The River

CHAPTER ONE

The two of them loved paddling in storm. With the spray deck sealing the canoe they felt safe as long as they did not broach sideways, and they struck out away from the shadows and sounds of shore. The compass heading was redundant as long as they kept the breaking waves on the port quarter. They could take heavy water but a capsize away from land would kill them, so they were very careful to power through the whitecaps at an angle. They both paddled on their knees to keep the center of gravity low. It was exhausting. Then the wind died all at once as if throttled and in less than half an hour the lake glassed off and they felt suspended in fog. They moved within a moving nimbus in which only a few yards of black water were visible in any direction, and the pale fog drifted in tatters like stubborn smoke. The water whispered along the hull and it had a silver sheen that reminded Wynn of rayon. All of it was dreamlike; he thought of a Poe novel he had read in which the castaways are pulled toward the South Pole and the current they are riding gets warmer and calmer as they go.

Wynn stopped paddling. As the bowman today he set the pace and so Jack quit paddling too and they glided. The boat was sleek Kevlar, nineteen feet, and with a V’d hull in bow and stern it glided straight. There was something satisfying in a cessation of paddling on smooth water. It was like watching a flock of ducks all stop beating at once and sail over a bank of trees on extended wings.

“That was weird,” Jack said.

“Fucking A. Which part?”

“I can tick them off,” Jack said. He set the paddle across the spray deck and pried a tin of Skoal out of his shirt’s breast pocket. He was soaked from spray, but Jack never wore a rain jacket when he was paddling because he said he got just as wet from sweat, even in the breathable stuff. He also didn’t use bug dope, on principle. He tucked a pinch into his lip. “Let’s see: Wind and fog together, that’s a first. Oh yeah, and frost. The sudden calm. The shouts. And this. This is kinda weird.”

Wynn didn’t say anything. They were still gliding and something about the near silence was like a sacrament. He stuck a finger in the dark water and it was still cold, probably near forty degrees, and he watched his finger cut a small V-wake. It was the only sure sign of motion. “I was thinking of that story by Poe,” he said finally. “Arthur Gordon Pym.”

“Yeah, right?” Jack spat. “I wonder who they were. It sounded like a couple.”

“Maybe we’ll see them again.”

“I hope not. All morning I’ve been wondering if we should’ve stopped.”

“To tell them about the fire?”

“Yeah.”

“It would’ve been dicey,” Wynn said. He meant to surf in—and what if the beach had been broken limestone? They called any open shoreline that ran smoothly to the water a beach.

Jack said, “I was thinking maybe we should have stopped and tried to hail them.”

They drifted. “Want some lunch?” Wynn said.

“Okay. I guess we’re good with the deck.”

They unbuttoned the spray deck from its cleats and Jack rummaged in the day bag and pulled out a brick of sharp cheddar, a dry summer sausage, and a Ziploc full of half-broken Triscuits. He sat up on the cane seat. There was a small cutting board in the bag, too, and Jack flipped open his clip knife and set the board on his knees and sliced the cheese and sausage.

They were best friends at Dartmouth who had decided to take the summer and fall quarters off. They had worked as wilderness instructors for an outdoor program in the Adirondacks all June and July, and they decided to blow half their savings on the flights in and out of the river in the old Otter floatplane. Neither was attached. Jack had broken up with his high school sweetheart in the spring. She lived in the Fraser valley of Colorado, near Granby, where Jack’s family had their small ranch.

Wynn had not had a girl since junior year at the Putney School in Vermont. It was kind of a fancy boarding school, but his family lived three miles away and he was a day student. He’d dated the daughter of a movie star, who’d found him exotic and rustic, and he told Jack he had known it wouldn’t work when he went home with her to Malibu during spring break and they’d all gone out to brunch on a weekday and the star mother and the daughter ordered eggs Florentine and he’d asked what it was and both their heads swiveled and the mother said, “Wynn, it’s like Benedict but with spinach instead of Canadian bacon.” She’d adjusted her glasses. “Benedict?” she’d said. “Yes? No?” and they’d both burst out laughing and Keri had reached over and patted him on the shoulder. He knew what eggs Benedict was. He said the pat burned like a brand and that afternoon he’d changed his flight and flown home. It was sugaring season anyway, one of his favorite times, and he helped his father boil in the little sugar shack along Sawyer Brook.

