promise. That it was my trip.” She looked from one to the other vaguely. Her voice was weak. Jack was afraid she would pass out. He put a hand on her good shoulder.
“Okay, your trip. What do you mean?”
“My study,” she said. The words were faint. Uh-oh. But she was just straining to remember. It looked like it was causing her physical pain. “He would be my research assistant this time and it was my study.”
“Okaaay,” Jack said. “And?”
“And I was so mad. Wouldn’t you be?” Jack felt lost at sea. He saw tears trickle from the corners of her eyes. At least she was cogent. Remarkably. She was like one of those coma patients you read about who wake up after months and start talking about their vacation plans.
“Yeah, sure,” he said. “Then what?”
“I turned around and walked away. Fuck him, right?”
“Right. Fuck him.”
“And he grabbed my arm really hard and spun me back.”
Okay, the dislocation. They were getting somewhere.
“It was violent. It really hurt. I think he dislocated my shoulder.”
“He did,” Wynn said. She looked up at him as if seeing him for the first time.
“Oh,” she said. “Yes.” As if she’d forgotten what she was agreeing to.
“That’s why it’s in a sling,” Wynn suggested gently. “Jack popped it back in.”
“Oh, thanks.” She looked down at her arm in the sling. Almost as if it didn’t belong to her but to someone else.
“Then what?” Jack said.
Her eyes found his face. “Then what what?” she said.
“After he grabbed you and hurt your arm.”
“I don’t know. I screamed at him. It really hurt. My arm hung there. I turned away. I was going to go to the canoe and find the phone and call Pickle Lake for a flight out. I was done. As far as I was concerned, the marriage was over. I told him.” Her face remained placid but the tears ran.
Jack said, “You had a phone?” He thought how badly they could use it now, to call in a chopper, to get her out.
She nodded.
“Then what?”
“He was yelling that the marriage was not over, no way, and he grabbed me again and I spun back and hit him with my good hand. I slapped him, I guess, and I knocked his glasses off. They hit the rocks. Broke. His only pair. We just stared at them. He’s pretty nearsighted.”
“Nearsighted?” Jack said.
“He told me once that at forty feet he can see it’s a dog but not what kind of dog.”
A lot was coming clear: why the man had been straining to see the drop of the falls when he had come around the bend, why he hadn’t chosen to ambush them at that first pullout but had tried at the second falls—because he didn’t trust his vision and he needed them to be very close and tightly grouped. Where he’d been waiting on the ledge, the pullout was only twenty feet below him; they would have paddled right into the blast of his shotgun had Jack not made them take out above. Pierre could still paddle downstream, because running whitewater, he would see the blurred white of the big holes, enough to navigate around them. Damn.
“Then what?” Jack murmured.
“I said, ‘Fuck you, serves you right,’ and I walked away.” Tears were streaming now.
“And?”
“I don’t know. I blacked out.”
Jack and Wynn looked at each other. Wynn cleared his throat. He was about to speak but thought better of it. Jack said, “What kind of study?” She blinked. “What kind of study were you two doing?”
“Buffering,” she said. She closed her eyes and said sleepily, “The capacity of subarctic rivers and lakes to absorb acid rain. We’re geochemists.” She said it as if she’d said it a hundred times before. Which she probably had.
* * *
Jack skinned the calf quickly and boned her out, and they started a fire on the bedrock and roasted the backstraps first, which were the size of a summer sausage, then random cuts off the hindquarters. Surprisingly little meat, maybe twenty pounds. She had been a baby. They’d talked about the risk of the campfire, but it seemed the risk of being ambushed here, on a random bank, was much lower than the risks of gradually growing weaker. So they roasted the meat in strips draped across forked saplings and in skewered chunks and they all ate. The woman winced a few times as if the meat hitting her stomach caused her pain, but she kept tearing off small morsels and