The River

by Peter Heller

  Berry-picking was like being a little kid again, crouching in the sun and rolling the berries from fingertips to palm and eating most of them before they reached the cup. They’d done it often on the way across the lakes and Wynn had lost himself every time, daydreamed like a bee-droned bear. They’d met one on Cedar Lake. Wynn had been picking black raspberries, mostly eating them, squatting at the edge of the thicket with the water behind him, and he’d stood at the same time as a black bear on the other side of it. They both swayed, twelve feet apart, about the same height, eye to eye, the bear lifting and moving her nose around, trying to identify the strange and dangerous scent. Odds were she’d probably never met a human before. Wynn had never met a bear that close. They were both surprised. He knew she was a she because a second later two heads popped up out of the bramble, little bear heads, and they looked at him with the curiosity of raccoons. They weren’t raccoons, they were this season’s cubs, and Wynn’s heart jumped because he suddenly knew how much danger he was in. Whatever the smell was, and the maybe strange sight of him, she didn’t like it. She snorted and dropped to all fours out of view. He reached for his bear spray and he didn’t have it because his pants and belt were lying over the rail of the canoe to dry, he was wearing his long johns, fuck, his hand swiped at air and he knew she had dropped for a charge and would come bursting through the thorns and knock him over. He had only time to bark a shout, to alert Jack, wherever he was, and to pray his buddy had time to break up the fight. He barked and braced and stumbled back and…nothing.

  Air and sunshine. He saw the tall willows back of the raspberries shake and he knew the bears were hustling away and gone. Maybe it had been the shout. He knew he’d been lucky, and after that he always carried the pepper spray.

  And so it was maybe why he’d had no reason to doubt the man’s story of losing his wife—he knew how easy it would’ve been to meet a bear even close to camp. To surprise a bear and be mauled and dragged. Especially in fog. Or even to climb a tree to get away from a bear and slip and fall. He’d read that bears sometimes buried a carcass for later, the way a croc can stuff a kill under a riverbottom log. When he saw the woman’s head wound and the bits of earth, his mind had gone from the surprise attack to being half buried by the bear. Did black bears do that? He’d heard of it only with grizzlies. And then, though the man said he’d searched, if he was in shock and scared and blinded by grief he might not have searched that well and have easily missed her. The woods could be very thick. He had been in shock. Why had he been looking straight ahead at the horizon line of the falls and nearly missed the portage? He’d been transfixed. By the danger, maybe. He was traumatized. What if they hadn’t yelled and woken him up? He might be another casualty, but this one terminal. And so…but.

  It galloped through Wynn’s mind as they circled the cabin and picked. They knelt and filled up the pot and their tied shirts; they gathered with a will and a speed like migrant pieceworkers, the berry-picking that wasn’t fun anymore. She had not said more than one word yet, so they didn’t know. Jack didn’t know either but he was forming a theory. He was gathering evidence and he would indict and convict the man before they even met him again. Wynn wouldn’t. It was plausible. It was. A whole handful of possibilities: The Texans with their quiet motor could have stalked the couple in the fog. The poor man Pierre, in the grip of terror, had lost his wife and fled this new bear here by the falls, or fled them. Thinking that they had been the ones who had taken her in the mist and were now probably after him.

  Wynn picked. There were so many fat berries and now that they weren’t eating them he was surprised at the speed and the growing volume. He could grab handfuls. He widened his fingers and raked through the twiggy bunches, the tiny leaves, clawed away the fruit. They were fat and almost blue where the skins were powdery and almost shiny black where the dust had been smudged and rubbed off. His mind raced. He thought about standing up and telling Jack that they needed to slow down, to get reasonable, everything now was going too fast. But what would it accomplish? Their next actions would be the same anyway: they had to get downriver as fast as possible. So. He picked.

  * * *

  In an hour they filled their caps, the shirts. Then they filled the single pot with more blueberries, and their two travel mugs. Good. Jack was no fool. He had no illusions that things would just work out, that somehow they would make it out in eight or ten days and would not get weak from hunger and vulnerable to exposure. They needed as many calories as they could get and they could not afford to pass them up. Jack had read the accounts. Of the expeditions that failed, that starved to death, that cannibalized, that lost their lives to cold and hunger. Of the kid who went into the wild and could not gather enough food and lost himself to encroaching lethargy and maybe poisonous berries. More numerous to count—the tragedies. And he had read of the ones that succeeded, sometimes miraculously: of Shackleton, who against all odds did not lose a single man; of Hugh Glass, the mountain man who was mauled badly by a bear and crawled himself through a Rocky Mountain winter to safety. They were not a thousand miles from anywhere, they were something like a hundred and fifty miles upriver from rescue, but they had whitewater to deal with and the onset of early cold, and they did not have all their warm clothes or food, and they had an injured person. Two sleeping bags, one small tent. Well. No more than two could sleep at the same time anyway, because they also might have another threat, and that meant that either he or Wynn would have to sit up at night with the rifle.

