Nowhere Wild

by Joe Beernink

  Jake steered them westward, guessing that the river to Laroque lay within a few miles in that direction. Without an accurate map and a position fix, trial and error became his next best option. The lake was dozens of kilometers long, east to west. If they hit the entrance of the Churchill, he’d know he’d guessed wrong, and have to turn back around. His gut told him he wasn’t that far off his goal. He just didn’t know for sure which direction they needed to go. If they didn’t hit the river by lunch, he’d turn them around and try to the east.

  Jake waited for his rhythm with the paddle to set before he dared return to his questions from the night before. There were so many, and now that they were back on the water, he couldn’t distract his thoughts. He needed more answers.

  “Izzy?”

  She twisted in the sleeping bag to face him. “Yeah?”

  “Why were you running away from Rick? Was he—” Jake couldn’t finish the question.

  She paused for a moment before she answered.

  “Does it matter?”

  “Does it matter?” Jake echoed. Of course it mattered. He had been shot at. He had nearly died crossing the lake in weather not fit for a boat twice the size of their small canoe. He now had a girl in his boat, one he barely knew—one who had, just an hour before, tried to steal his compass. He needed to know exactly what sort of a mess he had gotten himself into.

  “If he was hurting me or not hurting me? Does that make a difference now? Would you turn around and drop me back there if I said he wasn’t hurting me?”

  “No.”

  “Then I don’t really want to talk about it. Not right now.”

  She looked at him briefly before diverting her eyes to the nearby shoreline. She said no more. Jake clenched the shaft of the paddle and forced himself to think before speaking.

  “Fine.” He pulled the paddle through the water and scanned the lake ahead. “You’re welcome, by the way.”

  His mind wandered back to parts of her story: the gangs in Thompson, the flu and all the people killed, the details of the past year she had glossed over. She said her parents had died. She said that Rick’s wife had died. Just how many others had died? A hundred? Five hundred? A thousand? More? How many would it take for the kind of chaos she described to kick in? It was nearly eight months since she’d left town for the last time. Would those gangs still be there? If it were all true, it would explain so much.

  Izzy fidgeted in the bow, then sat up to face him.

  “He lied to me, Jake.”

  Jake stopped paddling.

  “He told me I’d be safe with him, Jake. I was never going to be safe with him.”

  Jake couldn’t hold her gaze. He watched a drop of water slide down his paddle and splash back into the lake. That one statement told an awful truth. For a year she had lived with a man she feared—a man she was dependent upon for survival. A man who had no qualms about taking advantage of his power. Living like that, Jake thought, would be impossible for him to do. He had watched his mother and his grandfather die, living with fear that he would be left alone without his family. Even with all that, he had never really doubted he would make it out—that his situation would end with rescue. He had always believed in himself and his ability to survive. His survival was all within his power.

  She believed nothing remained to go back to. She had lived with a horror he couldn’t imagine—being trapped with Rick, a man Jake had only seen from a distance but already knew was evil. A man willing to kill to keep what he believed was his.

  Jake scanned the water for any signs of humanity. Small waves lapped at the hull.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pressure you. It’s just—there’s just so much I don’t know about what happened. I didn’t see what you saw. I didn’t have to do what you did. I just want to get home. Back to Thompson. And now—now you tell me it’s not—it’s not safe there either. And yet you want to go back.”

  “You wouldn’t have recognized the city when we left. It was like some third-world country. No power. No lights. No heat. No gas. Maybe it’s better now. Better than this anyway.”

  Jake imagined the city, once fifteen thousand people strong, devoid of life.

  “That was last October?”

  “Yeah, late October.”

  “Did you happen to see my dad? He’s a little taller than me, with a green canoe, and would have been heading south through here, looking for help. Bush hat. A blue two-man tent.”

  “There were lots of people in the bush back then, Jake. I don’t remember anyone like that. Besides, we were hiding most of the time. Every time we saw someone coming, we hid or we ran.”