Sometimes they boiled all night. At dawn the sun washed the patchy snow in a rose light, and the daybreak wind rattled the dried leaves of the oaks and the bare branches of the maples, and he heard the rush of the snowmelt brook, the songs of the nuthatch. The fire crackled under the long pan of clear sap and he and his dad didn’t say much, but he was aware enough—he’d read enough fiction, he guessed—to realize that these might be the best hours he and his father ever spent together.

He also came to see in the long hours of trying to work through his heartache that maybe he had been just as ruthlessly shallow and opportunistic as she had been: she’d wanted to indulge in a local boy who wore flannel shirts and could fish and cut wood and was as at home sleeping under the stars as she was in a five-star suite, and he’d wanted to date the daughter of a star who moved through the world like a different species. But really she was just a young girl who was far from home and probably scared, and he was much more cultured than he let on and had spent more hours in the art museums of Boston and New York than he cared to admit. He just had never had eggs Florentine.

He came to the conclusion one morning walking the sugarbush of Dusty Ridge that he and Keri had never really been friends and that they had rarely laughed. That was sad.

Jack’s story was simpler. He had known Cheryl since second grade, when her father came to the valley to take over as police chief, and they were best friends, and now she wanted to get married and have kids and he realized that she was the best kind of woman and that he was already bored. He’d written her the Dear Jill letter in May, and when he’d said he hoped they remained friends forever he meant it.

So both Jack and Wynn had digested their share of bewilderment, and maybe there was a heavy place like a stone inside each of them. Wynn would never admit that he’d been in love and that Keri’s scorn had been a gut punch. Or that maybe he hadn’t dated in the first two years of college because he was gun-shy.

They drifted. Jack kept slicing the cheese and the sausage until there was none left. They ate like wolves. The good thing about a canoe trip is that they didn’t have to be shy about provisions. They had two three-foot plastic barrels stuffed with enough food probably to get by even if they never caught another fish.

“They must be paddling down to Wapahk,” Jack said. That was the village they were headed for: the plan was to paddle this last lake that emptied into the river, then the river for a couple of weeks, then take out at the little settlement at the mouth of Hudson Bay.

“Or they’re just paddling the lakes up here and they’ll get picked up. Them and the drunks.”

They thought about that. It occurred to them, though neither of them spoke it, that with the fire coming the safest thing would be to catch a flight out of Blueberries Lake. They’d flown in to the first lake on floats and they could take off on them, too. Because this evening or tomorrow morning this most northerly lake would pour into a river. And when they left the lake behind and paddled into the tongue of current that became the Maskwa there would be no going back. They would ride the swift V of moving water into the channel and they would be committed to paddling all the way to Hudson Bay. There would be nowhere on the large but constricted river to land a floatplane until they were near the mouth in two weeks. But. They could not stay up on the lake because they had no radio or sat phone to contact the airfield in Pickle Lake for a pickup—or any airfield. Or anyone, if they needed a rescue. They’d talked about it in planning the trip and decided that modern communications had made true adventure a thing of the past. Plus, they couldn’t afford a sat phone.

They drifted in the fog. The lightest breeze from the northwest carried the sharp scent that was different from the smell of the woodstoves, which was so familiar in the valleys where they had grown up. It was heavier with char and smelled darker somehow.

“Maybe they have a phone,” Wynn ventured. They drifted.

Jack said, “You think we should abort?”

Wynn shrugged.

They had paddled many rivers together in the two years they’d known each other, and climbed a lot of peaks. Sometimes one had more appetite for danger, sometimes the other. There was a delicate but strong balance of risk versus caution in their team thinking, with the roles often fluid, and it’s what made them such good partners. Jack would not disrespect his friend by belittling his concern. He said, “We’ve made a lot of effort to get here, huh?”

“Yep.”

“But nobody wants to get overrun by a megafire.”

“Nope.”

“Want a chocolate bar?” Jack said.

“Sure.”

They could barely feel the breeze on their left ears and cheeks and it moved the fog over the water with a timeless languor as if there never had been a time without fog and there would never be one again. It seemed to be lightening.

