In the far, far North, a lake called Rainy forms the international border between Canada and the United States.  In times past, it was a smuggler’s paradise with hundreds of tiny islands, coves, portages and streams.  On one island, sits a massive house in a terrible state of repair.  On a splintered, weather-beaten dock jutting into the lake from a granite outcropping, four souls extract themselves from their tiny boat, which is already beginning to rock violently as the black waters of Rainy buck and roll in the precursor to a coming storm. Four souls, two federal bureaucrats, a historian, and a park ranger, stand on the dock, reluctant to begin moving toward the house.  What they find there will be beyond belief. 

In the far, far North, a lake called Rainy forms the international border between Canada and the United States.  In times past, it was a smuggler’s paradise with hundreds of tiny islands, coves, portages and streams.  On one island, sits a massive house in a terrible state of repair.  On a splintered, weather-beaten dock jutting into the lake from a granite outcropping, four souls extract themselves from their tiny boat, which is already beginning to rock violently as the black waters of Rainy buck and roll in the precursor to a coming storm. Four souls, two federal bureaucrats, a historian, and a park ranger, stand on the dock, reluctant to begin moving toward the house.  What they find there will be beyond belief. 

In the far, far North, a lake called Rainy forms the international border between Canada and the United States.  In times past, it was a smuggler’s paradise with hundreds of tiny islands, coves, portages and streams.  On one island, sits a massive house in a terrible state of repair.  On a splintered, weather-beaten dock jutting into the lake from a granite outcropping, four souls extract themselves from their tiny boat, which is already beginning to rock violently as the black waters of Rainy buck and roll in the precursor to a coming storm. Four souls, two federal bureaucrats, a historian, and a park ranger, stand on the dock, reluctant to begin moving toward the house.  What they find there will be beyond belief.