The River

by Peter Heller

  Now he blew out a long breath and shivered and zipped himself up. He stretched and looked up at the sky. Across the river and downstream, high up, somewhere over where the fire should be, there was a pale cloud that drifted and elongated and accordioned into a high curtain of softest light, and as he watched, it spread silently across the northern sky. It pulsed with inner radiance as if alive and then poured itself like a cascade to the horizon and shimmered with green. A pale green cataract of something scintillant that spread across an entire quadrant and sang as it fell with total absence: of sound, of substance, of water or air. In the week before, they had sometimes seen what looked like the faintest moving clouds, but not this. Now an arc of greener light shot from the top of the falls and jumped the current of the Milky Way and ignited a swirl of pink in the southeast that humped and crested like a wave. Jack shivered. The northern lights had just enacted what the heat and sparks would do when they jumped the river. It was like a portent—more: a preview—and it was as if every cantlet and breath of the night was filled with song—and silent. It was terrifying and unutterably beautiful.

  Wynn had told him that the Cree and other northern peoples thought of the lights as the spirits of the dead who looked down in judgment of the living and so when the aurora appeared the people kept their bad children inside so as not to offend the ancestors. Jack thought that was funny. He figured a bad child, or adult for that matter, was just as bad inside as out, and that if the ancestors could pull off a show like this, then they probably had like thermal sensors or something that could image the bad kids hiding in the igloo or tent or cabin. Which made him think of the man Pierre.

  He was bad. He had tried to kill them in all earnestness twice now. Once in dumping food and gear, once in brazen ambush. It boggled his mind that Wynn still reserved a final judgment. What was he waiting for? To get shot? Even then he might plead terror on the man’s behalf, he might insist that the man was convinced that they, Wynn and Jack, had abducted his wife.

  Those ancestors up there, they knew. They were looking down on the man tonight, too, Jack had no doubt, and if they wanted to enact punishment, and if Jack was the instrument of their vengeance, he was glad to oblige. Fuck Pierre. He would put a bullet in him in happy reciprocity, and if he didn’t kill the man he’d be happy to truss him up like a calf at branding and tow him down the river on a log raft awash with waves. Happy to dump him before the elders or council or selectmen or whatever they were in Wapahk, where it sounded as if they might or might not call the Canadian Mounties. Tundra justice. Wife-killer. What was the word? Wynn had taken a single Latin class, he’d have to ask him.

  Jack shrugged the rifle off his shoulder and took it in both hands and surveyed the camp. The fire: a nexus of vulnerability, a target, as conspicuous as a bull’s-eye. The woman sleeping there. From here he could see the top of the wool hat, the red tassel, the outer sleeping bag moving steadily with her breath. Good. Off a ways, in the shifting light of the flames, the blue tent. At least it wasn’t yellow. Wynn inside it. He knew his buddy—he’d be sleeping like the dead. Scratch that, bite your tongue: like a log, like an angel. Jack felt himself smile. Wynn was an angel in a way. He slept usually as soon as his head hit the pillow or rolled-up jacket, he slept easily and hard because, Jack figured, his conscience was clear and he had faith in the essential goodness of the universe and so felt cradled by it.

  Imagine. That’s what Jack thought. Imagine feeling that way. Like God held you in the palm of his hand or whatever. Wynn could take all the philosophy courses he wanted, and he had taken a few, and he could read the arguments of Kant, the treatises of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and he did, and he got really excited about them, tried to explain them to Jack, but in the end, though he did not think of himself as religious in the least, Wynn would bet all his chips on goodness. It wasn’t even a bet, was it? It was no decision at all. Like the fish who had no idea what water was: Wynn swam in it. The universe cradled him, it cradled all beings, everything would work out. Beings suffered, that sucked; he himself suffered, it certainly sucked; but step back far enough and take the long view and everything would take care of itself.

  It sort of awed Jack. Sometimes, usually, it made him crazy.

