The River

CHAPTER TWO

The canoe moved this morning as if greased. North again toward the top of the lake where it became a true river. They let their eyes rove the shore looking for the colors of a tent or tents, the shape of a boat on a beach, but saw only more patches of yellow in the trees and a swath of orange black-eyed Susans on the shore. They watched a skein of geese fly over that end of the lake, just one side of the V, an uneven phalanx that curved and straightened as they flew in constant correction. The distant barks drifted down. Jack thought how nature was so often imperfect and sometimes perplexed or bewildered. Once on Duke he had ridden up on a golden eagle in a sage meadow who had just feasted on a prairie dog and the huge bird hopped and tried to fly and was too heavy with her meal. She turned and stood tall and glared at them, awaiting her fate, which was only the indignity of hearing Jack laugh.

They didn’t smell the big fire this morning and they wondered if it had damped down, somehow died off in the new cold. Then they could relax again.

“It’d be good to see it,” Jack said. “To check one more time before we get on the river.”

“Yeah it would.”

“Wanna pull out and climb a tree or something?”

“That’d be you.”

“Never a question,” Jack said.

They pulled out on the west side of the cut and the outflow. The thin strand of stones was partly shadowed by tamarack and grown over by a stand of stiff dried mullein, the tall stalks that Jack’s dad called cowboy candlestick. White moths flitted in and out of the sunlight and lighted on the purple asters that edged the beach. The boys climbed up the low moraine covered in trees and they chose a tall straight balsam fir. Wynn laced his fingers and boosted Jack to where he could reach the first limb.

It was just big enough to bear his weight, and he grasped it close to the trunk and chinned up and reached for the next and was climbing. A few needles spun down, as did his curses. It wasn’t that he was barking his arms while shinnying or gumming his hair and face with bubbles of sap—he was, but he didn’t mind—it was just that he liked to curse when he was climbing, it gave him a kind of a rhythm. They were both feeling a certain excitement at the possibility that the megafire was maybe now only wisps of white smoke, the last wheeze of a dying catastrophe. Jack wrapped a leg around the thinning trunk with the instinct of a rider on a bucking pony. He shielded his face with his forearms and shoved his head through a fragrant spray of needles and looked to the northwest. The happy curse that was halfway up his throat caught like a bone.

“What?” Wynn said, expecting a shout. “What?”

Silence.

“You okay?”

“Not really.”

“What’s wrong? You get sap in your eye?” But he knew what was wrong, he knew Jack well enough. “It’s bad, huh?” he said.

“I don’t know if bad is the word, Big. Give me a minute.”

Jack said that sometimes. Gimme a minute. It was when he was about to take the stern paddle through a heavy rapid. He said it when he was overcome with emotion, and he’d said it in a brew pub in Lake Placid a few weeks ago when a very large summer person in a Ralph Lauren shirt had returned to the bar to find Jack talking to his wife. Jack hadn’t known it was the man’s wife, but he had unerring antennae for a-holes and they were vibrating strongly. The girl wasn’t wearing any kind of a ring and she’d seemed quite eager to talk. But the man didn’t have much of a sense of humor and Jack’s antennae hummed. Jack stood, willing to move off and let it go, but the man had tapped his shoulder and said, “Hey, dude, you think you can just worm in when a guy goes to the pisser and worm off when he comes back?” Jack set his Red Canoe Lager down on the table and told the man to give him a minute. The man looked confused, because it was not rhetorical—Jack was actually trying to decide what to do; and then he made his decision and decked him. (Later in the car Wynn had said, laughing, “So much depends upon/a red/canoe/beaded with beer/sweat/beside the white/dickhead.”) So now when Jack said Gimme a minute Wynn felt his guts tighten.

Jack called down finally, “You ever feel like you’re in a weird dream?”

“Like when we’re hanging out?”

“You know, if you were up here you might not be cracking jokes.”

“Bad?”

