The River

by Peter Heller

  They paddled into the dusk because they could. They stuck to the middle of the river so as to be less of a target from either side. Jack did not think Pierre was a crack shot—just a feeling. They were drifting now, taking a break and drinking, tossing the filter bottle back and forth. They must both have been thinking the same thing, because Wynn said, “I feel pretty safe out here. In the middle. Maybe I shouldn’t.”

  Jack said, “From the fire or the man?”

  “The man.”

  Jack squeezed the last of the bottle, dipped it over the side and refilled it, tossed it back.

  “Well, he’s not a hunter. There’s that.” Jack scanned the banks.

  “No?” Wynn said. He looked uneasily along the shore.

  “Nope. Did you see him when he first came around the corner the other day?”

  “Yeah.” It was a question.

  “He was staring straight ahead. Looking for the lip of the falls. Fixated on it.”

  “Yeah…So?”

  “A hunter would’ve been scanning the shore. It’s instinct. Even you would have done it.”

  “Fuck you. You want more?” Wynn held up the bottle.

  “Nah, I’m good. I’m serious. Even with a major drop coming up. I’ve watched you. As long as he’s in flat water, a hunter’ll be scanning the shore. For sign like the breaks of game trails. For movement. For shapes, shifts at the edges of shadows, color. Can’t help himself. Pierre, he didn’t do any of that. That’s instinct. This fucker fixated on the single danger downstream. And he still almost missed the portage. He can paddle okay, we saw him ferry across, but he’s bush league.”

  Wynn almost laughed. That Jack could judge a man’s character in two seconds, at two hundred yards.

  “That’s reason for optimism, right?” Wynn said.

  “Take it where you can get it.”

  * * *

  They paddled on, looking now for a place to camp. The filter bottle was getting harder and harder to squeeze—the filter was clogging up with dirt from the river. They’d try to nurse it. From what they could judge of where they might be on the map, there were no tributary brooks forthcoming, so they’d have to boil water out of the river. They’d sterilize a potful and let the sediment settle out of it before they drank it. When they did get to a clearer creek, Wynn would try to clean out the filter again. They also had the iodine in the day box—they could use it to purify water if they had to.

  The river flowed between walls of black timber here, which thickened the twilight. They could smell the spruce, the cold tang of them, as if they were exhaling at the end of a long day. Soon the first stars burned through the haze and the temperature was dropping, but it was still light enough to see. They were paddling slowly, scanning for a clearing, a good take-out, and Jack held up a hand. “Look,” he said.

  Something was swimming ahead of them: it was a caribou calf. They saw no cow, just the little calf trying to keep itself afloat. The stiff current between the narrow banks was getting the best of her and she was twisting her head in panic. Jack waved Wynn forward and they picked up the pace. Jack looked to the left bank and upriver: no sign of a mother. Wynn guided them with precision and slid the bow just behind the thrashing calf, whose breath blew fast and panicky. Wynn slid the bow so she was on the right side and Jack scooped an arm in water and hauled up the kicking caribou. Her slicked fur was tawny, her nose almost black, and she was rib thin, Jack could feel them beneath the warm hide of her chest. Still nursing. Without a mother at the leading edge of the fire she was doomed. He glanced at Wynn. Wynn had never seen that face—it was raw grief. Jack was struggling with the thrashing calf and for just a moment the hard set of his face fell away and Wynn saw a kid stricken and not willing to accept any of this. Wynn nodded, Okay. Okay. And in a flash Jack’s right hand went to the clip knife in his pocket and in a flash thumbed it open and at the same time his left arm gripped the calf’s head tight and twisted it back and he plunged the knife in her tightened throat and ripped upward and she uttered a sound like a startled bird and the kicking quieted and she bled and was gone.

  They drifted. Wynn had looked away and when he looked back Jack had the little caribou across his lap, he was bent over her letting the blood run freely over his legs and Wynn could not see his face.

