by Peter Heller
“Yo!” Jack called over the roar of the falls. “Just hearing that sonofabitch makes me need to pee.” The thunder throbbed and thumped and if you listened closely you could parse out the rush of a ledge, the sluice beside it, and the crashing hydraulic beneath. A thousand violent sounds.
“Right?” Wynn said. “Wonder how we’ll sleep. I can feel it in the ground.”
“Fine, because we don’t have to try to run the damn thing.”
Maybe somebody could—run it. In a kayak. It was probably Class VI, a series of ledges with a massive amount of water pouring through. It looked like the North Sea in storm being spilled down a staircase. Maybe seventy feet top to bottom and ramped over an eighth of a mile. One rock island in the middle, the size of a rowboat, supported one gnarled and stunted spruce. The living fact of it trembling there in the middle of the mayhem only made the cataract more terrifying.
The sun broke through a reef of cloud and lit the falls, blazing the snowy whitewater and somehow sharpening the sounds, and Wynn thought it was beautiful, too. The way sheer rock ridges are beautiful, and avalanches.
There were blueberries. As the sunlight swept over the cabin it warmed the low groundcover around it and loosed the scent of the fruit and the tang of Labrador tea. The blueberries covered the clearing. And they were ripe. A fire might be coming and the frost might have landed early, but right now the country felt unbridled and wild, and bountiful, and mostly benign. The funk and low-grade fears of the morning had passed. They felt like themselves again.
They went back through willows and alders for the small dry-bag packs, the lifejackets and fishing rods, the gun. It was a short enough walk around the falls, maybe four hundred yards in all. They’d haul the canoe out and leave it where it was until morning. The Kevlar boat was light and it was just as easy for one of them to flip it up on his shoulders and carry it. Easier for one. The center thwart was wide and yoked for carrying. They made a pile of the four barrels and a dry bag on the bluff overlooking the rapid. And then they sat against the bag and just enjoyed the sun soaking them from over the woods across the river. It’d be gone in a minute, more clouds were coming. They noticed how instantaneously the afternoon cooled in the shadow, but for now they could sit with nothing to do but close their eyes and let the sun warm their eyelids. Probably four or five more hours before it dropped over the trees. In a few minutes they’d make camp and then pick enough blueberries to make pie. Their version of one, made in a frying pan with Bisquick and brown sugar.
“You wanna fish?” Wynn said without opening his eyes. “There was a good-size creek right above where we took out.”
“Be good to have a pan fry tonight, huh? Brookies and blueberries.” As soon as Jack said it, it sounded corny. “How come something so good just sounded so lame?”
“Professor Paulson said alliteration was dangerous if you don’t know how to use it.”
“Seems to me you could say that about anything. A frying pan or a car jack.”
Wynn thought about it. “Paulson said there was a principle in aesthetics: the more you prettify something, the more you risk undermining its value. Its essential value.”
“I don’t know what that means.” Jack tossed a pebble over the edge of the bluff. “Sounds like something a professor likes to say. I guess he means like plants that put all their energy into brilliant flowers and not the roots.”
“I guess.”
“So what if the value is already there? A strong and beautiful woman puts on makeup. So what?”
“Maybe if she puts on too much she could look cheap.”
“But she’s not cheap, is she? She’s still who she is.”
Wynn looked at his buddy. Jack had this way of questioning platitudes, dogma, authority. Jack thought most of his professors were zombies.
They lay back on the bag in the sun and didn’t say anything. After a minute Jack said, “What’s the dude’s definition of danger anyway? When he said using alliteration can be dangerous.”
“Yeah, right?” Wynn, eyes closed, felt around him until his palm lay on a small bed of warm moss. “It’s like when they say this or that writer took a big risk,” he said. “What are the consequences? He might have to hit delete on his laptop?”
