she’s eyein’ me from afar…” Wynn squinted in the stern and made out the rack of a moose. Huge. It must have been, it looked big even from that distance. Two miles from the nearest shore. Great. They’d be sharing a little island with a comfortably amphibious bull moose. At least it wasn’t rut season yet. “Hey, hey Jack, look at that. Damn.” He didn’t know why he was whispering. Jack kept humming, lost in some reverie. “Hey.” Hum, murmur, a snatch of rap. “Hey! Dude!” Jack had turned, startled.
“Do you know you hum all day?”
“I do?”
“Yep. And we’re gonna have company.” Wynn pointed with his paddle.
“Crap, is that a moose?” Jack laughed. “Too bad we can’t harness the fucker like a reindeer. Look at him haul the mail. Must be going four knots.”
They had decided to camp on the island anyway and had no problem coexisting that night. The south shore had a cove full of duckweed and they’d walked around quietly and watched him feed. Just before full dark they’d been sitting at the fire drinking late coffee and Jack had whistled soundless and Wynn had turned and they saw the moose standing at the edge of the woods watching, and he seemed forlorn, as if he wanted to join them. He had clearly never seen a human before.
Now, with the fog lifted and the air lens-clear and cold, they thought they’d have no problem spotting the couple’s camp, but they couldn’t. It occurred to them that maybe there’d been more than two. Two people. Maybe it had been an entire expedition camped on the east shore and all they’d heard was the shouting of the couple down on the beach. Maybe the man and the woman had walked away from the group to argue. But then it would have been even easier to spot the colorful tents of this other party, or to see the string of canoes making their way north to the lake’s outlet and the true river, but they didn’t. They didn’t see a thing.
They saw the patches of bright fireweed and the wall of woods, and shallow bays with stony beaches sometimes backed by fringes of tall tawny grass; they saw rocky coves with deadfall spruce lying across black boulders and bleached like bones, and low patches of vegetation between the rocks on the shore that they knew were lowbush blueberries.
If they were tempted to stop and pick they didn’t say it. They were feeling pressured now. What they had wanted by giving themselves almost a month, more, to cross the lakes and run the river was a voyage with no hard end date. They left the flight out from Wapahk open-ended—they’d call when they got to the village—and they’d planned a leisurely pace with short days whenever they wanted. With layovers in camp to hike, to hunt if they felt like it, to forage for berries, to rest and smoke their pipes and take their ease like Huck Finn or Stubb—the pipes were anachronistic and they loved them, to recline in camp and puff a vanilla tobacco mix made them feel like old explorers. They hungered to immerse themselves in the country without the hurry of a jammed itinerary. They’d even left their watches, trusting their sense of time to the sun and stars when they could see them and to their bodies’ rhythms when they couldn’t. Most of their previous river trips had been a hustle, because they were students with jobs and so their time off was short. They wanted to try this, to feel what it was actually like to live in the landscape a little. But now everything had changed. The fire they’d seen the other night and the early frost had changed it.
They paddled back a hundred and seventy degrees from the way they’d come, which angled them toward shore, and they thought it was odd that they hadn’t seen any sign of a recent camp or crossed tracks with another canoe. A small tributary creek wound out of the woods and across a broader beach and they decided to stop and make a fire and have tea and think about things. Normally they might have fished the side slough but now they didn’t. It was a darker color than the lake which had hued to an opaque green in the early-afternoon sun. The creek was brown with tannin, and they’d often had luck catching brookies in the smaller tributaries, but neither of them