He pushed the stub ends of driftwood into the embers and held out his right hand and heated his palm. Then he reached down and worked his hand into the sleeping bag wrapping her head, into the warmth of it. Warmth, good. Her core temp had come up, little by little, and the shivering and whimpering had stopped, and they kept putting warm stones in with her and retrieving them when they cooled. She had drunk a full cup of ramen and eaten a chocolate bar and now she was generating her own heat. He worked his fingers down and felt the pulse at her throat and it was steady and strong. Good. The shock, the worst of it, was over. The challenge would be to keep her out of it.
He turned his eyes away from the fire and out to the lake. The circle of light wavered over the stones of the beach. It flared in the wind and dimmed when the gust passed. The night was dense. The firelight could not penetrate to the water. Out there, in the felted blackness, was only sound. The lap of small waves, the sift of water sliding over water. He thought he heard a slap, he could have—the tail of a beaver? He glanced down beside him: the Savage .308 was there, out of its scabbard, scoped and chambered. When they had finished the portage Jack had unshouldered the canoe and reached for the gun on Wynn’s shoulder. He’d thumbed the safety and levered the action and dug in his pocket for a single cartridge and shoved it into the top of the magazine and snapped up the lever. Now with the five in the magazine there’d be six shots. Tonight, in low voices, they had decided to leave the gun with whomever was on watch. No telling what the crazy fuckers on the island would do.
Maybe, Wynn thought, they were overreacting. Maybe she had been attacked by a bear. It had been his initial assumption. But the more he thought about her injuries, the more of a stretch it seemed. A bear clawed and bit and tore, it didn’t club and punch and twist arms from their sockets. But a fall could have. If she’d tried to climb a tree as they had, a fall could have done it. Wynn shivered. He was now downwind of the flames, the smoke stinging his eyes, the heat billowing into knees and face; he wasn’t shivering from cold. He realized that sometime in his musing he had reached for a chunk of driftwood and still held it. Damn, he must be getting sleepy. He reached out and laid it on the flames.
* * *
He got up and stretched and went to the woodpile and picked up an entire armload and fed it to the fire. They had scavenged the shoreline and stacked a pile of driftwood waist high. Might as well stay warm. And the way the megafire looked to be running, in a week or so all of this wood might be burned up anyway. He sat back down. He couldn’t keep his eyes open. The day seemed interminable, it defied natural law, no day could last this long. He made himself stay awake and in what seemed like twenty minutes he woke up Jack and passed out in the tent.
CHAPTER EIGHT
They had oatmeal in the box, and brown sugar and tea. They boiled the oats and added sugar until it was sweet and spooned it into her. They made tea for themselves, ate a little after she did, let her drink hot sweet water. She sat up in the sleeping bags. She didn’t say anything, but when Wynn held the spoon to her mouth she opened it, slowly—half opened it; it seemed her jaw was sore from whatever blows had blackened her eyes. She blinked when it was too hot or she’d had enough. She could use only one hand, but even that she barely had the energy to lift. The other arm they’d slung with two tied-together bandannas. When she had drunk most of the cup of hot water she half opened her mouth and emitted a rasping croak.
“What?” Wynn said, leaning his ear down close. “What’d you say? We?”
“She has to pee,” Jack said.
“Oh.”
She nodded, barely.
“Oh, okay.”
They took up their now regular positions and Wynn held her under her head and upper back and Jack lifted her hips and knees and they carried her fifteen feet from the fire and set her down over a larger stone and let her half sit. They still held her torso. She was very weak.
“Can you pee like that?” Wynn asked. She was naked from the waist down from where they’d stripped off her wet clothes. She nodded. She did. They both felt relief as they heard it hitting the stones, almost as if it were they themselves emptying. When she finished, everyone held position for an awkward minute.
“Ipe,” she whispered.
“Wipe? Oh, wipe! Got it!” Wynn said, a little too loud. This was all new territory for him. Jack, who had grown up on a ranch, held little stigma for bodily functions and no patience for squeamishness, said, “Just a sec,” and ran up to the berm and yanked out halms of dried grass and brought them back. He handed them to her and she tried to take them but she was too weak. Her eyes spilled tears then. The tears ran unhindered down over her bruised cheeks and dripped off her chin.
“Okay, okay,” Jack said gently. “I got this. Okay?”
She nodded faintly. He patted her with a bunch of grass and they carried her back. She was very weak. Her underwear and pants had been hanging by the fire and were dry, and Jack and Wynn worked one, then the other up her legs and snapped and zipped the fly and buckled the webbing belt. They worked her right arm through the sleeve of her zip-up fleece sweater and then through the sleeve of the rain jacket and zipped them up over her slung left arm. The wind had died, thank God. A light northwest breeze and the overcast had broken up. Just high clouds drifting slowly and bruised-rose underneath from the rising sun, which had not yet cleared the trees. No frost. They worked her dried wool socks over her feet and put her Gore-Tex hiking boots back on and laced them up. They doused the embers of their fire with lakewater. After the first hiss and the exploding puff of ash and steam and the sharp stench of char, they walked away from it and could smell woodsmoke. The first time in two days, and they knew again that they were keeping company with the forest fire.
* * *
They wrapped her in one of the sleeping bags and folded the emergency blankets, struck the tent, rolled up the ground pads, and packed their meager provisions in the canoe. Well, now there was room for her. They didn’t even know her name. The man, Pierre, had said something like Maia, hadn’t he? They set her in the middle, propped back against the dry bag. Wynn walked up the beach to retrieve the pieces of the walkie-talkie, he wasn’t sure why. Maybe the guts of it were still good, maybe there was another party ahead of them on the river that had one, though he thought the odds were low. But when he got to the handset the plastic body was badly shattered. He tried the volume and squelch knobs, but nothing—it was dead. He scooped it up for the garbage bucket when they got to their gear. They shoved off. Wynn took the stern and steered. Jack set the pace in the bow. He sat up in the webbing seat and he kept the rifle propped against the bow deck.
Wynn felt like they had paddled this stretch of shore now a hundred times. It felt as if they had spent half their lives paddling this piece. If this were really a bad dream, or Hell, they would paddle it for another hundred years. It was not a bad place to have to relive again and again, what with the birches just beginning to yellow, and the brightening day flushing the lake with blue, the tall grasses and the fireweed in so many shades of pink. A place to revisit, to sustain one like Cézanne’s mountain. Not.
Jack thought that if he never saw this shoreline for the rest of his life, or one like it, he’d be fine. It was some vortex that kept sucking them back, or the voices were, hers and his. If they’d never heard the voices in that strange fog, they’d be long gone. He wished they were. They needed to get off this damn lake once and for all, get downriver, get to the village and a phone, get the hell out of this country that was starting to feel like very bad luck.
Jack believed in luck. The turning of a card that sent a life in one direction or another. The slip of a single hoof on stone, the sound of two voices in the mist. He believed in it as much as he believed in any other thing, like loyalty or hard work. And sometimes the places that happenstance sent you weren’t as vague as a direction, sometimes they were as steel-cast and unforgiving as a set of rails. And sometimes the only way to jump the rails and set a new course was to have a wreck. Right now they needed speed. And he felt some comfort in the rifle propped at his feet; they might need that, too.
* * *