The Land of Dreams

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128 14 the sun had colored the lake an almost artificial-looking blend of yellow, pink, and violet. Soon the violet would darken and erase the other hues, until finally everything would turn to black. But it would be a while before that happened. Lance was sitting at his desk at home looking at a photograph. He’d taken it out of a folder of old photos from the Soderberg archives . Each folder usually contained eight pictures, and he’d already gone through about twenty of these folders. The photo he held in his hand showed a man standing in a small clearing in the woods. According to the accompanying text, he was standing on a path. He wore pin-striped trousers. They almost look like suit pants, thought Lance. His jacket might also pass for an old suit coat. Worn and wrinkled. He had his thumbs hooked in his suspenders and was staring truculently at the photographer, whoever that might have been. The text in the folder, written in Olga Soderberg’s florid script, said, “Joe Caribou on the path leading to his mother’s house, .” There was no photo of Swamper Caribou in the archives. This picture of his brother was the closest Lance was going to get to the medicine man who had disappeared. Joe looked like someone who hadn’t slept in a long time. The photo was taken thirteen years after his brother had vanished. The path to his mother’s house, thought Lance. From the picture it wasn’t possible to determine where the house was located. Somewhere in Cook County, he assumed. Maybe on the reservation, or near Grand Marais. Maybe somewhere THE LAND OF DREAMS 129 else altogether. The path, which was barely visible in the picture, no long existed, of course. The house it once led to probably didn’t either. The photo showed a long-deceased man standing on a path that had grown over ages ago, on his way to a place that no longer existed and would be impossible to reconstruct—the small home of an old Ojibwe woman in possession of old stories that had also been forgotten. Thirteen years earlier this man’s brother had vanished without a trace. It was this missing brother that Lance was searching for. He wanted to find out how Swamper had died—which was something no one knew. It seemed like an almost hopeless task, so many years after the man had disappeared. So far the only thing Lance had to go on was the information he’d found in the Grand Marais Pioneer. First and foremost, there was Joe Caribou’s statement to the editor. He had said that his brother disappeared “from his hunting cabin near the mouth of the Cross River around the time of the last full moon, which was on the night of March .” But this quote was not strong enough evidence that Swamper had vanished on that particular night. “Around the time of the last full moon” indicated that Joe wasn’t exactly sure when his brother had gone missing. It might be give or take a couple of days, thought Lance. He also had the brief article from September  of that same year, which reported that a body had been found near the mouth of the Manitou River, but it had been impossible to establish the victim’s identity. Lance assumed that the body of Swamper Caribou had been found. The current must have carried it the ten or so miles during the six months since he had died. He put the photograph down on the desk and took another one out of the folder. This picture showed four young men in a photographer ’s studio. Two of them sat ramrod-straight on chairs, slightly turned toward each other. Behind them stood the other two men, their arms hanging straight at their sides. All four had big, workman hands that seemed much older than the rest of their bodies. They wore dark suits, and all of them had close-cropped blond hair. Under the picture Olga Soderberg had written: “Duluth, . Four from Tofte visiting town. From left: Helge Tofte, Andrew Tofte, Thormod Olson, and Sam Bortvedt.” There sat Thormod Olson twelve years after he fell through the ice. If that was what actually happened, of course. Lance wondered Vidar Sundstøl 130 whether the man staring at the camera knew...