The River

CHAPTER NINE

They made a fire by the canoe, right on the cobbles of the portage beach. And they wrapped her in the sleeping bags again and heated rocks and warmed her up. They elevated her legs and when she stirred they got her to sip some warm sweet water. It was touch and go; that’s what Wynn thought. If she survived the next few days it would be…what? A miracle? No, but the odds didn’t seem good. If she was going to survive, the next few days would be critical. They needed to keep her in fluids and calories, and more than anything she needed rest. That was the quandary.

They could bust open the door of the little cabin in the clearing and stay for a few days, let her build up her strength. They could forage berries and fish. But. If the fire caught them here they would be toast. Or anywhere up here. From the topo maps the river looked to be pretty narrow for the next forty or fifty miles. Flash-baked. What they didn’t want to become. And every day they screwed around here near the lakes was another day closer to harder frosts and snow. She needed rest and they needed to get down the river to the village at the mouth of the bay.

Jack said, “We should get some miles in today.”

“I was thinking that. But—”

“If I’m right, Number One Dickhead will be waiting at the next portage. He can’t afford to let us pass him.”

“Well—”

“It’s flat water till Godawful Falls. Twenty-eight miles. She can rest in the boat. The rapid is a short portage like this and an easy beach landing. What the notes say. If he did this, he’ll be there.”

Wynn said, “Maybe we should pick some blueberries before we take off.”

“I was thinking that, too. She’s warm in the bags now, we can let her sleep.”

“I don’t think that’s sleep.”

“Yeah.”

They pulled out the single stainless pot and walked back to the clearing. The cloud shadows moved over it, and over the silvered peeling logs of the cabin walls, and the steel roof, and over the shrubs, the dark swaths of blueberries that roughened the meadow behind.

The swift shadows striped them with running stains that flowed over without a snag and suddenly cooled the air, and were chased upstream by the next sweep of sunlight. Wynn stopped and watched the cloud shadows run and thought that there was something beautiful in the cabin in the clearing in the running sunshine. The crashing of the river had become white noise, and strangely, looking around him, he thought the place was held in a rare silence.

He almost wished they could stay there. Wished that the cabin was stocked with cans of pork and beans, barrels of flour, sugar, rice, salt, packets of dried meat. That there was a saw, two saws, axes, that they could all stay here and rest and put up firewood and hunt a moose and soak the meat in salt brine and hang it to dry on racks. That the three of them could stay there all winter, and she could rest and heal, and they could let Pierre or whoever he was enact whatever drama, whether grief or cover-up. Wynn walked to the edge of the little bluff and looked at the mayhem of the falls.

Ten days out to the village. Eight maybe, if they paddled like demons, but then she would slow them down—on the portages around the big rapids, in the speed with which they could break and make camps and extend their days, and in her need for rest. So maybe more than ten. Jack must have been thinking the same thing, and about the meager amount of food in the box, because he came up beside him and said, “Maybe we should collect more than a potful.”

Wynn said, “Good idea.”

“I’ve been thinking about the next portage. Thing is, the book says it’s just after a small rock island with a couple of little trees. Says it’s an easy take-out, but it doesn’t say what the bank’s like.”

The book was just a printout of a couple of trip blogs, stapled and sealed in a map case. Each of them had one, for redundancy. The most helpful by far was the blog written up by two canoe guides from Pickle Lake who had paddled the river two summers ago. They had a simple sense of humor; they said things like, “Take out just after the bull moose on the left.” It made Jack crazy, he thought they were idiots, but Wynn envied people who could wring pleasure from the simplest things. But altogether the trip accounts and the topo map gave them a fairly detailed sketch of what they were in for: a hundred and fifty-two miles altogether, of a big river that flowed north and grew in power as it gathered tributaries big and small. Two more mandatory portages around big falls: about twenty-eight miles to the next one, Godawful Falls. Then eighty-one miles of fast water after that, to the next huge drop and portage at Last Chance Falls, with a couple of bigger rapids between, dangerous but runnable. A large meander in this stretch, northwest to northeast, before the river bent again north and made directly for Hudson Bay as if eager to get home. After Last Chance it was just forty-three miles of swift but mostly flat water to the village and the take-out.

“Thing is,” Jack said, “at Godawful we don’t know if there’s cover. Rocks, trees, maybe a bedrock ledge where Fucker Number One can just go prone and blast us from above. We don’t know shit.”

“He just panicked. Maybe we’ll catch up to him this afternoon. We can talk to him.”

Jack didn’t answer.

