Chapter 5: Jorgen

The Stump is a bar the size of a boxcar, with a moose head over the register.

The sign under it says NO TABS, NO TEARS, NO TALKING TO THE MOOSE.

By seven the next night it was full of people who had come to look at me.

"Don't hide," said Dell, shoving a rag into my hands. "Pour. Be useful. They'll tip you out of guilt."

I poured.

I had been behind that bar at sixteen, selling birch beer to loggers.

Somebody started clapping.

By eight a quarter of the pack had come up to apologize.

By nine, three of them had cried.

The old man with the feed cap, who had eaten his sandwich at the skidder, set a twenty on the bar.

"Your father taught me to read a river, and I never thanked him," he said.

He left before I could answer.

I put the twenty in the tip jar and stood there a moment with my throat tight.

"Don't," said Dell. "You'll set off the whole room."

At the far end of the bar the Blackfir Alpha was washing glasses.

Dell had put him there.

"You signed the paper," she'd told him. "You can scrub the glasses. Break one, you buy it."

He had broken one so far and was visibly afraid of her.

"I'm very good at this," he told me when I passed.

"You've put the pint glasses in with the wine glasses."

"They're glasses."

"Soren."

"Is that bad?"

I laughed so hard I had to hold the bar.

He looked at me.

Dell hit him on the arm with a bar towel.

"Eyes on the sink, Alpha."

At nine-thirty Sigrid Brekke came in.

She walked straight past the crowd on her hooked cane to the corner booth, sat down, and ordered a slice of huckleberry pie.

Dell served it herself.

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