Питер Геллер - The River

Made sense. He might not find cover in the burned-over ground along the bank, but he might have it where the river erupted and fell—the biggest drops tend to be ledgy. As before. He could find plenty of cover behind rock outcrops. But. Anyway. They did not have to chase him. He would be waiting, surely. They needed food. The fire had been traumatic, but as they paddled steadily downstream on flat moving water they lamented even more the loss of the berries. It was a further violation: at the height of berry season, with the blueberries and blackberries and their cousins heavy on their stems and all the calories they’d probably need just at hand, the fire had thundered through and snatched it away. The river had taken care of the rest: in the flip they’d also lost the remainder of the caribou meat. It would have served them now.

Anything was better than nothing. After what must have been three miles of paddling through the burn, past huge toppled trunks still fluttering with yellow flame and pointed stumps sending up thin white smoke as if releasing the last of their spirits, they saw a creek entering in from river left. It flowed between low scorched banks and blackened stones, and it was scattered with fine ash but otherwise clear. They pulled out on the sand beach which seemed untouched, and they drank straight from the stream and pulled out their rods and strung them and began to fish. They figured if they caught any they could cook them over a still-burning stump. It lightened their spirits, enacting this simple routine, the steps of a ritual—piece together the rod, screw tight the locking ring against the reel, string the guides, pick a fly—the steps of a lifelong discipline that promised joy. They fished for an hour in the warmth of the afternoon—the freezing nights seemed to have cooled the days, too, it was no longer hot but pleasant and warm. They fished in the warm breeze and got not a single rise. No fry nor minnows darted past their ankles. As they cast and mended the lines and stripped them in, their moods sank. Neither wanted to be the first to say it. Wynn fished up to Jack and said, “They’re gone.”

“I know.”

“It’s shallow here. Do you think it could have boiled? Or all the ash?”

Jack shrugged.

“Why don’t we see any floating?”

Jack shrugged. “I dunno. It flashed over. Twenty-five hundred degrees could boil a creek for sure. I just hadn’t thought of it.”

Wynn thought, You can’t think of everything. And you’re hard on yourself when you don’t. Wynn would not shed tears again in front of his buddy, but somehow of all they had recently endured, the loss of the trout seemed the saddest.

They both heard it at the same time, a crunch behind them, of gravel, and they spun around and Maia was standing there. Her left arm cradled to her side, maybe covering some pain in her stomach. Disheveled, but standing.

“They didn’t all die,” she rasped. Her voice was almost normal. She seemed…almost like a normal woman. “It happens. We—I’ve been in some big fires on our trips. My trips.” She was snipping the man out of the snapshots, trying to. “They seem to know what’s coming somehow and a lot of them will swim down into the river.”

“No shit,” Jack murmured. He was truly awed and relieved. The implacability and violence of nature always awed him. That it could be entirely heedless and yet so beautiful. That awed him. But also its intricate intelligence. Its balancings. Its quiet compensations. It was like some unnamed justice permeated everything. He would not go further than that. Still, the workings of nature made the voracious, self-satiating intelligence of humans seem of the lowest order, not the highest.

“They’ll swim back up,” she said. “By next summer, if the insects come back—and they will—so will many of the fish.”

They all just stood there dumbly, in the sun and the smells of scalded earth, and the colder, welcome scents of the ashy creek, and absorbed the prospect of life returning. And the fact that they now had zero source of food.

They broke the rods down and stashed them back in the dry bag. They drank their fill of the creek, filled the battered, faithful pot full of clear water—the stream would not turn milky with mud and ash until the next rain—and they shoved off.

For a while they paddled slowly, then drifted. Without wind, in the middle of the current they were making four knots. They had not counted the tributary creeks they’d passed, nor reckoned their volume, but the streams were adding up and adding to the speed of the river. They were woozy with fatigue. With hunger. They did not have a plan. How many days were they from the village? They’d lost track.

Somewhere ahead they would know for sure. Because somewhere ahead was the biggest falls on the river, Last Chance, and from there they figured three days out. A few miles below the rapid was the confluence with the Pipestem, another big river that entered from the west, and after that the current would pick up, the two rivers together would widen, the gradient would flatten, and they could paddle everything then, every riffle. They could paddle it starving. They could drift it when the wind was down and save their strength. They would be home free. Probably. They did not have a plan, but neither did they plan on just letting the man shoot them.

Now the wind had quieted and they stroked slowly. Where the river ramped down around a bend and the current picked up they touched the water enough to keep the canoe straight and otherwise drifted. They knew: from here on out it was touch-and-go, they’d have to save their strength. And they’d have to stay awake and alert—they couldn’t drift into the lethargy of the very hungry. When the man attacked they’d have to answer. Or attack first, which was apparently Jack’s MO—who had known he had the temper of a killer? What Wynn was thinking as they drifted past a gravel bar on the right bank and an odd hump there, blackened and reeking like burned hair. He steered them closer in the easy current and they passed the stony flat within ten feet and he saw sticks jutting from the pile and the stench made him gag and then he realized it was a mother bear and cub, lying together and half burned, and he did gag and nothing came up.

“Jesus,” Jack said. The cub was half under the mother as if seeking shelter, and in places the mama bear’s hide was burned away and the fat beneath it too and the charry bones came through. They must have run just ahead of the juggernaut and made it across the river and been overcome with smoke and then it flashed over.

They drifted past and Jack said, “Hey, hey, wait a sec. Big. Pull over. We can salvage the meat.”

“No way.”

“We don’t have a choice.”

Wynn had gone ghost-white. He wiped his mouth on his forearm and his lips trembled and he took two strong strokes and let the current carry them past. This time he didn’t listen to his friend. He was no way going to disturb the pair, and plus no meat from them would ever stay down.

Jack glared. Wynn did not apologize this time. He looked past his friend and paddled.

How long? Nobody kept track. The raw sun rose clear of the smoke and let a white sky rinse clean the blood. It tipped past its zenith. They paddled. It was not desultory, it was deliberate and slow. Nobody spoke. She slept. No more eagles as sentries flying down off the tops of the tallest trees, they were blackened spires standing along the banks like the masts of wrecked ships, and the fire had burned away the branches and the big nests. No more flycatchers chattering, no mergansers winging in pairs fast upstream, no more loons loosing their laughter and wails. Only the sift of current through the stubbed limbs of a burned and fallen pine, the occasional knock of a paddle, the sip of the dipping blades as they lifted out of water. At some time in the afternoon Wynn muttered, then called, “Fucking A.”