before dawn. A caesura. The fire was a heap of dusted embers. No wind. In the lacuna between outbreath and inbreath even the owl hushed. The sipping of the river seemed to drop an octave. Fuck. Jack’s head jerked up. He must have passed out. Even he couldn’t vanquish the exhaustion of the past couple of days. He must have slept sitting up, slumped over the rifle in his lap, and now he stirred and his head twitched up, and he shook it and straightened his back against the stiffness. Fuck. He sucked in a draft of cold air. Something had woken him. Wha—?
He heard an animal. Tussling, squeaking near the woods. He swung around. It wasn’t the woods, it was…what? There was Wynn, stretched flat on his back, dead to the world on the stones. It was no animal. He heard squeaking and a muffled cry and looked farther in the half dark and saw the man JD’s boots sticking out of the unzipped door of the tent.
* * *
He moved. If he had ever moved that fast—he scooped up the rifle and was at the tent in twelve strides. The man’s gun was lying on the rocks. He kicked it away over the stones. And then in one movement Jack shifted the grip on his rifle and slammed the butt into the man’s kidneys. An explosive grunt. In the next second he was dragging him out by his belt with one hand, and when his head was clear of the flap he heard him utter, “Not! Not what you think!” and Jack dropped him like a bale of hay and with both hands he swung the stock of the Savage 99 hard across the side of the man’s head. An awful thwack and the man slumped to the stones.
He heard crying and reached back into the tent and whispered fast, “It’s okay, it’s okay, it’s Jack. We’re leaving now, getting away.” He put his hands in and half pulled, half urged her out. She was awake, thank God. She was swimming up out of some nightmare. Her eyes unblurred and he could see that she was replaying the last minutes like a film, he could see her mind spinning fast. She gripped his arm in the near dark and nodded. She stood. Shaky. He reached past her and pulled out the pad and sleeping bag and crumpled them in his left arm.
“We’re going, we’re going, we’re leaving,” Jack whispered, harsh. “Can you walk?”
She nodded. She was breathing hard, maybe hyperventilating. “Okay,” he said. He took her elbow with his right hand and guided her fast, as fast as they could, down toward Wynn and the shore. When they got to the sleeper, Jack released her and crouched, shook Wynn hard, moved the cap off his face where it lay and shook, and when Wynn uttered “Hey,” half in sleep, he put his hand over his mouth.
Wynn groaned and his eyes sprang open and Jack’s fingers went to his lips. Wynn blinked twice, then nodded in his bag. Jack made a downward pressing gesture with his open hand—Keep it superquiet.
Wynn roused himself and picked up his pad and sleeping bag and followed, confused. The three of them were now in the dark like ghostly revenants of the river upstream, the upstream side of the creek where everything was burned and the trees were bone. Because they moved without sound and were lit only by starlight, and were so depleted and rattled by the past days that they walked to the water’s edge in a hitching trance. Two did. Jack urged them on. They headed for the boats. Jack held Maia’s arm and kept looking back at the dull glow of coals that was the remains of the fire and at the shadow of the wall tent. They moved toward the boats and then Wynn drifted right, down toward their canoe, and Jack whistled without sound, just a hushed blow, and jerked his head, kept moving toward the Texans’ square-tail beached twenty feet upstream. Maia hesitated. Jack tugged her elbow and she followed. They tiptoed as best they could over the stones. Jack felt for the slung rifle on his back and piled in the sleeping gear and went swiftly to the bow and lifted and began to push and slide the men’s canoe. Very slowly, easing the hull so it barely scraped. Maia stopped. She swayed on the beach and lifted her hands. A questioning gesture, even