  * * *

  They could no longer camp on the left shore. It would be crazy with the fire coming who knew when. But the river was too narrow here and neither harbored any hope that the right bank would offer further protection. Forty yards was wide but it wasn’t enough. If the fire came and there was any wind at all it would jump. In nine or ten miles, according to the map, the banks widened out a little, but the river was dropping here, off the edge of the Canadian Shield, and it steepened just enough to kick up rapids and riffles, and neither wanted to broach on some rock and flip in the dark. They could feel another hard frost coming and neither wanted to get wet and freeze to death in the night. They’d had Farmer John wetsuits for whatever whitewater, but they’d been in the blue barrels, now gone, and anyway there were only two suits. Wynn couldn’t help but think of Frost’s poem “Fire and Ice,” thinking of the first time he’d read it. He could picture his kitchen table back in Vermont. He had been so taken with the music of it, the near-nursery-rhyme singsong juxtaposed to the clear-eyed…what? nihilism? he’d read it to Jess.

  Some say the world will end in fire,

  Some say in ice.

  From what I’ve tasted of desire

  I hold with those who favor fire.

  But if it had to perish twice,

  I think I know enough of hate

  To say that for destruction ice

  Is also great

  And would suffice.

  Jess had pursed her lips, which she did when she was thinking hard, and said, “How about flood? I thought it was supposed to be flood.” She was nine then, sharp as a tack. He’d never imagined that in a few short years he might have to choose between freeze and burn.

  They pulled over at a slab of bedrock close-backed by trees. No choice. The granite sloped to the river in two overlapping shelves. Jack hopped out and trotted to the edge of the woods while Wynn held the canoe against the bank. Jack came back, said, “There’s thick moss. We’ll put her in the tent tonight.”

  “No fire?”

  “I dunno. Sucked last night. I don’t wanna give Dickhead a target again.”

  Wynn looked around at the leaning forest, the straight stretch of river, which had darkened and silvered like a black mirror. “Okay.” Then he said, “What if it hits tonight?”

  Jack didn’t say anything. What was there to say? They could launch the canoe. They could wrap her in the sleeping bags and the emergency blanket and tent fly and themselves in their Gore-Tex raingear and douse everyone with water from the three-quart pot and paddle through it and pray. The water on the nylon would freeze tonight, he was sure of it. It didn’t seem like a good plan.

  “Do you wanna climb a tree and look?”

  Jack didn’t answer. He looked around them. His mouth was dry and for the first time he coughed. From the smoke. He’d studied the map that afternoon when they were drifting, catching their breath, and he knew that the country around them was flat. He could climb a tree, but he knew that unless he was on some rise, he would not see past the forest on the far bank. He might see thickening smoke but nothing else.

  He said, “What’s the point, Big? We—I—won’t see past those trees. What can we do anyway? Tonight?”

  “We could keep going.”

  “And navigate the rapids by sound?”

  “We’ve done it before.” Which was true. They’d taken a western river trip last summer and paddled out of the Gates of Lodore on the Green in the dark. Through Split Mountain Canyon. It was a rush and it was hair-raising.

  “That was in kayaks. That’s way diffe
rent.”

  Wynn climbed out of the canoe and they both hauled it onto the bedrock. On some other night maybe, even a week before, they might have been more careful with the hull. Wynn might have winced at the grating of tiny pebbles as they dragged the boat up with the woman in it, but now he didn’t. She jerked back and then forward against the dry bag like a child being hauled in a toboggan, and remarkably she sat up and looked around her.

  “It’s smoky,” she croaked. Jack and Wynn glanced at each other. Her eyes were open. The swelling along the blades of her cheek was almost gone. She looked…like a normal person—disarrayed, half the hair loosed from her braid, dark circles of deep fatigue under her eyes, but blinking and alert.

  “Are you in pain?” Wynn said.

  She shook her head. “A little.”

  “Where?”

  “Here.” She motioned to the side of her head where he had sewed the gash. “And here.” She touched her stomach.

