a run he let the line slip back out through his fingers and gradually tightened the grip again as he felt the fish tire at the end of his sprint and he began again to pull him in. It was not a long fight and not a huge fish, but it was a fourteen-inch brown—who knew how they had come to live way up here—big enough, the first like him they’d seen, and with a gratitude and quiet joy he did not know he still had he got the slapping fish up on the rocks and thanked him simply and thwacked him on a smooth stone and the golden trout went still. Phew. Lunch. A few more like that and they’d be set for the day.
He did not call out. On another day he would have whistled or yelped. Especially on new water, or on water they weren’t sure about. He almost did, but then he swallowed it. And it surprised him. He wanted to hold on to the quiet, the sense of being alone with the strange afternoon. Because it was strange. Being at this edge was like standing at the high-tide line of a tsunami. Looking out over the wreckage and death. The sense that you could turn around and walk away into the hills, and life.
It might not be that simple with a homicidal freak downstream, but for now the sun was shining and the day was warming and they would have fish for supper.
* * *
Jack caught trout, too. A handful of small brookies and a brown, not as big as Wynn’s but a good part of a meal. They made a fire on the beach and steamed the fish in the pot. Maia was awake. She climbed out of the canoe unsure of her balance and walked unsteadily toward them, and they both stood quickly and went to help her.
She almost buckled as soon as they had her but she stayed on her feet and smiled a sad apology. Sadness or apology, it was the same. She had gotten them into this. “If it wasn’t for me,” she murmured, “you two would be long gone.”
They lowered her to the stones where she could use a driftwood stump as a backrest. She smiled again and said, “Optimism. All that green and the end of the burn.”
They split all the fish three ways and wished again they had salt and devoured it all. It didn’t feel like enough but it felt better. They didn’t see any berries here but knew they should find more farther down, so the stress of starvation seemed lifted for now. She ate, but she winced often and her skin was white and Wynn saw her press her stomach with her good arm as if she were quelling spasms.
Jack tossed a strip of fine bones into the coals. “He probably made it through,” he said. “The fire. If this is the northern edge and he is ahead of us by a day, he made it through.”
They both looked at him.
“Will he get harder or weaker?” Jack said.
Her eyes flickered. They were sleepy eyes, almost drugged. “What do you mean?”
“I mean will all the waiting and stalking make him sharper? Will it hone him or erode him? Will he start to waver?”
“He doesn’t second-guess himself, if that’s what you mean.”
Jack nodded.
She grimaced, and Wynn thought it was either her injuries or the thought of her husband. She said, “He told me that when he applied to prep school in Connecticut, the admissions director asked him to name his best quality. ‘I’m tenacious,’ Pierre said. ‘Okay,’ the man said. ‘What’s your worst?’ ‘I’m stubborn,’ he said.”
“So Pierre’s a psychopath and also cute.”
She shrugged her good shoulder.
“Why does he want you dead so bad?”
“Because he tried to kill me and screwed up?”
“Yeah, I mean before.”
“I’m starting to think it’s for the same reason he married me.” She half turned, as if ashamed, and Jack saw the tears running and looked away out of tact.
After a while he said gently, “Why?”
“Because my family has money?” She said it simply, without pride or shame but as a fact. “My husband loved me because I was a Rhode Island Brown.”
Jack blinked. It was clear that didn’t mean shit to him. “You die, he inherits.”
She nodded vaguely and wiped her wet face with her good arm. “We hadn’t been getting along for a while. And I had a paper in Science and one in Nature and