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thank. She’s the one who reviewed the prospectus and lease—she even negotiated the purchase. She’s got a mind for details I don’t have myself.”
    “So how are you making it go?”
    “I guess I have a mind for the maps.”
    And because Olaf seemed interested, Noah elaborated. Some of the maps were three or four hundred years old and from as far away as the Horn of Africa. He described the beautiful Latin and French words he had such trouble translating, the beautiful script they were written in.
    Olaf, looking even more dubious, said, “Say I wanted to buy one of these maps, what would it set me back?”
    “You could spend a hundred bucks, you could spend ten or twenty thousand.”
    “For an old map that couldn’t get me out the front door?”
    So Noah explained again how they were less maps than collectibles, or, he repeated, works of art. Not to be used, as his father said, for getting out the front door but for admiring on the wall in your billiard room, to ogle with your country-club friends over twenty-year-old scotch.
    Olaf said, “I’ll take my atlas and gazetteer.”
    “When was the last time you needed an atlas?” Noah said, remembering his father’s instructions for finding the house.
    “Let’s just say one won’t be necessary to find lunch. You hungry?”
    O UTSIDE THE M ANITOU Lodge hay bales and cornstalks and pumpkins had been set out for Halloween. There were a dozen pumpkins, all half eaten, a feast for the deer; their tracks were all over the mud. Three cars were parked in the lot, but inside, the dining room was deserted.
    It was a moderately sized room with grand ambitions. The walls were paneled with dark, stained wood, and the vaulted ceiling supported four chandeliers that aspired to some kind of elegance but failed. A rippling, knotted pine floor glimmered, polished to a shoe-shine brown. Along one wall a colossal fireplace with a mantel as big as a canoe loomed over the deep hearth. Hanging over the mantel a moose head and antlers spanning four feet surveyed the room with glass eyes. On either side of the fireplace black-bear skins hung like paintings. Above the wall of windows that faced the highway, a dozen fish—chinook and brown salmon, steelhead, northern pike, walleye—hung mounted on elaborately carved and lacquered pieces of wood. The tables were sturdy and unvarnished and covered with paper place mats and lusterless silverware. The three waitresses wore black skirts and white blouses. One of them directed Olaf and Noah to a table by the window and gave them menus.
    “Our soup of the day is Lake Superior chowder,” she said, filling their water glasses. She switched a peppermint from one cheek to the other and asked if they had questions.
    Olaf said, “Give me the chowder. And coffee.”
    Noah smiled and asked, more politely, for the same. The waitressput her pencil behind her ear, collected their menus, and walked toward the kitchen.
    “Once upon a time you would have ordered a bottle of suds with your chowder,” Noah said.
    “A bottle of suds? Times you’re talking about I’d have skipped the chowder altogether, ordered four boilermakers over the noon hour, and called that lunch.”
    “No more boilermakers?”
    “No more cigarettes, either.”
    “Since when?”
    Olaf ran his hand through his beard. He appeared reluctant to speak. “On the way back from your wedding I stopped in the Freighter for a pair of bourbons before finishing my drive up here. Twenty straight hours I’d been behind the wheel, thought I deserved a nip.” He paused, ran his hand through his beard again. “Met a couple of the old boys. We had a high time of it. A high time.
    “The next morning I woke up in the truck. Couldn’t see a thing, the windows were all rimed from a night of snoring. I mean, they were completely fogged over. I had no idea where I was until I stepped out of the truck.” He smiled, looked almost as if a punch line were in the offing. “I was parked in front of