when they were twenty yards from the take-out beach this crazy sonofabitch had popped out from behind a tree and shot at them. With a 12-gauge. But he was clearly not a shooter and he didn’t seat the stock and he blasted high. The fat one had told it and he said his partner JD might have been hungover and he might be a fuckup, but he was a good and loyal friend and he had been a Marine—that’s where he and Brent had met—and he plugged the man Pierre in the chest as easily as he would shoot a deer startled in a clearing. He shot him just as Pierre let off another wild blast that this time shredded the limbs of the pine as he fell.
The village had called up to Churchill and Churchill had sent a Mountie named Austin McPhee. McPhee had married a Cree girl from Wapahk and so he was family and the town was relieved. He flew in on an Otter that night and had already interviewed the Texans and had asked them to be patient and had kept them under guard at the rec center. So Mountie McPhee was already there when the kids ran into town yelling about a wild man with a scoped Savage slung on his back and the wounded girl in the canoe with Wynn.
Hansie and Jess would not take their eyes off Jack. It was as if his face would give some lie to the telling, that he would crack and say, “No, not really. None of this happened. Wynn will be home tomorrow.” Instead he said, “We carried her up to town on a stretcher behind a four-wheeler and they called back the Otter. We took her and Wynn to the airstrip in two separate trucks. McPhee flew back with them to the health center and returned the next morning with two more Mounties. They kept me in the back of the rec center away from the men and interviewed everyone separately. I guess they were afraid I would try to kill them. But I hadn’t shot anyone, and the Texans weren’t pressing charges about the boat. So they said they’d take me back to Churchill on the next flight and arrange another plane back to Pickle Lake, where we—I—had my truck.” Was he telling them what they needed to know? He wasn’t sure.
He said, “They said you-all had already arranged about getting Wynn home.” Why hadn’t he called them then?
“We did,” Hansie murmured. “Then what?”
“Does it matter?”
“Yes.”
“Okay.” Somehow in the telling he had drunk his wine. He reached for the bottle, poured half a glass carefully, drank it down. He said, “McPhee said, given all the circumstances, the Crown or whatever did not foresee charging the Texans. There’s, uh—” He held himself tight. Why now? He’d gotten through the hardest parts.
He said, “The Mountie said preventing a man from stealing your boat in the wilderness can be considered self-defense.” He took a breath. “Well, and—considering the confusion, heat of the moment…”
She had squeezed her own napkin into a ball. Now she looked at it in her palm like a crumpled dove and laid it out on the table and smoothed it, folded it. She said, “What about the rape? The attempt?”
“The man JD said he was just checking on her since he was the only one awake. She couldn’t tell which man it was in the dark, and though she knew he was trying to molest her, in her half-conscious state she wasn’t sure of much more than that.”
Hansie blew out. She refused to cry again. He wished she would. Jess was looking from her mother to Jack, covering her curled right hand with her good one as if she were trying to protect it from the story.
Jack said, “They held the Texans, I guess, in Thunder Bay for two days. That was it. The woman Maia had a perforated intestine, broken ribs. McPhee told me that they said she would fully recover.”
Hansie said, “She called us. She was at Brigham and Women’s. We talked for an hour.”
Jack looked up sharply. Of course she did. He was the only one who hadn’t. Hadn’t come across. Because in his heart he was still on the river. Right then he realized that was why. He was still on the river with Wynn and they were still paddling and they were still arguing about how much slack they should give the man, everyone. They were still