“If they aren’t getting picked up and they are planning to head downriver, we should tell the couple about the fire,” Wynn said. He handed his wrapper to Jack, who crumpled it and tucked it into a mesh pocket slung on one of the barrels. They’d burn the wrappers tonight. “Everyone going downriver is going to want to hustle.”

Jack blew through his cheeks. “We’ll lose half a day, huh?” He picked up his paddle from where he’d slid it into the pocket of the bow.

“Yep.”

“Well, let’s lose it then.”

They spun the canoe against the light resistance of the false keel, spun it on the smooth water as if on a spindle, and straightened out and dug in. Back the way they had come. Without the wind and waves to provide the angle of a heading, Jack used the compass and held a course of 170 degrees and they paddled back into the mist to warn the other party.

The fog did lift. It seemed to lighten and clear within minutes, vanishing into the crisp morning as if it had never existed, and the sky was cloudless and an autumn blue. The clarity of the air was like putting on magnifying glasses: every trunk of every birch tree seemed to stand out against the backdrop of tamarack, of spruce, and there were touches of yellow at the edges of the limbs, and some of the tamarack needles were the faded colors of fall grass. The pink fireweed along the shore beneath the trees popped as in a painting. Overnight it seemed summer had surrendered to fall. It was beautiful and it scared them both. All the whitewater was ahead of them, and it would be much safer if the warmer days of late summer persisted. They had brought wetsuits, but they’d heard about expeditions getting overrun by early snow or cold and men dying. It had happened on a now-famous canoe trip of six Dartmouth men in 1955 up on the Dubawnt when the leader, named Art Moffatt, had died after a long swim through a rapid in freezing weather. Up here there was no predicting the timing of the seasons and they had picked their window for the chance of lowest water and warmest days; also, it was when their jobs had ended.

They paddled. Jack hummed. He usually hummed when he paddled, bars of old cowboy songs his father had sung to him like “Streets of Laredo” and “Little Joe the Wrangler” and “Barbara Allen.” Also Sky Ferreira and Drake and Solange; Wynn appreciated the range.

A few days back they had been paddling between two islands on Lake Sorrow and Wynn in the stern had seen something in the water. It was big and it was cutting a wake like a small boat. He stared. Whatever it was, it was traveling toward the same island on which they’d planned to make camp. Jack was humming and partly singing in snatches Wyclef Jean’s “Guantanamera”: “I’m standing at the bar smoking a Cuban cigar…Hey yo I think she’s eyein’ me from afar…” Wynn squinted in the stern and made out the rack of a moose. Huge. It must have been, it looked big even from that distance. Two miles from the nearest shore. Great. They’d be sharing a little island with a comfortably amphibious bull moose. At least it wasn’t rut season yet. “Hey, hey Jack, look at that. Damn.” He didn’t know why he was whispering. Jack kept humming, lost in some reverie. “Hey.” Hum, murmur, a snatch of rap. “Hey! Dude!” Jack had turned, startled.

“Do you know you hum all day?”

“I do?”

“Yep. And we’re gonna have company.” Wynn pointed with his paddle.

“Crap, is that a moose?” Jack laughed. “Too bad we can’t harness the fucker like a reindeer. Look at him haul the mail. Must be going four knots.”

They had decided to camp on the island anyway and had no problem coexisting that night. The south shore had a cove full of duckweed and they’d walked around quietly and watched him feed. Just before full dark they’d been sitting at the fire drinking late coffee and Jack had whistled soundless and Wynn had turned and they saw the moose standing at the edge of the woods watching, and he seemed forlorn, as if he wanted to join them. He had clearly never seen a human before.

Now, with the fog lifted and the air lens-clear and cold, they thought they’d have no problem spotting the couple’s camp, but they couldn’t. It occurred to them that maybe there’d been more than two. Two people. Maybe it had been an entire expedition camped on the east shore and all they’d heard was the shouting of the couple down on the beach. Maybe the man and the woman had walked away from the group to argue. But then it would have been even easier to spot the colorful tents of this other party, or to see the string of canoes making their way north to the lake’s outlet and the true river, but they didn’t. They didn’t see a thing.

