by Kirk Landers
There was no signal from Annette or Gus. Pender took a long pull of water, checked his map and compass to set his course, and began paddling east-northeast to his first landmark, Lookout Island. When he got to Lookout Island, he’d sight the next visual cue, a low island lying another four kilometers east-northeast, and keep leapfrogging landmarks until they got to French Lake. Another twelve miles, give or take, Pender thought, as he entered the full wind and rough water zone just beyond the shadow of Emerald Island.
Annette watched Pender with growing respect. He was a strong paddler, revived from the ardors of portaging. He made good decisions. She was surprised when he headed north along Emerald Island. Most tired paddlers would have taken their chances with the archipelago. She would have taken Pender’s course, especially with the wind building. Running with the wind might actually be faster than trying to quarter it coming out of the archipelago, and it was surely safer for their tired crew.
It was strange, she thought, that he was so reckless and violent in some ways and yet patient and considerate in others. Taking all that crap from the khaki woman so Annette wouldn’t get any blowback—this from a guy who punched out his boss and took on Gus. Bonding with that crazy dog. Buddying up with Gus. It was very hard to put those pieces into the same picture.
The base campers were tired but game. Every few minutes, a paddle hitting a gunnel sounded a notice that they were getting heavy-armed, but they stayed with it. Emily and Joe paddled like a well-oiled machine, slow, perfect paddle strokes, perfectly synchronized, their power balanced so the canoe required almost no course correction. Their efficiency let them keep pace with the flotilla without seeming to try. She worried that they might not have the strength to deal with rough weather. They looked so frail.
When Pender paused before going east, she thought about signaling him to wait so she could give everyone a short rest and maybe set towlines. But she didn’t want to coddle the group. It could make them dependent and vulnerable if things got bad. Plus, if she were tethered to another boat, she would be very limited in her ability to help anyone else. Better to run for Lookout Island, take a break there, see how everyone was doing, see how the weather was.
* * *
When Pender reached Lookout Island, the wind was blowing steady and strong. Pickerel Lake was a waterscape of swelling waves with deep troughs, serious but not yet perilous. This was the kind of water that kept canoeists sober and focused, Pender thought. It was fairly easy to stay aligned with the waves and to float down the deep swells, like a surfer. But the threat was there. Lose your concentration for a few seconds, and you’re swimming.
Pender shivered at the thought. You’d be in the middle of a cold, bottomless lake in stiff winds, your gear sinking to the depths, you trying to self-rescue in water you couldn’t handle before your boat filled up with water. Good luck. And even if you somehow got upright, what do you do? It’s windy and cold and you’re trying to make shore in a boat half filled with water. Maybe the others would rescue you, but that’s no panacea either. One more person would overload any of the boats, and so would Chaos.
At the southern end of the island, Pender neatly slid along the waves into the lee waters of its east shore, then turned his canoe west so he could see how the others were coming.
They were fanned out over a few hundred meters, Gus keeping his tandem just behind Emily and Joe, who were paddling calmly in the big water as if they had done it all their lives. Annette was a few yards behind the base campers, who were thrashing a bit but keeping their boat on the right line. Pender decided to wait for them to gather in the lee water.
He waved his paddle in a wide, overhead arc to signal Annette and the others to watch him, and then slipped back into the lee of Lookout Island to wait for them. He took a long drink of water, let Chaos lean over the gunnel and drink from the lake, and then lifted his legs above the gunnels so he could lie back on the pack behind him. It was uncomfortable, but it let him stretch his back for a minute, relieving taut muscles and aching vertebrae.
As the other boats drew near, the drone of an airplane engine came over the north horizon. Pender positioned his boat so he could scan the sky. Out in the big water, Annette was screaming at the base campers to keep paddling.
The floatplane came over the ridges behind them, riding low and slow. They could hear that it was close. They could hear it coming toward them, even though they couldn’t see it until it got in front of them.
