Calendar Mystery 17: GREAT TAMARACK SWAMP
Characters:
Chris Josephson, 29, creative writer, professor, owner of Sandy Point
lighthouse
Frank Zanetti, 24, detective sergeant
Simon Red Crow, 24, Ojibwe living with Chris
Peter Red Crow, 19, Simon's brother, farmer in Orr
Shout out to Seth! With thanks for support. And to Michael and Thomas, too: this might be the chapter you've been waiting for. The `Great Tamarack Swamp' is a real place, more than 20 square miles of marshy land with tamaracks growing on solid ground. So far as I know, the swamp has no name, but I had to call it something! Only locals seem to know about it, but it's a beautiful place to visit in winter.
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First Friday in November. Winter frost caked patches of ice in the sand dunes. Chris and Simon skipped dinner and went to the sauna at dusk, bathing each other with balsam boughs. There was no snow to roll in, and the lake water was too cold, so they shared a hot shower in the master bathroom. Chris stood facing the back wall of the sauna, arching his ass. Simon stepped into the breath and administered a vigorous breeding.
"Sebastian says we're an old married couple," Chris remarked as they climbed into bed.
"We're neither old nor married, but we're a couple," Simon replied. He offered to service Chris with a blowjob.
"Let's just snuggle," Chris said. "I'm getting that weird feeling that comes before a vibe from Manitou." He got vibes before he knew Simon, of course, but after Simon, he credited them to Manitou.
"Is that why we skipped dinner," Simon asked.
"It is," Chris replied.
Simon could have eaten something, but he wanted to share Chris's emotions when `vibes' were concerned. They lay together in a silent snuggle. As Simon already knew, Chris practiced a shamanist technique. To open a channel of communication with Manitou, he concentrated on hunger and horniness, his body having been cleansed in a balsam-bath.
Simon shared in the exercise by concentrating on his hunger. His horniness returned. Without a word, he turned Chris face-down and fucked from behind. He soaked his cock in Ojibwe juices until it softened and slipped out of Chris's ass. They snuggled and fell asleep.
Chris awoke before midnight, startled.
"Bad dream?" Simon asked.
"Strong vibe," Chris replied.
"Tell me."
"You know Great Tamarack Swamp?" Chris asked.
"Of course," Simon said. "The road from Cook to Chisholm cuts through it for miles."
"Or the road from Chisholm to Cook. Depends on your point of view. We must go there tomorrow," Chris said.
"Deer-hunting season just started," Simon replied: "We'll need to take precautions. Red shirts and caps. At least the ground will be hard. It's ten degrees colder up there. As long as we're awake, we could drive to the farm tonight. That would give us an early start tomorrow."
"We'll need Frank," Chris said. "Whatever we find, it's got to be official."
Simon texted Peter to let him know that they would arrive at the farm around 2:30 AM.
Chris texted Frank. Frank texted his captain: "Driving patrol car to Orr. Lead on calendar murders. Location: Great Tamarack Swamp." Frank's captain returned his text: "If you find something, count time as work hours."
In the Red Crow farmhouse t was three men in a bed with Chris in the middle. Peter wanted to have a go at Chris, but Simon told them to get some sleep. "We'll be on the hunt tomorrow. Sex on a hunting trip brings bad luck."
"Simon's right," Chris said. "It's an ancient superstition, almost universal, but there's a grain of truth in it. It's even in the Bible. When David first went into exile with a band of young warriors, he asked for bread from a priest named Ahimelech in the village of Nob. The priest protested that his only food was sanctified bread, meant as an offering to God. David replied that whenever he and his men went on an expedition, they refrained from sex. David argued: My men are holy vessels even on an ordinary journey. In an important expedition like this one, how much more so will their vessels be holy?' So, the priest gave them holy bread. Then, in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight', when Lady Bertilak offered her body as a temptation to Gawain, he declined because he was on a quest. On this occasion, Gawain's chastity saved his life."
Peter accepted the refusal with good grace, not because he was persuaded by an argument complete with footnotes, but because he could see that Simon's relation to Chris had evolved into something like marriage. Far be it from him to mess with his brother's husband!
In the morning, Chris, Frank, and the Red Crow brothers purchased hunting licenses in Orr, and circled back to Great Tamarack Swamp, turning right onto Highway 1 near Cook, then left on 73 for about 40 miles. After passing by farms for three miles, they entered a wasteland of swamps, moss-land, and higher ground thick with tamaracks. Frank parked the patrol car in a wide spot in the road. The Red Crow brothers carried crossbows, being averse to rifles. Chris went unarmed, having no intention of shooting a deer. Of course, Frank had his service revolver. All four men wore red-and-black flannel shirts, red caps, and jingle-bells strapped above their ankles to alert hunters and warn off the as-yet unhibernated bear.
Tamaracks are a type of evergreen whose needles turn brown in winter. Seen in sunlight from a distance, the trees look radiant with gold. The swamp was windless and silent, except for the crunching steps of our four hunters, who spread out twenty feet apart.
"What are we looking for?" Peter asked.
"A bit of clothing, a watch or a neck-chain, anything that looks like a clue. Anything out of place in a swamp," Frank replied.
"Or a corpse," Chris said, in a somber tone.
This time of the year, the tamaracks gleam radiant with gold. Close up, their needles are faded brown, but in sunlight at a distance, they look like they are coated with gold.
Two hours went by. The foursome crossed paths with two local farmers out hunting, Finnish brothers known as Arvid and Aaron Arvila.
"We expected to see more hunters this morning," Chris told them.
