The River

by Peter Heller

  “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.

  CHAPTER THREE

  When Jack’s mother died, Jack’s father, Shane, stopped talking. It wasn’t like Jack was missing much—his father had been a man of few words, unlike his father’s brother, Lloyd, on the next ranch over, who could talk the bark off a tree. But later, over the years as his voice returned, Shane had told Jack stories about Uncle Lloyd, and whenever they were all together Jack could see how much his dad loved him. Shane told Jack that growing up he had not resented his older brother’s volubility, he had admired it. They were Irish twins, eleven months apart, and Shane said he would often find himself in a circle of mutual friends listening to Lloyd tell a story he knew was wildly embellished. Lloyd might be recounting a ride through the Devil’s Thumb lease with their cousin Zane, intoning, “Well, Zane, you know he’s a gangly sonofabitch, shot up so fast in high school they had to climb halfway up his backside to find a place to hang his asshole.” Laughter. “He was riding ahead of me on the trail, turned back and was trying to tell me some goddamn thing, and he hit the limb of this cottonwood and it knocked him out of the saddle. Well, you know he may not be that smart but he’s quick as a snake in a boot and he grabbed that branch and he was hanging there squirming and I just rode on under and picked him up. There we were, riding together like newlyweds. He was half up on Shirley’s neck and I squeezed him around the waist and said, ‘Well, this is cozy. How’s that saddle horn feel…’ ” Laughter.

  Shane said it wasn’t quite the way it had happened but it was somehow more true to the moment than if Lloyd had just told it dry, and it was way more fun. Jack did notice one thing, and it was something he loved about his uncle: Lloyd never embellished the bones of a hunting or fishing story. The fish never got bigger nor the rack of the bull elk wider. Inches, feet, miles, weather, were all surprisingly accurate. Shane said that Lloyd had once told him that a great storyteller had to know when never to lie. “Hunting and fishing’s so much fun,” he said, “only a pissant needs to lie about it.” Jack could see that in all his father’s dealings with Lloyd—splitting up the ranch after their parents died, sharing the lease, covering for each other in calving time, and coping with irrigation—Shane trusted his brother more than any other person on earth. Jack knew that Lloyd made life more fun, it was that simple, and without ever compromising the dead seriousness of it. That was a person to ride the river with.

  Jack’s father may have blamed himself and gone just about mute, but so did Jack—blame himself. That morning he had insisted on acting like a big man and taking up the rear. He’d never done it before. His gray, Duke, was much more athletic than sweet lumbering Mindy—if it had been him behind his father when BJ balked, Duke would have kept his footing. It was his fault for trying to be bigger than he was. His damn fault. In truth, at eleven he was already a constitutionally modest kid, and the accident just reinforced his aversion to drawing attention to himself or overreaching. He liked to be good at what he did—both his mother and father had instilled the value of that; there was nothing really more important other than treating animals and people with decency and respect—but not a lot of people had to know about it. What good did bragging do anyway? He had a few good friends who respected him and would do anything for him. Why did anyone else need to be impressed?

  When he opened the envelope that said he’d gotten into Dartmouth, his father didn’t hoot or take him out to a celebratory dinner at the Tabernash Tavern; he looked at him with an odd expre
ssion, half pride, half sorrow, and said simply, “Your mother would be over the moon.” Over the moon. She was over the moon. It was almost exactly how he had been thinking of her these past years. When he walked halfway to the horse barn on a cold night and stood in the frozen yard and watched the moon climb over Sheep Mountain, he sometimes whispered, “Hi, Mom.” He wasn’t sure why, it just seemed that if she were to be anywhere it would be there. Maybe it was because his favorite book when he was very little was Goodnight Moon. She had read it to him over and over, and after she drowned he kept the battered copy on the little shelf above the bed and sometimes fingered the worn corners and flipped through it before he slept.