  Jack thought about that. Lord knows he had been wrong before. Too many frigging times to count. This could have been a bear. But what if it wasn’t? What if his warning bells were right and the man was a killer? The only way to stay safe was to assume the worst. Which meant they would have to post a sentry in camp, and they could not both sit up. They would have to take watches. And the one on watch would be sitting by a fire for warmth and the extent of his vision would run to the edge of the firelight. He’d be sitting by a fire, illuminated, and he would not be able to see into the darkness beyond, what? Fifty feet? Sixty? Which meant…

  His mind turned away from the conclusion and he forced it back. Which meant that most of the time whoever was on watch sitting by the fire was a sitting duck. Could be blasted from the cover of darkness. Especially as the fire burned down, as the watchman got sleepy. And the tent. He felt the goosebumps on his arms. The tent could be snuck up on from the far side, the dark side away from the fire, and the sleepers blown away at close range in their sleep. Then he could sprint forward and blast the surprised watchman as he struggled to swing the rifle and find the target through a scope at night. Which, in a hurry, at close range, is almost impossible.

  Fuck. Fuckfuckfuck. The man had them. He had them dead to rights.

  They could not travel this way. Waiting to be killed by a spousicidal maniac. What was the word for a wife-killer? He had to look it up. When…when they got back. He did not allow himself to think If.

  Plus Wynn was still sleepwalking. He needed to wake up and smell the coffee or they might be toast.

  They needed a better plan. Instinctively he knew they could not play defense, not the way they had the night before on the lake. They needed to go on the attack.

  * * *

  Jack looked at the sun. It was almost noon. Lots of daylight. The sun didn’t set until almost nine p.m. Good. They’d push it. There was no major whitewater until Godawful Falls. If he was waiting for an ambush, it would be there. The map said twenty-eight miles. On a normal trip, taking their time, stopping for lunch, paddling about fifteen miles a day, they’d get there tomorrow afternoon. But this was not a normal trip. Jack thought about the current sliding around the bend here before the falls. It would be about the same below if the river maintained a similar gradient. At this water level—and it was a low year, with the drought, and so the current would be slower—at this flow he figured the river was moving in the flats at about two miles
per hour. It would pick up where things got constricted and steeper. He knew that the two of them could paddle 4.5 mph with a loaded boat, no wind. They’d lost gear and food but they had her.

  But the canoe would slow down if they had to fight an upstream wind, which typically happened in the afternoons. So say they paddled an average of 3 mph. Add the current: 5 mph total speed, they could get to the portage in six hours. If they loaded up and got moving now, they’d get there before dusk. The sooner they engaged the man, the better, as far as he was concerned. They just had to figure out how.

  Offense. A tactical surprise. Something that Number One Shithead would not expect. That’s what they had to do. And they had to figure it out in the next six hours.

  * * *

  They left her in the spotty sun for last, eyes closed, lying before the fire and whimpering. That was a new development, and it scared Wynn. Could she be unconscious and whimper? He didn’t know. Was it her shoulder, or her head, or something inside her? He didn’t know and it frightened him.

  Jack jerked the canoe to his shoulders and trotted to the clearing and down the steep trail on the other side of it. The path skirted the ledge rock and dropped fast over uneven steps of granite and root to a gravel beach below the falls. Wynn carried the dry bag on his back, the fishing rods, the Pelican box, the rifle. They went back for her and the shirt sacks filled with blueberries. A stretcher would have been the best. They didn’t have one and they didn’t have time to make one. The portage was too far to carry her in his arms, so Wynn squatted and lifted her into a fireman’s carry over his shoulder. He prayed she had no injuries in the soft tissue of her belly. She moaned and he walked as swiftly and smoothly as he could.

  CHAPTER TEN

  This is what they had gathered on the stones beside the canoe, which Jack slid half into the water:

  1 NRS roll-top dry bag, lg., with shoulder straps

  Inside the bag were:

  2 Sierra Designs aqualoft down sleeping bags rated to 20 degrees F

  2 Therm-A-Rest standard backpacker sleeping pads

  1 Sierra Designs 2-person tent

  1 box 20 ct. Winchester .308 180-grain cartridges, minus 6 in the rifle

  2 fleece sweaters, midweight

  2 re-Tex rain jackets

  2 shoulder-slung fly-fishing gear bags with fly boxes, gink, tippet, etc.

  Beside the bag were:

  2 fly rods, 9 ft., 5 wt., one Sage (Jack), one Winston (Wynn)

  1 Savage 99 .308 lever-action rifle with Leupold 4-12X scope

  1 Pelican survival and day box

  Inside the box were:

  2 emergency blankets

  1 signal mirror

  1 lighter

  1 waterproof match case

  1 magnifying glass

  1 tube fire paste

  6 freeze-dried single-serving meals, assorted—could be eaten with cold water if necessary

  1 Ziploc of rolled oats

  1 bottle bouillon cubes

  1 box Lipton teabags

  1 lb. brown sugar

  6 Mars bars

  6 Clif bars

  First aid kit, sm. (gauze, iodine, SecondSkin, morphine from Wynn’s uncle)

  1 stainless steel pot with lid, 3 qt.

