When the sun went down, so did the wind. They raked the stones out of the fire and let them cool to an even heat and wrapped them in their shirts and placed them in the sleeping bags with the woman. Pot, spoon, their two cups. What Jack had brought. He’d had a gut feeling they might be spending a night or two out. When her shaking stopped they stirred a bouillon cube into half a cup of water and blew on it until it wouldn’t burn her and then they both propped her up and let her sip the salty liquid. She seemed awake enough to understand. Wynn thought she might have been badly concussed. They’d have to see. They let her drink the clear soup slowly and then Jack made up a cup of sugar water, not tea—no caffeine in case of a bad concussion. She drank that, too. She whimpered a little as she sipped but was otherwise quiet.
When she finished, Wynn said gently, “We’re going to have to put your left shoulder back in. It’s dislocated. Once we get it back in the socket you’ll have a ton of relief.” She blinked. “It’s going to hurt a lot,” Wynn said. “But just for a minute.”
Her head may have moved up and down. Jack had thrown in their wool hats for good measure, and Wynn took his Ivy Darrow hand-knitted Putney ski hat and spread it open and worked it over her head and bandage. “Ready?”
Her eyes closed. Maybe that was an affirmative. Wynn had seen it before: injured people who had barely enough energy to shift a little, to eat, but not enough to talk. Strange that words took so much life force. She was half sitting propped back against him. Jack ran his hands up and around her left arm in its thin wool shirt. He felt up to her shoulder and he gently rotated the arm inward to its normal position and then pulled. Gently at first, then more firmly, then hard. She cried out, a peal of pain stronger and louder than they could have imagined, and then she was gasping and tears were running down her bruised cheeks and then she passed out. They laid her back down and zipped up the bags and let her sleep.
CHAPTER SEVEN
They stoked the fire all night. There was plenty of driftwood wracked on the shore. It didn’t rain and the cloud cover kept the night warmer and it didn’t frost. Jack set up the ultra-light tent, a tapered tube with an arched pole at either end that staked out taut, front and back. He snapped on the waterproof fly to cover it, as much for a little more warmth as anything, and they took turns stretching out and sleeping on Wynn’s pad inside it. In a sweater and rain jacket and wrapped in one of the emergency blankets, they were cold, but it was doable.
It didn’t rain. The low clouds lidded the sky and the wind dropped. Except for the flames of the fire, which sent their sparks toward the wall of trees and then shifted and blew out over the water, there was no light. Wynn stared across the lake westward and at times he thought he might have seen the faintest glow reflected in the overcast, but he would blink and it would be gone. He thought the distant fire was like a war zone, like a front in some battle that was too distant to hear but that would in a matter of days change your life forever. How it felt. The night was pitch, but Wynn could feel that the sky was moving overhead, scraping the treetops.
She must have slept. They’d gotten some ramen in her after dark and in themselves, too. Wynn carried a larger stone to the fire and sat beside her head. He covered it as much as he could with the hood of one of the sleeping bags, but he could see in the fluttering light the top of his ski hat, blue with a broad red band. Knit by his friend Pete’s grandmother. The Darrows had the orchard one ridge over from his place, and he knew the hillsides blind from years of running through them in every season, from swimming in the pond at the lower edge. His favorite time was early May, when the slopes were a sea of white apple blossoms that perfumed the air with a scent so delicate and sweet he thought it might be the most enchanting smell on earth. Autumn, too, in the fields and woods, mid-October, the earth smells of fallen leaves slick with rain, of tall grasses and stony trails wet with cold rain and the cold stone smells of the brooks surging with the rush of all-night downpours. That smell was unbeatable.
Why was he thinking of home? Because he wanted to be there, right now. This trip they’d looked forward to all year had taken a turn. That was okay. That’s what adventures were all about: dealing with unforeseen dangers. And when you were with a friend as solid as Jack, there might be nothing better. But this was different. He sat in the wavering heat and felt the low sky raking overhead just beyond the firelight and he smelled rain. He hoped it held off. He hoped the sense he had of things slipping toward disaster would blow away like the clouds.
Right now he wanted to be home. He and Jack could both be there for a couple of weeks, end of summer, helping his dad put up firewood. Tonight, by now, Jess and his mom and dad would’ve gone to sleep. A northeast wind that presaged fall would be buffeting the windows, and he and Jack would sit by the woodstove with one lamp lit and talk about the canoe expeditions they would take. They’d step outside for air and if the wind was right they’d smell the apples ripening on the trees in the dark down the ridge. Funny to think that now, now that he was on the canoe trip they’d wanted to take the most.
This one. It had started like magic. The clear warm weather, the cool nights and stars, no northern lights yet, but they’d only been out a week. The fishing that seemed like cheating. They’d paddle to the edge of a lake, or into the mouth of a slough or creek and they’d throw dry flies and catch lake trout out of a dream. They’d throw big tufty Stimmies and tiny black gnats. Didn’t seem to matter much. They’d barely touched their dried food and they were almost getting sick of pan-fried fish. They picked blueberries and raspberries and blackberries along the shores and they gorged themselves. Their mouths turned blue and purple and they laughed about how they could pick for an hour and never fill up a pot or a baseball cap. They ate them all. They were strong paddlers and made easy time across the lakes, and they challenged themselves to try to make the longest portages in one carry and they never could. Not with the rifle and fly rods and small barrels of food and gear.
The rifle. Wynn huffed out a breath. What had been the best trip ever was now…what? It still seemed like a dream, but turning bad. He didn’t think she’d been mauled by a bear, but it was possible.
He wished he had his pipe. It was anachronistic and on a wilderness trip there was nothing he enjoyed more—to stuff it with a vanilla burley blend and smoke it late by the fire. But he’d left it in camp. It had been his grandfather’s, his father’s father’s. Whom Wynn had adored because he was a risk-taker and a goofball. The old old man, Charlie, had trained as a lawyer and married a Boston Brahmin and had worked on Wall Street for a few years and hated it; he’d moved to southern Vermont and become a respected amateur painter and early organic gardener and local historian. He painted barns and fields, but he also painted nudes, and the story went that he had two model mistresses, one widow and one widow aspirant, who’d told her drunk husband that if he made a peep she’d slit his throat the next time he passed out, which would probably be tomorrow. Charlie’s youngest son, Wynn’s dad, had inherited his father’s fluid, honest line and sense of color but had eschewed fine art for the more practical pursuit of architecture. After college he had spent a year in Japan studying landscape and had never gotten over it, and he now built Japanese-inspired houses all over southern Vermont. The goofy, risk-taking fine-arts gene had skipped a generation and landed on Wynn. Who thought he’d be perfectly willing to spend half the year as a low-paid outdoor instructor if he could spend the other half living in some barn constructing art installations and sculptures.