Northwest Angle by William Kent Krueger Read Free Book Online

baby’s mouth, and instantly, he fell silent and tried to feed. He sucked loudly and then began to cry again in frustration. Jenny realized that the divide in his upper lip prevented him from forming a good vacuum. She gently pressed her finger over the cleft to seal it. The child sucked again, this time successfully.
    “How long since you ate, little guy?” Jenny said, watching how furiously he worked at the nipple. She looked around her at the deserted cabin. If not for the damage from the storm, it would have been a clean, cozy place. “Where’s your mother?”
    While the child fed in her arms, Jenny stepped outside. She walked the perimeter of the cabin. She came across a wooden tub with a washboard inside. Strung between a couple of aspen saplings that had survived the storm was a fifteen-foot length of nylon cord. A clothesline. She ducked under the line and headed to a rocky rise that backed the cabin. But for the baby, she would have climbed immediately to have a look at her surroundings.
Later,
she decided.
    By the time the baby had finished the bottle, his eyes were drifting closed. Jenny took a minute to burp him, then returnedhim to the wicker basket, where he fell instantly asleep. Hungry and exhausted from crying, she figured. How long had it been since someone had fed him, cared for him? Where was his mother?
    She left the cabin again and this time climbed the rise behind the cabin. The crown of the hillock was bare and gave her a decent view of the island. She shielded her eyes against the low sun. She could see the rocky outcropping at the other end, where she’d sought shelter from the storm. What lay between that far place and where Jenny stood was total devastation: snapped trunks, uprooted trees, an enormous web of fallen timbers. She cupped her hands and hollered, “Hello! Can anybody hear me?”
    No reply. She called again and again with the same result.
    She deserted the rise. In front of the cabin, she found a trail that led toward the shoreline. The trail was blocked by fallen trees, but she followed it anyway, ducking and climbing, and, in a couple of minutes, stood at a little inlet littered with detritus from the storm. Around a ragged pine stump was a groove bare of bark, worn, Jenny guessed, as the result of a boat tying up there often. No boat was tied there now. She stared out from the inlet and saw only more destroyed islands across the channel. She was afraid for her father and for her family. She felt utterly alone and was tempted to give herself over completely to despair. But there was the baby to consider now.
    She returned to the cabin, sat on the mattress beside the wicker basket, and studied the child. His skin was the color of sandstone. His hair was thick and black. When his eyes had been open, Jenny had seen their hard, almond color.
Ojibwe?
she wondered. She tried to sort through the whole strange situation of finding the baby in the basket hidden under the woven mat outside. One more odd circumstance in what was becoming a long line of circumstances that were not at all right.
    “I’ve been thinking,” she said quietly to the sleeping child. “Maybe I’ll build a bonfire on top of the rise out there, keep feeding it until someone sees the smoke and comes.”
    But will anyone come?
said the voice of reason inside her head.
    “It may take a while, but yes,” she replied aloud. She looked toward the stacks of cardboard boxes on the other side of the cabin, beyond the fallen pine. “If we have to, we can wait a long time.”
    Yeah, as long as there’s propane for the stove,
reason pointed out.
    “Let me see what we can find,” Jenny said.
    She hadn’t seen another propane tank near the stove, so she began to clear away debris where the fall of the pine tree had toppled the back wall. She pulled away broken branches and put her back into moving one of the logs enough to create a gap for her to slide through so that she could explore the corner of the cabin where the