Breaking Point

33

The core of his body was so hot from the fire that when he lowered himself to his chest in the Middle Fork of the Twelve Sleep River, Joe expected the water to sizzle and steam to rise, but it didn’t. Clamping his hat on tight so it wouldn’t float away, he slipped beneath the surface. It was instantly quiet, and the water was clear and cold. Joe opened his eyes to see the multicolored riverbed of smooth potato-sized rocks, and three fat cutthroat trout finning in the current near an undercut bank. The fish just held there with a minimum of effort, something Joe wished he could do.

He lowered his boots to the riverbed and stood up. When he broke the surface the sounds came back: the well-muscled flow of the river, the roar of the fire hundreds of feet above. Joe let the cool water chill and soothe him.

“Oh, God,” Butch said after resurfacing, “it feels so good.”

Joe looked over to see Butch standing with his eyes closed and a smile of sweet relief on his face. He imagined how wonderful the cold water must feel on the open blisters and burned skin.

Farkus entered slowly, tentatively, cautious step by cautious step, until he was in to his knees.

“Come on in,” Joe said. “It’s great.”

“I can’t swim.”

“It isn’t deep enough to drown. We’re both standing.”

Farkus winced. “Any water is deep enough to drown.” With that, he stepped forward, slipped on a river rock, and flailed his arms and went under. He came up sputtering and cursing several feet downstream.

The three of them stood in the river without speaking after that, each with his own thoughts. Joe let his body cool until he had goose bumps on his flesh. He looked straight up at the narrow opening of the canyon as if at another world. It was hell up there.

Although it was mid-morning, the sky was dark and mottled. Tongues of flame slashed out from both sides of the canyon. Despite how far away they were from the top, ash fell softly around them to be carried downstream.

Finally, Farkus said, “How long do we stay here before we climb out?”

“We’re not climbing out,” Joe said. “That fire will be burning all around us for a long time.”

“Then what do we do?” he said, a high note of panic in his voice. “Do we build a tepee and stay down here?”

“We could borrow those poles up there,” Butch said as a joke, but Farkus didn’t smile. Joe noted that Butch’s mood had improved markedly since they’d found the water.

Joe said, “The only thing we can do is go down the river.”

“Have you ever been down it?” Farkus asked.

Joe shook his head. The Twelve Sleep Wilderness Area had been so designated because the canyon and the river were nearly impenetrable. There were no roads in and very few trails. It was wild and steep and ancient and not navigable except by adventurers in kayaks in the early runoff season.

“I’ve always wanted to see it, though,” Joe said.

“There’s something wrong with you,” Farkus replied.

Joe grinned. Marybeth had often said the same thing.

With Farkus and Butch clinging to a dry pileup of debris, Joe scouted downriver.

There wasn’t enough water in the river to swim freely, and the canyon walls were so sheer they couldn’t walk more than a few feet on the dry bank. Going downstream was their only option, but there didn’t seem to be an easy or practical way to do it. Because of the pitch of the riverbed, Joe assumed the river conditions changed around every bend. There would be long, deep pools leading to furious rapids to stretches where it looked like a boulder field that just happened to have a river going through it.

He stood knee-deep in an eddy with his hands on his hips, shaking his head.

When he returned to the others and told them what he could see downriver, he stopped in mid-sentence.

“What?” Farkus said. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” Joe said, studying the debris pileup. For years, trees that had been dislodged upriver had been washed down during flood years and runoff months. The pile they were on was dense with interlocked driftwood that had been washed smooth and was pale white in color. It looked like some kind of boneyard. But simply because the pile was wood, Joe knew, didn’t mean it would float. Most of the lengths, he guessed, were fatally waterlogged.

Butch seemed to read his mind and swiveled where he sat. He pointed at a broken tree trunk near the top of the pile that was eighteen inches in circumference and eight or nine feet long. It was high enough on the pile, Joe thought, that it might be a recent addition and wouldn’t be heavy with water. It looked stout enough to hold them all, and there were enough nubs on it where branches had once been that could serve as handgrips.

