by Peter Heller
He went stock-still. He didn’t breathe.
“You need to tell it, and I need to hear it. Jess, too. She can hear it,” she said.
“Hear it?”
“Jack.”
He felt a surge of panic, maybe like a calf when it feels the first bite of the rope before branding.
“You want me to tell how we…? All of it?”
Hansie nodded.
“Jess?” he said. The girl’s eyes were wide and shiny. He saw that the slice of meat on her plate was uneaten. Her mother in her distraction had forgotten to cut it up. “Hey,” he said. “Hey, Jess, I’m sorry. You want me to cut it up for you?” She nodded without taking her eyes off him, and he reached across with his knife and fork and cut the beef into pieces.
He heard a tree branch ticking one of the windows. He owed them.
“Well,” he said. “I—” He set his knife and fork on the plate. “Sure,” he said. He wiped his mouth with his napkin and laid it on the table beside his plate, he didn’t know why. As if at the end of the telling he would get up and go. He might.
“It began with us smelling smoke,” he said. He glanced at Hansie.
She nodded.
“Okay. Well. We climbed a hill on an island and saw the fire. It was so big. It scared us. And then a morning with a heavy frost and a thick fog and a lot of wind.”
He told it. The fog, the voices, how it was Wynn who insisted that they paddle back and tell the couple about the fire. Wynn was always taking care of people. He told about the man coming around the bend alone, about finding the woman. They watched his face. Jess’s eyes were wide, almost as if she were watching a thriller she couldn’t tear away from, and she kept twisting her napkin. The only sound was the knocking of the branch and an occasional gust buffeting the windows, whistling in the stove pipe. Now and then their drawn breaths. They didn’t want him to slow down or stop.
He told about the woman’s injuries, the near ambush, the fire. How they walked back into the burn. He didn’t tell about the calf or the bear and her cub on the beach. When he got to meeting the Texans again and the night and the man in the tent and them hurrying down the beach toward the two canoes in the dark, he stopped himself. He turned his chair away, toward the stove. He just breathed. They hadn’t shed a single tear since the beginning and he owed them.
“Okay,” he said. Turned back.
“I took their canoe because it had a motor,” he said. “She needed to get out as fast as we could get her and there was no way I was sending her with them.” He reached for the Skoal in his shirt pocket without thought, untwisted the lid, put in a dip. “Also, after what happened I didn’t want them to catch up with us.”
“Here.” Hansie slid him her teacup from the afternoon. It was rude to chew at dinner—what was wrong with him?
“I’m okay,” he said, and swallowed.
She watched him closely. He coughed into his fist. “And because I wanted to protect my best friend and this woman. At all costs.”
Her eyes bored into him. He said, “That’s why I went upstream. I wanted the Texans to lead. I knew he—the man Pierre—would be waiting with his gun.” He made himself look at her. She nodded. He was not looking for a reprieve and she did not give him one; it was as if she barely saw him. If she were anywhere, she was on that beach.
He told them how the fat man had shot Wynn. He told them that Wynn had died instantly. It was the only lie he told. He told about motoring down to Wapahk. He had given the Texans half a day and then paddled and motored all day and night. He told how he’d come to the portage at Last Chance and found Pierre. The shock. How he carried first the woman, then Wynn around the falls. How two Cree boys were on the dock when they got to the village at daybreak, and when they saw him they ran up the road. The Texans had come in the night before in a sleek expedition canoe raving about men being shot, a woman kidnapped. The men said they had come around the corner at Last Chance and angled toward the left shore and when they were twenty yards from the take-out beach this crazy sonofabitch had popped out from behind a tree and shot at them. With a 12-gauge. But he was clearly not a shooter and he didn’t seat the stock and he blasted high. The fat one had told it and he said his partner JD might have been hungover and he might be a fuckup, but he was a good and loyal friend and he had been a Marine—that’s where he and Brent had met—and he plugged the man Pierre in the chest as easily as he would shoot a deer startled in a clearing. He shot him just as Pierre let off another wild blast that this time shredded the limbs of the pine as he fell.
The village had called up to Churchill and Churchill had sent a Mountie named Austin McPhee. McPhee had married a Cree girl from Wapahk and so he was family and the town was relieved. He flew in on an Otter that night and had already interviewed the Texans and had asked them to be patient and had kept them under guard at the rec center. So Mountie McPhee was already there when the kids ran into town yelling about a wild man with a scoped Savage slung on his back and the wounded girl in the canoe with Wynn.