  “Sharp or dull?” He didn’t know why he asked her that. He wasn’t a doctor, what could he do with the information?

  “Dull.” She touched her head. “Sharp.” She touched her stomach. Well, okay. Probably not an infection in the cut on her head—that would be sharp, wouldn’t it? And who knew what in her gut.

  “Do you have to pee?”

  “God, yes.”

  They helped her stand. They held her while she stepped onto the rock. “I can walk,” she said. She took a couple of tentative steps, swayed, held out an arm and Wynn grabbed it. She breathed and tried again, asked to be released, and they watched her walk uncertainly to the trees. They stood there. Neither knew what to do now. Should they screw the tactical worries and make camp? Make a fire? So they could roast the little caribou calf and all sleep comfortably? Two in the tent and one by the fire? And pray that whatever was coming held off until daylight, until they could maybe paddle through it, paddle the whitewater? Or pray that the thing never came at all, that it somehow died out or turned south, that the hardest rain of the summer would sweep in tonight? Fat chance. It was coming.

  She came back. Slowly, a little drunk with weakness, but she came.

  “Okay?” Wynn said. He couldn’t hide his anxiety. “Thirsty?”

  It took her a second to locate him. She was like a very old person, trying to keep all the parts together while she executed a simple task. Her eyes swept past him once and came back and settled on his face, like a frightened searchlight.

  “Okay,” she said. “I have blood in my stool.” If they felt paralyzed standing there, her words did not help. Neither knew what to say. She sat down gingerly on a low ledge of the bedrock. She looked at the boys.

  “I’m not dead,” she said. “I don’t think I am.”

  Jack set his cap back and rubbed his eyes and cheeks with the back of his hand. “Well,” he said.

  “We’re going to get you out and to a hospital,” Wynn said. It sounded lame. To him. Her lips quivered into a smile.

  “Thank you,” she said. That was it. That was all she seemed able to muster. Given the last few days, it seemed like a lot. Jack went to the canoe and pulled out the water bottle, which was half full, and took it to her, and she drank gratefully, eyes closed. He squatted beside her and when she opened them she found his face and let her eyes rove over it. They were jade-green with flecks of gold—or Kevlar. What Jack thought. And he saw them darken exactly as if a cloud shadow had passed over. Or the shadow of a huge bird. “Where’s Pierre?” she said.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The question was flat but tinged with concern or fear. Jack was less startled by the question than by her composure.

  “Downstream,” he said. Which was the simplest answer. She nodded, grimaced.

  “Data,” she murmured.

  “What?” Jack said.

  “Does he have my data?”

  Jack’s jaw may have dropped. Wynn hovered over them like La Tree and felt again like he was in a weird dream.

  “Data?” Jack said.

  She lifted her right hand in an attempt to wave it away. For a moment they all held still, as in some incredulous tableau. Jack said, “Did he do this to you?” It was the question he’d wanted to ask for three days and he wasn’t going to delay it while she lost consciousness again. He wanted Wynn to hear the answer.

  Her brow furrowed. As if she were trying to remember. Really? Jack thought. Are you kidding? We’re not going to get a straight answer?

  “We were arguing,” she said. “That morning with the thick fog and wind, I remember that.”

  “Yeah?” Wynn said, eager, from somewhere above.

  “I was really mad. He was going back on his promise. That it was my trip.” She looked from one to the other vaguely. Her voice was weak. Jack was afraid she would pass out. He put a hand on her good shoulder.

  “Okay, your trip. What do you mean?”

  “My study,” she said. The words were faint. Uh-oh. But she was just straining to remember. It looked like it was causing her physical pain. “He would be my research assistant this time and it was my study.”

  “Okaaay,” Jack said. “And?”

  “And I was so mad. Wouldn’t you be?” Jack felt lost at sea. He saw tears trickle from the corners of her eyes. At least she was cogent. Remarkably. She was like one of those coma patients you read about who wake up after months and start talking about their vacation plans.

