Air and sunshine. He saw the tall willows back of the raspberries shake and he knew the bears were hustling away and gone. Maybe it had been the shout. He knew he’d been lucky, and after that he always carried the pepper spray.
And so it was maybe why he’d had no reason to doubt the man’s story of losing his wife—he knew how easy it would’ve been to meet a bear even close to camp. To surprise a bear and be mauled and dragged. Especially in fog. Or even to climb a tree to get away from a bear and slip and fall. He’d read that bears sometimes buried a carcass for later, the way a croc can stuff a kill under a riverbottom log. When he saw the woman’s head wound and the bits of earth, his mind had gone from the surprise attack to being half buried by the bear. Did black bears do that? He’d heard of it only with grizzlies. And then, though the man said he’d searched, if he was in shock and scared and blinded by grief he might not have searched that well and have easily missed her. The woods could be very thick. He had been in shock. Why had he been looking straight ahead at the horizon line of the falls and nearly missed the portage? He’d been transfixed. By the danger, maybe. He was traumatized. What if they hadn’t yelled and woken him up? He might be another casualty, but this one terminal. And so…but.
It galloped through Wynn’s mind as they circled the cabin and picked. They knelt and filled up the pot and their tied shirts; they gathered with a will and a speed like migrant pieceworkers, the berry-picking that wasn’t fun anymore. She had not said more than one word yet, so they didn’t know. Jack didn’t know either but he was forming a theory. He was gathering evidence and he would indict and convict the man before they even met him again. Wynn wouldn’t. It was plausible. It was. A whole handful of possibilities: The Texans with their quiet motor could have stalked the couple in the fog. The poor man Pierre, in the grip of terror, had lost his wife and fled this new bear here by the falls, or fled them. Thinking that they had been the ones who had taken her in the mist and were now probably after him.
Wynn picked. There were so many fat berries and now that they weren’t eating them he was surprised at the speed and the growing volume. He could grab handfuls. He widened his fingers and raked through the twiggy bunches, the tiny leaves, clawed away the fruit. They were fat and almost blue where the skins were powdery and almost shiny black where the dust had been smudged and rubbed off. His mind raced. He thought about standing up and telling Jack that they needed to slow down, to get reasonable, everything now was going too fast. But what would it accomplish? Their next actions would be the same anyway: they had to get downriver as fast as possible. So. He picked.
* * *
In an hour they filled their caps, the shirts. Then they filled the single pot with more blueberries, and their two travel mugs. Good. Jack was no fool. He had no illusions that things would just work out, that somehow they would make it out in eight or ten days and would not get weak from hunger and vulnerable to exposure. They needed as many calories as they could get and they could not afford to pass them up. Jack had read the accounts. Of the expeditions that failed, that starved to death, that cannibalized, that lost their lives to cold and hunger. Of the kid who went into the wild and could not gather enough food and lost himself to encroaching lethargy and maybe poisonous berries. More numerous to count—the tragedies. And he had read of the ones that succeeded, sometimes miraculously: of Shackleton, who against all odds did not lose a single man; of Hugh Glass, the mountain man who was mauled badly by a bear and crawled himself through a Rocky Mountain winter to safety. They were not a thousand miles from anywhere, they were something like a hundred and fifty miles upriver from rescue, but they had whitewater to deal with and the onset of early cold, and they did not have all their warm clothes or food, and they had an injured person. Two sleeping bags, one small tent. Well. No more than two could sleep at the same time anyway, because they also might have another threat, and that meant that either he or Wynn would have to sit up at night with the rifle.
Jack thought about that. Lord knows he had been wrong before. Too many frigging times to count. This could have been a bear. But what if it wasn’t? What if his warning bells were right and the man was a killer? The only way to stay safe was to assume the worst. Which meant they would have to post a sentry in camp, and they could not both sit up. They would have to take watches. And the one on watch would be sitting by a fire for warmth and the extent of his vision would run to the edge of the firelight. He’d be sitting by a fire, illuminated, and he would not be able to see into the darkness beyond, what? Fifty feet? Sixty? Which meant…
His mind turned away from the conclusion and he forced it back. Which meant that most of the time whoever was on watch sitting by the fire was a sitting duck. Could be blasted from the cover of darkness. Especially as the fire burned down, as the watchman got sleepy. And the tent. He felt the goosebumps on his arms. The tent could be snuck up on from the far side, the dark side away from the fire, and the sleepers blown away at close range in their sleep. Then he could sprint forward and blast the surprised watchman as he struggled to swing the rifle and find the target through a scope at night. Which, in a hurry, at close range, is almost impossible.
Fuck. Fuckfuckfuck. The man had them. He had them dead to rights.
They could not travel this way. Waiting to be killed by a spousicidal maniac. What was the word for a wife-killer? He had to look it up. When…when they got back. He did not allow himself to think If.
Plus Wynn was still sleepwalking. He needed to wake up and smell the coffee or they might be toast.
They needed a better plan. Instinctively he knew they could not play defense, not the way they had the night before on the lake. They needed to go on the attack.
* * *
Jack looked at the sun. It was almost noon. Lots of daylight. The sun didn’t set until almost nine p.m. Good. They’d push it. There was no major whitewater until Godawful Falls. If he was waiting for an ambush, it would be there. The map said twenty-eight miles. On a normal trip, taking their time, stopping for lunch, paddling about fifteen miles a day, they’d get there tomorrow afternoon. But this was not a normal trip. Jack thought about the current sliding around the bend here before the falls. It would be about the same below if the river maintained a similar gradient. At this water level—and it was a low year, with the drought, and so the current would be slower—at this flow he figured the river was moving in the flats at about two miles per hour. It would pick up where things got constricted and steeper. He knew that the two of them could paddle 4.5 mph with a loaded boat, no wind. They’d lost gear and food but they had her.
But the canoe would slow down if they had to fight an upstream wind, which typically happened in the afternoons. So say they paddled an average of 3 mph. Add the current: 5 mph total speed, they could get to the portage in six hours. If they loaded up and got moving now, they’d get there before dusk. The sooner they engaged the man, the better, as far as he was concerned. They just had to figure out how.
Offense. A tactical surprise. Something that Number One Shithead would not expect. That’s what they had to do. And they had to figure it out in the next six hours.
* * *