Pender saw the plane come over the ridgeline. The pilot spotted them and did a slow turn, coming east, a loud, lumbering beast floating on the air currents. The bow paddler in Gus’s boat waved his paddle madly at the aircraft as it passed overhead. Pender waved his arms widely as the plane approached his position. It flew a few kilometers farther east, then made a wide, slow circle and came back into the wind to land.
Annette stifled a cheer when the plane dropped softly onto the churning surface of Pickerel Lake. She urged the group to keep paddling hard. There was still plenty of opportunity to capsize. But her sense of relief was like a giddy high. Her injured people would be taken to a hospital. The rest of them could make the run to French Lake in, what, three hours? Maybe less in this wind. Home free!
The pilot stood on one pontoon and opened the door to the seats and storage area as they approached. The aircraft was a de Havilland Beaver, nearly as old as Pender but the Mercedes-Benz of bush planes in canoe country. As the canoes converged on the plane, the wind and surf picked up more intensity. The seaplane pitched and rocked. Sprays of water droplets erupted into the air like monsoon rains. The base campers arrived first, their canoe banging hard against a pontoon, then rubbing and screeching as the plane and canoe rose and fell in the waves. The pilot held the canoe while the base campers helped their injured comrade into the plane. The pilot was yelling to the campers and they were yelling back, but Annette couldn’t hear them in the din of the waves and the wind.
The pilot gestured to Gus to raft up, then Annette. She could barely hear him in the wind even though he was shouting.
“. . . bad weather . . . wind . . .” She could only catch pieces of what he was saying. She cupped a hand to her ear. He stepped into the first canoe, kneeling, cupped his hands over his mouth like a megaphone.
“This is my last trip. Bad wind, low cloud cover. I can take eight people. No gear. No dogs.”
Annette waved Pender to the plane. He had been treading water downwind from the plane. She yelled for the base campers to get on the plane with their comrade.
“Gus, get Bill on board, then help us steady these boats while we get everyone else on board.”
“Okay,” yelled Gus, “But I’m going to paddle out of here with the li’l fella.”
“No!” yelled Annette. “You look after Bill and make sure they send someone to French Lake to pick us up.”
“How about you and I paddle out?”
“No. Pender and I are on a date, remember?” She was thinking, this is the roller-coaster part.
Gus nodded, disappointment etched in his face.
As Gus loaded the others onto the plane, Annette, Chaos, and Pender moved into Gus’s canoe and tethered the two solo canoes behind it. They threw all the gear in the three canoes and turned the others loose to float in the wind and surf. There would be plenty of time to go searching for the abandoned boats in the days to come.
Annette stationed Pender in the bow and Chaos on a pack in front of her. The waves banged the tethered boats into them and one careened onto the other side of the plane’s pontoon, fouling its line. Gus signaled them to sit tight as he freed the line. The pilot finished seating the other passengers and then crouched by Gus on the pontoon, the two of them holding Annette and Pender’s canoe steady.
“Run for shore,” the pilot yelled. “This is going to get worse!”
Annette and Pender locked eyes. Her raised eyebrows asked him what he wanted to do. He pointed south, toward French Lake. “Why hide when you can fly?” he shouted into the win
d. She couldn’t hear him, but she knew what he was saying. She felt the same way.
Gus reached out a meaty hand to shake hands with Annette, then moved to the bow and shook hands with Pender. “You’re a mean old bastard,” he yelled. “I want to be just like you when I grow up.” He punched Pender softly in the shoulder and then boarded the plane. The pilot pushed them off and waited for the line of canoes to pass behind the aircraft. Seconds later, the Beaver’s engine fired to life, and the pilot slowly moved into the wind and took off.
As the Beaver droned into the ether, Pender was left with the same eerie feeling he had felt the first time a floatplane dropped him in the wilderness. It was a sense of dread mixed with a sense of excitement. The difference was, before he had also felt alone. This time he was with Annette and Chaos, and he felt a bond with both of them.