  He remembered visiting Wynn’s family in Putney one time. It was last fall, the fall of their junior year. Wynn’s little sister, Jess—who had clearly been a surprise to everyone, she was ten—followed them around. If they sat by the woodstove, she did, too. If Jack put in a dip, she demanded to try Skoal, and was so adamant that Jack opened the tin and said quietly, “Suit yourself. Best if you take that first one like the size of an ant.” She didn’t. She saw what he took and dug her fingers in and tucked it in her lip the way he showed her and she threw up and almost passed out. If they swapped jokes, she asked them what the Zero said to the Eight: “Nice belt!” She was such a tenacious pain in the ass that Jack couldn’t help himself and became crazy fond of her. She was brilliant, too. She had read The Hobbit in three days. She had been born with cerebral palsy and had undergone a dozen operations to lengthen tendons, and now the only visible effect was that her right hand curled and she walked with a quad cane and a limp. Jack and Wynn had gotten up from a big lunch on a windy, sunlit Saturday, with the leaves of the maples blowing onto the trails, and announced that they were going to run up Putney Mountain. Jess announced that she wanted to go, and Wynn didn’t hesitate. It awed Jack: Wynn said, “Put on your running shoes, let’s go.” He ran the two-mile climbing trail with Jess on his back, she laughing and chattering the whole way. When they got to the rocky top, which Wynn’s cousin Geordie had cleared so that they could stand on granite and look across to Monadnock and over a little cliff to Brookline Road—when they got there and caught their breath, Wynn said that they had to make a sacrifice to the volcano and told Jack to take Jess’s legs. Wynn took her arms and they swung her hard and high out over the cliff edge, counting down to the launch while she screamed and laughed hysterically.

  They put her down. Jack had maybe never seen a person so happy. Wynn split up a Dairy Milk chocolate bar between them and told Jess that she really had nothing to worry about, they couldn’t really throw her off until she was twelve.

  Jack looked at the tent awash in firelight and thought that if that’s the way Wynn saw, or felt, the world, then he was very lucky. Who was he to wish him otherwise?

  He went back to the fire and put down the rifle and set his hand against the woman’s throat and checked her pulse as Wynn had instructed. Steady and slow, not weak. Good. Food and rest could work wonders.

  * * *

  He nodded off. He jerked his head up and cursed himself and he wondered how long, and he saw the Milky Way and figured he’d been asleep two hours, maybe more. The northern lights lay against the northern horizon and they pulsed and flared like the lava inside a volcano and spread in pinks and purples; he had never heard they could become those colors. Still infinitely remote and silent, like something that wanted to be forgotten and never would be. What it seemed. He thought about waking Wynn and getting some serious sleep. If the man Pierre was going to attack he would have done so by now. Probably. It was probably about two, two thirty right now; the man might be waiting for the magic ambush hour of four a.m., the hour used by police and assassins and generals worldwide, the dead of night, insomniacs’ bane, the Portal. He’d always thought of it that way: that there were portals in reality, in time and space, in geography, in seasons, when and where the dead or the very far away rubbed up against the living. It was in that hour or two before dawn, when the slip of ruddy moon was sinking like a lightship over the mesa at home, that he would hear his mother singing. That he would call to her and she would answer back in a voice as quiet as those lights.

  A good time to attack because in that hour, if someone was not asleep, he was probably transported by longing as Jack was, and in some way asking to be taken. He would not be that person. He would
not let Wynn be. He wished almost more than anything right then that they had some coffee, but they didn’t. A shirr and flutter in the darkness zinged him wide awake, but it was just a small flock tumbling past as if windblown. Just over the tops of the living trees.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  At dawn, before sunup, Jack woke Wynn and they broke what there was of camp, not much, and portaged the canoe to the small shale beach below the big rapid where Jack had last seen the man. They took time and care to douse the embers of their fire with water carried in the pot, though they thought, but did not say, that it was a little like stacking a line of sandbags before a tsunami. Well. With everything seeming to fall apart, good habits were one thing to hold on to.