“Ugh,” Jack said. “Some of these dudes need to get out more.” He sat up, looked over the edge of the short cliff. “Running this drop is a risk. Or paddling through that frigging fire.” As soon as he said it, he wished he hadn’t. The leading edge of the cloudbank covered the sun as if in sympathy and Jack felt the goosebumps running over his arms.
“Let’s go get some dinner,” Wynn said.
They roused. They shook off their lethargy and found the rod cases in the pile. They each put on a light fleece sweater and dug out their fishing kits: small waist-belt packs with tippet, a couple of fly boxes—dries and nymphs—Gink floatant, soft-weight and split-shot. Nippers and forceps. That was it. They both carried clip knives out of habit, in the pockets of their pants. They had serrated rescue knives, too, slotted into plastic sheaths on their life vests, but the clip knives were with them everywhere, all the time, and they could thumb them open in a split second with one hand. They practiced it, like gunfighters drawing a gun, and they did it so often, around the fire, scouting a route, that most of the time they didn’t even know they were doing it. A good skill if somehow you got snagged and were being dragged by a rope behind a runaway horse or boat. Jack’s father had taught him to carry one when he was still a kid; he, Shane, had once saved his own life with a flip knife when he’d gotten bucked off a green-broke Arab and his foot went through the stirrup. He was getting dragged and beaten to death and he’d managed to double himself and reach his foot and haul himself up with one hand and cut the leather.
The reverberation of the whitewater was less menacing now that they’d lived with it for half an hour and knew they could easily portage around it, and they walked back through the brush to the beach.
They unshucked the four-piece rods from their PVC tubes and pulled free the ribbons that tied them and unrolled the soft cloth sheaths. They slid out the slender sections. Jack had a Sage (green cloth), Wynn a Winston (red cloth). Wynn rubbed the butt end of each tapered piece against the side of his nose to lubricate it just a little before he twisted it into its hole, a trick his mother had taught him that kept the sections from locking up when you pulled them apart. He and Jack snugged together the pieces of the rods and slipped the reels into their saddles and tightened the lock rings. They ran the lines through the guides and checked their leaders.
They left the tubes in the canoe, and Jack held the end of the leader against the cork handle and reeled up the slack until the line lay taut against the rod. He began walking up the shore. The creek flowed in at the top of the beach. Like the one that ran through the last camp, it was slow and tea-colored with peat and tannin. And as they stepped slowly to the open bank they saw shadows darting. Brookies. Good.
They began to fish. Jack tied on a dark elk-hair caddis—he didn’t think it would matter much what he threw—and crimped the barb with his forceps. Easier to lose a fish with no barb and they were fishing for dinner but he did it anyway. He moved upstream twenty yards to the beginning of the first big trees and into the sachet scent of the spruce. He began to cast into a slow pool. The pool was darkened by clumps of a fine dark grass that waved along the sandy bottom like hair. He made long casts into the deep shade of an undercut bank, and as soon as the fly touched water on the third cast he got a strike. The fish bent the tip of the rod hard and jerked it wildly and Jack laughed out loud because as he hauled it in he saw it was no bigger than the palm of his hand. Ounce for ounce a wicked fighter. He held it lightly in the shallow teawater at his feet and marveled at the intricate crinkled green patterns on the top of its head, and wondered again how natural selection could have scribed them. He slipped out the small hook easily. The trout
wriggled wildly in his hand and darted free. “Go, go!” he whispered. He watched the little missile lose itself in the shadows of the grass. He almost always let the first one of the day go. It was respect.
Wynn waded into the shallows at the mouth. The river out of the lake already carried a load of silt from the banks and would be too murky to fly-fish, but the creek was clear and dark. If they were going to catch fish from now on, it would be in these side streams. He threw a tiny parachute Adams, a short cast into the middle of the barely moving brook, and instantly got a bump. He set the hook and threw the tiny brook trout airborne. It was not much bigger than a minnow. It landed in the water near his feet and he brought it in and cupped it gently and apologized and turned out the hook, and it shook itself as if waking from a bad dream and shot away.