Hansie and Jess would not take their eyes off Jack. It was as if his face would give some lie to the telling, that he would crack and say, “No, not really. None of this happened. Wynn will be home tomorrow.” Instead he said, “We carried her up to town on a stretcher behind a four-wheeler and they called back the Otter. We took her and Wynn to the airstrip in two separate trucks. McPhee flew back with them to the health center and returned the next morning with two more Mounties. They kept me in the back of the rec center away from the men and interviewed everyone separately. I guess they were afraid I would try to kill them. But I hadn’t shot anyone, and the Texans weren’t pressing charges about the boat. So they said they’d take me back to Churchill on the next flight and arrange another plane back to Pickle Lake, where we—I—had my truck.” Was he telling them what they needed to know? He wasn’t sure.
He said, “They said you-all had already arranged about getting Wynn home.” Why hadn’t he called them then?
“We did,” Hansie murmured. “Then what?”
“Does it matter?”
“Yes.”
“Okay.” Somehow in the telling he had drunk his wine. He reached for the bottle, poured half a glass carefully, drank it down. He said, “McPhee said, given all the circumstances, the Crown or whatever did not foresee charging the Texans. There’s, uh—” He held himself tight. Why now? He’d gotten through the hardest parts.
He said, “The Mountie said preventing a man from stealing your boat in the wilderness can be considered self-defense.” He took a breath. “Well, and—considering the confusion, heat of the moment…”
She had squeezed her own napkin into a ball. Now she looked at it in her palm like a crumpled dove and laid it out on the table and smoothed it, folded it. She said, “What about the rape? The attempt?”
“The man JD said he was just checking on her since he was the only one awake. She couldn’t tell which man it was in the dark, and though she knew he was trying to molest her, in her half-conscious state she wasn’t sure of much more than that.”
Hansie blew out. She refused to cry again. He wished she would. Jess was looking from her mother to Jack, covering her curled right hand with her good one as if she were trying to protect it from the story.
Jack said, “They held the Texans, I guess, in Thunder Bay for two days. That was it. The woman Maia had a perforated intestine, broken ribs. McPhee told me that they said she would fully recover.”
Hansie said, “She called us. She was at Brigham and Women’s. We talked for an hour.”
Jack looked up sharply. Of course she did. He was the only one who hadn’t. Hadn’t come across. Because in his heart he was still on the river. Right then he realized that was why. He was still on the river with Wynn and they were still paddling and they were still arguing about how much slack they should give the man, everyone. They were
still fishing a tea-colored creek with watergrass in the bottom, wading up the stream, separated by a few yards. Wynn was making sculptures of rock and feathers on the shore. Thingamajigs. And reading to him from a book of ghost stories by the fire. This was Wynn’s mother and sister, they were trying to move on. He wasn’t.
“Gimme a minute,” he said. “Please.” He stood. He went out into the windy dark that smelled sweet of decaying leaves and stood on the little deck and packed his pipe and lit it. In a minute he would go back in. He would tell them whatever else they wanted to know.
But he wouldn’t tell them how a Cree deputy had met him at the airport in Churchill and driven him to the Aurora Hotel. How he hadn’t gone in. That he’d turned around and walked up Bernier Street past the ramshackle houses and rusted Ski-Doos and down to the shore. The tide was out, and he walked past the wreck of an outboard motorboat half buried in the sand and he walked straight out onto the tidal flat. He’d seen the polar bear warning signs and knew the bears stalked the shore this time of year but he didn’t care.
How he’d walked twenty yards to open water and kept walking into the shallows until it was near the top of his boots. He pulled Wynn’s canoe from his pocket and set it in the water. It windcocked into the onshore wind and faced the open sea of Hudson Bay. Good. “Good, Wynn,” he whispered. “You carved it true. Of course you did.” How he pushed the little boat toward open water. But the tide was slack and the wind kept knocking the canoe back into his legs. It wouldn’t go. “Hey, hey,” he whispered. “It’s okay, it’s okay, you can go now. Please.” It was almost desperate. How the boat turned sideways against the top of his boot and rested there. He stood in the shallows against the small waves and didn’t move. He looked out into the bay where the line of the horizon was gray against gray. Sky and sea the same. A skein of geese. He closed his eyes. He smelled salt. He heard the rapid plaint of a gull. And then he picked up the canoe and held it in his hand and walked back into town.
Acknowledgments
Many people lent their energy and wisdom to the making of this book. To my first readers, Kim Yan, Lisa Jones, Helen Thorpe, Donna Gershten, Jay Heinrichs, and Mark Lough, I am deeply grateful. Your passion and ready insights were essential, as always. These books would not live without you.
Thanks to Jad Davenport for deep knowledge of the country and for sharing with me a crucial history. And to Jason Hicks, Steve Schon, Bobby Reedy, Mike Reedy, Billy Nutt, Cedar Farwell, Jay Mead, Silas Farwell, Sascha Steinway, Lyn Bixby, Mark Young, John French, Geordie Heller, and Becky Arnold, for their expertise. And to Kate Whalen for fuel. Lamar Simms provided invaluable help in understanding the law. And for all things medical, doctors Melissa Brannon and Mitchell Gershten were indispensable. Thanks to firefighter Jim Mason for relating in great detail the characteristics and awesome power of fire and to Marilee Rippy for introducing us. To Shawn Manzanares and Angela Lewark I am always grateful.
