The River

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Walking into the outskirts of hell is like: filling your rubber knee-high Wellingtons with an inch of water—just seemed like the right thing to do. He and Jack still had them, as Wynn had thought to shove them into the dry bag for the night paddle. In case. In case what happened happened. Had they been wearing them in the flip they would have lost them. So as they walked into the embered wasteland of a burned forest they sloshed with every step. Maybe because the moon was not up, and the light there was cast from exploding trees across the river—the sense again of pulse like blood or breath, like something alive. The scorched landscape throbbed with light. Otherwise black and red: black ground, black stumps, red embers, black distances between the flaring stumps. It was hot. They walked through charred spindles and spears—the simple skeletons of the old-growth trees. They wound around the hollowed broken rounds of trunks, some twenty feet tall, that speared the night and whispered with small flames that ran up and down the edges. They passed a stump sheared ragged at the top and still, incredibly, barked, if charred, and streaked with resin. They passed one patch of spruce, maybe ten trees, singed but standing. How? Like retracing the tracks of fate. And if it was hellish at first, within a few minutes it felt holy. They held Maia upright between them to help her walk and they stepped slowly and nobody spoke. They avoided still-burning roots and feared those that burned beneath a layer of dirt. They sweated, and the ground was mostly very hot but it did not melt their boots more than a little. They coughed. Their sinuses burned but the smoke was mostly gone. They were aghast and awed. Nobody said a word but now and then one gasped.

They walked maybe a quarter mile and Jack whispered, “This is probably far enough. We’ll just wait.” His voice was a croak. He felt tired beyond reckoning. They scraped a patch of ash and scorched soil away with their boots and stood mute as the embered edges of the spiked trees breathed around them. It was not real. Jack looked around and thought that the Inferno was not credible: not because the details of Hell were beyond the pale—they were—but because of the unshakable equanimity of Virgil.

They waited there for hours. They leaned together and held her and slept like horses, standing. The ground was still too hot to sit on. She was weak and she buckled between them and they held her up. A crescent moon clawed out of the smoke to the east, a dim moon, heavy with blood. When she collapsed again they decided to move. It was too much—they’d take their chances on the beach.

They walked slowly back. They were dreamwalking now. She was mumbling, inarticulate. Jack couldn’t look at Wynn; whenever they passed a stump still burning, the large sear on his face glistened with pus and blood. He kept his eyes on the retreating flames eastward, a dread stare, his arm gone numb from holding her up. Wynn held her belt and thought of nothing. He saw shadows passing, shaped like caribou, coyote, moose, fleet and weightless as smoke, he even saw a bear, and he knew they were ghosts. Or maybe his eyes were closed; he kept snapping them open.

They stumbled down the bank to the stony bar. The hulk of the canoe lay there unharmed and Jack startled with a jolt of adrenaline, the thought: What if the fire had flashed back and burned the boat? What would they have done then? No logs even to make a raft. He hadn’t thought it through. They would have stood stunned on the narrow beach like castaways and watched a red sun rise on their own deaths.

Fuck. No way to truly reckon the odds, ever. They had been lucky. Was all this lucky?

They slept on the rocks, oblivious of the cold. At least the heat of the burn had dried their clothes and warmed their chilled bones. At the first touch of grainy light they slid the canoe to the water without a word and helped her in and she lay down against the bag and passed out. They shoved off and picked up the paddles. They could see their breath. In the gray dawn the river smoked with tendrils of mist. No wind, the water glass-smooth. No sound but the current frilling the stones of the bank. No bird chatter, no crickets. The river and the burns on either side were very still, the only movement there the tatters of flame worrying the biggest fallen logs. Jack said, “Big, we need fuel. Food. There won’t be any berries for miles is my bet.”

“Do you want to fish?” Thank God they’d broken down the rods and packed them in the bag.

“We’d better.”

“Okay. I’ll aim for the first creek.” Wynn picked up his paddle and put it down again. The boat was still gliding from their first strokes—the silent slip and freedom from land like flight that they both so loved. “That was really close,” he said.

