The River - Peter Heller Page 0,4
the airfield in Pickle Lake for a pickup—or any airfield. Or anyone, if they needed a rescue. They’d talked about it in planning the trip and decided that modern communications had made true adventure a thing of the past. Plus, they couldn’t afford a sat phone.
They drifted in the fog. The lightest breeze from the northwest carried the sharp scent that was different from the smell of the woodstoves, which was so familiar in the valleys where they had grown up. It was heavier with char and smelled darker somehow.
“Maybe they have a phone,” Wynn ventured. They drifted.
Jack said, “You think we should abort?”
Wynn shrugged.
They had paddled many rivers together in the two years they’d known each other, and climbed a lot of peaks. Sometimes one had more appetite for danger, sometimes the other. There was a delicate but strong balance of risk versus caution in their team thinking, with the roles often fluid, and it’s what made them such good partners. Jack would not disrespect his friend by belittling his concern. He said, “We’ve made a lot of effort to get here, huh?”
“Yep.”
“But nobody wants to get overrun by a megafire.”
“Nope.”
“Want a chocolate bar?” Jack said.
“Sure.”
They could barely feel the breeze on their left ears and cheeks and it moved the fog over the water with a timeless languor as if there never had been a time without fog and there would never be one again. It seemed to be lightening.
“If they aren’t getting picked up and they are planning to head downriver, we should tell the couple about the fire,” Wynn said. He handed his wrapper to Jack, who crumpled it and tucked it into a mesh pocket slung on one of the barrels. They’d burn the wrappers tonight. “Everyone going downriver is going to want to hustle.”
Jack blew through his cheeks. “We’ll lose half a day, huh?” He picked up his paddle from where he’d slid it into the pocket of the bow.
“Yep.”
“Well, let’s lose it then.”
They spun the canoe against the light resistance of the false keel, spun it on the smooth water as if on a spindle, and straightened out and dug in. Back the way they had come. Without the wind and waves to provide the angle of a heading, Jack used the compass and held a course of 170 degrees and they paddled back into the mist to warn the other party.
* * *
The fog did lift. It seemed to lighten and clear within minutes, vanishing into the crisp morning as if it had never existed, and the sky was cloudless and an autumn blue. The clarity of the air was like putting on magnifying glasses: every trunk of every birch tree seemed to stand out against the backdrop of tamarack, of spruce, and there were touches of yellow at the edges of the limbs, and some of the tamarack needles were the faded colors of fall grass. The pink fireweed along the shore beneath the trees popped as in a painting. Overnight it seemed summer had surrendered to fall. It was beautiful and it scared them both. All the whitewater was ahead of them, and it would be much safer if the warmer days of late summer persisted. They had brought wetsuits, but they’d heard about expeditions getting overrun by early snow or cold and men dying. It had happened on a now-famous canoe trip of six Dartmouth men in 1955 up on the Dubawnt when the leader, named Art Moffatt, had died after a long swim through a rapid in freezing weather. Up here there was no predicting the timing of the seasons and they had picked their window for the chance of lowest water and warmest days; also, it was when their jobs had ended.
They paddled. Jack hummed. He usually hummed when he paddled, bars of old cowboy songs his father had sung to him like “Streets of Laredo” and “Little Joe the Wrangler” and “Barbara Allen.” Also Sky Ferreira and Drake and Solange; Wynn appreciated the range.
A few days back they had been paddling between two islands on Lake Sorrow and Wynn in the stern had seen something in the water. It was big and it was cutting a wake like a small boat. He stared. Whatever it was, it was traveling toward the same island on which they’d planned to make camp. Jack was humming and partly singing in snatches Wyclef Jean’s “Guantanamera”: “I’m standing at the bar smoking a Cuban cigar…Hey yo I think