Force of Blood (19 page)

“Bootie call?” Friday asked with a knowing grin.

It was nearly 5 p.m. “Been bouncing all around Luce County,” Service said. Slept in my truck last night. I just wanted to see you and the kid and sleep in our bed,” he said. “So you wouldn’t mind skipping sex tonight?”

“Up to you,” she said with a shrug. Then she pushed him hard in the chest. “Now hear this,” she declared. “There
will
be sex in our bed tonight.”

He had arrived minutes before and sent the babysitter on her way.

“Your case making progress?” she asked.

“Sort of,” he said. “Cases. It looks like two of them. What’re you doing?”

“Dude in Skandia caught his wife with his business partner’s son and gave them a few exuberant head shots with a pickax.”

“Geez,” Service said, wrinkling his face. “Intent?”

“Sure, but it will plead down to second-degree, moment of passion, yada yada yada, bargain-deal—you know the drill.”

He did.

“You think anyone has any notion how screwed-up our justice system is?” she asked.

“Nope, and as long as it doesn’t touch them, they really don’t give a shit,” he said.

“You here for just one night?”

“Two, I hope.” He had called Professor Shotwiff, who agreed to help out. Shark was bringing him again, and Service would take him to Newberry and put him in a cabin owned by a friend of Jeffey Bryan.

• • •

Sedge called to report that she had talked to Toliver about the dig. “He damn near came while I was talking to him,” she said.

“No objections to revising his dig plan?” Service asked.

“As predicted, not after I told him about the flex remains.”

Chief Waco called next. He and the DNR lawyers were meeting with the AG’s people. No need for Service in Lansing. Yet.

“The AG folks keep talking about one of their people who retired and who’s the most knowledgeable about archaeological issues. They want to bring him back as a consultant.”

“He may not accept,” Service told his boss.

“Why?”

“There could be tickets and warrants awaiting his arrival.”

“I’ll tell them to extend the offer and see what happens. If he shows, you guys can pinch him.”

Service called his granddaughter. “
Mad
at you!” she said. “You no call.”

“I’ve been busy, hon.”

“Bampy
mean!
” she shouted, and dropped the phone.

“Bituva temper,” Karylanne said.

“I should have called.”

“No, she’s just got a bug. She’ll be fine. Don’t pay any attention.”

Simon del Olmo called. “This is wild! Iron, Dickinson, Gogebic—we’re making pinches all over the place. It’s like the dirtbags all had brain farts at the same time. Major over-limits of fish, shooting at deer, ATVs all over prohibited federal land—it’s crazy! Like the god of nature is for once smiling down on the good guys, and it’s not even the full moon.”

“Right,” Service said. “The god of nature. That would be the relative of the Tooth Fairy or the Easter Bunny? I can never remember.”

“Who cares, Sarge. We are busy as hell everywhere right now. Hey, Quinn is a great pick for master sergeant.”

Service agreed.

“You look tired,” Friday said.

He felt in his gut he was going to get a lot more tired in the days ahead, but he wasn’t sure why he felt this way, and didn’t care to examine the feeling.
Is what it is
, he told himself.

Professor Shotwiff arrived with Shark at 4 a.m., and within minutes his bags were in Service’s truck and the two men were racing toward Lansing. Chief Waco had called Thursday night. “Need you here, thirteen hundred tomorrow, my office.” No explanation offered.

“Professor Shotwiff will be with me. You want us there earlier?”

“Nope, this meeting is being forced, so I’m going to use my ways to control it. My turf, my time. About the time the beer-a-craps and politricks get antsy for Friday drinkies, we’ll just be settling in for all-night palavers.” He added, “Be careful,” chuckled mightily, and hung up.

Beer-a-craps?

Service stopped to refuel on the state card in St. Ignace. Professor Shotwiff stared at a billboard questioning the DNR’s ability to chase wrongdoers. “Is that true?” he asked Service.

“Nope.”

Shotwiff nodded. “Interesting,” was all he said. Then he switched subjects. “I’ve been thinking a lot about your theory,” he said, “and I still think it’s plausible that the Iroquois would come in from the west, but maybe they were after something different than white men’s history books tell us. You know anything about Iroquois fighting tactics and strategies?”

“No.”