  “Not everyone could have been bad.”

  “No, not everyone, but you couldn’t tell the good from the bad by looking at them. Hiding was safer. You never knew who you could trust. I was pretty scared most of the time. Rick figured out what to do. So we survived.”

  “So I was your first chance to leave, to get away from him?”

  “No—not the first chance.” Her eyes drifted to the bottom of the boat. “The guy Rick took this canoe from—”

  “Bill Six Rivers?” Jake stopped paddling. “You met him?”

  “You knew him?”

  “Since I was a kid.” Jake paused. “Knew him? Wait. He’s—”

  “He was a good man. He tried to help me. Rick killed him.” Izzy paused. “I’m sorry, Jake.”

  Jake’s chest locked tight. He forced the air from his lungs with a profanity and slammed the paddle against the water. The sound of the impact ricocheted off the trees onshore before dissolving across the waves.

  “He and Rick knew each other. From before the flu. Bill said Rick was responsible for what happened to his daughter.”

  “Cammie? She . . . died. A couple of years ago. Long before the flu.”

  “Bill blamed Rick for it. He was going to take me home to make sure the same thing didn’t happen to me. They argued. Rick shot him.”

  “Bastard.”

  Cammie’s suicide had shocked them all. Jake had been a freshman. Cammie had been a junior. Jake had been over to her house a dozen times. He had been to her funeral. The whispers had divided the school. Her boyfriend had been white. The word rape had spread like wildfire. Nothing raised tension in school faster than racial issues. The boyfriend had been blamed, but never charged. Now Jake knew why. It hadn’t been the boyfriend. It had been the boyfriend’s father.

  Jake looked at the rifle strapped to his pack. It hadn’t been out of its case since he decided to try and rescue Izzy without causing a confrontation. Now he second-guessed that decision.

  He should have just lined up the first good shot he had and taken it.

  He gritted his teeth.

  It wouldn’t have been that easy.

  Nothing about this trip was easy.

  They exchanged a look that told Jake she knew exactly where he was emotionally. They had no need to go into it deeper, to dump each other’s troubles onto sympathetic but already burdened shoulders. She was young, and Jake had spent the night worrying he would have to take care of her the whole way back, that she would be some lifeless, useless passenger. She wasn’t. She was alert and competent and mature beyond her years. There was a reason for that, Jake thought. She had survived for months in the most brutal of circumstances. An average person doesn’t last a week out here, his father’s voice whispered to him. An average person doesn’t make it through everything else she had described, either, Jake thought.

  He looked at her again. Only a bit of her face poked out from the sleeping bag. She no longer looked like a little girl to him. She looked older and stronger. She smiled nervously back at him.

  “Three days?” she asked as she turned her attention to the shore.

  “Less than that if we get you a paddle.”

  “That’d be good.” She hunkered down below the gunwale to stay out of the breeze.

  Jake checked behind him for any sign that Rick was back there, following them. The lake rem
ained empty.

  He paddled on.

  CHAPTER 30

  Izzy

  For six hours, Izzy lay in the bottom of the canoe while Jake paddled westward. A slight breeze from the northwest threw choppy water into their path. Jake chattered on about the current coming in from the west, and how it made this lake so dangerous and so unpredictable. Izzy barely listened. She watched the horizon behind them, half-expecting Rick to materialize from the haze at any moment. The shore moved by at a glacial pace. Once, Jake pointed out wildlife on the shore—a black bear that bolted back into the cover of the forest as soon as it saw them. After so many months in the bush, wildlife—unless it was dinner—didn’t interest her. Getting farther away from Rick—and getting home, wherever that was now—were the only things that mattered.

  Around lunchtime, Izzy’s stomach began to rumble. She reached for Jake’s pack and began to undo the straps holding the fishing-rod case to the side.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “What does it look like? I’m going to fish. Catch us some lunch.”

  “You know how?”

