“Oh,” she said. “Yes.” As if she’d forgotten what she was agreeing to.
“That’s why it’s in a sling,” Wynn suggested gently. “Jack popped it back in.”
“Oh, thanks.” She looked down at her arm in the sling. Almost as if it didn’t belong to her but to someone else.
“Then what?” Jack said.
Her eyes found his face. “Then what what?” she said.
“After he grabbed you and hurt your arm.”
“I don’t know. I screamed at him. It really hurt. My arm hung there. I turned away. I was going to go to the canoe and find the phone and call Pickle Lake for a flight out. I was done. As far as I was concerned, the marriage was over. I told him.” Her face remained placid but the tears ran.
Jack said, “You had a phone?” He thought how badly they could use it now, to call in a chopper, to get her out.
She nodded.
“Then what?”
“He was yelling that the marriage was not over, no way, and he grabbed me again and I spun back and hit him with my good hand. I slapped him, I guess, and I knocked his glasses off. They hit the rocks. Broke. His only pair. We just stared at them. He’s pretty nearsighted.”
“Nearsighted?” Jack said.
“He told me once that at forty feet he can see it’s a dog but not what kind of dog.”
A lot was coming clear: why the man had been straining to see the drop of the falls when he had come around the bend, why he hadn’t chosen to ambush them at that first pullout but had tried at the second falls—because he didn’t trust his vision and he needed them to be very close and tightly grouped. Where he’d been waiting on the ledge, the pullout was only twenty feet below him; they would have paddled right into the blast of his shotgun had Jack not made them take out above. Pierre could still paddle downstream, because running whitewater, he would see the blurred white of the big holes, enough to navigate around them. Damn.
“Then what?” Jack murmured.
“I said, ‘Fuck you, serves you right,’ and I walked away.” Tears were streaming now.
“And?”
“I don’t know. I blacked out.”
Jack and Wynn looked at each other. Wynn cleared his throat. He was about to speak but thought better of it. Jack said, “What kind of study?” She blinked. “What kind of study were you two doing?”
“Buffering,” she said. She closed her eyes and said sleepily, “The capacity of subarctic rivers and lakes to absorb acid rain. We’re geochemists.” She said it as if she’d said it a hundred times before. Which she probably had.
* * *
Jack skinned the calf quickly and boned her out, and they started a fire on the bedrock and roasted the backstraps first, which were the size of a summer sausage, then random cuts off the hindquarters. Surprisingly little meat, maybe twenty pounds. She had been a baby. They’d talked about the risk of the campfire, but it seemed the risk of being ambushed here, on a random bank, was much lower than the risks of gradually growing weaker. So they roasted the meat in strips draped across forked saplings and in skewered chunks and they all ate. The woman winced a few times as if the meat hitting her stomach caused her pain, but she kept tearing off small morsels and chewing slowly. They all badly wished they had some salt but no one spoke it. When they were done they boiled river water in the pot and made weak tea with one bag and added sugar. They had enough brown sugar for maybe two more pots. The tea and the protein and the calories revived them, Jack and Wynn. Her lids grew heavy and she nodded off. They fetched the sleeping bags and wrapped her and laid her on a Therm-a-Rest as they had before, and she slept. At their backs, away from the fire, the night was cold. In the swath of sky between the trees, the stars smoldered less through haze than through a screen of smoke. A clear night, and for the first time their eyes stung. At first they thought it was the smoke from their own fire, but the wind was carrying their sparks upstream. Jack coughed. Whatever it was chafed his throat.
They needed to paddle out of there in the cold and they did not have neoprene gloves and for the first time they said it out loud: they were fools.
“We’re fools,” Jack said.
Wynn was carving the knot of driftwood he’d found at the last lake camp. He cupped it tightly in his left hand and poked and worried the wood with the point of his clip knife as if he were using a chisel. “Why didn’t we? Bring paddling gloves? Not much fabric for a whole lot of insurance.”
“Because we’re fools?”
“Right.”
“Because we’re minimalists. Which is a synonym for idiots.”
“Right,” Wynn said.
“Because you’re a minimalist.”
“Hold on a sec.”
“I suggested we bring pogies, remember.” They were tubes of neoprene that Velcroed around the paddle shafts like gauntlets and protected the hands. “And you said it was August.” Wynn winced.
“What’re you making?” Jack said.
Wynn shrugged. “Not sure.”
Jack narrowed his eyes. “How do you work on something and not be sure?” He was razzing him. In truth, it was one of the things he admired about Wynn: how often he started a piece of art—with stones, with wood, even with paints—and had no idea.
Wynn looked up. “It’s like cooking. You have a pile of ingredients and you start cooking and don’t have a clue what you’re making. Haven’t you ever done that before?”
“No. Anyway, it’s not like that. If you have a pile of ingredients and cook it it’s going to be food. One way or another. That thing—it’s a bird, or an elephant, or a boat. If you don’t know what it is, how can you carve? You’ll end up with a pile of shavings.” That seemed to really bother Jack.
Wynn smiled. He held up a finger and said, “Ah, Grasshopper.”
“Fuck you.”
“You’ve been saying that a lot lately.”
“I’ve been meaning it.”
Wynn smiled and continued to carve whatever. He turned sideways a bit more to the fire to cast more light on the wood, and as he did the wind also shifted and blew the smoke crossways into the trees and they heard the surf. Crashing surf far off, buffeted and torn by wind. They both sat up, turned their heads. The surf surged and sifted back like breathing. They listened hard and could hear that it was punctuated with explosions like the crash of larger waves on rocks. And beneath it was a groan. A deep groan at a frequency lower almost than their ears could register, like something geologic. Like layers of bedrock rumbling over each other.
“Holy fuck,” Jack whispered.
They could still see nothing, no change in the pallor of the night, which seemed, now that they stared, faintly illuminated by more than starlight. Maybe not. And then they heard a crack. Out of the roar of distant waves a shot like the spar of a giant ship breaking.
Jack cocked his ears as if he were receiving some alien broadcast. “The big ones,” he said, “they talk. That’s what my cousin said, the hotshot firefighter in Idaho.”
“Talk?”
“The biggest fires. They talk, just like this. Listen.”