They fished. They were both very good, but from a distance anyone could tell them apart. Not just that Wynn was bigger and heavier or stayed in the water wherever he could, but in their styles: Jack made his casts with an offhand grace, as if he were barely watching the line, he gathered it and stepped while taking in the wider circle of the banks, the woods, he cast with near indifference; the loop was always clean but sometimes low over the water and sidearm. If he false-cast he did it once to shake the water out of a dry fly, and the line lay straight and the fly landed lightly, always, as natural as a settling bug. If his wrist bent at the last moment to force the line upstream into a stiff wind, he didn’t care. He fished almost as unconsciously as he walked or breathed. Wynn was different. He was more studied and he thought about everything. He calculated drift and knew before he threw the rhythm of the mends, and he divided the stream into quadrants, and if he was prospecting he worked across the slices of current, and if he was nymphing he worked one depth across, then dropped the fly a foot deeper into the column and worked back. He had learned from both parents and he had read a ton of books. His mother, Hansie, was an especially good fisher and teacher. His rod was almost always high, the metronome of the tip moving eleven to one on the clockface, or ten to two, the classic cast. His roll cast was textbook, and he double-hauled into the stiffest wind with the perfect cadence of a treadle. Jack sometimes watched his buddy fish and thought it was funny that he himself was the engineer and not Wynn. They caught about the same amount of fish.
Now they were having fun and laughing with the voracious brookies and letting every fish go. A pair of flycatchers chattered nearby and blew on thin reeds as they worked through the trees. The brookies were mostly tiny and they were crazy exuberant, like little kids. They darted for the fly and missed, or they were so excited they jumped right over it, or they bumped it and seemed to bounce off. Often two would try to hit it at once. Jack finally unshucked his Leatherman and snipped the hook right off the fly and tried to land the fish at the instant of strike. He managed to get a couple out of the water, but not for long. He heard a whistle.
He glanced downstream and Wynn was reeling in and motioning with his head to come down fast. It wasn’t a fish—he was staring at the big river. Jack reeled in all his line and trotted down the stony bank. Wynn had stepped up onto dry land and he was staring dead upriver. Jack got to him and didn’t say a word. He stood at his shoulder and they both peered upstream.
CHAPTER FIVE
They saw a boat. A canoe, green. It rounded the wide curve of the bend and came fully into view in the middle of the river. Not good. In another fifty yards whoever it was wouldn’t have much time to make the beach for the portage on river right. They’d go over the falls.
“Shit, I wonder if they know,” Wynn said.
“They’re not giving themselves a whole hell of a lot of time.”
Jack whistled, a searing ballpark jeer, and they both started waving their arms, motioning the paddlers to their side of the river. The flycatchers quit calling. And as the boys squinted they saw that it wasn’t paddlers, not two—two with twice the power to move the boat—it was one. A man, hatless. They could barely see the figure, and the flash of the paddle in the patchy sunlight. A few strokes, then rest, heedless in the center of the relentless current.
They waved and whistled, both now. And they saw the paddle stop. And stop for more than a beat, two. It stopped as if frozen, stopped altogether in some surprised consideration.
“Yeah, that’s right,” Jack murmured, almost with scorn, “reconsider your line. Think about not committing suicide.” He whistled again and Wynn’s left forearm came up to protect his nearside ear. “Hey,” Jack said. “Fuckin’ A, that’s just one dude.”
Jack was going to loose another whistle and wave when they saw the paddle start to move again. It glinted sunlight and the sunlight passed, buried in cloud, and they felt the chill. Whoever it was began to dig. And then in a sign of an experienced canoeist he made a broad turn of the boat upstream and angled the bow toward the right shore and began to ferry across. Good. But what the fuck? That’s what Jack thought. There should be two paddlers, a man and a woman.
Wynn was just glad to see that the man in the canoe had some sense and at least some basic skills, because it looked like he, too, was committing himself to run the river.