  “Of course I know how.” She shook her head. “My father taught me. Years ago.”

  A half-truth. Her dad had tried to teach her. She had been too squeamish at the time. Rick had done his best to not teach her anything about fishing, but she had picked up a few things. How hard can it be? she asked herself.

  She pulled the rod from the case and assembled it, careful not to tangle the line. She paused only briefly to guess how the reel worked—it was a spinning rod, not the spincast reel she had used with her dad, but the operation wasn’t too different. Still, it took four tries to get the lure into deeper water away from the canoe. She adjusted her position, keeping the tip of the rod well out from the boat, so as not to interfere with Jake’s paddling.

  Three minutes later, a fish grabbed the lure. Izzy set the hook with a snap, just like she had seen Rick do a hundred times, and began to apply pressure to reel the fish in. A quick turn by Jake left too much slack in the line. In an instant, the fish broke free. Izzy scowled. She reeled in the extra line. Jake grabbed the line as it slid along the hull and inspected the lure.

  “Hooks are dull. Need to be sharpened. Should have done it a week ago.” Jake shrugged off her misfortune. He dropped the lure back into the water so she could reel in the rest of the slack. “Keep the pressure on the line when reeling it in and it should still work.”

  Izzy did not reply. Dull hooks or not, if he had kept the boat steady, she would have already had lunch in the boat.

  She hauled the lure back in and checked the points on the dual treble hooks herself with the tip of her finger. She drew blood. They seemed sharp enough. She cast the line back into the depths.

  Half an hour passed before her next bite. She set the hook and this time, kept a close watch on both the incoming fish and Jake’s actions with the paddle. After a brief struggle, the large northern pike surged and broke the surface three boat lengths from the bow. It threw itself into the air, spun end-for-end, and wrenched the lure free from its jaw.

  Izzy used more of the swear words Rick had taught her.

  “You need to set it hard, then pull with steady force. If it wants to run, let it go a bit. Don’t jerk it after it’s been set. You’ll tear right through the skin.”

  “I know. I’ve fished before. A lot,” Izzy muttered.

  Another half-truth. She had watched Rick fish a lot. She reeled the line in and recast the lure into the lake. The line tightened as Jake resumed paddling.

  “Look.” She pointed north. The opposite shore emerged from the haze. “Should we be able to see that? Shouldn’t we have found the river by now?”

  “Yeah. The river must have been to the east, not the west.”

  “I thought you said you knew where you were,” she growled. Where was he taking her?

  “I did. I mean, I do. Crossing a lake this size without a map and a good idea of where you started from isn’t an accurate business.”

  “So we’ve got to go all the way back?”

  “Yep.” Jake set the paddle down across his legs and pulled the map from his pack. “Unless you want to try to go up fifty klicks of the Churchill. We could head for South Indian Lake.”

  “Is that doable?”

  Jake shook his head. “Not really. Not for us. The Churchill is big. And fast. We’d have to portage the whole way. Better to turn back around and head for Laroque.”

  “You sure you know the way?”

  “Yes. I know the way,” he snapped. “We must have just missed the river by a couple of klicks to the east. Bad luck. That’s all it was.”

  Jake stowed the map and picked the paddle up.

  Izzy turned away from his glare. Jake swept the canoe into a tight turn, throwing the bow directly over her line. Izzy reeled it in as quickly as she could, so it wouldn’t get caught on his paddle.

  “Watch my line!” she warned as he accelerated faster than she could pull in the slack.

  “Just reel it in.”

  “I am.” Izzy spun the crank. The line snagged on the keel and before she knew it, it snapped. The lure disappeared into the depths.

  “Damn it! Look what you made me do,” Izzy said.

  “Me? You’re the one who broke the line.” Jake leaned forward and snatched the rod from her hands. “That was my best lure.”

  “I didn’t do it on purpose. You turned without looking where I was.” This scrawny boy who had just got them lost was accusing her of not knowing what she was doing?

