The River

by Peter Heller

  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 lon
g 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.

  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?”

  Si
lence.

  “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—”