The River - Peter Heller Page 0,11
the pillow of his jacket was wet and he knew he’d been crying again.
* * *
Jack woke before sunrise and shook off his frost-covered bag in a spray of snowflakes that floated for a moment like an icy hatch of mayflies. He started a fire and put coffee on while Wynn slept or read. Nothing on earth he loved more than to be the first one up, cracking sticks for a fire, making coffee.
The lake was still, a pale half-moon setting over the fringe of trees. He found the tin of Skoal in his shirt pocket and had his first chew sitting on the log and watching the flames lick blue along the lengths of driftwood, catching and flaring. He tried not to think about the dream. Except he did think that the mare Mindy must have taken wing somehow, in real life, was somehow transported out of the certain death of that white funnel, because that morning a fishing guide scouting the trail for July clients saw her scramble out of a riffle onto the right bank and stand wild-eyed and shaking. She was cut and bruised, she had a deep gash along her right flank and a sprained fetlock, but she was otherwise okay. A miracle if there ever was such a thing on earth. She fully recovered, but would never again walk a river trail. His mother wasn’t so lucky. He stopped the thought. He looked out over the water that held the bruised rose and grays of dawn. Well. Few people had the luck to die in the prime of life in full appreciation of all the goodness therein. Leave it at that, he thought. As good a place as any.
They hadn’t caught any fish, so he mixed up some powdered egg with chunks of cheddar and oiled the long-handled pan and then threw stones at the tent until Wynn groaned and got up.
CHAPTER TWO
The canoe moved this morning as if greased. North again toward the top of the lake where it became a true river. They let their eyes rove the shore looking for the colors of a tent or tents, the shape of a boat on a beach, but saw only more patches of yellow in the trees and a swath of orange black-eyed Susans on the shore. They watched a skein of geese fly over that end of the lake, just one side of the V, an uneven phalanx that curved and straightened as they flew in constant correction. The distant barks drifted down. Jack thought how nature was so often imperfect and sometimes perplexed or bewildered. Once on Duke he had ridden up on a golden eagle in a sage meadow who had just feasted on a prairie dog and the huge bird hopped and tried to fly and was too heavy with her meal. She turned and stood tall and glared at them, awaiting her fate, which was only the indignity of hearing Jack laugh.
They didn’t smell the big fire this morning and they wondered if it had damped down, somehow died off in the new cold. Then they could relax again.
“It’d be good to see it,” Jack said. “To check one more time before we get on the river.”
“Yeah it would.”
“Wanna pull out and climb a tree or something?”
“That’d be you.”
“Never a question,” Jack said.
They pulled out on the west side of the cut and the outflow. The thin strand of stones was partly shadowed by tamarack and grown over by a stand of stiff dried mullein, the tall stalks that Jack’s dad called cowboy candlestick. White moths flitted in and out of the sunlight and lighted on the purple asters that edged the beach. The boys climbed up the low moraine covered in trees and they chose a tall straight balsam fir. Wynn laced his fingers and boosted Jack to where he could reach the first limb.
It was just big enough to bear his weight, and he grasped it close to the trunk and chinned up and reached for the next and was climbing. A few needles spun down, as did his curses. It wasn’t that he was barking his arms while shinnying or gumming his hair and face with bubbles of sap—he was, but he didn’t mind—it was just that he liked to curse when he was climbing, it gave him a kind of a rhythm. They were both feeling a certain excitement at the possibility that the megafire was maybe now only wisps of white