  Wynn asked Jack if his stomach was cramping up as his was and Jack said yes. Too many blueberries and nothing else. They had only five dried meals left and they were saving them for her. On the map there was a creek entering the river just around the corner. They would stop and make a breakfast camp and fish. Wynn carried the woman this time in his arms and they loaded her without waking her, which was either a good or a bad sign, and they shoved off.

  No sign of the man. Good. He had not made camp at the obvious spot below the rapid, by the first creek, he had forsworn the clear water and sandy flat for distance. Good. They had made a bed for her in the boat from fir branches and they lifted her off it and laid her on an inflated Therm-a-Rest on the sand. She was breathing steadily and she was warm inside the two sleeping bags, so they left her. Before they moved her again they might ask her to drink something, maybe sweet water.

  They slipped the rods from the tubes and jointed them and strung the lines and began to fish. It was a small creek, running shallow over sand at the mouth and narrowing to a channel the color of black tea where it emerged from the trees. They smelled smoke only now and then, but when the wind was right it was strong and rank. They fished without joy now. They knew they were beginning to starve. There was no hatch of insects that they could see, which was odd on a sun-warmed morning, and no pupae on the rocks of the bed. Maybe the water was too acidic, they didn’t know, but they picked the flies with more care; they did not confer but reached into their own archives of past summer mornings on slow tannin creeks. Jack had been kept company in the night by a single cold cricket so he tied on a small hopper. He hit the leaves and stems of the grass and asters along the bank and let the hopper bounce off them and fall in like a wayward jump. Wynn used a little wooly bugger which he stripped upstream to mimic a fry or minnow. They began catching fish and they relaxed, and they kept every trout now that was bigger than their clip knives, everything that could offer a couple of bites. In less than an hour they had a panful, and they rustled together a fire and cleaned the fish.

  They steamed the brookies in an inch of water in the pot and wondered why they hadn’t thought to pack salt in the emergency box. Jack said, “Ten each? To start?” and they dug in. They speared each fish with their knives and at first laid it in their palms and unzipped the spine with its rows of needled bones. After a few they figured out how to dangle the small fish by the tail and strip the meat off the bones with their teeth. They started slowly and picked up speed. The first few hit their stomachs and it was only then they knew they were ravenous for protein, and they felt nauseous at the same time, which was novel. They were spitting errant bones into the fire and when they finished ten Jack counted and said, “Seven more,” and they finished them. They felt logy and bloated and Wynn gagged but managed to keep the food down, and they grabbed the rods and fished for another hour and made themselves eat again. They didn’t care if it took most of the morning. This time they tried making a grill of willow saplings and roasting the brookies over the coals but found they lost too much of the skin when it burned, so they went back to steaming. They ate another round. They lay back against the rocks groaning and looked at each other, sated and miserable, and Jack said, “You better not fucking throw up. I’m sick of fishing this morning.” And they started laughing so hard they almost did barf. Relief. Just the laughter. It was like a warm rain. A rain that would tamp and douse the forest fire and rinse away the sweat and the fear.

  * * *

  They did bathe. Before they launched again they stripped and rolled in the shallow water of the brook. It was dark but clear like brown glass and so cold they gasped.

  They lay back on the rocks in the sun and let it dry them. Wynn liked to lay one cheek and then the other against a warm smooth stone and smell the mineral heat. A downstream wind poured over their wet skin and raised goosebumps. If one concentrated on one thing and then another—the good things in each moment—the fear wrapped deep in the gut seemed to unswell, like an iced bruise. Still there, but quieter.

  As they lay drying, Jack said he understood now how Canadian trappers who had tried to survive through the winter on flour and rabbits had died. Starved for fat. It’s what he craved now. The ones in the camps who made doughnuts in lard lived. He’d give his frigging right arm for a doughnut. A Krispy Kreme glazed in sugar floated across his mind like an angel. It scared him, because they’d barely made a day and had at least a week to go.