They looked at the rapid. Half the river on the near side poured into a wide chute that unleashed over the first high ledge and battered itself to white on the way down and pummeled the foaming water beneath it in an exploding hole that rolled back on itself. In the surging trough reared a large black log. It buoyed up and was pulled down and buried in froth and bobbed up and flailed for air and was beaten back, held against the falls by the upstream folding of the hydraulic. It made Jack queasy. He looked away. He had long ago trained himself not to think of horses or anything else, but sometimes he did.

“So we’ll ask her about what happened when she wakes up,” Jack said. “Let’s pick a mess of berries now and get going.”

On their trip so far berry-picking had been the best respite. Maybe the most fun thing they did. Because, unlike with fishing, they had zero ego involved, zero ambition. They hadn’t grown up thinking, I’m going to be the best berry-picker ever, whereas with fishing and even canoeing they thought that. Berry-picking was like throwing a Frisbee around, or taking a walk up the orchard road, or jumping into the lake and then lying on the sun-warmed stones. It was an achievement-free zone, which Wynn was coming to realize is where most of his joy happened. Making constructions on the riverbank was the same.

Berry-picking was like being a little kid again, crouching in the sun and rolling the berries from fingertips to palm and eating most of them before they reached the cup. They’d done it often on the way across the lakes and Wynn had lost himself every time, daydreamed like a bee-droned bear. They’d met one on Cedar Lake. Wynn had been picking black raspberries, mostly eating them, squatting at the edge of the thicket with the water behind him, and he’d stood at the same time as a black bear on the other side of it. They both swayed, twelve feet apart, about the same height, eye to eye, the bear lifting and moving her nose around, trying to identify the strange and dangerous scent. Odds were she’d probably never met a human before. Wynn had never met a bear that close. They were both surprised. He knew she was a she because a second later two heads popped up out of the bramble, little bear heads, and they looked at him with the curiosity of raccoons. They weren’t raccoons, they were this season’s cubs, and Wynn’s heart jumped because he suddenly knew how much danger he was in. Whatever the smell was, and the maybe strange sight of him, she didn’t like it. She snorted and dropped to all fours out of view. He reached for his bear spray and he didn’t have it because his pants and belt were lying over the rail of the canoe to dry, he was wearing his long johns, fuck, his hand swiped at air and he knew she had dropped for a charge and would come bursting through the thorns and knock him over. He had only time to bark a shout, to alert Jack, wherever he was, and to pray his buddy had time to break up the fight. He barked and braced and stumbled back and…nothing.

Air and sunshine. He saw the tall willows back of the raspberries shake and he knew the bears were hustling away and gone. Maybe it had been the shout. He knew he’d been lucky, and after that he always carried the pepper spray.

And so it was maybe why he’d had no reason to doubt the man’s story of losing his wife—he knew how easy it would’ve been to meet a bear even close to camp. To surprise a bear and be mauled and dragged. Especially in fog. Or even to climb a tree to get away from a bear and slip and fall. He’d read that bears sometimes buried a carcass for later, the way a croc can stuff a kill under a riverbottom log. When he saw the woman’s head wound and the bits of earth, his mind had gone from the surprise attack to being half buried by the bear. Did black bears do that? He’d heard of it only with grizzlies. And then, though the man said he’d searched, if he was in shock and scared and blinded by grief he might not have searched that well and have easily missed her. The woods could be very thick. He had been in shock. Why had he been looking straight ahead at the horizon line of the falls and nearly missed the portage? He’d been transfixed. By the danger, maybe. He was traumatized. What if they hadn’t yelled and woken him up? He might be another casualty, but this one terminal. And so…but.

It galloped through Wynn’s mind as they circled the cabin and picked. They knelt and filled up the pot and their tied shirts; they gathered with a will and a speed like migrant pieceworkers, the berry-picking that wasn’t fun anymore. She had not said more than one word yet, so they didn’t know. Jack didn’t know either but he was forming a theory. He was gathering evidence and he would indict and convict the man before they even met him again. Wynn wouldn’t. It was plausible. It was. A whole handful of possibilities: The Texans with their quiet motor could have stalked the couple in the fog. The poor man Pierre, in the grip of terror, had lost his wife and fled this new bear here by the falls, or fled them. Thinking that they had been the ones who had taken her in the mist and were now probably after him.

Wynn picked. There were so many fat berries and now that they weren’t eating them he was surprised at the speed and the growing volume. He could grab handfuls. He widened his fingers and raked through the twiggy bunches, the tiny leaves, clawed away the fruit. They were fat and almost blue where the skins were powdery and almost shiny black where the dust had been smudged and rubbed off. His mind raced. He thought about standing up and telling Jack that they needed to slow down, to get reasonable, everything now was going too fast. But what would it accomplish? Their next actions would be the same anyway: they had to get downriver as fast as possible. So. He picked.