“That just might be our boat,” Joe said.

It took nearly a half-hour to free the log from the pile because it was so entangled in the debris, but they finally were able to free it and roll it down the river. The log bobbed in the water and didn’t submerge, and Butch held it in place while Joe and Farkus reached around it and found places to hang on.

The surface of the log was smooth and slick, the bark blasted off by scouring water, but it was dry and buoyant. On the count of three, they lifted their feet off the riverbed and pushed it out into the deepest part of the river.

It floated.

“This might just work if we can keep it pointed downriver,” Joe said. “If we let the back end swing around, we might get hung up on rocks or more debris. That would be bad.”

They found their grips and balance on the log-Joe was on the left side of the log with his right arm draped over the top, Butch was on the right a few feet behind, and Farkus switched between the left and right side around the stump of the log depending on which way it drifted.

“Are you guys about ready?” Joe asked.

Before either could answer, there was a large explosion on the surface of the water between the log and the bank, and the splash slapped across their faces.

Joe’s first thought was that rocks were being dislodged from the canyon walls and dropping down into the river. But when he squeezed the water out of his eyes, he looked up to see the silhouette of a large mule deer, the antlers in velvet, dropping through the sky right toward them. It was trailing a stream of smoke like a shot-up fighter plane about to crash.

“Duck-it’s coming right at us. .” he shouted, before letting go of the log and submerging.

A herd of deer had been trapped, he guessed. They’d retreated as far as they could to the rim of the canyon, but there was no way to outflank the fire. They’d bunched on the rim as the flames burnt their hides until they actually tried in vain to jump the canyon.

The buck deer hit the log with a concussive impact that boomed through the water. Joe looked up to see thrashing arms, legs, and hooves in a cloud of white bubbles and swirls of blood. The end of the log itself was driven down in front of his vision by the weight of the buck-before rolling out from beneath it and righting itself.

When he came to the surface, he looked into the frightened eyes of Butch Roberson, who was standing a couple of feet away. Their boat-log was floating slowly downriver, just out of reach.

And there was no sign of Dave Farkus.

“You get the log,” Joe said to Butch. “I’ll look for Farkus.”

Joe took a deep breath and again dropped beneath the surface.

He could see two still bodies a few feet downstream, tumbling in lazy slow motion along the river rocks. One was the buck-its back broken, ribbons of blood streaming out from its snout, its hide horribly burned-and the other was Farkus.

Joe closed the distance quickly and managed to grasp Farkus by his shirt collar. There was no resistance-no indication of life or struggle-as he pulled him up. The river was shallow enough that he could stand and breathe, and he kept Farkus above the surface by reaching under the man’s arms and pulling Farkus’s back tight to his chest. Joe backed his way to the narrow bank and lowered Farkus to the river rocks.

The man was breathing, but his breath was soft and shallow. Farkus’s left shoulder was asymmetrical, and when Joe bent over and loosened his shirt he could see the shoulder-and possibly the clavicle and sternum-had been crushed by the impact.

Farkus moaned, opened his eyes briefly, then passed out again.

“Only you would nearly get killed by a falling deer,” Joe said to Farkus, hoping the power of the fall hadn’t broken too many bones inside the man.

Butch splashed his way over with the log in tow. They lifted Farkus and placed him facedown on the log as if straddling it, with his hands and legs dangling down into the water and his head resting on its ear on the trunk itself. They decided not to bind him to the log in any way so he wouldn’t slip off, but try to keep him balanced between them. If they tied him on, Joe thought, and the log flipped or got away from them in a rapid. .

Joe and Butch walked the log into the deepest part of the river, until the current leaned into them from behind. They pushed off and raised their feet out in front a foot or so below the surface and let the log float them.

As if he were guiding a fisherman on a drift boat, Joe kept his eyes downriver at all times. The river was technical and challenging; the trick was to anticipate the deepest runs and try to stay in the faster-moving water most of the time. But when the current looked like it would speed up and suck them into exposed boulders or dead trees or the cliff face itself, they’d have to maneuver the log so it would skirt the hazards but still keep floating.