They saw the patches of bright fireweed and the wall of woods, and shallow bays with stony beaches sometimes backed by fringes of tall tawny grass; they saw rocky coves with deadfall spruce lying across black boulders and bleached like bones, and low patches of vegetation between the rocks on the shore that they knew were lowbush blueberries.

If they were tempted to stop and pick they didn’t say it. They were feeling pressured now. What they had wanted by giving themselves almost a month, more, to cross the lakes and run the river was a voyage with no hard end date. They left the flight out from Wapahk open-ended—they’d call when they got to the village—and they’d planned a leisurely pace with short days whenever they wanted. With layovers in camp to hike, to hunt if they felt like it, to forage for berries, to rest and smoke their pipes and take their ease like Huck Finn or Stubb—the pipes were anachronistic and they loved them, to recline in camp and puff a vanilla tobacco mix made them feel like old explorers. They hungered to immerse themselves in the country without the hurry of a jammed itinerary. They’d even left their watches, trusting their sense of time to the sun and stars when they could see them and to their bodies’ rhythms when they couldn’t. Most of their previous river trips had been a hustle, because they were students with jobs and so their time off was short. They wanted to try this, to feel what it was actually like to live in the landscape a little. But now everything had changed. The fire they’d seen the other night and the early frost had changed it.

They paddled back a hundred and seventy degrees from the way they’d come, which angled them toward shore, and they thought it was odd that they hadn’t seen any sign of a recent camp or crossed tracks with another canoe. A small tributary creek wound out of the woods and across a broader beach and they decided to stop and make a fire and have tea and think about things. Normally they might have fished the side slough but now they didn’t. It was a darker color than the lake which had hued to an opaque green in the early-afternoon sun. The creek was brown with tannin, and they’d often had luck catching brookies in the smaller tributaries, but neither of them pulled out his rod.

There was plenty of wood. They were on the leeward shore and the driftwood wracked up on the stone beach like the flotsam of a tide line. There were the skeletons of fir trees that silvered smooth and hard, and the carcasses of birch that rotted, still sheathed in their skins of powdery white bark. Piles of smaller sticks seasoned in the sun and wind and they cracked over Jack’s knee like a gunshot. He gathered an armload while Wynn stood in his rubber Wellington boots a few feet into the water and scanned with his binocs up and down the shore and over the jade water toward the mouth of the outlet. Jack noticed that he often did that—stood a foot deep in the shallows when he could just as easily have stood on shore—and it amused him. Just as Jack was comfortable with heights and exposure, Wynn loved to be immersed whenever he could, and never minded the chaos of whitewater—it’s when he seemed to come most alive. The same for fishing: Jack would rather fish a river from the dry bow of an oar boat, while Wynn preferred to be thigh-deep in a stiff current and wading. Jack chalked it up to landscapes of origin—he was raised in the heart of the Rocky Mountains and that’s where he was comfortable. High desert, higher peaks. Wynn’s world had been a country of brooks and rivers, ponds, lakes; a world of water.

Wynn kept a finger on the focus knob and moved the binocs over the northern shore. He could not actually see the cut where the lake emptied but he knew where it was from the map. It was beside the hump of a glacial moraine that in another epoch had been a pile of tumbled rocks and was now softened with moss and trees. They had been so close to it earlier in the morning and it was now about five miles distant. It’s where the river started, and a mile and a half down the river were the first big falls, a terrible stepped rapid that had killed four canoers last year who had missed the mandatory portage on river right. But it was very swift water above the drop and the left bank was a sheer ledge with no place to pull out. One of the biggest warnings in any description of the entire river was to be far to the right in the mile below the lake.

A pair of mergansers winged into the field of Wynn’s glasses and out of it, beating fast southward. He scanned east and caught a big raptor circling; he followed it and it flashed white and he was sure it was a bald eagle hunting.

