up from the inside.
    Lance got up, leaning his hands on the edge of the big display table and bending forward over Lake Superior. Even the rivers that emptied into the lake were depicted. There he saw the Temperance River, where he’d parked his car before starting the last drive of the deer hunt. And there the Cross River entered the lake. A tiny cross marked the place where Father Frederic Baraga had miraculously survived a storm in August 1846 when he was on his way to Grand Portage to help the Ojibwe who were suffering from smallpox. It was near Baraga’s Cross that Lance had discovered the murdered body of Georg Lofthus. And it was there that he’d lain on his back a few months ago and listened to Andy topple backward into the underbrush after the shot was fired. Only a few inches farther along the shoreline was the Grand Portage Indian Reservation, marked by a canoe floating on the water. The canoe was as big as the freighter that was docked in Duluth, and when Lance leaned closer, he saw a man sitting in the canoe, holding on to a tiny paddle. That’s Willy, he thought. He didn’t know where the thought came from, but once it took hold, he couldn’t get rid of it. Down there, paddling the canoe, was his former father-in-law Willy Dupree. Lance thought about the Ojibwe relationship to dreams and how it had always governed their lives. He leaned even closer to the canoe and the tinyman sitting inside. Willy couldn’t see the gigantic face hovering above him, but Lance hoped that he would somehow sense it was there.
    “Help Lance dream again,” whispered the face.

8
    AFTER TAKING a long and complicated route through the snow-covered forests and along icy waters, Lance pulled up in front of Willy Dupree’s house in the Grand Portage Indian Reservation. It was almost midnight, but for safety’s sake, he parked behind the garage so his car couldn’t be seen from the road.
    He felt a great warmth flood his chest when Willy opened the door.
    “Come in,” said the old man.
    More than two months had passed since the last time Lance was here. That was back in November, and he and Andy had finished the first day of their deer hunt. What happened on the second day hadn’t yet taken place. No ice storm, no shot fired in the dark, or the sound of Andy falling backward with icicles clinking all around. But as Lance took off his coat in the hall, he remembered that he’d had blood on his hands. He’d hit a cat as he was driving out to see Willy, and he’d been forced to kill it with a wrench. And the more he’d struck the poor animal, the more pleasure it had given him. His hands had been spattered with blood, and there were also drops on his face, like dark freckles on his nose and cheeks. Willy had pointed this out to him, but not until Lance was about to leave. During his entire visit the old man had sat there looking at the blood on his hands and face without saying a word or asking any questions.
    When they were each settled in an