walked away from it and could smell woodsmoke. The first time in two days, and they knew again that they were keeping company with the forest fire.
* * *
They wrapped her in one of the sleeping bags and folded the emergency blankets, struck the tent, rolled up the ground pads, and packed their meager provisions in the canoe. Well, now there was room for her. They didn’t even know her name. The man, Pierre, had said something like Maia, hadn’t he? They set her in the middle, propped back against the dry bag. Wynn walked up the beach to retrieve the pieces of the walkie-talkie, he wasn’t sure why. Maybe the guts of it were still good, maybe there was another party ahead of them on the river that had one, though he thought the odds were low. But when he got to the handset the plastic body was badly shattered. He tried the volume and squelch knobs, but nothing—it was dead. He scooped it up for the garbage bucket when they got to their gear. They shoved off. Wynn took the stern and steered. Jack set the pace in the bow. He sat up in the webbing seat and he kept the rifle propped against the bow deck.
Wynn felt like they had paddled this stretch of shore now a hundred times. It felt as if they had spent half their lives paddling this piece. If this were really a bad dream, or Hell, they would paddle it for another hundred years. It was not a bad place to have to relive again and again, what with the birches just beginning to yellow, and the brightening day flushing the lake with blue, the tall grasses and the fireweed in so many shades of pink. A place to revisit, to sustain one like Cézanne’s mountain. Not.
Jack thought that if he never saw this shoreline for the rest of his life, or one like it, he’d be fine. It was some vortex that kept sucking them back, or the voices were, hers and his. If they’d never heard the voices in that strange fog, they’d be long gone. He wished they were. They needed to get off this damn lake once and for all, get downriver, get to the village and a phone, get the hell out of this country that was starting to feel like very bad luck.
Jack believed in luck. The turning of a card that sent a life in one direction or another. The slip of a single hoof on stone, the sound of two voices in the mist. He believed in it as much as he believed in any other thing, like loyalty or hard work. And sometimes the places that happenstance sent you weren’t as vague as a direction, sometimes they were as steel-cast and unforgiving as a set of rails. And sometimes the only way to jump the rails and set a new course was to have a wreck. Right now they needed speed. And he felt some comfort in the rifle propped at his feet; they might need that, too.
* * *
They quartered into the light wind and made good time. They paddled into the mouth of the outlet and felt the acceleration of the current. They entered the broad right-turning bend and hugged the right shore. Then they came around a ledge of bedrock and they saw the flat horizon line of the falls and beyond it the tops of the trees below, and there was the take-out beach and the tributary and the gap in the willows that was the path of their portage and there was nothing for it but to paddle in. Jack turned on the seat, said, “You got this?”
The current was not too fast and Wynn said, “Sure,” and Jack put his paddle behind him and picked up the gun.
* * *
No sign of a boat. Not on the beach nor in the shade of the trail. They paddled in and hauled out on the shore and Jack said to the woman that they would just be a minute, they were going to take a look, she’d be fine, and she blinked. It was like a semaphore: OK. Jack picked up the rifle and they trotted down the trail.
They could see in the mud that he’d dragged his boat. Maybe he’d hauled it to their campsite on the bluff in front of the cabin. His canoe was polyethylene, the heavy plasticlike material of the synthetic Old Towns; dragging