* * *
The man let the bow fall off and aimed for shore. He took a few hard strokes for speed and made a smooth swing across the eddy line. He ruddered on the left side so as not to turn straight upstream and he held his angle across the pool and let the bow grind up onto gravel. Good. They were both holding their rods, but they stepped forward in unison without a word and grabbed the man’s bow, and together they pulled him up onto the beach so that only his stern stayed in water. Their eyes swept over the boat. It was a green Old Town Penobscot, heavy but tough. Well scratched and gouged. The man kneeled center thwart in solo paddler position, and they counted four dry bags, two forward, two aft. Just ahead of him on top of a bag, under a strap but in no case, was a plated Winchester Marine 12-gauge—a short-barreled shotgun. Jack knew what it was because he had one at home. The boys took it all in. They were more interested in the man’s face. He was young, maybe midthirties. Mussed dark curly hair, a few days of beard, red-rimmed blue eyes, a stunned look, maybe panic or shock. The man did not thank them for the help in landing the boat. He did not speak. He looked from one to the other.
“Maia,” he said. It was a croak. “Mai—” Like it was hooked in. The word. Hooked in like a half-swallowed fly.
Wynn said to the man gently, “Hold on. Why don’t you come up? You can stand. You’re on the beach.”
The man didn’t seem to understand. Jack murmured, “Maybe he’s French or something. Or a Swede. The Europeans are crazy for these rivers.”
“Yeah, maybe.”
“I’m not a Swede,” the man croaked. It was a half bark. And then his face crumpled. He began to cry. The boys stared. “My wife,” he said finally. “She’s missing. Gone.”
* * *
They set their rods inside their own canoe and helped the man out of the boat. He wore a green plaid wool shirt, and knee-high gum boots as they did, and he staggered when he tried to stand on the stones. Jack caught him. “Hey, hey,” Jack said. “What’s wrong? What’s wrong with your leg?”
Wynn looked down. The man’s pants, the right thigh, were ripped and stained with blood. “Nothing,” the man said. “I stumbled in the fog, it’s nothing.”
“That doesn’t look like nothing. What’d you do, get speared by a deadfall?”
“It’s a scratch.” The man was almost vehement.
Jack let it go. “Whyn’t you come up here and sit for a sec?”
The man looked at them as if for the first time. It was a feral look, almost wild with grief or fear. He turned back to the canoe and slid his shotgun out from under the strap and slung it over his shoulder. Jack glanced at Wynn and then led the limping man to a ledge of bedrock back of the beach. The granite made a high bench and Jack leaned him against it. Wynn had brought his filter wate
r bottle up with him and he handed it to the man, who drank greedily.
“What do you mean, she’s gone?” Jack said.
The man blinked. “Gone,” he said. “The night the fog came in. When it cleared I saw another canoe. Far off.” Jack noticed the man’s right hand feeling shakily for the strap of the gun. “We—we’ve gotta get down. Get down and tell someone.”
Wynn, even stooped, hands in pockets, towered over the man. It was the posture he took when he was concerned and didn’t know what to do. Like he was trying to provide proximity and shade. When Jack saw him like that he always called him La Tree. Now La Tree looked dismayed. He didn’t understand. Jack took the water bottle from the man’s hand and gave it to his friend. “Refill this, will ya?” Wynn took it without a word and turned up to the creek. The water was clearer there and wouldn’t clog the filter with sediment.
“Take a deep breath, dude,” Jack said. “That’s it, breathe. Whoa, don’t cry. We’ll figure this out.” The man pressed his face into his sleeve. Jack put his hand on his shoulder. He said, “I need you to focus.” It was a command.
The man’s head came up. For a split second his blurry eyes were clear. And then they fogged over again. “Huh?” he said.
“I need you to focus,” Jack said. “Something’s not right. Now tell me what happened.”
The man studied Jack. It was an assessment, a measuring. Jack also smelled fear. He shook his own head as if to clear it. Why did he feel so confused? The man didn’t think that they had carried off his wife, did he? He was clearly in shock—something very bad had just happened.