Thanks to my old friend Creigh Moffatt for telling me about her father’s expedition up on the Dubawnt River and to Skip Pessl for sharing more of the story. Many years ago Peggy Keith and her daughter, Margaret Keith-Sagal, hosted a dinner in New Hampshire that provided the germ of this novel. Thanks for that evening and for so many others.
Thank you to the people of Peawanuk for your hospitality after a long river trip, to Kim for paddling with me, and to Lynn Cox, and Matt, and Jerry.
And thank you to the ones who ran the rivers, my paddling partners over the years, who shared with me the wildest and most beautiful country and who always had my back. This book is especially for you. Landis Arnold, Sascha Steinway, Andy Arnold, Roy Bailey, Newton Logan, Rafael Gallo, Adam Duerk, Peter Weingarten, Paul Bozuwa, Harold Schoeffler, Willy Kistler, John Mattson, John Jaycox, Dan Johnson, Chuck Behrensmeyer, Jay Mead, Billy Nutt—you are my brothers, always.
This book would not have been written without the encouragement and guidance of my extraordinary agent, David Halpern, and my brilliant editor, Jenny Jackson. You were both there from the first sentence, and to you both I raise a glass.
It is an honor and a privilege to know you all.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Peter Heller is the national best-selling author of Celine, The Painter, and The Dog Stars. The Painter was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and won the prestigious Reading the West Book Award, and The Dog Stars, which was published to critical acclaim and lauded as a breakout best seller, has been published in twenty-two languages to date. Heller is also the author of four nonfiction books, including Kook: What Surfing Taught Me About Love, Life, and Catching the Perfect Wave, which was awarded the National Outdoor Book Award for Literature. He holds an MFA in poetry and fiction from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and he lives in Denver, Colorado.
An A. A. Knopf Reading Group Guide
The River by Peter Heller
The questions, discussion topics, and reading list that follow are intended to enhance your reading group’s conversation about The River, the searing new novel from Peter Heller, best-selling author of The Dog Stars.
Explore the early days of Jack and Wynn’s friendship. What brought them together? What does each young man admire about the other?
Examine Jack’s mother’s death. How old was he when she died, and how does he understand his own role in her death? To what extent has he processed his grief? How does our knowledge of this part of Jack’s history deepen our understanding of his character?
Discuss Jack’s sole trip back to the Encampment. How many years had passed since his mother had died there? How did he spend his time on this visit? Why do you think he chose not to tell his father?
Consider Jack and Wynn’s decision to go back up the river to look for Maia. Whose initial idea is it, and why is the choice ultimately made in spite of what the two men know about the threat of the fire?
Compare and contrast Jack and Wynn’s responses to danger. As you answer this question, consider the fire, Pierre, Maia’s injuries, and JD and Brent. To what do you attribute their different response styles? Whose approach to these dangerous situations do you consider to be more appropriate? Why?
Explore Wynn’s relationship with his sister, Jess. How does observing Wynn interact with his sister help Jack understand his friend’s worldview?
What does the ordeal teach these two young men about one another, their friendship, and themselves? How does their friendship evolve over the course of their journey?
Examine the role that nature plays in the novel. What is it about nature that is so appealing to both Jack and Wynn? Does their understanding of their place in nature change as the novel progresses?
Discuss the theme of luck as it is depicted in the novel. Would you characterize Jack and Wynn as lucky? Why or why not?
How would you characterize Jack’s sense of justice? What type of behavior, in Jack’s eyes, is unforgivable? How does he respond to the unethical behavior of others? Do he and Wynn see eye to eye, ethically?
On this page, Heller writes of Jack, “Everybody he loved most, he killed. One way or another. Hubris killed them—his own. Always.” Why does Jack feel at fault in both his mother’s and Wynn’s deaths? Do you feel that Jack is being fair to himself? Why or why not?
Explore the conclusion of the novel. Why do you think Jack decided to visit Wynn’s family? What role do you think his retelling of the story plays in his own grieving process? In that of Hansie and Jess? Do you think Jack will ever be able to move on from what happened?
Further Reading:
Good Morning, Midnight by Lily Brooks-Dalton
Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer
My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent
The Dog Stars by Peter Heller
The Mountain Story by Lori Lansens
The River at Night by Erica Fere
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The Road by Cormac McCarthy
The Son by Philipp Meyer
The Stranger in the Woods by Michael Finkel
The Revenant by Michael Punke
Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
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