Uncle Gunnar sat on the stone hearth with the old revolver in his hands, and he told me in a shaking voice what he had seen on Burntside Lake on the sixteenth of November, 1974. “Jo,” he said, “the fur buyer was named Harold Nystrom. He was a gentle old man from Virginia, Minnesota. He asked your grandfather to take him out to a trapper cabin on the far shore, and they went across the new ice in the afternoon, on foot, because the boat was out. I was fifteen. I was on the shore with the dog. I saw the ice go under him.” I sat across from him with the split hide of the buck in my lap and did not breathe.
He told it in pieces. The ice had been too thin. Harold Nystrom had gone through at forty yards from the shore, and my grandfather Arvid had run out on his belly to reach him, and the ice had broken again and again, and he could not get a hand on him. The old man had slid under. Arvid had crawled back, half frozen, and had found the satchel of the fur buyer on the ice, with the cash. He had picked it up before he had even thought. He carried it back to the cabin, and then he could not put it down.
“He was a good man, Jo,” said Gunnar. “He was the best guide in the county, and he tried. But he took the money. He thought, Harold has no one, and I have a wife and a mortgage. And then it was too late to say. Every year, on the sixteenth of November, he put on his hunting jacket and sat by the fireplace and drank until morning. The buck was a monument to it. He hung it over the hearth, so he would have to look at it every single night.” He raised his face, and the tears ran down into his beard. “I was fifteen, and I never said a word.”
A split trophy buck taken down from a fireplace gave one granddaughter the afternoon to bring her uncle back to the truth in Ely.
I gave my terms on the stone hearth with the revolver on the rug between us and the split hide across my knees. “Uncle Gunnar, we are going to the St. Louis County sheriff this afternoon. We are going to tell them where Harold Nystrom went through the ice and what Grandpa did, all of it. The man has been missing for fifty years, and somewhere he has a family who never knew. We are not going to sell this buck to a collector. We are going to find the daughter of that man, if there is one, and put this money in her hand.”
Gunnar bowed over his knees. “I have waited fifty years for someone to ask me,” he said, brokenly. “I drank because I could not tell. I never married because I could not let a woman close enough to hear it in my sleep. I let Dad carry it alone and I let him carry it to the end. If I had told someone in 1974, they might have found Harold in the spring. His wife would have had a place to stand beside.” He lifted the revolver slowly. “I want to throw this in the lake, Jo. I want to throw it as far as I can.”
He stood up with the revolver in his fist and strode out the door of the cabin and across the frozen yard toward the shore of Burntside, his boots crunching in the snow. I ran after him. He was a heavy man of sixty five, and he went down the path like a boy. He was nearly at the water when old Sven Aronson, the retired game warden from the next cabin, who had been splitting wood on his porch, stepped out onto the path with the axe in one hand and raised the other palm out. “Gunnar,” he said, “not into the lake. That is evidence.”
Gunnar stopped with the revolver raised over his head, breathing hard in the cold. Sven walked up and gently closed his big hand around the wrist of Gunnar, and lowered it. “Give it to me, son,” he said. “I was a deputy in 1974. I took the report from the wife of Harold Nystrom. She sat in my office for four hours and never cried.” Gunnar let go of the gun. He stood on the shore with his empty hand open, and then Sven put an arm around him, and they stood together looking out at the gray ice.
The money consequences were thoughtful. The dive team of the sheriff found the fur buyer in the spring, in forty feet of water not far from where Gunnar had pointed, and the family of Harold Nystrom, a daughter named Elaine, seventy one, living in Duluth, was told the whole truth. She did not hate us. She received the ninety four thousand dollars from my hands in the kitchen of her house, and then she asked to be taken to the lake. We stood on the shore in the rain.
In the name of Arvid, who passed in the fall, I started the Arvid Lindahl Fund. It pays for ice rescue gear, boating safety classes and treatment for families touched by drinking, in St. Louis, Lake and Cook counties. In the first year we gave rescue ropes and ice picks to thirty one volunteer departments and placed twenty seven people in treatment. One was a trapper of sixty from Tower who had carried a story in his chest for thirty years. He told it in a room full of strangers and then he laughed.
Gunnar came to the cabin on the sixteenth of the following November with a quiet face. He did not sit by the fireplace, and he did not drink. He walked down to the dock with Elaine Nystrom, and the two of them set a small wooden boat with a candle in it out onto the open water. We watched the little flame drift away from the shore. Gunnar said a name aloud, Harold, and then, to my astonishment, he said, “Dad.” The buck, repaired, hung back over the hearth, with a plaque beneath it that told the whole story.
