The River

CHAPTER TEN

This is what they had gathered on the stones beside the canoe, which Jack slid half into the water:

Inside the bag were:

Beside the bag were:

Inside the box were:

Also on the rocks were:

On their persons they each carried:

And they had maybe twenty pounds of blueberries. They emptied their caps and the pot into the improvised shirt sacks.

That was it. Step back and one sees on the rocks of the beach one blue duffel-size bag, one plastic box the size of a large camera box, two fishing rods, and a rifle. And a couple of bulging tied undershirts full of berries, like two lumpy pillows. Not much.

They wouldn’t have had any of it if Jack hadn’t been thinking fast.

This is how they loaded the Wenonah nineteen-foot Itasca expedition canoe:

They propped the dry bag just aft of the center thwart. They lashed it in as best they could with its two shoulder straps.

They lowered the woman into the boat and let her lean against the bag as a backrest, and she sat on Jack’s life vest. She was facing aft. They were a bit stern-heavy, but it would have to do. They decided they wanted her facing backward so someone could see her face and watch her. Also, after what she’d been through they thought it might be better, if she woke up, to see someone she could easily talk to rather than watch the bowman’s back. They unslung her left arm for a minute and worked her into her own life vest and zipped it up. It was just flat swift water for the next twenty-eight miles, but if for some unforeseen reason they flipped, neither had confidence that she could swim.

The Pelican box, thankfully, still had its own short cam strap looped to the handle so they strapped it to the thwart right behind the bow paddler. They leaned the fly rods beside her on the starboard side, rod tips angled up and forward. They would not get in the way of the bow paddler, who they decided would be Jack from now on. He was the shooter and if they needed to shoot from the boat Wynn could navigate and steer from the stern. And then the rifle went up in the bow, leaning against the bow deck, leather strap clipped to the bow carry handle with a carabiner. Jack thought about it and went back to the dry bag and unclipped and unrolled it against her back and fished out the ammo box and picked six more cartridges out of the plastic holder and slipped them into the front pocket of his Carhartt pants.

They laid the tied shirts filled with blueberries in the completely open section of boat between center and forward thwarts, where they looked like sad limbless sacks of contraband. They laid them on Wynn’s open life vest to lift them off the hull in an effort to keep them as dry as possible. They’d need the shirts tonight. The breeze was picking up and it smelled strongly of smoke now and the clouds were flying, but they were getting more widely spaced, like fleets of ships scattered by storm. It was clearing. Tonight looked to be cloudless, and if it was, it would probably frost hard again and it would be cold. They’d need every layer they had. Now they were in their light undershirts, which in the cool breeze was just tolerable, but they knew they’d warm up as they paddled.

They did. They glanced at each other and Wynn slid the boat bow-first farther into the water and held it steady as Jack climbed in; then, in case the woman could hear, he said to her, “We’re going to get going now, okay? We have easy flat water all day today, we’re just going to move downriver.” Her eyelids fluttered and he saw that the swelling there was calming down and that the blood in her right ear had dried. And then he gave a strong shove and hopped in, a practiced jump, and the boat buoyed with what seemed like relief, and they were floating free across the pool. They slid over the eddy line and the steady current turned them downstream in a wide arc and they dug in and began paddling north.