He hoped he wasn’t getting them killed.
Annette was feeling guilty. A good guide would have insisted on paddling for safety, sitting this one out, rolling in tomorrow morning. But the thrill ride into French was too much to resist. How often did you get the chance to run like a bat out of hell in high winds and big surf? This was it. She was sixty years old and life had given her another chance to act like a kid. She just hoped she didn’t get Pender and Chaos killed with her exuberance.
30
There was a jolt when they reached the end of the towline and the trailing canoes snapped into line, slowing their momentum. They strained at their paddles to get the line of boats moving faster than the waves, and Annette had a brief, passing doubt that this was going to work. It was one thing to run with the wind in a canoe. It was quite another to do it towing other canoes. How would that work? She checked the short-bladed knife clipped to her flotation vest to make sure it was at the ready. If things got bad, she’d cut the towlines.
Pender was on an adrenaline high. Sitting in the bow, his only job was to supply power and to switch sides when Annette told him to. It would be a mute crossing—he could hear her if she screamed; she wouldn’t hear him until they got out of the wind. Ten miles with a howling tailwind. It would be a wilderness thrill ride, the ultimate last outing in Quetico.
Though they had never paddled a tandem canoe together, they found a paddling rhythm quickly and they were very fast. They focused on the navigation landmarks, the direction of the wind, the direction of the waves, the thickening clouds slowly covering them in dim light.
Halfway to their next landmark, Pender glimpsed movement in the corner of his vision. He looked north and sighted a canoe, light colored, two paddlers hugging the shoreline, coming out of Stanton Bay, on a southeasterly heading.
“It’s the khaki people!” Annette shrieked from the stern.
Pender nodded in agreement. The white canoe, the smallish figure in the bow seat, the slow hull speed, the bow paddler stroking daintily, the stern paddler working hard. Had to be the khaki princess and her loyal subject. They must have gone for the Stanton Bay take-out, figuring it was much closer than French Lake, only to find it closed off from the outside world, just like Annette had predicted.
Annette and Pender watched the canoe with growing horror. The khaki people were hugging the shoreline, probably feeling safer there, but they were catching the wind and waves almost broadside and they were getting turbulence from waves breaking onshore and echoing back. The roiling, confused water was like being in a drunken boat, unsteady, unsure of where it’s going, unlikely to stay upright.
“They’re going to capsize!” Annette yelled.
Pender nodded his agreement again. It was just a question of when and where.
The white canoe made its way to the tip of the landmass, catching even harsher wind and wave conditions as they entered the open water of Pickerel Lake. Both paddlers were digging on the left side of the boat to keep the vessel upright, and even the bow paddler had picked up the tempo. At the tip of the landmass, they had a choice to make. They could shoot over a reef to the lee side of an island, which would protect them from the waves while they changed their course to east-northeast—that’s what Pender would have done—or they could paddle across the windward tip of the island with the wind and waves hitting them at a right angle and execute a hard left turn to the east when they cleared the island. The suicide option, Pender thought.
They chose the suicide option. As they came past the island, the khaki princess was nearly blown over from the force of the wind. Her paddle flew into the air, and she scrabbled wildly for something to grab.
“Go!” screamed Annette. And Pender dug as if he was in a race for his life.
They were a hundred yards from the canoeists and they covered the water with amazing speed, but it was still like watching a train wreck in slow motion. The white canoe floundered out of control. The stern paddler stopped paddling and tried to calm his spouse. She was screaming, her face upright, her hands clinging to the gunnels of the canoe, her body frozen in terror. The current seized the white canoe and rammed it sideways into open water.
The man tried to crawl across the packs to reach his wife, raising the boat’s center of gravity into the danger zone. Wind and current rocked the canoe far beyond its point of initial stability, then beyond its secondary stability. The man fell into the water as the canoe lurched, then rolled over, the woman still clinging to the gunnels, wailing.