  And it was books he took solace in. When he wasn’t out on the ranch, or riding the lease, or fishing. He eschewed team sports—he felt like they were a bunch of kids showing off—and he kept most of his reading to himself. Not even his English teachers knew the depths of his growing erudition, but the school librarian did, as did Annie Bosworth down at the Granby Public Library. They knew. They also knew his instinctive modesty and shyness, so they encouraged him with guidance but never made a big deal of his extraordinary voracity, nor of his range. They simply kept him in books.

  He and Wynn had that in common, a literary way of looking at the world. Or at least a love of books, poetry or fiction or expedition accounts. Wynn was a straight-up arts major who took a lot of courses in comparative literature, particularly French. Jack was engineering and supremely comfortable in the language of mathematics, but for the rest of his courses he took anything to do with poetry or novels, and he had especially adored American literature from the beginning. They had met even before the first day at school, on a freshman orientation trip, a four-day backpacking romp through the White Mountains. He and Wynn had rambled way out ahead of the group and talked nonstop, about canoes and rivers and climbing, but also about how Thoreau did his laundry across the pond at Emerson’s house and how Faulkner was such a terrible drunk and womanizer and whether “Spring and All” was as good and important as “The Waste Land.” Jack was startled. He’d never had conversations like this with another kid, and he’d never imagined anyone else his age would love to read as much as he did—especially a guy who seemed to be able to more than handle himself in the woods. They were best friends from that first day, and whatever else they were doing, they never went very long without trading books.

  One thing they talked a lot about on that first hike was Louis L’Amour. Once they’d discovered they were both avid readers and had gotten over their shyness about it they began to reel off authors and books, what was good about them and bad, what they loved. It was a breathless conversation, and not only because they were hauling ass down the north side of Mount Madison. And then they were both relieved to find that the other was not at all a literary snob. The classics and the canon were one kind of animal, but sometimes a trashy yarn that ran headlong with no pretensions was just as good. Or at least as fun. And so they could admit that they’d both read probably every Louis L’Amour pulp western extant, even the ones that mysteriously appeared years after he died. Wynn read them because the aspen forests, the sage meadows, the sandrock canyons of the West were as exotic and enticing as anything he could imagine. And because the characters rode horseback through that landscape, and splashed across ice-rimed creeks, and pushed through herds of elk, and calmed their quivering horses when they picked up the scent of a lion or the blood trail of its kill. The heroes made camp in the ferns beside a stream spilling from snowcapped peaks and rubbed down their horses with halms of wheatgrass, and they kept their fires small and “smokeless” so they didn’t alert their enemies. Jack read them because everything in them was familiar but shiny-familiar, not quite like the life he knew but the way things ought to be. Especially the part about killing all the bad guys and getting the girl.

  They had been talking so much and hiking so fast and not even noticing the weight of their packs that they outstripped the group by a few miles. When they got to a stream they unbuckled the waist belts and slipped the backpacks off their shoulders and leaned them against the hemlocks. Wynn had a filter bottle so they filled it in the cold brook and drank and filled it again. “Look,” said Wynn, “this is kinda refreshing.” He reached down to the base of a balsam fir where the cloverlike wood sorrel was covering the roots. He pulled up a handful and handed half to Jack and crumpled the bunch into his mouth. And puckered. Jack hesitated, then followed.

  “Sour,” he said.

  “Kinda thirst-quenching.”

  “I guess.”

  They sat on a mossy boulder overlooking a low falls that spilled into a black pool infused with bubbles. Jack had never been in the mixed hardwoods of the East, but though they were alien, they felt comfortable to him, too. The rhythm of the ridges and streams was different, softer, less relief in the ups and downs, no rimrock, and more sheltered, too—the dense woods covered the valleys and went nearly to the tops of the mountains—but once he got used to the cadence, he liked it. A little claustrophobic, but he’d get used to it.

  “Brookies in there, huh?” Jack said.

  “If we had a bare hook we could probably catch them with a piece of our shirt. That plaid one of yours.”