  Jake examined the rod and let out a frustrated sigh. He shook his head, but did not meet her gaze. He reeled in the excess line, then rethreaded the line back through the loops on the rod. From his pack he dug out another lure—a small silver spoon with a single treble hook on the end. He tied it with nimble fingers, bit the extra line from the knot, and pressed two small lead weights an arm’s length from the lure. He reluctantly handed the rod back to her.

  “You still trust me with your precious fishing rod?” Izzy asked.

  “We need lunch, and I need to paddle. Be careful. We lose that lure and we’ll be using our hands.”

  Izzy waited until he realigned the canoe, now with the bow pointed east, then cast the line far out to the side. She glanced back at him only once. He was lost in thought, barely paying any attention to her. She let her emotions cool. Jake hadn’t reacted to her words, not like Rick would have.

  So maybe this boy wasn’t quite the same as Rick. Still, Rick had been nice at first, too, and the day was still young. She peeked at the shore. Once they got back to land, she’d be able to make it on her own if she needed to.

  Her stomach picked that moment to complain, as if to remind her that as much as she wanted that to be true, it wasn’t entirely true. Life in the bush, alone, was more than a little difficult.

  Izzy returned her focus to the task at hand. Getting lunch was up to her.

  CHAPTER 31

  Jake

  An hour later, Izzy hooked a pike that nearly sawed through the thin filament line. Jake grabbed the rod from her as soon as he realized how big the fish was. He couldn’t afford to lose that last lure, and more importantly, if the line did break, he didn’t want to have her to blame. Still, she didn’t seem to take his help very well. She barely said a word as the fish cooked over a hastily built fire. For a while, it was like Jake was all alone again, only now with more responsibility.

  They passed their previous night’s camp around dinnertime, but Jake didn’t even slow down. Two kilometers farther east, they found what they were looking for: the river snaked out of the forest, rippling and bubbling with runoff from recent rains. Jake put his left arm in the air, bent at the elbow to signal a right turn. Izzy didn’t get the joke.

  The lazy flow ran wide enough and deep enough to paddle. According to his map, less than two days’ paddling and portaging remained until they would reach Laroque. Two rivers and two lakes stood between them and their
goal.

  They camped just a few kilometers from their previous night’s location. Knowing where they were, and that the girl seemed capable of surviving the next two days, lifted Jake’s spirits.

  “You can have the tent and the sleeping bag,” Jake said as they polished off the leftovers from lunch.

  “You sure?” Izzy asked.

  Jake lifted the canoe and propped it up against a log near the fire. “Yeah. I’ll be fine out here.” He grabbed his hatchet and hacked a few branches off a nearby cedar tree. He crammed the boughs under the canoe. “Sleeping on these branches won’t be so bad. Done it before.”

  “Whatever.” Izzy eyed the branches for a moment, then disappeared into the tent, zipping it closed.

  Not even a thank you, Jake thought. Whatever. A little appreciation for all he had done—was doing—would have been nice.

  Jake threw another hunk of wood on the fire and crawled under the canoe, pulling his clothes tight. The reflected heat from the fire made his cubby under the canoe bearable. He tried to force the expectation for her appreciation out of his head. This girl was not right. Whatever had happened to her had damaged her in a dozen ways. Everything he did to help her seemed to be grounds for suspicion. Everything he said was taken the wrong way. His journey home to this point had been exhausting. The last thirty hours with her had pushed him, and his patience, to the limit. When they got to Laroque, he’d be glad to be rid of her—to turn her over to the authorities, or whoever was left there.

  He had his own issues to deal with.

  He paddled, and together they portaged the entire length of the river the next day. The distance wore down, five kilometers before lunch, four after, then three more after a quick break. The river drained an L-shaped lake so large they couldn’t see one side from the other. He knew this lake though. He had seen it from the air a half dozen times. To the southwest loomed another large lake. On the western side of that lake, on a thin spit of land, was the town of Laroque.