“Yep.”

“I feel relieved,” Wynn said.

“Me, too. I do.”

Wynn opened his mouth to speak, had nothing to say. Jack was half turned on the bow seat, watching him. “I know,” Jack said. Wynn’s face was torn open by the burn and smeared with black and runneled pale where the tears ran. “I know. We did good,” Jack said. “We did.” Jack felt his own tears spring and he turned in the seat and began to paddle.

It was exhaustion, Jack thought. The tears. Hunger, exposure, exhaustion. How long could they keep this up?

One good thing: the man would have no cover. Not up here. Had he survived the fire? He’d had maybe a day lead and might have missed it altogether. But then who knew how far down the river the fire ran? For all they knew it went to the delta, the coast. What would stop it? But they had to assume he still lived. In the burn they’d be able to see him way before they got into shotgun range. They still had the rifle, thank God. If the scope hadn’t been knocked too badly they could drift and find him and pick their shot. Not they, Jack. Wynn would still not sanction the long-shot kill. Well, maybe he would now. Jack thought that it didn’t matter—he would hunt and snipe the man the first chance, and as long as Wynn didn’t fuck with him and try to unbalance the boat, he would kill him.

They paddled. The sun rose and burned almost crimson through the smoke that lay over the eastern horizon like a weather front, not even visible as sun until halfway to the zenith, and even then it was a hot red disk that looked more like some molten planet than a star. All along the cut banks were the scribed traces in damp earth where embedded roots had been, blackened and forking lines like some inscrutable calligraphy. The topography revealed was desolate. So much of the country had been covered in lichen and moss sometimes feet thick, and it had all burned away in the night, and the underbrush, the fireweed and willows, all that was left was seared dirt and bedrock, the black spears of trees, sepulchral, and without the woods there was the much longer view, the slight rising and falling of ground in every direction, the humps of eskers mostly bare of stumps, the folds where creeks had run, dry as if boiled off. Not fun, Wynn thought. The earth stripped to its geography did not feel like home.

There was still a handful of power bars in the day box and when Maia woke and sat up Wynn thumbed open the latches and fished out three and they each ate one. They drifted. The sugar in the blood felt almost like a cup of strong coffee and each felt suddenly more awake, alert. They were starving, for sure, Jack thought. He looked up and down the banks and of course there was nothing, nothing to forage. And no wood, he realized now, to make a fire. Though the thought of touching match to wood almost made him shudder. They had the pot still. How would they cook the last of the freeze-dried meals? She could eat them soaked cold. How would they make tea to fortify themselves? Forest fires were always, always patchy, there would be spots along the bank that for whatever reason had been jumped over, there had to be—they’d have to keep their eyes out. For that, and for the man. Maybe it was the rush of protein and sugar, but before he could take back the words he spoke them: he said, “Maia. Maia, right? Your fucker husband was waiting in ambush back at the last falls. What are the odds he will keep this up? I mean if he’s not cinders by now.”

He could see only the back of her head. The wild hair unbound from the braid in the long swim. She’d also lost the wool hat and the bandage. “You mean trying to kill us?” she said softly. It surprised him. The ready, cogent answer. She must be healing somehow, even with all the trauma.

“Yes.”

Jack glanced at Wynn, who looked stricken. Jack felt like slapping him. What you don’t want to look at can still kill you, Big. What he wanted to say but didn’t. Well, he’d kill the man himself if it came to that.

She was very still. Not the stillness of passivity, but the stillness of holding oneself rigid in the face of some emotional wind. She was definitely getting her strength back. “He tried to murder me.”

“What I was thinking,” Jack said gently.

She said, “Unless we are very lucky, someone is going to die.”

