Питер Геллер - The River

They could bust open the door of the little cabin in the clearing and stay for a few days, let her build up her strength. They could forage berries and fish. But. If the fire caught them here they would be toast. Or anywhere up here. From the topo maps the river looked to be pretty narrow for the next forty or fifty miles. Flash-baked. What they didn’t want to become. And every day they screwed around here near the lakes was another day closer to harder frosts and snow. She needed rest and they needed to get down the river to the village at the mouth of the bay.

Jack said, “We should get some miles in today.”

“I was thinking that. But—”

“If I’m right, Number One Dickhead will be waiting at the next portage. He can’t afford to let us pass him.”

“Well—”

“It’s flat water till Godawful Falls. Twenty-eight miles. She can rest in the boat. The rapid is a short portage like this and an easy beach landing. What the notes say. If he did this, he’ll be there.”

Wynn said, “Maybe we should pick some blueberries before we take off.”

“I was thinking that, too. She’s warm in the bags now, we can let her sleep.”

“I don’t think that’s sleep.”

“Yeah.”

They pulled out the single stainless pot and walked back to the clearing. The cloud shadows moved over it, and over the silvered peeling logs of the cabin walls, and the steel roof, and over the shrubs, the dark swaths of blueberries that roughened the meadow behind.

The swift shadows striped them with running stains that flowed over without a snag and suddenly cooled the air, and were chased upstream by the next sweep of sunlight. Wynn stopped and watched the cloud shadows run and thought that there was something beautiful in the cabin in the clearing in the running sunshine. The crashing of the river had become white noise, and strangely, looking around him, he thought the place was held in a rare silence.

He almost wished they could stay there. Wished that the cabin was stocked with cans of pork and beans, barrels of flour, sugar, rice, salt, packets of dried meat. That there was a saw, two saws, axes, that they could all stay here and rest and put up firewood and hunt a moose and soak the meat in salt brine and hang it to dry on racks. That the three of them could stay there all winter, and she could rest and heal, and they could let Pierre or whoever he was enact whatever drama, whether grief or cover-up. Wynn walked to the edge of the little bluff and looked at the mayhem of the falls.

Ten days out to the village. Eight maybe, if they paddled like demons, but then she would slow them down—on the portages around the big rapids, in the speed with which they could break and make camps and extend their days, and in her need for rest. So maybe more than ten. Jack must have been thinking the same thing, and about the meager amount of food in the box, because he came up beside him and said, “Maybe we should collect more than a potful.”

Wynn said, “Good idea.”

“I’ve been thinking about the next portage. Thing is, the book says it’s just after a small rock island with a couple of little trees. Says it’s an easy take-out, but it doesn’t say what the bank’s like.”

The book was just a printout of a couple of trip blogs, stapled and sealed in a map case. Each of them had one, for redundancy. The most helpful by far was the blog written up by two canoe guides from Pickle Lake who had paddled the river two summers ago. They had a simple sense of humor; they said things like, “Take out just after the bull moose on the left.” It made Jack crazy, he thought they were idiots, but Wynn envied people who could wring pleasure from the simplest things. But altogether the trip accounts and the topo map gave them a fairly detailed sketch of what they were in for: a hundred and fifty-two miles altogether, of a big river that flowed north and grew in power as it gathered tributaries big and small. Two more mandatory portages around big falls: about twenty-eight miles to the next one, Godawful Falls. Then eighty-one miles of fast water after that, to the next huge drop and portage at Last Chance Falls, with a couple of bigger rapids between, dangerous but runnable. A large meander in this stretch, northwest to northeast, before the river bent again north and made directly for Hudson Bay as if eager to get home. After Last Chance it was just forty-three miles of swift but mostly flat water to the village and the take-out.

“Thing is,” Jack said, “at Godawful we don’t know if there’s cover. Rocks, trees, maybe a bedrock ledge where Fucker Number One can just go prone and blast us from above. We don’t know shit.”

“He just panicked. Maybe we’ll catch up to him this afternoon. We can talk to him.”

Jack didn’t answer.

They looked at the rapid. Half the river on the near side poured into a wide chute that unleashed over the first high ledge and battered itself to white on the way down and pummeled the foaming water beneath it in an exploding hole that rolled back on itself. In the surging trough reared a large black log. It buoyed up and was pulled down and buried in froth and bobbed up and flailed for air and was beaten back, held against the falls by the upstream folding of the hydraulic. It made Jack queasy. He looked away. He had long ago trained himself not to think of horses or anything else, but sometimes he did.

“So we’ll ask her about what happened when she wakes up,” Jack said. “Let’s pick a mess of berries now and get going.”

On their trip so far berry-picking had been the best respite. Maybe the most fun thing they did. Because, unlike with fishing, they had zero ego involved, zero ambition. They hadn’t grown up thinking, I’m going to be the best berry-picker ever, whereas with fishing and even canoeing they thought that. Berry-picking was like throwing a Frisbee around, or taking a walk up the orchard road, or jumping into the lake and then lying on the sun-warmed stones. It was an achievement-free zone, which Wynn was coming to realize is where most of his joy happened. Making constructions on the riverbank was the same.

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.