“Most of the time they operated in small groups. Big group battles were rare at any time, and reports of huge forces are no doubt overstated many fold. Most of our reports come from the Jesuits, and you can bet the Indian informants would play things way up or way down as events most benefited them. Simply put, you can’t rely on aboriginals for anything like dependable or accurate quantitative information. It’s nothing sinister; it just wasn’t part of their culture.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning that perhaps one hundred Iroquois makes more sense than three hundred. The real innovators of the birch-bark canoes were the Ojibwa, not the Iroquois. The Ojibwa and Odawa had trade routes in giant canoes hundreds of miles west and north into Canada. The Iroquois had few large canoes, and depended mostly on the under-twenty-footers to scoot about. These craft carried two or three warriors and supplies, so a force of one hundred would amount to thirty to fifty canoes—like you said, pretty damn difficult to hide on river travel, and you couldn’t take the damn things too far offshore in the big lakes. If the war party was four hundred warriors, then we’re talking a hundred and twenty to a hundred and fifty small canoes, an impossibly large group to hide.”

“Unless they were coming from the south and west.”

“I’m beginning to put some credence in that thinking, especially when other factors are taken into account.”

Service threw a token in the fare basket and sped south up the span of the bridge toward Mackinaw City, pegging his speed at 45 mph.

The old man stared off in the distance as they crossed the Straits of Mackinac. The water was almost azure, and the clouds floating overhead were moving like gigantic, lugubrious airships. “Understand, the Iroquois
were
bloodthirsty bastards. Totally. Agrarian economic base; they had surpluses of food for their families and the women doing all the scut work, which left the men with nothing to do but hunt and fight, so that’s pretty much what they did,” Shotwiff said.

“But beaver began to run out, and the Iroquois were forced to expand westward for new fur sources. This is when they swept into northern Ohio, west of Toronto, southern Michigan, and parts of northern Indiana, driving some tribes away and killing survivors by hundreds. The destruction was so complete that southern Michigan was virtually without Native Americans for almost fifty years. Some tried to resist and were crushed. Most ran to Illinois, or Wisconsin, or up to and across the Upper Peninsula. The Iroquois rightfully infused everyone with abject fear, all of it deserved.”

Service was spellbound.

“The Iroquois, flush with success, got to feeling invincible and decided to go after the Ojibwa, or Saulteur—they’re the same tribe,” Shotwiff continued. “That’s when the proverbial shit hit the fan, irresistible force colliding with unmovable object. The Ojibwa didn’t want to talk. They didn’t run,
and they didn’t surrender. They dug in and fought as ferociously and dirtily as their enemies, fighting to the death in every engagement. Such a show of resistance brought grudging admiration—then reinforcements from displaced tribes and the Ojibiwa force soon grew larger as the Iroquois began to shrink from losses. Understand, I’m interpolating history, but this is the gist of how it progressed.”

“Losses like they suffered on Lake Michigan against the Menominees and Ojibwa?” Service asked.

“Exactly; attrition at its worst. You are far from home and reinforcements can’t be had. My thinking is that they had to begin getting a little desperate for a win to change momentum. The Ojibwa resistance brought almost continuous reinforcements, and between 1640, when the fur expansions began, and 1670 or so, the Ojibwa drove the Iroquois completely out of northern Michigan and back through Ontario to upper New York. The Iroquois didn’t stop making war, but they concentrated their efforts on foes in Pennsylvania and Maryland. Late in the century European countries switched alliances and allegiances, and the Iroquois found themselves with insufficient backing or a provider of modern weapons.”

“Then smallpox hit?” Service offered.

“Exactly, though European historians prefer to give credit to superior European soldiering. Neither the Ojibwa, nor the disease, get deserved credit for the final one-two punch. Understand, I’m not talking about ritualized, ceremonial wars of previous eras. I’m talking about near-total warfare with ruthless carnage on all sides. There was nothing like it in aboriginal history until then, and very little afterwards—until Custer’s days out west—and with such fighting, the Ojibwa took command of upper Michigan permanently. As one of my more-jocular colleagues used to put it, the Ojibwa put the
bad
into badass.”

“I don’t remember any of this from my school days,” Service said, laughing.

“It wasn’t taught. All you learned about were
les sauvages
and European contact. To give proper credit, the Iroquois were a brave and clever people, and politically sophisticated with their five- and then six-nation alliances. They liked war, realized its importance, and studied it in the context of their own efforts and those of their enemies. Damn clever. They’d come upriver by canoe, and when they got within striking distance of an objective, they
would fill the canoes with rocks and sink them. Then they’d go ashore, form up, and head through the woods on foot to attack the enemy at a vulnerable time or place. Assault over, they’d race back to their canoes, refloat them, and paddle like hell to get out of the area. Sort of an early Nazi blitzkrieg style.”