But no canoe. Wynn gave up, and Jack knew what he was going to do next and he did. He set the binocs on the rocks where they wouldn’t dangle off his neck and then he squatted and began prospecting for stones up and down the beach. He gathered armloads. Not just rocks but sticks, two feathers, probably osprey and crow—and he knelt and stacked the stones into two piles, less like cairns than funeral mounds, and channeled the water around them and lay the feathers in the channels like boats. “Longboats,” he muttered to himself, but Jack heard him. “Like a Viking funeral.” If Jack hummed, Wynn talked to himself, especially while making his Thingamajigs. What Jack called them. Wynn was crazy about Goldsworthy, the environmental sculptor, and was in awe of the ethic of ephemeral art, from Buddhist sandpainting to the sapling moons of Jay Mead. The untethering of ego: the purity of creating something that wouldn’t even be around to sign in a matter of hours or days. What that said about ownership and the impermanence of all things. He was less impressed with the extravagant shroudings of Christo, which he thought were grandiose and domineering.

Squatting there at water’s edge, Wynn reminded Jack of a little kid at the beach with a bucket and pail. He was just as absorbed and happy. “Aren’t you even going to take a picture?”

Wynn looked up, shrugged. He had a goofy smile, like someone caught in the act of talking seriously to a chipmunk.

Jack started a fire. It popped and blazed and he dipped the kettle and arranged two flat rocks beside the flames and with a stick he raked coals and burning sticks into the gap, over which he placed the pot. The water boiled fast and he flipped up the wire handle with his stick and lifted it onto one of the rocks and went to the canoe and dug tea and brown sugar from a plastic box they used as a day bag. There were two emergency blankets and waterproof matches and a tube of firestarter in the bottom of it. And a packet of food, rolled oats and sugar, power bars, freeze-dried fruit, and a few meals; enough for maybe three days for the two of them. Also a signaling mirror and a small compass with no bezel. He dropped the tea bags into the kettle and sat on a smooth log in the bright sun and watched the lake.

There is no place I’d rather be, he thought. And also: Something is not right. He could feel it on the back of his neck, almost the way the hair prickles and rises just before a lightning storm in the Never Summers back home. Just before he stepped into a Montana clearing straight into the glare of a grizzly. He’d always had it, that sixth sense—some people do—and he thought it had saved his bacon more than once. He’d had it the morning he was eleven and a young mare had stumbled on the slick rock of an angled slab above a raging summer creek. Now he felt the heat rise in his neck and he shoved the image away.

He breathed. Nothing more peaceful, he thought, than right now. He could hear bees humming in the fireweed and asters behind him. The tea was brewing, the lake glassed off, a white sun hung midway to the woods and warmed the stony shore. His clothes were almost completely dry. His best friend was thirty feet away, evidently just as content. Nothing better than this. What he liked to say to himself.

There was no plume of smoke to the west, the wind there must have shifted. Here there was barely any breeze, the pale smoke of their fire stirred almost straight upward and thinned and vanished before it reached the height of the spruce. But it bothered him, the feeling. They should be now very close to the place on the shore where they’d heard the shouting and there was nothing, no sign.

He poured the two stainless travel mugs full of the steeped tea and shook brown sugar into his and stirred it with a twig and sat on his log and couldn’t relax. What had been sheer fun before now felt ominous. The foreboding didn’t feel like a general threat, like Fall is coming early, we better hustle, or There’s a big fucking fire to the northwest and we might want to pick up our pace—he was used to those shifts. In a ranching family they happened on an almost daily basis and he had learned to set them in a place in his psyche that did not disturb his daily well-being—life was about being agile in spirit and adapting quickly. This was different. It prickled on his skin like a specific and imminent danger which he could not place.

“Hey,” he said. “Ding-ding. Tea’s ready.”

Wynn stood and picked up the binocs. He tromped up to the fire and sat on the log. Jack handed him his cup of tea. “Strange,” Wynn said. “I scanned the whole shore. You don’t think it could’ve been the wind? What we heard?”

“What? The wind shouting, ‘This is my goddamn trip. This time it’s mine!’ That’s what I thought I heard.”

“Yeah. Me, too. That was her. I thought I heard him yell, ‘Bullshit! I’m through! This is the last time!’ ”

“What do you want to do?” They’d paddled over ten miles already.

“You?”

“Well.” Jack studied the stones between his feet and moved his jaw around. Wynn knew that’s what he did when he was thinking hard. “They might have passed us somehow in the fog. Unlikely, though, huh?”