"Someone's been spreading a rumor that the swamp's got no deer," Arvid Arvila replied. "You guys don't seem to mind about that, or you wouldn't be wearing those jingle bells."
Frank showed his badge and explained what they were doing, "looking for anything human in the swamp."
The Arvila brothers decided to join the search. So, six men spread out in a 120-foot phalanx, edging their way through golden growths of tamarack mingled with mossy wetlands.
Frank was the first man to see a whitetail buck with six-tined antlers, standing in front of a tamarack that looked larger than the others. He took a photo with his cellphone.
"You saw the buck first, Frank. Your shot," Arvid said.
"With a service revolver? Never mind about that," Frank replied. "Time for a huddle. I've got something to show you."
The six men stood in a circle. Frank showed them his photo of the buck and the tamarack.
"Nice pic, but what of it?" Aaron Arvila asked.
"Jesse Kovic has the exact same pic hanging on the wall in his room in the boardinghouse," Frank said. "I saw it last Saturday."
"Not a coincidence," Chris remarked.
Arvid and Aaron were mystified, but from the facial expressions of the others, the Arvila brothers surmised that the scene with the buck was significant.
The buck turned to left and disappeared into the growth of tamaracks.
"The buck was sent by Manitou to show us the way," Simon said.
The Arvila brothers knew nothing of Ojibwe mysticism, but they obliged when the men spread out in a phalanx, with Frank as point-man, following the buck's tracks in a skiff of snow.
"Three miles in this direction and we'll come to a deserted farm," Arvid said.
"If Manitou sent the buck, how much more likely must it be that he sent the Arvila brothers, too," Chris remarked to Frank. Another argument `a fortiori', just like the one that David used on Ahimelech, and just like the one that Chris used to stop Peter fucking him.
"I heard that," Arvid said.
The flurries turned into snowfall so heavy that the swamp looked like a collage of miniature tamaracks in a glass globe, pelted with snowflakes when you shook it. This time it was Chris saw their next clue: a mound in a clearing, concealed in a growth of tamaracks. "It looks like the green chapel' in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight'," Chris mused.
"Maybe it's an omphalos," Frank speculated," "a gateway to the underworld. A place where spirits gather when they come to visit the earth and bring bad luck to anyone they encounter."
"Maybe it's an Ojibwe burial mound," Simon suggested.
"Or an ancient Hopewell charnel house," Peter chimed in.
"Looks more like a hogan to me," Arvid said.
"A hogan?" Frank asked.
"A root-cellar," Chris explained. "It's local dialect. Hogan' is a Swedish word for the same thing. When I was growing up in the Boundary Waters, I thought hogan' was an Ojibwe word, but it's Swedish. Well, not really Swedish. American-Swedish. In Swedish, hugg' refers to any act of cutting into stone or wood or earth. A hugg' is a blow or a cut. Same word as hog' as in Stop hogging the deserts'. A `hogan' is a storage-hut dug out of the ground, with the dirt thrown over it to form a mound. You find them on any old farm around here."
"This one looks like it might be new," Frank said. He brushed two inches of snow from the surface and added: "The growth of grass doesn't look older than three or four years."
"Why would anyone build a hogan this far from a farmhouse?" Aaron asked.
"That's the $64,000 question," Frank replied. "Jesse Kovic has a photo on his wall that looks a lot like this. It shows a hogan with tamaracks in the background, and near the entrance, a stump big enough to have come from the trunk of a Norway pine. An axe hacked into the stump."
The men circled around the hogan to the front. Sure enough, there was a huge stump, its top surface marked by axe-strokes.
"What the fuck!" Frank exclaimed.
Next thing the others knew, Frank was on his cellphone telling Sebastian to gather his portfolio and art paraphernalia and high-tail it to Father Andrew's parsonage. "Don't go back to the boardinghouse, and don't go anywhere near Jesse Kovic," Frank said. Then he was on the phone to Father Andrew, who promised to take care of Sebastian.
The door to the hogan was padlocked. The door was solid, its boards fashioned by hand from white pine. No need to check for clues in the only lumber yard in the region, the one on the Little Fork river in Cook. Aaron offered to shoot the padlock with his rifle, but Frank said, "No, we've got to keep quiet until we know what we're dealing with."
Frank picked the lock and opened the door. Even in the light refracted from snow, the hogan was gloomy inside. Simon stood guard at the entrance while the others went inside, where they saw, lining opposite walls, two sets of shelving, each one four shelves high. Four human skulls were displayed on the top shelf on each side, adding up to eight skulls. Below each skull, on the second shelf, the remains of rib-cages and arms; below these, on the third shelf, pelvic remains and what was left of leg-bones and feet. On the bottom shelf, shoes and socks, and men's clothing neatly folded.
"Don't touch anything," Frank cautioned, "but take photos. Systematically, one skull at a time and the remains below it." Then he muttered to himself: "This thing is above my pay grade." He called his captain, George Sowell, who promised to drive to Orr that evening. Captain Sowell called the county sheriff. "Two hours from now, this place will be crawling with law enforcement, but what we really need is a forensic anthropologist," Frank said.
The six men waited outside, twenty feet from the entrance to the hogan. While they waited, Frank tape-recorded part of his police report: "The stump, this is where our serial killers decapitated his victims. There must have been two killers. They probably imprisoned the victim in the hogan for a few days. They terrorized him by showing him his fate. Then they dragged him outside, stripping him naked, and chopped off his head. They might have left the victim outside as food for vultures, maggots, and worms. After the bones were picked clean, they got carried back to the charnel house." After turning the recorder, Frank added: "I could be wrong, but I wouldn't be surprised to see Jesse Kovic's name on the title to this abandoned farm."