In an hour they filled their caps, the shirts. Then they filled the single pot with more blueberries, and their two travel mugs. Good. Jack was no fool. He had no illusions that things would just work out, that somehow they would make it out in eight or ten days and would not get weak from hunger and vulnerable to exposure. They needed as many calories as they could get and they could not afford to pass them up. Jack had read the accounts. Of the expeditions that failed, that starved to death, that cannibalized, that lost their lives to cold and hunger. Of the kid who went into the wild and could not gather enough food and lost himself to encroaching lethargy and maybe poisonous berries. More numerous to count—the tragedies. And he had read of the ones that succeeded, sometimes miraculously: of Shackleton, who against all odds did not lose a single man; of Hugh Glass, the mountain man who was mauled badly by a bear and crawled himself through a Rocky Mountain winter to safety. They were not a thousand miles from anywhere, they were something like a hundred and fifty miles upriver from rescue, but they had whitewater to deal with and the onset of early cold, and they did not have all their warm clothes or food, and they had an injured person. Two sleeping bags, one small tent. Well. No more than two could sleep at the same time anyway, because they also might have another threat, and that meant that either he or Wynn would have to sit up at night with the rifle.

Jack thought about that. Lord knows he had been wrong before. Too many frigging times to count. This could have been a bear. But what if it wasn’t? What if his warning bells were right and the man was a killer? The only way to stay safe was to assume the worst. Which meant they would have to post a sentry in camp, and they could not both sit up. They would have to take watches. And the one on watch would be sitting by a fire for warmth and the extent of his vision would run to the edge of the firelight. He’d be sitting by a fire, illuminated, and he would not be able to see into the darkness beyond, what? Fifty feet? Sixty? Which meant…

His mind turned away from the conclusion and he forced it back. Which meant that most of the time whoever was on watch sitting by the fire was a sitting duck. Could be blasted from the cover of darkness. Especially as the fire burned down, as the watchman got sleepy. And the tent. He felt the goosebumps on his arms. The tent could be snuck up on from the far side, the dark side away from the fire, and the sleepers blown away at close range in their sleep. Then he could sprint forward and blast the surprised watchman as he struggled to swing the rifle and find the target through a scope at night. Which, in a hurry, at close range, is almost impossible.

Fuck. Fuckfuckfuck. The man had them. He had them dead to rights.

They could not travel this way. Waiting to be killed by a spousicidal maniac. What was the word for a wife-killer? He had to look it up. When…when they got back. He did not allow himself to think If.

Plus Wynn was still sleepwalking. He needed to wake up and smell the coffee or they might be toast.

They needed a better plan. Instinctively he knew they could not play defense, not the way they had the night before on the lake. They needed to go on the attack.

Jack looked at the sun. It was almost noon. Lots of daylight. The sun didn’t set until almost nine p.m. Good. They’d push it. There was no major whitewater until Godawful Falls. If he was waiting for an ambush, it would be there. The map said twenty-eight miles. On a normal trip, taking their time, stopping for lunch, paddling about fifteen miles a day, they’d get there tomorrow afternoon. But this was not a normal trip. Jack thought about the current sliding around the bend here before the falls. It would be about the same below if the river maintained a similar gradient. At this water level—and it was a low year, with the drought, and so the current would be slower—at this flow he figured the river was moving in the flats at about two miles per hour. It would pick up where things got constricted and steeper. He knew that the two of them could paddle 4.5 mph with a loaded boat, no wind. They’d lost gear and food but they had her.

But the canoe would slow down if they had to fight an upstream wind, which typically happened in the afternoons. So say they paddled an average of 3 mph. Add the current: 5 mph total speed, they could get to the portage in six hours. If they loaded up and got moving now, they’d get there before dusk. The sooner they engaged the man, the better, as far as he was concerned. They just had to figure out how.

Offense. A tactical surprise. Something that Number One Shithead would not expect. That’s what they had to do. And they had to figure it out in the next six hours.

They left her in the spotty sun for last, eyes closed, lying before the fire and whimpering. That was a new development, and it scared Wynn. Could she be unconscious and whimper? He didn’t know. Was it her shoulder, or her head, or something inside her? He didn’t know and it frightened him.

Jack jerked the canoe to his shoulders and trotted to the clearing and down the steep trail on the other side of it. The path skirted the ledge rock and dropped fast over uneven steps of granite and root to a gravel beach below the falls. Wynn carried the dry bag on his back, the fishing rods, the Pelican box, the rifle. They went back for her and the shirt sacks filled with blueberries. A stretcher would have been the best. They didn’t have one and they didn’t have time to make one. The portage was too far to carry her in his arms, so Wynn squatted and lifted her into a fireman’s carry over his shoulder. He prayed she had no injuries in the soft tissue of her belly. She moaned and he walked as swiftly and smoothly as he could.