They were both exceptionally strong paddlers and they knew it, and that morning in the waves they weren’t holding back.

“Like they might have an electric motor and a solar panel like those jackasses.”

“They could have,” Jack said. “People bring them just for crossing the lakes.”

“Man. Why not just stay home and drive around?” Wynn was more of a purist than Jack. A few times that morning Jack had thought having a motor would’ve been awesome.

Jack said, “It feels funny, though. I don’t know.”

“Is that your Spidey sense talking?”

“Yep.”

“Damn!” Wynn jerked away the cup and spilled tea onto the stones. “I always do that.” He unscrewed the cap on his mug and blew on the piping-hot tea. “Burned my tongue.”

Jack barely heard him. He was wrestling with a rare sense of portent. He said, “Whoever it was, it feels like we did our due diligence. We tried to warn them.”

Jack didn’t want to throw shadow onto the trip; there was nothing worse on any expedition than a naysayer. But now he kind of wished they had found whoever it was and that they’d had a sat phone and they could call into Pickle Lake. Maybe not for a plane, but at least for an update on the fire, which he was sure the Fire Center must be monitoring.

The hair standing up on the back of his neck, the goosebumps, he’d learned not to ignore them. It was almost like a distant ringing of alarm bells somewhere deep at the base of his skull, which he could hear if he listened. But they didn’t have a sat phone and the couple was nowhere and they’d already made their decision to leave the lake and enter the river. Which was a funnel of current and committed them to two weeks at least of swift water and portages around bigger rapids. He didn’t say a word; this time he kept his mouth shut.

“Wanna make camp here?” Wynn said. “That’ll give us plenty of time tomorrow to get across and down to the falls, and we can take our time and be really careful.”

“Okay. Hey, Big One?”

“Yeah?”

“Nothing.”

Wynn lowered his tea and studied the side of his friend’s face. Under the week of beard the prominent cheekbones were deeply tanned, the straight nose sunburned, the crow’s feet at the corner of his almost black eye a spray of fine wrinkles, paler than the skin around them; his tendoned neck was smattered with small sun spots. He hadn’t earned any of those learning to canoe at summer camp or attending the National Outdoor Leadership School. Wynn envied him. He thought again how being outside, sleeping under stars, cooking on a fire, were as natural to Jack as breathing. He’d been on horse pack trips with his family ever since he could cling to the back of a green-broke mare. And he didn’t seem to mind being cold and wet or exhausted the way other people did. It wasn’t fun, but then life wasn’t meant to be that fun. That was the difference, Wynn thought. For Jack, stuff like cold and hunger didn’t have a value, good or bad, they just were, and it was best if they didn’t last that long; but if they did, as long as one survived them, no harm, no foul. It gave Jack a strength, a temper, that Wynn admired. At about five-ten, Jack was almost six inches shorter than Wynn. Wynn could grunt a car out of the mud, but Jack was lighter and leaner and could run faster, and Wynn knew he had that toughness that was bred in the bone. So when Jack was troubled, Wynn paid attention.

“What are you thinking, Cap?”

Jack shrugged.

“You’ve got a bad feeling?”

“Maybe a little.”

“Me, too. The fire, and those guys were creeps. It’s all gotten weird. But we don’t have much choice, do we?”

Jack turned his head. In the bright sun his dark eyes were clear and full of lights. If he was worried, he was also partly amused. At how shit stacked up. “Nope, we don’t,” he said. “Which means we don’t have to decide a thing.”

They had plenty of staples, black bean powder and quinoa, rice, macaroni, lentils, even pounds of jerky. They had also brought some fancy premade freeze-dried meals for variety and relief, and they decided that night to make turkey à la king. They ate it with relish, and Wynn mixed lemonade powder in a water bottle and they poured it into their cups and added a splash of Jim Beam from a plastic flask. There’s always relief in committing to a decision, even when there’s no choice.

Neither of them understood why it was called turkey à la king. Wynn pointed out that it seemed to be French and king was masculine and so it should be le king. Jack said that à la is like the au in au gratin, meaning “made with,” which must mean that there were bits of the king in the food. He admitted that it had been his favorite meal at Granby Public Schools.