“Does this relate to our site?”

“It could. I’m getting to that,” Professor Shotwiff said. “Let’s say for purposes of our discussion that they came north as you have speculated. They might very well have landed at your site. The question is why.”

Service kept his eyes on I-75 and set the speed at eighty. “Crisp Point is a long way from the Soo.”

“Right, my boy. Too far away for accidental discovery, at least theoretically. And that would be one good reason. But perhaps they sank their canoes there, gathered in a camp, and got themselves together for a push against another target to the southeast.”

“Southeast?”

“Bawating might not have been the objective at all. The Iroquois liked to campaign, move in a sort of series of strategic thrusts and attacks. I’m thinking it’s entirely possible that they intended not to strike Bawating or Bay Mills, but the heavily populated villages of Ojibwa and other tribes from the mouth of the Tahquamenon up to the Upper Falls. Lots of people in those villages. If the Iroquois successfully struck these camps, they could capture food and weapons and begin to advance eastward in greater strength toward Bawating. It would then amount to a concerted, planned military campaign, which was their hallmark. My boy, I think it’s quite possible the battle happened at your site.”

“Pure bad luck for the Iroquois that the Ojibwa stumbled onto them.”

“If the theory is right.”

“How can we know?”

“We can never know absolutely, but if the test dig begins to uncover canoe remains and more bodies, we’ll start to get a reasonable estimate of the battle’s dimensions, casualties, and so forth. The dig is critical.”

“Canoe remains and flexed bodies?”

“Possible in this northern landscape. Do you know why the bodies were flexed?”

“No. Respect?”

“Some believe that, but I don’t. It was out of fear, not respect. They double the bodies, folded them if you will, in the belief that this would keep evil spirits inside the remains and keep them from being loosed on living humans.”

“Which means the dig may release evil sprits?”

Shotwiff chuckled. “You superstitious?”

“Not especially. You?”

“Hell, yes,” the professor said, breaking into uncontrollable laughter.

At Wolverine Shotwiff asked, “Any idea what awaits us in Lansing?”

“Nossir,” Service said.

“Want my take on it?” Shotwiff asked. “If Native Americans are there, and involved, this will be what we called, in my military service days, a SNAFU. You have a term for it in your line of work?”

“Goat rodeo,” Grady Service said. “That’s not a compliment.”

“You like a good fight, Sergeant?”

Service nodded. “When the stakes warrant it.”

“Me,” the professor said happily, “I like
any
fight—especially one where the opposition thinks it has the upper hand.”

• • •

The cell phone buzzed as they passed Mount Pleasant. “Service? Chook Whybus. Sorry to take so long to get back to you, but Ms. Ence/Wingel is not a subject the university folks want to talk about. Grady turned the phone to speaker so the professor could listen along with him.

“She started her academic career at Oregon, got a BA in biochemistry and an MA in aboriginal studies, and began her doctorate under Professor Cayuga Greysolon,
the
expert on northwest Native American art. Ence is Wingel’s birth surname. Seems she got involved in … activities, uh, outside the professional? They became a scandal. The professor was married to another heavyweight scholar, who apparently took umbrage. Obviously race was part of the public issue, white professor, young, pretty black female. This woulda been around 1970, ’71.

“Then a Salish necklace came up missing from the professor’s personal collection. The wife blamed Ence, and filed a complaint with the cops. They came to question the girlfriend. The Salish were a major coastal tribe known
for unique arts and crafts. The necklace in question was not just rare, but priceless, one of a kind, the only known Kwakwaka’wakw erotic piece. A pendant of a woman in a compromised position. The police were left with an accusation but no evidence, and the professor died a couple of years later.

“Ence left campus and the state and finished a doctorate at McGill in Montreal under the name of Wingel,” Whybus continued. “No idea where that name comes from. She also sued the dead prof’s wife for slander and got some sort of huge out-of-court settlement. Ence/Wingel was considered a brilliant student, but also a shady archaeologist, and a rank opportunist. She has a lot of digs to her credit, and far more papers than it seems possible one person could author unless she were a true polymath.

“So that’s the story. I’ve got a couple of young women working for me who can play computers like concert pianists. They found an interesting photo that I’ve sent on to your chief, along with a second photo. Take a look. I think you’ll find them to be thought-provoking.”

“Thanks, Chook,” Service said. “I owe you.”

“Yep, you do,” Whybus said.

“How long to Lansing?” Dr. Shotwiff asked. “I gotta drain the old downspout again.”