Питер Геллер - The River

“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.

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 different.”

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.