They pitched the tent in a cove of spruce off the beach. Neither of them felt like fishing, though they saw fry darting in the tea-colored shallows of the creek. They read and smoked their pipes. What wind there was died to a breath they could barely feel. The sky was clear and cloudless. The last light slid down to the edges and slipped onto the silvered lake which bore it without a ruffle. Also the reflections of the first stars. The cold came on fast and they knew it would be another night of frost.

They kicked up the fire and added driftwood and sat in the heat. Wynn pulled out the pages he had torn from a book called True Tales of the North: Ghosts, Witches, Spirit Bears, and Windigoes. It was written in 1937 by an amateur anthropologist named Spencer Halberd Knight. Jack had teased Wynn about the name—“If that’s on the sonofabitch’s birth certificate I’ll eat that chapter”—and about Wynn’s habit of tearing books apart for his trips—“You must’ve grown up with a hell of a lot more books than I did. Whyn’t you just let them live out their natural life?”—but he’d asked sheepishly if he could read the pages when Wynn was done. The wood was dry and burned bright and Wynn turned sideways on the log they’d pulled over for a seat and scanned the first page.

“I was telling you, there’s a whole chapter on Wapahk. That’s some dark history up there.”

“Yeah?” Jack feigned nonchalance, but he was sitting up. There was nothing he loved more than a good dark story.

“A whole string of murders in the twenties. This gaunt pale giant spirit haunted the village and possessed people and turned them into cannibals. It was called the Windigo. So what happened is, whenever the elders thought a villager was possessed by the Windigo they shot or strangled him so he couldn’t eat his friends and family. Kind of a preemptive strike.”

“How many?”

Wynn turned farther away from the fire so the light fell on the text. “Nine. In a village of maybe two hundred.”

“Damn.”

“I know.”

“Maybe it was a starving polar bear.”

“Maybe.” Jack sounded to Wynn a little like a kid desperate for an explanation.

“One of those that likes to walk on two legs.”

“Huh.”

“Could’ve been a bad seal year for some reason,” Jack suggested.

“Could’ve been. Says the village felt doubly cursed because warm currents made the fishing bad two years in a row.”

Jack felt goosebumps for the second time that day. “Well, what the hell do you think it was?”

“A hungry ghost.”

“Fuck you.”

The campfire quieted to embers and they could not smell the conflagration in the northwest at all; it was as if it no longer existed. The breeze must have backed around. They didn’t talk about it but now and then each turned his face sideways to the lake and flared nostrils exactly like an elk or deer would, scenting for a predator.

An hour after full dark they turned in and left the door of the tent unzipped and tied back so that they could see the stars, and the northern lights if they sang silently later on. They closed the mesh screen so it would collect the frost. Later Jack moved his pad and bag out onto the cobbles of the beach and slept under the throbbing arch of the Milky Way. He didn’t care about the frost, it would feather on his bag and he could shake it off in the morning. Last night’s freeze had taken care of the mosquitoes. Wynn heard the knock of stone as Jack moved outside, and he also heard the slow creek making the faintest ripple. He thought of the Merwin poem about dusk that he loved so much. Merwin describes the sun going down believing in nothing, and how he hears the stream running after it: It has brought its flute it is a long way.

It killed him. The one and only sun without belief in anything and the little stream believing so hard, believing in music even. What he loved about poetry: it could do in a few seconds what a novel did in days. A painting could be like that, too, and a sculpture. But sometimes you wanted something to take days and days.

Jack lay awake for a long time and when he slept he dreamed of his mother and the morning on the Encampment. He had the same dream a few times a year. They camped in Horseshoe Park, the meadow beneath the little bridge, just as they had in real life. There were just the three of them—his father, he, and his mom—just as it had been, and when they broke camp his father rode Dandy, his favorite hunting horse, and led BJ, the strawberry roan mare who was half Arab and who they always used as a packhorse because she was too twitchy to ride. She could rear at a chipmunk or leap over a low deadfall stick as if it were a two-rail jump.