  “Yeah, sure,” he said. “Then what?”

  “I turned around and walked away. Fuck him, right?”

  “Right. Fuck him.”

  “And he grabbed my arm really hard and spun me back.”

  Okay, the dislocation. They were getting somewhere.

  “It was violent. It really hurt. I think he dislocated my shoulder.”

  “He did,” Wynn said. She looked up at him as if seeing him for the first time.

  “Oh,” she said. “Yes.” As if she’d forgotten what she was agreeing to.

  “That’s why it’s in a sling,” Wynn suggested gently. “Jack popped it back in.”

  “Oh, thanks.” She looked down at her arm in the sling. Almost as if it didn’t belong to her but to someone else.

  “Then what?” Jack said.

  Her eyes found his face. “Then what what?” she said.

  “After he grabbed you and hurt your arm.”

  “I don’t know. I screamed at him. It really hurt. My arm hung there. I turned away. I was going to go to the canoe and find the phone and call Pickle Lake for a flight out. I was done. As far as I was concerned, the marriage was over. I told him.” Her face remained placid but the tears ran.

  Jack said, “You had a phone?” He thought how badly they could use it now, to call in a chopper, to get her out.

  She nodded.

  “Then what?”

  “He was yelling that the marriage was not over, no way, and he grabbed me again and I spun back and hit him with my good hand. I slapped him, I guess, and I knocked his glasses off. They hit the rocks. Broke. His only pair. We just stared at them. He’s pretty nearsighted.”

  “Nearsighted?” Jack said.

  “He told me once that at forty feet he can see it’s a dog but not what kind of dog.”

  A lot was coming clear: why the man had been straining to see the drop of the falls when he had come around the bend, why he hadn’t chosen to ambush them at that first pullout but had tried at the second falls—because he didn’t trust his vision and he needed them to be very close and tightly grouped. Where he’d been waiting on the ledge, the pullout was only twenty feet below him; they would have paddled right into the blast of his shotgun had Jack not made them take out above. Pierre could still paddle downstream, because running whitewater, he would see the blurred white of the big holes, enough to navigate around them. Damn.

  “Then what?�
� Jack murmured.

  “I said, ‘Fuck you, serves you right,’ and I walked away.” Tears were streaming now.

  “And?”

  “I don’t know. I blacked out.”

  Jack and Wynn looked at each other. Wynn cleared his throat. He was about to speak but thought better of it. Jack said, “What kind of study?” She blinked. “What kind of study were you two doing?”

  “Buffering,” she said. She closed her eyes and said sleepily, “The capacity of subarctic rivers and lakes to absorb acid rain. We’re geochemists.” She said it as if she’d said it a hundred times before. Which she probably had.

  * * *

  Jack skinned the calf quickly and boned her out, and they started a fire on the bedrock and roasted the backstraps first, which were the size of a summer sausage, then random cuts off the hindquarters. Surprisingly little meat, maybe twenty pounds. She had been a baby. They’d talked about the risk of the campfire, but it seemed the risk of being ambushed here, on a random bank, was much lower than the risks of gradually growing weaker. So they roasted the meat in strips draped across forked saplings and in skewered chunks and they all ate. The woman winced a few times as if the meat hitting her stomach caused her pain, but she kept tearing off small morsels and chewing slowly. They all badly wished they had some salt but no one spoke it. When they were done they boiled river water in the pot and made weak tea with one bag and added sugar. They had enough brown sugar for maybe two more pots. The tea and the protein and the calories revived them, Jack and Wynn. Her lids grew heavy and she nodded off. They fetched the sleeping bags and wrapped her and laid her on a Therm-a-Rest as they had before, and she slept. At their backs, away from the fire, the night was cold. In the swath of sky between the trees, the stars smoldered less through haze than through a screen of smoke. A clear night, and for the first time their eyes stung. At first they thought it was the smoke from their own fire, but the wind was carrying their sparks upstream. Jack coughed. Whatever it was chafed his throat.