The cadence of the paddle strokes was high and it hurt after a couple of hours and so they weren’t thinking about a lot. Jack had pored over the map and there would be a few riffles and smaller rapids and nothing to portage for two days, so he was at a loss as to where to expect the next attack. They had passed a wide cove with a pair of loons, one was probably nested nearby, and when they stroked past, the one closest tilted back her head and loosed a pitched wail that must have moved the trees like wind. It pierced the haze and echoed off the waiting forest and rolled over the water like any scream, and seemed to carry a pathos so deep it was a wonder a mere world could support it. Maybe she knew what was coming. Maybe she had hatchlings in a nest and nowhere to go and she knew.
Others did. Because now as they paddled into the afternoon they saw the first moose. Two. A big female with a calf. The moose trotted to the open margin of the left riverbank and clattered over the broken shale on stiff legs and entered the water without pause, and she stretched her neck and let the water sweep her without concern and set a ferry angle and swam across. The calf mimicked the mother. They could hear the chuffs of their breathing. They were only yards ahead of them. The next was a bull moose, and then a black bear with two cubs. The cubs hesitated at water’s edge, they seemed frightened, and the mama bear snorted and waded out of the river and got behind them and drove them forward. They swam. The littler one lost ground in the current and Wynn thought he would get swept away, but the mother got below him and bumped and shouldered and goaded him across. Damn. They could hear the other cub, who had reached the far bank first, bawling and bawling. They saw mink cross, and squirrels. In late afternoon Jack had his head down, paddling hard, trying to maintain the tempo, and Wynn whistled and he looked up and saw what must have been a hundred mice. They’d never heard of such a thing. It was like a miniature herd. They swarmed a steep cut bank and fell or jumped or dripped off it into the water and they swam. Who knew how they kept track of the correct direction, but they did. They came across the current in a moil.
“Looks like Dunkirk,” Jack said.
“Fucking A.”
They saw woodland caribou, a small herd of bulls at first, three smaller and two with massive racks, who took to the river as the moose did, with zero hesitation. Toward the end of the afternoon they both sang out as one: they came down through a riffle of small waves and ahead was an entire string of caribou swimming the river in single file. They counted twenty-three. Jesus. Later Jack wondered why they hadn’t thought to shoot one for meat and could only think that they’d been smitten with awe. They had never seen anything like it.
And they could see smoke now. Real smoke. It was gray, not black, and it did not plume but hazed west to east across the river as the animals had done. Still they could not hear a thing but wind and their own paddles, and the river listing along the rocks of the banks and sifting in the deadfalls.
They paddled into the dusk because they could. They stuck to the middle of the river so as to be less of a target from either side. Jack did not think Pierre was a crack shot—just a feeling. They were drifting now, taking a break and drinking, tossing the filter bottle back and forth. They must both have been thinking the same thing, because Wynn said, “I feel pretty safe out here. In the middle. Maybe I shouldn’t.”
Jack said, “From the fire or the man?”
“The man.”
Jack squeezed the last of the bottle, dipped it over the side and refilled it, tossed it back.
“Well, he’s not a hunter. There’s that.” Jack scanned the banks.
“No?” Wynn said. He looked uneasily along the shore.
“Nope. Did you see him when he first came around the corner the other day?”
“Yeah.” It was a question.
“He was staring straight ahead. Looking for the lip of the falls. Fixated on it.”
“Yeah…So?”
“A hunter would’ve been scanning the shore. It’s instinct. Even you would have done it.”
“Fuck you. You want more?” Wynn held up the bottle.
“Nah, I’m good. I’m serious. Even with a major drop coming up. I’ve watched you. As long as he’s in flat water, a hunter’ll be scanning the shore. For sign like the breaks of game trails. For movement. For shapes, shifts at the edges of shadows, color. Can’t help himself. Pierre, he didn’t do any of that. That’s instinct. This fucker fixated on the single danger downstream. And he still almost missed the portage. He can paddle okay, we saw him ferry across, but he’s bush league.”
Wynn almost laughed. That Jack could judge a man’s character in two seconds, at two hundred yards.
“That’s reason for optimism, right?” Wynn said.
“Take it where you can get it.”
* * *
They paddled on, looking now for a place to camp. The filter bottle was getting harder and harder to squeeze—the filter was clogging up with dirt from the river. They’d try to nurse it. From what they could judge of where they might be on the map, there were no tributary brooks forthcoming, so they’d have to boil water out of the river. They’d sterilize a potful and let the sediment settle out of it before they drank it. When they did get to a clearer creek, Wynn would try to clean out the filter again. They also had the iodine in the day box—they could use it to purify water if they had to.
The river flowed between walls of black timber here, which thickened the twilight. They could smell the spruce, the cold tang of them, as if they were exhaling at the end of a long day. Soon the first stars burned through the haze and the temperature was dropping, but it was still light enough to see. They were paddling slowly, scanning for a clearing, a good take-out, and Jack held up a hand. “Look,” he said.
Something was swimming ahead of them: it was a caribou calf. They saw no cow, just the little calf trying to keep itself afloat. The stiff current between the narrow banks was getting the best of her and she was twisting her head in panic. Jack waved Wynn forward and they picked up the pace. Jack looked to the left bank and upriver: no sign of a mother. Wynn guided them with precision and slid the bow just behind the thrashing calf, whose breath blew fast and panicky. Wynn slid the bow so she was on the right side and Jack scooped an arm in water and hauled up the kicking caribou. Her slicked fur was tawny, her nose almost black, and she was rib thin, Jack could feel them beneath the warm hide of her chest. Still nursing. Without a mother at the leading edge of the fire she was doomed. He glanced at Wynn. Wynn had never seen that face—it was raw grief. Jack was struggling with the thrashing calf and for just a moment the hard set of his face fell away and Wynn saw a kid stricken and not willing to accept any of this. Wynn nodded, Okay. Okay. And in a flash Jack’s right hand went to the clip knife in his pocket and in a flash thumbed it open and at the same time his left arm gripped the calf’s head tight and twisted it back and he plunged the knife in her tightened throat and ripped upward and she uttered a sound like a startled bird and the kicking quieted and she bled and was gone.
They drifted. Wynn had looked away and when he looked back Jack had the little caribou across his lap, he was bent over her letting the blood run freely over his legs and Wynn could not see his face.
* * *
They could no longer camp on the left shore. It would be crazy with the fire coming who knew when. But the river was too narrow here and neither harbored any hope that the right bank would offer further protection. Forty yards was wide but it wasn’t enough. If the fire came and there was any wind at all it would jump. In nine or ten miles, according to the map, the banks widened out a little, but the river was dropping here, off the edge of the Canadian Shield, and it steepened just enough to kick up rapids and riffles, and neither wanted to broach on some rock and flip in the dark. They could feel another hard frost coming and neither wanted to get wet and freeze to death in the night. They’d had Farmer John wetsuits for whatever whitewater, but they’d been in the blue barrels, now gone, and anyway there were only two suits. Wynn couldn’t help but think of Frost’s poem “Fire and Ice,” thinking of the first time he’d read it. He could picture his kitchen table back in Vermont. He had been so taken with the music of it, the near-nursery-rhyme singsong juxtaposed to the clear-eyed…what? nihilism? he’d read it to Jess.
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,