  2 stainless travel mugs stamped with the Dartmouth Pine and the school logo, Vox Clamantis in Deserto

  Also on the rocks were:

  2 bent-shaft paddles

  3 zip-up life vests

  1 filtered squeeze water bottle, 1 qt.

  On their persons they each carried:

  1 can bear spray in Cordura belt clip

  1 Leatherman

  1 clip knife

  And they had maybe twenty pounds of blueberries. They emptied their caps and the pot into the improvised shirt sacks.

  That was it. Step back and one sees on the rocks of the beach one blue duffel-size bag, one plastic box the size of a large camera box, two fishing rods, and a rifle. And a couple of bulging tied undershirts full of berries, like two lumpy pillows. Not much.

  They wouldn’t have had any of it if Jack hadn’t been thinking fast.

  This is how they loaded the Wenonah nineteen-foot Itasca expedition canoe:

  They propped the dry bag just aft of the center thwart. They lashed it in as best they could with its two shoulder straps.

  They lowered the woman into the boat and let her lean against the bag as a backrest, and she sat on Jack’s life vest. She was facing aft. They were a bit stern-heavy, but it would have to do. They decided they wanted her facing backward so someone could see her face and watch her. Also, after what she’d been through they thought it might be better, if she woke up, to see someone she could easily talk to rather than watch the bowman’s back. They unslung her left arm for a minute and worked her into her own life vest and zipped it up. It was just flat swift water for the next twenty-eight miles, but if for some unforeseen reason they flipped, neither had confidence that she could swim.

  The Pelican box, thankfully, still had its own short cam strap looped to the handle so they strapped it to the thwart right behind the bow paddler. They leaned the fly rods beside her on the starboard side, rod tips angled up and forward. They would not get in the way of the bow paddler, who they decided would be Jack from now on. He was the shooter and if they needed to shoot from the boat Wynn could navigate and steer from the stern. And then the rifle went up in the bow, leaning against the bow deck, leather strap clipped to the bow carry handle with a carabiner. Jack thought about it and went back to the dry bag and unclipped and unrolled it against her back and fished out the ammo box and picked six more cartridges out of the plastic holder and slipped them into the front pocket of his Carhartt pants.

  They laid the tied shirts filled with blueberries in the completely open section of boat between center and forward thwarts, where they looked like sad limbless sacks of contraband. They laid them on Wynn’s open life vest to lift them off the hull in an effort to keep them as dry as possible. They’d need the shirts tonight. The breeze was picking up and it smelled strongly of smoke now and the clouds were flying, but they were getting more widely spaced, like fleets of ships scattered by storm. It was clearing. Tonight looked to be cloudless, and if it was, it would probably frost hard again and it would be cold. They’d need every layer they had. Now they were in their light undershirts, which in the cool breeze was just tolerable, but they knew they’d warm up as they paddled.

  They did. They glanced at each other and Wynn slid the boat bow-first farther into the water and held it steady as Jack climbed in; then, in case the woman could hear, he said to her, “We’re going to get going now, okay? We have easy flat water all day today, we’re just going to move downriver.” Her eyelids fluttered and he saw that the swelling there was calming down and that the blood in her right ear had dried. And then he gave a strong shove and hopped in, a practiced jump, and the boat buoyed with what seemed like relief, and they were floating free across the pool. They slid over the eddy line and the steady current turned them downstream in a wide arc and they dug in and began paddling north.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  They got hot. They paddled hard. Almost thirty miles on a flat-water current was a long way even for them. Because the river slowed and expended itself in unexpected wide coves. From which loons called as they passed—the rising wail that cracked the afternoon with irrepressible longing and seemed to darken the sky. The ululant laughter that followed. Mirthless and sad. And from across the slough or from far downstream the cry that answered.

  And the eagles. They seemed to mark the canoe’s progress from the gray spires
of dead spruce, spaced downriver like watchmen on some lost frontier, sometimes just the unmistakable shape of the hooded predator, sometimes a scraggly limb and a huge stick nest.

  They made time. They were strong paddlers and they lay into a steady rhythm and they stuck to the center of the river where a blast from a shotgun would be less likely to kill them. They stuck to the center even when the current was stronger and faster on the outside of a bend. It was mostly wide enough, the river here, between the banks. He’d have to be very good or lucky to make the shot. Wynn steered to the middle because Jack motioned every time they got too close to a bank. He didn’t have the energy to argue. Wynn still thought the notion crazy; he thought it much more likely that the man needed helpers, not adversaries.

  There had been the falls, but the river didn’t truly drop off the Canadian Shield—the vast plateau of ancient bedrock that covered much of northern Canada—for another fifty miles or so, and when it did it would pick up speed and maybe narrow before it widened again on its way to the bay. Here they could stay thirty yards from either bank. Maybe enough, maybe not.