It didn’t take long for Joe and Butch to sync, to read each other’s thoughts and keep the log-and Farkus-moving forward. When the bow of the log started to drift to the left, Joe’s side, Butch would drop a boot deep until it caught on a rock and the makeshift craft would correct to the right. They learned to slow it by dragging their feet on the riverbed like anchors, and turn it quickly if one man set his feet and the other lunged forward. They spoke very few words and navigated by feel and intuition.

“River right,” Joe would say, and Butch would either anchor a foot or shift his weight to cajole the log in that direction.

“River left-hard,” Joe would grunt, digging in so Butch could swing the craft over to avoid a series of bladelike rocks that blocked the right channel like a row of tombstones in a Civil War cemetery.

The sound of the river was omnipresent, but Joe could tell the intensity of the fire above was dissipating. Either the timber on top there was already burned to the ground or the fire hadn’t yet reached it-he couldn’t tell. The narrow band of sky was still choked with smoke and light diffused through it.

Despite how dire their situation was, Joe allowed himself to be astounded by some of the sights and features they floated by. He vowed to himself to come back someday, maybe with an experienced kayaker, and run the river with time to appreciate it. There was no wilder river in the mountains. It had never been dammed because it was impractical in the canyon, and there wasn’t enough water in it to be used for navigation or even to float ties or lumber when the railroad had been built downstream or the towns constructed. It was useless for irrigation because of the canyon walls. The Middle Fork was rocky, foamy, untamed, and amoral. Few human beings had left a mark on it of any kind.

Joe knew that the Middle Fork would eventually feed into the North Fork of the Twelve Sleep River several miles downstream, according to maps he’d studied. But river miles were different than map miles, and included bends, channels, and meanders that could double or triple the actual distance on paper. At the confluence of the Middle Fork and North Fork was a popular Forest Service campground that would likely be occupied by campers-if they hadn’t yet been evacuated. Joe thought it unlikely, since the fire had spread so fast.

Campers meant vehicles, cell phones, and possibly medical supplies for Farkus. It also meant the end of the trail for Butch Roberson, one way or other. Joe thought Butch had to know that.

But first they had to get there.

In some stretches where the canyon walls were especially close and the spray hung in the air, the fast river created an ecosystem of its own, Joe noted. There were ponderosa pines growing almost parallel to the canyon wall itself that were eight feet in circumference and reached sixty feet in the air. They were the tallest-and oldest-trees Joe had ever seen in the mountains. Unfamiliar orchidlike wildflowers in vibrant colors clung to small shelves along the way, nurtured by the steady spray and almost constant shadow. Butch nodded at ancient hieroglyphics drawn on slatelike slabs. Joe could make out human forms, spears, bows and arrows. The stick men appeared to be hunting bison, although the bison looked more like wildebeests than the buffalo Joe was used to. He wished he had a camera.

But whenever Joe’s concentration wandered from studying the river ahead, they’d drift one direction or the other and have to overcorrect. Or Farkus would moan pitifully or vomit. Joe noted that Farkus’s shoulder seemed to have doubled in size since the deer hit him, and dark discoloration was creeping out on his neck from under his collar. He continued to drift in and out of consciousness, but something inside him kept him clinging to the log regardless.

The water was cold and was fed by springs and snowmelt high above. While it had been welcome at first, given the heat of the fire, Joe was wary of hypothermia setting in. His limbs were numb and tight and at times not responsive. It was as if the cold water was sapping his strength away. When they floated through a patch of sunlight, he basked in it and tilted his face up toward the source of the warmth.

When he glanced at Farkus, he saw that he, too, was cold. His skin was ghostly white, and his lips were pale and tinged with ultramarine.

They floated the first hour-Joe guessed it had been three miles at best-without any serious mishaps. Given the circumstances, Joe felt almost ashamed of himself for enjoying the ride.

Until they heard the roar up ahead of them that sounded like the booming of thunder.

But it wasn’t thunder.