The trail ran into the spruce along the right bank of the river. The river still rushed with snowmelt in late June. It was really just a big creek and it dropped fast into a constricted shaded canyon densely wooded with spruce and pine. The trail climbed away from the thundering rapids. His mother rode ahead of him on Mindy, a sweet, big-boned quarter-horse mare, and he followed on Duke, his young gray. In the dream, and as it had been that morning, he insisted on taking up the rear, it made him feel more grown-up. As in real life they took their time. The trail was narrow and rocky and it hugged the side of the steep slope. His father sang as he rode. Fifty feet below, the river cliffed out into a narrow rock-walled gorge and vanished in a sharp right bend. The whitewater roared up like a jet engine and sent mist into the trees. His heart hammered and he loved this. His father in the lead got to a short sloping slab of bedrock and clucked Dandy across it. Jack heard the grating strike of the steel shoes, saw BJ toss her head, put her nose down and cross, he heard the bit rings jangle and the dainty click of her steps, and then his mother urged the slow-gaited Mindy, Good girl, what a sweet girl. As in real life something spooked BJ just ahead and she balked back and tautened the lead and his father, who held the line, called, “Whoa, girl! Easy!” and Mindy bunched back, she was on the slick slab and her rear hoof slid. The rear left foot, Jack saw it right there beneath him, the shod hoof slipped and scrambled for purchase, his mother yelling, “Hey, girl!”—the butt of the horse sliding and now the fore hooves scrabbled at the mossy bank above the trail and—he saw it all as if in slow motion, the horse, and his mother still reining and leaning forward over her mane trying to save the mare, and she lost all traction, flailing the back legs now and the mare screamed as she went over. Not his mother, the mare. A scream like a terrified human. He saw them hit a large spruce and get knocked sideways and out and they separated in air, his mother still clutching the reins, her hat knocked into space and tumbling like a shot bird, that moment frozen before it wasn’t and they hit the white torrent together. For a moment, miraculously, they were swimming, she was grabbing for the saddle, then they went over what must have once been a ledge but was now the hump of a breaking wave that rolled down into the trench of a thundering backward-breaking hydraulic, they vanished, came up once, first the mare’s dark head, then his mother’s arm before they slammed into the wall and were tugged around the bend. His father when he could speak shouted, “Stay!” and he looked wildly back and yelled, “Can you hold him? Can you?” and Jack nodded, mute, and his father let go the lead line of his packhorse and spurred Dandy into a crazy lunge down the trail. He was gone. In real life they both were gone. BJ loped after his father, trailing the rope. Jack stayed. He reined tight the quivering gelding and they were both shaking and he stayed. He would do what his father demanded. He loved her more than anything on earth. He was eleven.

But in the dream her hat caught itself and took wing and flew up to the other side of the canyon and caught the sunlight like a turning hawk, and she and Mindy did not hit the white rush but floated a moment in air and he knew they would figure out how to fly, too, he knew it, and when he woke up under the late stars a loon was calling pitched and lonely somewhere far out and the pillow of his jacket was wet and he knew he’d been crying again.

Jack woke before sunrise and shook off his frost-covered bag in a spray of snowflakes that floated for a moment like an icy hatch of mayflies. He started a fire and put coffee on while Wynn slept or read. Nothing on earth he loved more than to be the first one up, cracking sticks for a fire, making coffee.

The lake was still, a pale half-moon setting over the fringe of trees. He found the tin of Skoal in his shirt pocket and had his first chew sitting on the log and watching the flames lick blue along the lengths of driftwood, catching and flaring. He tried not to think about the dream. Except he did think that the mare Mindy must have taken wing somehow, in real life, was somehow transported out of the certain death of that white funnel, because that morning a fishing guide scouting the trail for July clients saw her scramble out of a riffle onto the right bank and stand wild-eyed and shaking. She was cut and bruised, she had a deep gash along her right flank and a sprained fetlock, but she was otherwise okay. A miracle if there ever was such a thing on earth. She fully recovered, but would never again walk a river trail. His mother wasn’t so lucky. He stopped the thought. He looked out over the water that held the bruised rose and grays of dawn. Well. Few people had the luck to die in the prime of life in full appreciation of all the goodness therein. Leave it at that, he thought. As good a place as any.

They hadn’t caught any fish, so he mixed up some powdered egg with chunks of cheddar and oiled the long-handled pan and then threw stones at the tent until Wynn groaned and got up.