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Heard those tree huggers really did a number at Lindstrom’s. You know anything?”
    “I was just out there.”
    “Yeah? Was it bad?”
    Talk in the Broiler quieted as other customers turned to listen to what Cork had to say.
    “To the mill, no significant damage. But someone died.”
    “No.” Johnny pushed back in surprise. “Who?”
    “They haven’t ID’ed the body yet.”
    “One of us, you think?”
    “Us?”
    “Locals.”
    “As opposed to those outside agitators, you mean.”
    “Bingo.”
    “Like I said, Johnny, nobody knows. Say, what does a guy have to do to get some coffee and a short stack around here?”
    Johnny shook his head slowly in puzzlement and dismay at this deadly turn the world around him was taking and he headed toward the kitchen.
    The talk of the Broiler regulars—the county work crews, the shop owners, the locals—resumed, and most of it was about the incident at Lindstrom’s. The talk Cork heard sided with the loggers. That didn’t surprise him at all. In a town surrounded by and dependent in so many ways on national forest land, the federal regulations restricting the use of that resource were like slivers under the skin. Snowmobiles and SUVs were severely limited to marked trails. Game wardens packing firearms strictly regulated hunting and fishing. Felling timber, harvesting wild rice, even taking a goddamn crap in the forest was controlled by law.
    Unless you happened to be Indian.
    History.
    The conflict between red and white was old and deep. Cork left the Broiler feeling a heaviness thatweighed on him from the past. Because Tamarack County had been down this road before, and not that long ago. The last flareup had occurred only two years earlier. It had been about fishing rights, an issue over which the two cultures had been skirmishing for more than a decade. Jo had argued successfully before a federal judge on behalf of the Ojibwe, asserting that the Iron Lake Treaty of 1873 gave the Anishinaabeg the right to fish that lake and any other in the state without restraint. The judge had decreed that Ojibwe fishermen had the right to take, if they desired, the full limit of fish set by the Department of Natural Resources for the whole lake over the entire season, leaving nothing for other anglers. Resort owners had panicked. Much of the citizenry of Tamarack County, whose economic welfare relied heavily on the money from weekend fishermen, rallied round the resort owners, and threats of violence arose. Cork had been sheriff then and charged with the duty of ensuring the safety of those Ojibwe who chose to gillnet and spearfish. The conflict came to a deadly head one cold, drizzly spring morning at a place called Burke’s Landing. Cork was escorting a group of Indian fishermen to their boats, down a corridor lined with angry whites. Jo was with the fishermen, as was Cork’s oldest friend Sam Winter Moon. He’d brought them safely almost to the landing when a scared little man named Arnold Stanley, a resort owner driven to desperation by the fear of losing everything he had, stepped in front of Cork with a rifle in his hand. He fired once before Cork cleared his revolver from its holster and pumped six bullets into the little man, the final three while Stanley lay on the wet ground.Although Arnold Stanley’s single shot had torn open Sam Winter Moon’s heart, killing him almost instantly, the people of Tamarack County, incited in large measure by Hell Hanover’s raging editorials, raised a hue and cry over the excessive nature of Cork’s response. In a recall election, Cork lost his job as sheriff. His self-respect pretty much followed. And just about everything else in his life had unraveled from there.
    As he stepped outside into the smoke-scented air, he had the frightening feeling that he—and all the others who called Tamarack County their home—were about to walk a bloody road again.

4
    J OHN L E P ERE HAD BEEN WAKING SOBER long enough that even when he had one of