Питер Геллер - The River

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.

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.

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.

They paddled. They leaned into the work. They would get their best sprint on their knees, but they knew they had a long haul and so stayed in the seats for comfort and reached for the long stroke. They each used an alder and basswood paddle made by the master Mitchell in New Hampshire and the blades bent from the shaft to keep the stroke farther forward, where it was strongest. The most efficient stroke was all in front of the paddler, the blade lifting out of the water when it reached the hip.