The River - Peter Heller Page 0,7

pot. The water boiled fast and he flipped up the wire handle with his stick and lifted it onto one of the rocks and went to the canoe and dug tea and brown sugar from a plastic box they used as a day bag. There were two emergency blankets and waterproof matches and a tube of firestarter in the bottom of it. And a packet of food, rolled oats and sugar, power bars, freeze-dried fruit, and a few meals; enough for maybe three days for the two of them. Also a signaling mirror and a small compass with no bezel. He dropped the tea bags into the kettle and sat on a smooth log in the bright sun and watched the lake.

There is no place I’d rather be, he thought. And also: Something is not right. He could feel it on the back of his neck, almost the way the hair prickles and rises just before a lightning storm in the Never Summers back home. Just before he stepped into a Montana clearing straight into the glare of a grizzly. He’d always had it, that sixth sense—some people do—and he thought it had saved his bacon more than once. He’d had it the morning he was eleven and a young mare had stumbled on the slick rock of an angled slab above a raging summer creek. Now he felt the heat rise in his neck and he shoved the image away.

He breathed. Nothing more peaceful, he thought, than right now. He could hear bees humming in the fireweed and asters behind him. The tea was brewing, the lake glassed off, a white sun hung midway to the woods and warmed the stony shore. His clothes were almost completely dry. His best friend was thirty feet away, evidently just as content. Nothing better than this. What he liked to say to himself.

There was no plume of smoke to the west, the wind there must have shifted. Here there was barely any breeze, the pale smoke of their fire stirred almost straight upward and thinned and vanished before it reached the height of the spruce. But it bothered him, the feeling. They should be now very close to the place on the shore where they’d heard the shouting and there was nothing, no sign.

He poured the two stainless travel mugs full of the steeped tea and shook brown sugar into his and stirred it with a twig and sat on his log and couldn’t relax. What had been sheer fun before now felt ominous. The foreboding didn’t feel like a general threat, like Fall is coming early, we better hustle, or There’s a big fucking fire to the northwest and we might want to pick up our pace—he was used to those shifts. In a ranching family they happened on an almost daily basis and he had learned to set them in a place in his psyche that did not disturb his daily well-being—life was about being agile in spirit and adapting quickly. This was different. It prickled on his skin like a specific and imminent danger which he could not place.

“Hey,” he said. “Ding-ding. Tea’s ready.”

Wynn stood and picked up the binocs. He tromped up to the fire and sat on the log. Jack handed him his cup of tea. “Strange,” Wynn said. “I scanned the whole shore. You don’t think it could’ve been the wind? What we heard?”

“What? The wind shouting, ‘This is my goddamn trip. This time it’s mine!’ That’s what I thought I heard.”

“Yeah. Me, too. That was her. I thought I heard him yell, ‘Bullshit! I’m through! This is the last time!’ ”

“What do you want to do?” They’d paddled over ten miles already.

“You?”

“Well.” Jack studied the stones between his feet and moved his jaw around. Wynn knew that’s what he did when he was thinking hard. “They might have passed us somehow in the fog. Unlikely, though, huh?”

They were both exceptionally strong paddlers and they knew it, and that morning in the waves they weren’t holding back.

“Like they might have an electric motor and a solar panel like those jackasses.”

“They could have,” Jack said. “People bring them just for crossing the lakes.”

“Man. Why not just stay home and drive around?” Wynn was more of a purist than Jack. A few times that morning Jack had thought having a motor would’ve been awesome.

Jack said, “It feels funny, though. I don’t know.”

“Is that your Spidey sense talking?”

“Yep.”

“Damn!” Wynn jerked away the cup and spilled tea onto