Chapter 2: It’s a Cabin in the Woods

Brandon finally regained consciousness three days after the wreck, feeling immediate pain from his injuries.

His eyesight was blurry, and he could only cry out, asking for help. The effort seemed to exhaust him, though, and he sank back into unconsciousness.

The next time he roused, slightly, he managed to eat a few spoons of applesauce and drank a cup of water, but that was the limit of his abilities. He started lightly snoring, unaware of the chuckles his sounds caused.

Dolores Lincoln checked her patient, Brandon Ellis, and made sure his blankets were in order. Then she returned to the kitchen to sit at the table.

“How is he doing?” asked her son, Ron.

“I think we can wake him up for a few hours tomorrow. He won’t enjoy it, but at this point he needs more activity. And he needs to eat some real food.”

Brandon received doses of dilaudid, a narcotic opioid. Dolores was a registered nurse with a master’s degree; her specialization was family nurse practitioner.

Ron got up and washed the dinner dishes, leaving his mother to think about how they got to this point.

Ron’s father, Laurence, had been an invalid for two years under her care before expiring when their son was only 8 years old. A commercial truck had gravely injured him, resulting in a seven-figure (millions) insurance payout to her and another large payout into a trust for Ron.

While caring for her husband, Dolores built up a substantial library of painkillers and medical equipment. Following the return of the hospital bed and after completing the funeral and burial, Dolores and Ron departed from their cozy little house, taking the hoard of medical supplies and all their most important possessions with them.

Dolores, widowed and bitter, found and purchased a cabin well off the highway in the Minnesota woods for the two of them. In this rural area, African Americans such as Dolores and Ron were quite uncommon. Instead, the local area’s population was mostly either tribal (“Indians”) or the very fair-skinned descendants of Norwegian immigrants.

A large portion of their possessions ended up sold, donated, or discarded. Ron was growing quickly, and he needed clothing that was more suitable for the outdoors anyway. She wasn’t growing, but instead of the scrubs of her past working life, she found flannel shirts, lined cargo pants, and so on.

After about $90,000 in renovations and upgrades, the cabin was ready for them to occupy. At a high cost, they brought in fiber internet service. They added solar panels to the roof, upgraded the well, and reworked the pipes and fixtures in the new propane system for the cabin with various contractors.

Other contractors graded, widened, resurfaced, and upgraded the drainage for the entire 700 feet of driveway, then erected a sturdy steel gate about 20 feet back from the highway shoulder. Passing cars (at 60+ miles per hour) would usually not even notice the driveway entrance. To maximize sunlight for the panels that were steeply raked to shed snow in the winter, an arborist topped a few of the pines south of the house.

One more task remained. She made an appointment at a nearby tribal administrative office, not too far away across the Mississippi River in Wisconsin. Alan Rivers, a local executive of the Ho-Chunk Nation (formerly known as the Wisconsin Winnebago Tribe), welcomed her into his office.

“Thank you for seeing me. I’ll get right to the point. I’d like to hire someone from your group to work with me for three weeks. This person must be absolutely trustworthy and very knowledgeable about living out in the woods throughout the year. You see, I’ve bought a cabin just over the river in Winona County, and I want to live there with my son (he’s 9) all year long. I want to be as self-sufficient and secure as possible.

“I’m a retired nurse, and I have a comfortable income. Along with learning useful skills, I need advice about a vehicle. I need a powerful truck able to plow my driveway, so we won’t be snowed in.”

“I see, and you came to us because...”

“A couple of things. For one, being a black woman in this rural area makes me feel a little out of place. There’s an expression: ‘people of color.’ I thought maybe a tribal person (am I saying that right?) might be more sympathetic, or something.”

“Hey, don’t worry about language. I’m an Indian, a Native American, a Tribe Member. In Canada they use First Nations, I like that one the most. There’s also Winnebago; that was the old name used for us. Officially, we are the Ho-Chunk Nation, with most members living in Wisconsin.