They tried to make sense of the map. They had lost their bearings in the night paddle and were not sure which rapids they had passed. The river ran north but it meandered broadly, in places even bending south, and it had changed a lot since the survey in 1959, but the general contours must be the same. Still, it was hard to orient the map with the sun overhead. When it began to lower westward they’d have a better shot. Even better after dark. The last couple of nights had been clear, and tonight, with a long enough stretch of river visible ahead of them, they could probably get a bearing on the North Star and correlate the shape of the river they could see. It was important to put a pin in it. Jack said, “For one, we don’t want to get surprised by another rapid. For two, he’s operating under the same constraints: he can’t let us pass him. So he’ll be waiting again where he knows we’ll stop, at the top of a portage. Right at the top of the next big drop.”

Made sense. He might not find cover in the burned-over ground along the bank, but he might have it where the river erupted and fell—the biggest drops tend to be ledgy. As before. He could find plenty of cover behind rock outcrops. But. Anyway. They did not have to chase him. He would be waiting, surely. They needed food. The fire had been traumatic, but as they paddled steadily downstream on flat moving water they lamented even more the loss of the berries. It was a further violation: at the height of berry season, with the blueberries and blackberries and their cousins heavy on their stems and all the calories they’d probably need just at hand, the fire had thundered through and snatched it away. The river had taken care of the rest: in the flip they’d also lost the remainder of the caribou meat. It would have served them now.

Anything was better than nothing. After what must have been three miles of paddling through the burn, past huge toppled trunks still fluttering with yellow flame and pointed stumps sending up thin white smoke as if releasing the last of their spirits, they saw a creek entering in from river left. It flowed between low scorched banks and blackened stones, and it was scattered with fine ash but otherwise clear. They pulled out on the sand beach which seemed untouched, and they drank straight from the stream and pulled out their rods and strung them and began to fish. They figured if they caught any they could cook them over a still-burning stump. It lightened their spirits, enacting this simple routine, the steps of a ritual—piece together the rod, screw tight the locking ring against the reel, string the guides, pick a fly—the steps of a lifelong discipline that promised joy. They fished for an hour in the warmth of the afternoon—the freezing nights seemed to have cooled the days, too, it was no longer hot but pleasant and warm. They fished in the warm breeze and got not a single rise. No fry nor minnows darted past their ankles. As they cast and mended the lines and stripped them in, their moods sank. Neither wanted to be the first to say it. Wynn fished up to Jack and said, “They’re gone.”

“I know.”

“It’s shallow here. Do you think it could have boiled? Or all the ash?”

Jack shrugged.

“Why don’t we see any floating?”

Jack shrugged. “I dunno. It flashed over. Twenty-five hundred degrees could boil a creek for sure. I just hadn’t thought of it.”

Wynn thought, You can’t think of everything. And you’re hard on yourself when you don’t. Wynn would not shed tears again in front of his buddy, but somehow of all they had recently endured, the loss of the trout seemed the saddest.

They both heard it at the same time, a crunch behind them, of gravel, and they spun around and Maia was standing there. Her left arm cradled to her side, maybe covering some pain in her stomach. Disheveled, but standing.

“They didn’t all die,” she rasped. Her voice was almost normal. She seemed…almost like a normal woman. “It happens. We—I’ve been in some big fires on our trips. My trips.” She was snipping the man out of the snapshots, trying to. “They seem to know what’s coming somehow and a lot of them will swim down into the river.”

“No shit,” Jack murmured. He was truly awed and relieved. The implacability and violence of nature always awed him. That it could be entirely heedless and yet so beautiful. That awed him. But also its intricate intelligence. Its balancings. Its quiet compensations. It was like some unnamed justice permeated everything. He would not go further than that. Still, the workings of nature made the voracious, self-satiating intelligence of humans seem of the lowest order, not the highest.

“They’ll swim back up,” she said. “By next summer, if the insects come back—and they will—so will many of the fish.”

They all just stood there dumbly, in the sun and the smells of scalded earth, and the colder, welcome scents of the ashy creek, and absorbed the prospect of life returning. And the fact that they now had zero source of food.

They broke the rods down and stashed them back in the dry bag. They drank their fill of the creek, filled the battered, faithful pot full of clear water—the stream would not turn milky with mud and ash until the next rain—and they shoved off.