  But they could live on berries and trout for a week, no problem. Had they been at their leisure it would have been fun to forage every day, to fish for food.

  When they were dry and dressed, they sat her up and Wynn held her against him and Jack asked her gently to wake up and eat a little. Drink. She did. They made another of the packet meals—they’d had five left, now four—beef stroganoff, and Jack spooned it into her and she ate half. She chewed slowly, as if in pain, and at one point her eyes flickered open and she saw them. She saw them. Her greenish eyes blurred over Jack, then focused. “Where?” she rasped. “The other?”

  “He’s holding you up, ma’am,” Jack said. “Hold on.” Jack grasped one side of the sleeping bag and Wynn shifted from behind her and came around to the front, his arm still around her shoulders. She looked from one to the other. It took great effort. “Thank you,” she whispered. “Both.” Her eyes closed again and she drifted off. They carried her to the canoe and laid her on the bed of boughs. Jack levered the rifle to open the breech and checked one more time that a cartridge was chambered, and they shoved off.

  * * *

  The day was half gone. They paddled steadily without letup. The wind shifted around to the west and for the first time they could see the hazy thickening of air that was not yet rolling smoke and the birds in flocks that were smaller now, and many single birds, mostly duller-colored, the females, and Wynn posited that these were the mother birds with hatchlings who had refused to leave their nests until just before the flames. That was heartbreaking if you thought about it.

  The cadence of the paddle strokes was high and it hurt after a couple of hours and so they weren’t thinking about a lot. Jack had pored over the map and there would be a few riffles and smaller rapids and nothing to portage for two days, so he was at a loss as to where to expect the next attack. They had passed a wide cove with a pair of loons, one was probably nested nearby, and when they stroked past, the one closest tilted back her head and loosed a pitched wail that must have moved the trees like wind. It pierced the haze and echoed off the waiting forest and rolled over the water like any scream, and seemed to carry a pathos so deep it was a wonder a mere world could support it. Maybe she knew what was coming. Maybe she had hatchlings in a nest and nowhere to go and she knew.

  Others did. Because now as they paddled into the afternoon they saw the first moose. Two. A big female with a calf. The moose trotted to the open margin of the left riverbank and clattered over the broken shale on stiff legs and entered the water without pause, and she stretched her neck and let the water sweep her without concern and set a ferry angle and swam across. The calf mimicked the mother. They could hear the chuffs of their breathing. They were only yards ahead of them. The next was a bull moose, and then a black bear with two cubs. The cubs hesitated
at water’s edge, they seemed frightened, and the mama bear snorted and waded out of the river and got behind them and drove them forward. They swam. The littler one lost ground in the current and Wynn thought he would get swept away, but the mother got below him and bumped and shouldered and goaded him across. Damn. They could hear the other cub, who had reached the far bank first, bawling and bawling. They saw mink cross, and squirrels. In late afternoon Jack had his head down, paddling hard, trying to maintain the tempo, and Wynn whistled and he looked up and saw what must have been a hundred mice. They’d never heard of such a thing. It was like a miniature herd. They swarmed a steep cut bank and fell or jumped or dripped off it into the water and they swam. Who knew how they kept track of the correct direction, but they did. They came across the current in a moil.

  “Looks like Dunkirk,” Jack said.

  “Fucking A.”

  They saw woodland caribou, a small herd of bulls at first, three smaller and two with massive racks, who took to the river as the moose did, with zero hesitation. Toward the end of the afternoon they both sang out as one: they came down through a riffle of small waves and ahead was an entire string of caribou swimming the river in single file. They counted twenty-three. Jesus. Later Jack wondered why they hadn’t thought to shoot one for meat and could only think that they’d been smitten with awe. They had never seen anything like it.

  And they could see smoke now. Real smoke. It was gray, not black, and it did not plume but hazed west to east across the river as the animals had done. Still they could not hear a thing but wind and their own paddles, and the river listing along the rocks of the banks and sifting in the deadfalls.