much. They’d barely touched their dried food and they were almost getting sick of pan-fried fish. They picked blueberries and raspberries and blackberries along the shores and they gorged themselves. Their mouths turned blue and purple and they laughed about how they could pick for an hour and never fill up a pot or a baseball cap. They ate them all. They were strong paddlers and made easy time across the lakes, and they challenged themselves to try to make the longest portages in one carry and they never could. Not with the rifle and fly rods and small barrels of food and gear.
The rifle. Wynn huffed out a breath. What had been the best trip ever was now…what? It still seemed like a dream, but turning bad. He didn’t think she’d been mauled by a bear, but it was possible.
He wished he had his pipe. It was anachronistic and on a wilderness trip there was nothing he enjoyed more—to stuff it with a vanilla burley blend and smoke it late by the fire. But he’d left it in camp. It had been his grandfather’s, his father’s father’s. Whom Wynn had adored because he was a risk-taker and a goofball. The old old man, Charlie, had trained as a lawyer and married a Boston Brahmin and had worked on Wall Street for a few years and hated it; he’d moved to southern Vermont and become a respected amateur painter and early organic gardener and local historian. He painted barns and fields, but he also painted nudes, and the story went that he had two model mistresses, one widow and one widow aspirant, who’d told her drunk husband that if he made a peep she’d slit his throat the next time he passed out, which would probably be tomorrow. Charlie’s youngest son, Wynn’s dad, had inherited his father’s fluid, honest line and sense of color but had eschewed fine art for the more practical pursuit of architecture. After college he had spent a year in Japan studying landscape and had never gotten over it, and he now built Japanese-inspired houses all over southern Vermont. The goofy, risk-taking fine-arts gene had skipped a generation and landed on Wynn. Who thought he’d be perfectly willing to spend half the year as a low-paid outdoor instructor if he could spend the other half living in some barn constructing art installations and sculptures.
He pushed the stub ends of driftwood into the embers and held out his right hand and heated his palm. Then he reached down and worked his hand into the sleeping bag wrapping her head, into the warmth of it. Warmth, good. Her core temp had come up, little by little, and the shivering and whimpering had stopped, and they kept putting warm stones in with her and retrieving them when they cooled. She had drunk a full cup of ramen and eaten a chocolate bar and now she was generating her own heat. He worked his fingers down and felt the pulse at her throat and it was steady and strong. Good. The shock, the worst of it, was over. The challenge would be to keep her out of it.
He turned his eyes away from the fire and out to the lake. The circle of light wavered over the stones of the beach. It flared in the wind and dimmed when the gust passed. The night was dense. The firelight could not penetrate to the water. Out there, in the felted blackness, was only sound. The lap of small waves, the sift of water sliding over water. He thought he heard a slap, he could have—the tail of a beaver? He glanced down beside him: the Savage .308 was there, out of its scabbard, scoped and chambered. When they had finished the portage Jack had unshouldered the canoe and reached for the gun on Wynn’s shoulder. He’d thumbed the safety and levered the action and dug in his pocket for a single cartridge and shoved it into the top of the magazine and snapped up the lever. Now with the five in the magazine there’d be six shots. Tonight, in low voices, they had decided to leave the gun with whomever was on watch. No telling what the crazy fuckers on the island would do.
Maybe, Wynn thought, they were overreacting. Maybe she had been attacked by a bear. It had been his initial assumption. But the more he thought about her injuries, the more of a stretch it seemed. A