  Jack laughed. “Hey, use your own goddamn shirt.” He opened a Ziploc of nuts and raisins and M&Ms and handed it to Wynn, who said, “I hate people who eat all the M&Ms.”

  “That’s what you wanna do, be my guest.” They looked at each other and laughed.

  And so they discovered that they were both fishermen, too. Check, check. They decided to make a small fire and boil water for tea. Why not? When the rest of the little group showed up they were stretched out by embers, sipping hot Lipton’s from plastic cups. The trip leader, a junior, just shook his head. They got a reputation after that.

  * * *

  Now as they zipped their lifejackets and slid the canoe into the water and hopped in; as they paddled for the middle of the cove, which narrowed toward the north and began to show current and funneled into a wide V that picked up speed and slipped down between banks of spruce; and as they looked ahead and saw the horizon line of the first rapid and dug in and paddled hard for the right bank—as they truly began to run the river, they didn’t think about anything but making it into the wide eddy pool along the right shore so they could scout the falls. But every river story they had ever read was just beneath the surface of their imaginations and must have fired them with extra energy and braced them, too, because at least half of those stories did not have happy endings.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  They rode the ramp of current down into a rippling of low waves and then the current smoothed and they were between low banks of tamarack and pine, with the white trunks of birch staggered through like markers or signals of who knew what. A fallen half-submerged log lay off the right shore and its black head bobbed in and out of the current like the nodding dead. Jack looked away. They stayed on the right side of the river out of an abundance of caution. The river had been run many times and was well described, but it was not run every year and no one in Pickle Lake had heard of anyone running it this summer. A must-make portage was maybe the most critical expedient they had to deal with, that and running the rapids without mishap. Sometimes the landing spots were small and right above the lip of a falls. Rivers could change a lot year to year, did change, and so a fallen tree blocking the eddy to one of those mandatory take-outs, or the erosion of a cut bank that wiped away a landing beach, had to be assessed well beforehand if possible. If not, they had to be on their toes with an emergency backup plan. Once on a river in Maine it had involved Jack jumping into the water with the painter rope of the canoe and grabbing for a snag against the bank. To keep them from going over a falls. A last-ditch and dumb move they never wanted to repeat.

  It was already afternoon. Ranks of high clouds had sailed in from the north and were scattering the sunlight on the woods and
the water. A pair of green-winged teals turned fast over the river and dropped sharply to the current and drifted ahead of them for a while. They caught sight of the bald eagle or its mate double-pumping its huge wings to land in the top of a dead tree. Wynn noticed that the smells were different now—it smelled like a river, like moving water, a colder, cleaner scent, and he pulled it into his lungs, from where it seemed to run through every capillary of his body, and he felt happy. Lake paddling was one thing, but it was good to be on a stream. It had always been that way for him: he’d string his favorite four-weight fly rod and step into a brook and feel the current pressing his knees and the rhythms, even the natural laws, of pedestrian life were suspended and he felt immediately uplifted. It had been that way since he was a child. Jack felt the excitement, too. After his mother died on the Encampment, he made himself fish again, and swim in current. It was hard at first but he did it, and after a while he could separate the one river from all the rest.

  They knew that the lip of the falls and the trail for the portage began just after the sweep of a wide right-hand bend and they paddled easily around it and saw easily the flat gravel beach and the dark opening of the trail through willows and they paddled across the gentle eddy pool which turned them upstream and they stroked right up onto smooth stones.

  * * *

  It was already afternoon but they could huck the portage and make more miles, but for some reason neither of them was ready to leave the lakes behind. They would make camp. They each lugged a personal blue barrel of camping gear and clothes and another of food and cooking stuff to a clearing on a rock bluff overlooking the drop. Four small barrels. There was an old log cabin there, very small, built probably for hunting by a Cree, someone who came in by a boat with a motor from the string of lakes. A good place to camp for a few weeks. Except for the noise. The rapid was so loud they almost had to shout to be heard.