The River

CHAPTER SEVEN

They stoked the fire all night. There was plenty of driftwood wracked on the shore. It didn’t rain and the cloud cover kept the night warmer and it didn’t frost. Jack set up the ultra-light tent, a tapered tube with an arched pole at either end that staked out taut, front and back. He snapped on the waterproof fly to cover it, as much for a little more warmth as anything, and they took turns stretching out and sleeping on Wynn’s pad inside it. In a sweater and rain jacket and wrapped in one of the emergency blankets, they were cold, but it was doable.

It didn’t rain. The low clouds lidded the sky and the wind dropped. Except for the flames of the fire, which sent their sparks toward the wall of trees and then shifted and blew out over the water, there was no light. Wynn stared across the lake westward and at times he thought he might have seen the faintest glow reflected in the overcast, but he would blink and it would be gone. He thought the distant fire was like a war zone, like a front in some battle that was too distant to hear but that would in a matter of days change your life forever. How it felt. The night was pitch, but Wynn could feel that the sky was moving overhead, scraping the treetops.

She must have slept. They’d gotten some ramen in her after dark and in themselves, too. Wynn carried a larger stone to the fire and sat beside her head. He covered it as much as he could with the hood of one of the sleeping bags, but he could see in the fluttering light the top of his ski hat, blue with a broad red band. Knit by his friend Pete’s grandmother. The Darrows had the orchard one ridge over from his place, and he knew the hillsides blind from years of running through them in every season, from swimming in the pond at the lower edge. His favorite time was early May, when the slopes were a sea of white apple blossoms that perfumed the air with a scent so delicate and sweet he thought it might be the most enchanting smell on earth. Autumn, too, in the fields and woods, mid-October, the earth smells of fallen leaves slick with rain, of tall grasses and stony trails wet with cold rain and the cold stone smells of the brooks surging with the rush of all-night downpours. That smell was unbeatable.

Why was he thinking of home? Because he wanted to be there, right now. This trip they’d looked forward to all year had taken a turn. That was okay. That’s what adventures were all about: dealing with unforeseen dangers. And when you were with a friend as solid as Jack, there might be nothing better. But this was different. He sat in the wavering heat and felt the low sky raking overhead just beyond the firelight and he smelled rain. He hoped it held off. He hoped the sense he had of things slipping toward disaster would blow away like the clouds.

Right now he wanted to be home. He and Jack could both be there for a couple of weeks, end of summer, helping his dad put up firewood. Tonight, by now, Jess and his mom and dad would’ve gone to sleep. A northeast wind that presaged fall would be buffeting the windows, and he and Jack would sit by the woodstove with one lamp lit and talk about the canoe expeditions they would take. They’d step outside for air and if the wind was right they’d smell the apples ripening on the trees in the dark down the ridge. Funny to think that now, now that he was on the canoe trip they’d wanted to take the most.

This one. It had started like magic. The clear warm weather, the cool nights and stars, no northern lights yet, but they’d only been out a week. The fishing that seemed like cheating. They’d paddle to the edge of a lake, or into the mouth of a slough or creek and they’d throw dry flies and catch lake trout out of a dream. They’d throw big tufty Stimmies and tiny black gnats. Didn’t seem to matter much. They’d barely touched their dried food and they were almost getting sick of pan-fried fish. They picked blueberries and raspberries and blackberries along the shores and they gorged themselves. Their mouths turned blue and purple and they laughed about how they could pick for an hour and never fill up a pot or a baseball cap. They ate them all. They were strong paddlers and made easy time across the lakes, and they challenged themselves to try to make the longest portages in one carry and they never could. Not with the rifle and fly rods and small barrels of food and gear.

The rifle. Wynn huffed out a breath. What had been the best trip ever was now…what? It still seemed like a dream, but turning bad. He didn’t think she’d been mauled by a bear, but it was possible.

He wished he had his pipe. It was anachronistic and on a wilderness trip there was nothing he enjoyed more—to stuff it with a vanilla burley blend and smoke it late by the fire. But he’d left it in camp. It had been his grandfather’s, his father’s father’s. Whom Wynn had adored because he was a risk-taker and a goofball. The old old man, Charlie, had trained as a lawyer and married a Boston Brahmin and had worked on Wall Street for a few years and hated it; he’d moved to southern Vermont and become a respected amateur painter and early organic gardener and local historian. He painted barns and fields, but he also painted nudes, and the story went that he had two model mistresses, one widow and one widow aspirant, who’d told her drunk husband that if he made a peep she’d slit his throat the next time he passed out, which would probably be tomorrow. Charlie’s youngest son, Wynn’s dad, had inherited his father’s fluid, honest line and sense of color but had eschewed fine art for the more practical pursuit of architecture. After college he had spent a year in Japan studying landscape and had never gotten over it, and he now built Japanese-inspired houses all over southern Vermont. The goofy, risk-taking fine-arts gene had skipped a generation and landed on Wynn. Who thought he’d be perfectly willing to spend half the year as a low-paid outdoor instructor if he could spend the other half living in some barn constructing art installations and sculptures.

He pushed the stub ends of driftwood into the embers and held out his right hand and heated his palm. Then he reached down and worked his hand into the sleeping bag wrapping her head, into the warmth of it. Warmth, good. Her core temp had come up, little by little, and the shivering and whimpering had stopped, and they kept putting warm stones in with her and retrieving them when they cooled. She had drunk a full cup of ramen and eaten a chocolate bar and now she was generating her own heat. He worked his fingers down and felt the pulse at her throat and it was steady and strong. Good. The shock, the worst of it, was over. The challenge would be to keep her out of it.

He turned his eyes away from the fire and out to the lake. The circle of light wavered over the stones of the beach. It flared in the wind and dimmed when the gust passed. The night was dense. The firelight could not penetrate to the water. Out there, in the felted blackness, was only sound. The lap of small waves, the sift of water sliding over water. He thought he heard a slap, he could have—the tail of a beaver? He glanced down beside him: the Savage .308 was there, out of its scabbard, scoped and chambered. When they had finished the portage Jack had unshouldered the canoe and reached for the gun on Wynn’s shoulder. He’d thumbed the safety and levered the action and dug in his pocket for a single cartridge and shoved it into the top of the magazine and snapped up the lever. Now with the five in the magazine there’d be six shots. Tonight, in low voices, they had decided to leave the gun with whomever was on watch. No telling what the crazy fuckers on the island would do.

Maybe, Wynn thought, they were overreacting. Maybe she had been attacked by a bear. It had been his initial assumption. But the more he thought about her injuries, the more of a stretch it seemed. A bear clawed and bit and tore, it didn’t club and punch and twist arms from their sockets. But a fall could have. If she’d tried to climb a tree as they had, a fall could have done it. Wynn shivered. He was now downwind of the flames, the smoke stinging his eyes, the heat billowing into knees and face; he wasn’t shivering from cold. He realized that sometime in his musing he had reached for a chunk of driftwood and still held it. Damn, he must be getting sleepy. He reached out and laid it on the flames.

He got up and stretched and went to the woodpile and picked up an entire armload and fed it to the fire. They had scavenged the shoreline and stacked a pile of driftwood waist high. Might as well stay warm. And the way the megafire looked to be running, in a week or so all of this wood might be burned up anyway. He sat back down. He couldn’t keep his eyes open. The day seemed interminable, it defied natural law, no day could last this long. He made himself stay awake and in what seemed like twenty minutes he woke up Jack and passed out in the tent.