Annette thought the woman might drown just like that, too terrified to let go, too disoriented to find her way to the surface. She and her husband would both be dealing with the shock of a sudden immersion in icy-cold water, a shock that leaves you unable to breathe for several seconds. You think you’re going to die—and if you panic, you probably will.
In the minutes it took for Annette and Pender to reach them, the man surfaced, looked about frantically for his wife, gasped for air, and dove back under. The man surfaced again, ten feet behind the drifting boat, not sure where to look for his wife. Annette steered their canoe to his side, motioned for him to grab the towline, and paddled to the overturned canoe. They pulled alongside, and Pender reached down with one hand to follow the gunnel. He stopped about halfway to the bow, pointed down, and screamed to Annette, “She’s underneath. In the air pocket.”
Annette nodded her understanding and fought to control their canoe.
The husband caught enough of the exchange to understand his wife was under the boat. He let go of the towline and swam in slogging strokes to the capsized canoe. When he was abreast of Pender, he dived again. Pender could feel the capsized hull roll and shimmy. The woman was resisting her husband’s attempts to pull her to safety. The man surfaced again, took a deep breath, dived again. Pender stripped off his flotation vest and looked to Annette, his face questioning.
She knew what he was asking and shook her head no. It was too dangerous. They were in rough seas and hypothermic weather conditions, and they were going to need two able-bodied paddlers to make it out of here.
The man surfaced again, took a breath, then another, dived weakly into the chill. Pender knew the man wasn’t going to make it, knew he was going to die trying to save his horrible wife. Pender looked back to Annette apologetically, then rolled over the side of the canoe. The shock of the cold water drove the air from his lungs and made his vision flutter like he was going to pass out. He forced himself to remain calm, waiting for the shock to pass. When he could make his chest work again, he took a lungful of air and dove.
Under the boat, the woman clung to a thwart, her neck arched so her nose was against the hull of the canoe, sucking trapped air. Her husband was limp behind her, floating in suspension, his arms moving weakly, a man about to die. Pender grabbed the man’s shirt, pulled him clear of the boat and pushed him toward Annette. Then he grabbed the woman’s nearest hand and wrenched it from the thwart with all his anger and contempt. She thrashed in panic. He held her free hand away from anything it could grab and grasped her other hand, tugging, tugging again, lacking the leverage to break her death grip. He wanted to leave her there to die, but it wasn’
t in him. He kicked his feet up above his head, walked them up the hull of the canoe until he was upside down, and then pushed up with all his might. The canoe and the woman’s hand separated in a single violent movement. Pender shot into the depths headfirst, disoriented, not sure which way was up. A wave of panic engulfed him. His lungs were exploding. He choked down the panic and waited for his body to float. He thought this might be how he was going to die, here and now. Thought this was not how he wanted to die, so dark and cold. So dehumanizing.
He started to float, got himself oriented, head up, feet down, kicked up toward the surface, lunged for the air. Couldn’t hold his breath. He inhaled a moment before breaking the surface, getting more water than air into his tortured lungs. Coughed and gasped madly, opposing actions, one reflex to get water out of his lungs, the other to bring air in. Hacked and gasped repeatedly, sank into the water, kicked up, hacked and gasped. Felt light-headed. He sighted Annette struggling to keep the canoe perpendicular to the waves and keep the khaki princess from pulling the boat over as she clutched at the gunnel. The woman’s husband was a few yards from the boat, floating on his back, his arms flopping weakly in an attempt to reach the canoe. Alive after all, Pender thought.
Pender willed himself to swim to the canoe. He held the gunnel for a moment, coughing and breathing until he had himself under control. Then he pulled the husband to the canoe, asked if he could hold the gunnel for a minute. The man looked at him with unfocused eyes but nodded yes. Pender went to the stern and reeled in the solo canoes. He positioned the first one by the woman, holding it with one hand and extending the other to her.