“Self-medication is a Landsman tradition.”

“So is being a Jew,” Landsman says. “Look where that’s got us.”

“Strange times to be a Jew,” the old man agrees.

He turns from the bar and presents Landsman with a highball glass fitted with a lemon-slice yarmulke. Then he pours himself a generous shot of slivovitz and raises it to Landsman with an expression of humorous cruelty that Landsman knows well and in which he long since ceased to see any humor.

“To strange times,” the old man says.

He eases it back, and when he looks at Landsman, he glows like a man who just said something witty that broke up a room. Landsman knows how much it must be killing Hertz to watch the skiff he poled for so many years, with all his craft and strength, drifting ever nearer to the falls of Reversion. He pours himself a second quick one and knocks it back with no show of pleasure. Now it’s Landsman’s turn to raise an eyebrow.

“You have your doctor,” Uncle Hertz says. “I have mine.”

Uncle Hertz’s cabin is a single large room with a loft that goes all the way around three sides. All the trim and furnishing is horn, bone, sinew, hide, and pelt. You reach the loft by a steep companionway at the back, next to the kitchenette. In one corner is the old man’s bed, neatly made. Beside the bed, on a small, round table, stands a chessboard. The pieces are rosewood and maple. One of White’s maple knights is missing its left horse ear. One of Black’s rosewood pawns has a blond flaw on its knob. The board has a neglected, chaotic air; a Vicks inhaler stands amid the pieces at one end, a possible threat to White’s king at e1.

“I see you’re playing the Mentholyptus Defense,” Landsman says, turning the board to get a better look. “Correspondence game?”

Hertz is crowding Landsman, exhaling his breath of plum brandy, the undernote of herring so oily and sharp you can feel the little bones in it. Jostled, Landsman tips the whole thing to the ground with a clatter.

“You were always the master of that move,” Hertz says. “The Landsman Gambit.”

“Shit, Uncle Hertz, I’m sorry.” Landsman crouches and gropes around under the old man’s bed for the pieces.

“Don’t worry about it!” the old man says. “It’s all right. It wasn’t a game, I was just fooling around. I don’t play by mail anymore. I live and die by the sacrifice. I like to dazzle them with some crazy, beautiful combination. Tough to do that on a postcard. Do you recognize the set?”

Hertz helps Landsman return the pieces to their box, also maple, lined with green velveteen. The inhaler he slips into a pocket.

“No,” Landsman says. Landsman is the one, executing the Landsman Gambit during a tantrum many years ago, who cost the White knight its ear.

“What do you think? You gave it to him.”

There are five books stacked on the nightstand by the old man’s bed. A Yiddish translation of Chandler. A French biography of Marcel Duchamp. A paperback attack on the wily agenda of the Third Russian Republic that was popular in the U. S. the year before. A Peterson field guide to marine mammals. And something called Kampf, in the original German, by Emanuel Lasker,

The toilet flushes, and there is the sound of Berko dashing water over his hands.

“Suddenly, everybody’s reading Lasker,” Landsman says. He picks up the book, heavy, black, the title embossed in gilded black letter, and is mildly surprised to discover that it has nothing to do with chess. No diagrams, no figurine queens and horses, just page after page of thorny German prose. “So the man was a philosopher, too?”

“He considered it his true calling. Even though he was a genius at chess and higher mathematics. I’m sorry to say, as a philosopher, maybe he wasn’t such a genius. Why, who else is reading Emanuel Lasker? Nobody reads Emanuel Lasker anymore.”

“That’s even more true now than it was a week ago,” Berko says, coming out of the bathroom, drying his hands on a toweL He gravitates naturally toward the dinner table. The big wood-block table is laid for three. The plates are enameled tin, the glasses plastic, and the knives have bone handles and fearsome blades, the kind you might use to cut the liver still throbbing from the abdomen of a bear. There is a pitcher of iced tea and an enameled pot of coffee. The meal that Hertz Shemets has prepared is plentiful, hot, and heavily weighted toward moose.

“Moose chili,” the old man says. “I ground the meat last fall, I have it in vacuum bags in the deep freeze. Killed the moose, too, of course. A cow, a thousand pounder. The chili I made today, the beans are kidney beans, and I threw in a can of turtle beans I had lying around. Only I wasn’t sure it would be enough, so I heated up a few more things I had in the freezer. There’s a quiche lorraine- that’s egg, naturally, with tomato and bacon, the bacon is moose bacon. I smoked it myself.”

“The eggs are moose eggs,” Berko says, duplicatin perfectly his father’s mildly pompous tone.

The old man points to a white glass bowl piled high with uniform meatballs in a reddish-brown gravy. “Swedish meatballs,” he says. “Moose meatballs. And then some cold roast moose, if anybody wants a sandwich. I baked the bread myself. And the mayonnaise is homemade. I can’t abide mayonnaise from a jar.”

They sit down to eat with the lonely old man. Years ago his dining room was a lively region, the only table in these divided islands at which Indians and Jews regularly sat down together to eat good food without rancor. There was California wine to drink and be expatiated upon by the old man. Silent types, hard cases, and the odd special agent or lobbyist from Washington mingled with totem carvers, chess bums, and Native fishermen. Hertz submitted to the raillery of Mrs. Pullman. He was the kind of domineering old cutthroat who chose to marry a woman who would knock him down a peg or two in front of his friends. Somehow it only made him look stronger.

“I put in a call or two,” Uncle Hertz says after several minutes of chess-deep concentration on his food. “After you called to say you were coming down.”

“Did you?” Berko says. “A call or two.”

“That’s right.” Hertz has a way of smiling, or of producing a smile-like effect, where he lifts only the upper lip on the right side of his mouth, and only for half a second, flashing one yellow incisor. It looks like someone has caught him by the lip on an invisible fish hook and is giving the line a sharp tug. “From what I gather, you have been making a nuisance of yourself, Meyerle. Unprofessional conduct. Erratic behavior. Lost your badge and gun.”

Whatever else he may have been, for forty years Uncle Hertz was a sworn officer of the law with a federal shield in his billfold. Though he undersells it, the note of reproach is unmistakable. He turns to his son. “And I don’t know what you think you’re doing,” he says. “Eight weeks away from the void. Two children and, mazel tov and kaynahora, a third on the way.”

Berko doesn’t bother to ask how his father knows that Ester-Malke is pregnant. It would only feed the old man’s vanity. He just nods and puts away a few more moose meatballs. They are good, the meatballs, moist with hints of rosemary and smoke.

“You are right,” Berko says. “It’s madness. And I don’t say that I love or care for that buffalo there, look at him, with no badge and no gun, bothering people and running around with frostbite on his kneecaps, any more than I do for my wife or my children, because I don’t. Or that it makes any sense for me to take risks with their future on his behalf, because it doesn’t.” As he contemplates the bowl of meatballs, his body emits a weary sound, a Yiddish sound, halfway between a belch and a lamentation. “But if we’re talking about voids, what can I say, that’s not the type of circumstances I want to be facing without Meyer around.”

“You see how loyal,” Uncle Hertz tells Landsman. “That’s just how I felt about your father, may his name be for a blessing, but the coward left me high and dry.”