For a while they paddled slowly, then drifted. Without wind, in the middle of the current they were making four knots. They had not counted the tributary creeks they’d passed, nor reckoned their volume, but the streams were adding up and adding to the speed of the river. They were woozy with fatigue. With hunger. They did not have a plan. How many days were they from the village? They’d lost track.

Somewhere ahead they would know for sure. Because somewhere ahead was the biggest falls on the river, Last Chance, and from there they figured three days out. A few miles below the rapid was the confluence with the Pipestem, another big river that entered from the west, and after that the current would pick up, the two rivers together would widen, the gradient would flatten, and they could paddle everything then, every riffle. They could paddle it starving. They could drift it when the wind was down and save their strength. They would be home free. Probably. They did not have a plan, but neither did they plan on just letting the man shoot them.

Now the wind had quieted and they stroked slowly. Where the river ramped down around a bend and the current picked up they touched the water enough to keep the canoe straight and otherwise drifted. They knew: from here on out it was touch-and-go, they’d have to save their strength. And they’d have to stay awake and alert—they couldn’t drift into the lethargy of the very hungry. When the man attacked they’d have to answer. Or attack first, which was apparently Jack’s MO—who had known he had the temper of a killer? What Wynn was thinking as they drifted past a gravel bar on the right bank and an odd hump there, blackened and reeking like burned hair. He steered them closer in the easy current and they passed the stony flat within ten feet and he saw sticks jutting from the pile and the stench made him gag and then he realized it was a mother bear and cub, lying together and half burned, and he did gag and nothing came up.

“Jesus,” Jack said. The cub was half under the mother as if seeking shelter, and in places the mama bear’s hide was burned away and the fat beneath it too and the charry bones came through. They must have run just ahead of the juggernaut and made it across the river and been overcome with smoke and then it flashed over.

They drifted past and Jack said, “Hey, hey, wait a sec. Big. Pull over. We can salvage the meat.”

“No way.”

“We don’t have a choice.”

Wynn had gone ghost-white. He wiped his mouth on his forearm and his lips trembled and he took two strong strokes and let the current carry them past. This time he didn’t listen to his friend. He was no way going to disturb the pair, and plus no meat from them would ever stay down.

Jack glared. Wynn did not apologize this time. He looked past his friend and paddled.

How long? Nobody kept track. The raw sun rose clear of the smoke and let a white sky rinse clean the blood. It tipped past its zenith. They paddled. It was not desultory, it was deliberate and slow. Nobody spoke. She slept. No more eagles as sentries flying down off the tops of the tallest trees, they were blackened spires standing along the banks like the masts of wrecked ships, and the fire had burned away the branches and the big nests. No more flycatchers chattering, no mergansers winging in pairs fast upstream, no more loons loosing their laughter and wails. Only the sift of current through the stubbed limbs of a burned and fallen pine, the occasional knock of a paddle, the sip of the dipping blades as they lifted out of water. At some time in the afternoon Wynn muttered, then called, “Fucking A.”

“What?”

“Look.”

Jack looked. On the right bank the burn ended. Or paused. It was like the border of another country. There was black wasteland and then there was green—willows, alders, the boisterous fireweed flushing pink. And woods—the green-black of the spruce and fir, the rusty tamarack and yellowing birch. It was a miracle. What it felt like.

“Damn.”

“It’s a creek,” Wynn said. It was. Wider than the ones they’d seen so far. The creek and the wind together had somehow conspired a hard edge. Pretty hard. A few of the taller trees in the green country had burned, but they had burned like torches in mostly solitary glory, and the boys could see that some had burned only partway, on one side, or in just the tops, and that the rest still lived. Wynn wondered if a tree had some analogy to pain. Or what pain would look like for a being without nerves.

“Should we see if there’s fish?” he said.

“We’d better. Since we don’t have any bear meat.”

Wynn kept his mouth shut and set a harder J and paddled them in.