“Well.” Jack hacked and spat down to the other side of the tree from Wynn, adjusted his footrest in the crotch of a limb. “The plume is rolling due south. Maybe a little east. Why—”

“Why we haven’t smelled it.”

“Yeah, and it’s not really a plume, Big. I’d say you should climb up here but no point in two of us having nightmares.”

“I guess.”

“It’s frigging clouds. Looks like a thunderhead. And it’s a lot closer. Maybe a quarter, a third the distance of what we saw the other night. I can see the frigging flames. Like the leading edge under the smoke.”

“How far do you think?”

Silence.

“Jack, how far?”

“I dunno. Maybe twenty miles.”

Silence. Wynn said, “The other night we thought it was twenty-five or thirty. So it’s come maybe five or ten miles in two days.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

“It’s getting colder.”

“Hold on.”

He shinnied down, lowered himself limb to limb, and at the bottom branch he swung out away from the roots and dropped the last five feet to a bed of needles. “What’d you say?”

“I said it’s getting colder. Maybe it’ll slow.”

“Yeah, maybe.” Jack dusted bits of bark off the front of his shirt. He didn’t sound convinced. He looked up at his friend. “I’ve seen a few wildfires, Wynn.”

Wynn winced. Jack almost never called him by his given name. It meant shit was serious, like when his mother said, “Wynn Peter Brelsford…” That was bad. He said, “You’ve seen a lot of fires and…”

“Right. Biggest fucker I’ve seen by far. Looks like a hay barn going up times a million.”

“In eight or ten days the river will be wide. A hundred yards anyway. Maybe.”

Jack raised an eyebrow and snagged the Skoal out of his shirt pocket and pried off the lid and offered it to Wynn, who shook his head. “That thing,” Jack said. He took a large dip, tamped it into his lower lip. “Won’t even notice. It’ll jump the river like a semi running over a chipmunk.”

“Yeah, but if we’re in the middle of the river…”

Jack shrugged. “Maybe. The air gets superheated. That’s what makes a firestorm. The rolling smoke is actually gas, and if the wind is right and it ignites, it’ll flash-bake you a quarter mile away.”

“It’s getting colder, though, right?”

Jack huffed a breath. “But we don’t want it to get colder, huh? I mean, for the whitewater. Or snow. That’s funny, isn’t it?”

“Nothing seems funny.”

“I wonder what happened to those people.”

They hiked back to the boat. They didn’t talk as they zipped up and clipped the waist belts of their life vests. They were about to get on moving water. The vests were light, fitted lifejackets made for paddling. They hadn’t worn them on the lakes except for the day of storm but now they did. Even in flat swift current a fast eddy turn could capsize a canoe. They were both thinking that in ten minutes the die would be cast. They’d shove the canoe into the current and head downriver, and the option of trying to find the couple, or whatever they were, and calling in a ride from their sat phone would be gone. Most everyone these days carried a phone. Except them. Except diehards nostalgic for the days of the voyageurs. Neither said a word. They’d made their decision, their nondecision; there was nothing else to do. They could try to paddle hard, harder than they ever had, and make longer days. And get to Wapahk as fast as they could. They could try to beat the fire.

Without a word Wynn went to the stern and found the cam straps and began lashing in the food and clothes barrels. He buckled in the extra lifejacket. Carrying one was required on certain rivers and it had become a habit. He ran a strap through the waterproof soft case of their rifle and snugged it tight, just ahead of the stern thwart, right side. He made sure the clips that opened the bag were easily accessible. He wasn’t sure why. He just felt better knowing he could grab the gun fast.

They had brought the rifle to shoot caribou and to protect against bears near the bay. Nobody used to, but the warmer winters had changed everything. With the ice regime changing, the lean summer season for the polar bears was extended, and hungry bears in early fall were known to rove upriver looking for food, sometimes as far as fifty or sixty miles. Some were near starving and would eat anything that moved. There were also wolves and black bears, though neither Jack nor Wynn seriously thought of those as a problem. The unspoken reason for having a gun was that neither felt comfortable going for a long trip into the northern wilderness without one.