They built a fire because they had to. They wrapped her in the bags again and warmed stones and when she came halfway to consciousness they fed her spoonfuls of sweetened and warmed water and the hot meal they’d made in its foil pack. Then they laid her back down and she slept. They ate blueberries and felt the exhaustion rise in their bodies like a ground fog and they knew they needed to catch fish or some other animal. Wynn had hunted in Vermont, but Jack didn’t trust him to secure the camp from a human attacker: Wynn might see the man crawl out of the woods and maybe even put him in the crosshairs, but he wasn’t sure he would shoot him. Wynn would want to ask him why he was so scared; maybe they could work everything out, none of this could be as base and horrific as it seemed. So Jack watched Wynn set up the tent and told him to take the first sleep, he’d sit with her by the fire, but he did not intend to wake him. He braced himself to keep vigil all night.
She slept. They’d tugged the wool hat down over her ears and pillowed her head with a pile of fir needles and covered those with the hoods of the sleeping bags. Less blocky and hard than one of the life vests. They had talked about whether to put her on her side so she wouldn’t aspirate, but they hadn’t seen her have any trouble breathing yet, or vomit or spit up in her sleep or coma or wherever she drifted, and so they thought she would be more comfortable on her back. They would watch her, though. Jack sat on a rock covered with his own life vest for warmth because the night was cold. He laid a couple of larger sticks on the fire and looked at her face. The swelling had come down today and he could see the planes of her cheeks for the first time, the bruising now a blush of pink edged with purple or black like something slowly smoldering. Maybe he thought that way because he could smell the burn, strong when the wind shifted a little more from the west. It was somehow consoling, not creepy, with the birds flying over. They were just reedy scatterings of sound over the rush of the rapid, and shadows more of movement than substance against the stars; they were saving themselves from whatever cauldron and it made him feel that they, the three of them, were not alone. One of his classmates at high school in Granby had become a hotshot firefighter in Idaho and had died in the infamous White River Complex when seven firefighters had been pinned against a ridge in a sudden wind shift and overrun. The boy had deployed his personal fire shelter against the ground and Jack thought he must have prayed as he huddled inside it, blind, and heard the trees exploding. He was nineteen.
He and Shane had lost cattle twice in fires. He never again wanted to be on horseback and in the path of a burn while he and his father tried to haze cow-calf pairs off the mountain. All they had to worry about now was themselves. Themselves. His mind was wandering and he forced himself to scan the edge of the trees back of the clearing, which he could see well enough by starlight. And the head of the trail, which was only thirty feet away.
He scanned, but still he wondered what had really happened. Had the man really swung a rock at his wife’s skull in some rage, or in some more calculated blindside, and then chickened out from strangling or braining her and just covered her with moss and duff where she lay? They must have planned the trip together—they had been out for some days already, out on the lakes because he and Wynn had not heard any planes. So the couple were functional partners at least in the sense of the barest logistics, in moving the canoe over water, in making camp. They had planned the trip together, packed together, must have shared the route-finding, they were in God’s country, among moose and loons, had slept under benign constellations—what could have brought them to blows, to murder? No telling, truly. Nothing but woods, then taiga, then tundra and mudflats, then the sea, nothing but the cries of birds, maybe coyotes, maybe wolves, sweeps of rain, the mutterings of wind for hundreds, even thousands of miles in any direction. Whatever malevolence the couple had ignited they had brought with them. That puzzled him. Why come so far if you were doing so badly? As people, as husband and wife? Why come way the hell up here?
Fuck: was that something moving against the wall of trees? No? No. He needed to stay on top of it, he was getting drowsy. Exhausted muscles and not much food weren’t helping. He thought of the pale hungry Windigo that stalked this country: it flickered at the corner of the eye but could never be truly seen; no matter how many people it consumed, it was never satiated, it stayed gaunt and voracious. He reached for the sack of blueberries and ate another handful. How long could you live on these? How long could you shit your guts out every day? They needed some meat.
He stood, stretched his arms, slung the rifle, and stepped off fifteen feet to pee. He was facing the river and he could smell the crashing water, the sediment in it and the spray, and he could see what the sluice of turbulence was doing to the dark. It was shredding the night and maybe his peace of mind. At least the violence was keeping him awake.
His mind drifted to the other violent and beautiful river. He had forced himself to ride his quarterhorse Duke back up the canyon of the Encampment just once. It was the summer before college, seven years after his mother had died there, and he had taken his father’s truck and the little two-horse trailer that hitched to the ball, not the gooseneck, and he had loaded Duke and they had driven north through Steamboat to Walden and turned up the North Platte and then forked up into the Encampment, and he had taken the Highline Road through the steep hills of lodgepole and spruce woods to Horseshoe Park and the top of the canyon. He didn’t take a packhorse and he didn’t tell his father where he was going and Shane didn’t ask. He and Duke camped in the park as the family had seven years before, and he put the gelding out on a picket—he wasn’t worried about him getting tangled up in the line, he was a mellow camper—and Jack fell asleep in his bag in the back of the truck with the sound of Duke chomping wheatgrass and his occasional snort and a couple of crickets. The low slip of the river. He made himself think about nothing. In the morning he made a fire and made coffee and ate a power bar and then he saddled up and they rode. It was mid-August and the little river was low and green over the myriad colors of the stones. It flowed gently in the flats and in the riffles it fell with the capricious release of a man whistling as he rode. So different from the June highwater throb and surgings of that other time. He rode through the sage and grass clearings along the bank, the paintbrush and lupines, and into the big trees, and when they got to the true gorge and the river spilled away from the trail and they were high above it, he pushed Duke, carefully, but did not pause, and when he got to the sloping rock slab he was sure was the one and looked down into the gorge at the ledgy drop that was all boulders now—nothing like the white torrent—he clucked twice and urged his horse across and they rode out of the canyon. That was it. He did not make himself ride back up. He talked to a lady in Encampment who had two horses in her yard and she let him turn Duke in, and he hitched a ride with two fishermen back up to his truck. He took one more look at the river running low and clear and drove down to town to pick up his horse. He had hay and oats in the trailer and he fed and watered Duke and loaded him up and drove home. He cried on the way. Once or twice, maybe more. At Hot Sulphur Springs he cried so hard the road blurred. He didn’t know why, why then. He never told his father.