he woke up with a start. His heart was pounding. And a new thought came to him: he was a fraud. Who was he, to think that he could guide people down the river? Oh, he knew the water, he knew the hikes, he knew enough stories and history to write a book. But in the end, he was just a guy who loved the river, who made a pact with the stars every night, who woke up every morning with the current tugging at his soul. For people like him, going down the river wasn’t just going down the river. It was something so much grander, a journey into a simpler time of a simpler soul, and JT suddenly had the feeling that in taking people down the river, he broke something in them, something that perhaps needed breaking but needed reconstruction as well; and while he was good at the breaking part, good at taking them to the other side of chaos, he felt like he gave them nothing with which to reconstruct themselves after the journey.
Fraud with a wrecking ball.
The takeout at Diamond Creek the next morning went as smoothly as possible. Everyone was as quick to help as they’d been on the first day at Lee’s Ferry—only now they weren’t trying to impress anyone; now they were simply getting the job done, stacking every single piece of gear into neat piles on the rocky beach. When all the gear had been unloaded, they rinsed off the boats, dragged them up onto shore, and opened the valves; and then the boys had an exhilarating ten minutes of flopping about to squeeze out every last cubic centimeter of air.
Jill looked on with dismay as the guides rolled the eighteen-foot rafts into three tight little bundles. Was this all it boiled down to?
“Lunch!” yelled Abo. “WASH YOUR HANDS!”
As people crowded around the picnic table, JT coiled up his ropes and straps and stashed them along with his carabiners in a worn zippered duffel. He was hot and hungry and felt a sudden craving for an ice-cold Coke. He was about to head to the shade of the picnic area when he looked up and saw the kayakers floating down the river. Six toy boats bobbing on top of the sparkling water, followed by the fat mule raft. Even from far away JT could spot Bud, with his full white beard.
As he neared the beach, Bud signaled to him with his paddle, so JT waited. Bud’s kayak glided swiftly toward shore and collided with the pebbly beach. But instead of unhooking his skirt and climbing out, he rested his paddle across the top of the cockpit.
“Señor,” said JT, nodding. Something about the man’s posture disturbed him. “Everything okay?”
“I thought you should know,” he said, squinting up at JT. “We found our life jacket.”
“Your life jacket,” said JT.
“The one we lent you,” said Bud.
“The dog’s, you mean.”
“Right.”
“The green one?”
“Yeah.”
JT felt his mind speeding up. He was already arguing with himself, that it didn’t mean anything, that the dog could have slipped out of his life jacket and still be alive. Why, he’d even thought about this yesterday, the possibility that the dog might have lost his life jacket right off the bat, up there in Lava; it didn’t clinch the issue yesterday, so it shouldn’t clinch the issue today.
“Listen, I don’t know if I should pass this on, but somebody on another trip was talking about a bunch of turkey vultures, back up around Pumpkin Spring,” said Bud. “I don’t know what they were circling.”
JT thought for a moment. “Could have been a dead ringtail,” he told Bud. “Could have been any number of things.”
“It could have,” said Bud. “But I thought you ought to know.”
JT felt his ears begin to ring. He did not want to share Bud’s news with the group. But Mitchell had already spied the kayakers, and he came down to the shoreline holding a messy sandwich.
“Greetings,” he said.
“Greetings,” said Bud.
“You haven’t by any chance seen the dog, have you?”
Just then the mule boat skidded up against the shoreline. There, on top of all their gear, was the green life jacket.
“Hey! That’s—” Mitchell broke off and glanced around at all the faces.
JT tried to draw Mitchell aside, but the word “dog” must have resonated, because instantly the boys came running down. When they saw Mitchell’s face, they slowed to a walk and came to stand by the nose of Bud’s kayak.
JT placed a hand on Sam’s bony