They quickly came upon the sign that said SMALL ENGINE REPAIRS, with an arrow pointing down an innocuous dirt road. "I'm at the end of the road," was all Ketchum had told Danny, though there was no sign saying this road was a dead end. Next came the sign that said (with the same neat lettering) BEWARE OF THE DOG. But there was no dog--no house or cars, either. Perhaps the sign was preparing them for an eventuality--namely, if they continued farther down the road, there would almost certainly be a dog, but by then it would be too late to warn them.
"I think I know the dog," Danny said, chiefly to reassure Carmella. "His name is Hero, and he's not really a bad dog--not that I've seen."
The road went on, growing narrower--till it was too narrow to turn around. Of course it could have been the wrong road, Danny was thinking. Maybe there still was a Lost Nation Road, and the crazy old salesman in the sporting-goods store had deliberately misled them; he'd definitely been hostile about Ketchum, but the old logger had always drawn hostility out of even the most normal-seeming people.
"Looks like a dead end ahead," Carmella said; she put her plump hands on the dashboard, as if to ward off a pending collision. But the road ended at a clearing, one that could have been mistaken for a dump--or perhaps it was a graveyard for abandoned trucks and trailers. Many of the trucks had been dissected for their parts. Several outbuildings were scattered throughout the premises; one weather-beaten shack had the appearance of a log-cabin smokehouse, from which so much smoke seeped through the cracks between the logs that the entire building looked as if it were about to burst into flames. A smaller, more focused column of smoke rose from a stovepipe atop a trailer--a former wanigan, Danny recognized. Probably, a woodstove was in the wanigan.
Danny shut off the car and listened for the dog. (He had forgotten that Hero didn't bark.) Carmella rolled down her window. "Mr. Ketchum must be cooking something," she said, sniffing the air. From the bearskin, stretched taut on a clothesline between two trailers, Danny assumed that the skinned bear was in the smokehouse--not exactly "cooking."
"A fella I know butchers my bears for me, if I give him some of the meat," Ketchum had told Danny, "but, especially in warm weather, I always smoke the bears first." From the aroma in the air, it was definitely a bear that was smoking, Danny thought. He opened the driver's-side door cautiously--on the lookout for Hero, assuming that the hound might see his designated role as that of guarding the smoking bear. But no dog emerged from one of the outbuildings, or from behind any of several sheltering piles of wreckage.
"Ketchum!" Danny called.
"Who wants to know?" they heard Ketchum shout, before the door opened to the wanigan with the smoking stovepipe. Ketchum quickly put the rifle away.
"Well, you aren't as late as you thought you would be!" he hailed them, in a friendly fashion. "It's nice to see you again, Carmella," he told her, almost flirtatiously.
"It's nice to see you, Mr. Ketchum," she said.
"Come on in and have some coffee," Ketchum told them. "Bring Cookie's ashes with you, Danny--I want to see what you've
got them in."
Carmella was curious to see the container, too. They had to pass the strong-smelling bearskin on the clothesline before entering the wanigan, and Carmella looked away from the bear's severed head; it was still attached to the pelt, but the head hung nose-down, almost touching the ground, and a bright globe of blood had bubbled and congealed. Where the blood had once dripped from the bear's nostrils, it now resembled a Christmas ornament attached to the dead animal's nose.
"'Amos' New York Steak Spice,'" Ketchum proudly read aloud, holding the jar in one hand. "Well, that's a fine choice. If you don't mind, Danny, I'm going to put the ashes in a glass jar--you'll see why when we get there."
"No, I don't mind," Danny said. He was relieved, in fact; he'd been thinking that he would like to keep the plastic steak-spice container.
Ketchum had made coffee the way old-timers did in the wanigans. He'd put eggshells, water, and ground coffee in a roasting pan, and had brought it to a boil on top of the woodstove. Supposedly, the eggshells drew the coffee grounds to them; you could pour the coffee from a corner of the pan, and most of the grounds stayed in the pan with the eggshells. The cook had debunked this method, but Ketchum still made his coffee this way. It was strong, and he served it with sugar, whether you wanted sugar or not--strong and sweet, and a little silty, "like Turkish coffee," Carmella commented.
She was trying hard not to look around in the wanigan, but the amazing (though well-organized) clutter was too tempting. Danny, ever the writer, preferred to imagine where the fax machine was, rather than actually see it. Yet he couldn't help but notice that the interior of the wanigan was basically a big kitchen, in which there was a bed, where Ketchum (presumably) slept--surrounded by guns, bows and arrows, and a slew of knives. Danny assumed that there must additionally be a cache of weapons he couldn't see, at least a handgun or two, for the wanigan had been outfitted as an arsenal--as if Ketchum lived in expectation that he would one day be attacked.
Almost lost among the rifles and the shotguns, where the Walker bluetick bear hound must have felt most at home, was a canvas dog bed stuffed with cedar chips. Carmella gasped when she saw Hero lying on the dog bed, though the bear hound's wounds were more striking than severe. His mottled white and bluish-gray flank had been raked by the bear's claws. The bleeding had stopped, and the cuts on Hero's hip were scabbed over, but the dog had bled in his bed overnight; he looked stiff with pain.
"I didn't realize that Hero had lost half an ear," Ketchum told them. "There was so much blood yesterday, I thought the whole ear was still there. It was only when the ear stopped bleeding a bit that I could see it was half gone!"
"My goodness--" Carmella started to say.
"Shouldn't you take him to a vet?" Danny asked.
"Hero isn't friendly to the vet," Ketchum said. "We'll take Hero to Six-Pack on our way to the river. Pam's got some gunk that works good for claw wounds, and I've got an antibiotic for the ear--while what's left of it is healing. Doesn't it serve you right, Hero?" Ketchum asked the dog. "I told you--you were too far ahead of me! The fool dog got to the bear while I was out of range!" Ketchum explained to Carmella.
"The poor creature," was all she could say.
"Oh, he'll be fine--I'll just feed him some of the bear meat!" Ketchum told her. "Let's get going," he said to Danny, taking the Remington .30-06 Springfield down from two pegs on the wall; he lowered the carbine across one forearm and headed for the wanigan's door. "Come on, Hero," he called to the hound, who rose stiffly from the dog bed and limped after him.
"What's the gun for? It looks like you got your bear," Danny said.
"You'll see," Ketchum told him.
"You're not going to shoot anything, are you, Mr. Ketchum?" Carmella asked him.
"Only if there's a critter in need of shooting," Ketchum answered her. Then, as if to change the subject, Ketchum said to Danny: "I don't imagine you've seen a skinned bear without its head. In that condition, a bear resembles a man. Not something for you to see, I think," the logger added quickly, to Carmella.
"Stay!" Ketchum said suddenly, to Hero, and the dog froze alongside Carmella, who had stopped in her tracks, too.
In the smokehouse, the skinned bear was suspended above the smoldering fire pit like a giant bat. Without a head, the bear indeed resembled a hulking man--not that the writer had ever seen a skinned man before. "Kind of takes your breath away, doesn't it?" Ketchum said to Danny, who was speechless.