There was no plume of smoke to the west, the wind there must have shifted. Here there was barely any breeze, the pale smoke of their fire stirred almost straight upward and thinned and vanished before it reached the height of the spruce. But it bothered him, the feeling. They should be now very close to the place on the shore where they’d heard the shouting and there was nothing, no sign.
He poured the two stainless travel mugs full of the steeped tea and shook brown sugar into his and stirred it with a twig and sat on his log and couldn’t relax. What had been sheer fun before now felt ominous. The foreboding didn’t feel like a general threat, like Fall is coming early, we better hustle, or There’s a big fucking fire to the northwest and we might want to pick up our pace—he was used to those shifts. In a ranching family they happened on an almost daily basis and he had learned to set them in a place in his psyche that did not disturb his daily well-being—life was about being agile in spirit and adapting quickly. This was different. It prickled on his skin like a specific and imminent danger which he could not place.
“Hey,” he said. “Ding-ding. Tea’s ready.”
Wynn stood and picked up the binocs. He tromped up to the fire and sat on the log. Jack handed him his cup of tea. “Strange,” Wynn said. “I scanned the whole shore. You don’t think it could’ve been the wind? What we heard?”
“What? The wind shouting, ‘This is my goddamn trip. This time it’s mine!’ That’s what I thought I heard.”
“Yeah. Me, too. That was her. I thought I heard him yell, ‘Bullshit! I’m through! This is the last time!’?”
“What do you want to do?” They’d paddled over ten miles already.
“You?”
“Well.” Jack studied the stones between his feet and moved his jaw around. Wynn knew that’s what he did when he was thinking hard. “They might have passed us somehow in the fog. Unlikely, though, huh?”
They were both exceptionally strong paddlers and they knew it, and that morning in the waves they weren’t holding back.
“Like they might have an electric motor and a solar panel like those jackasses.”
“They could have,” Jack said. “People bring them just for crossing the lakes.”
“Man. Why not just stay home and drive around?” Wynn was more of a purist than Jack. A few times that morning Jack had thought having a motor would’ve been awesome.
Jack said, “It feels funny, though. I don’t know.”
“Is that your Spidey sense talking?”
“Yep.”
“Damn!” Wynn jerked away the cup and spilled tea onto the stones. “I always do that.” He unscrewed the cap on his mug and blew on the piping-hot tea. “Burned my tongue.”
Jack barely heard him. He was wrestling with a rare sense of portent. He said, “Whoever it was, it feels like we did our due diligence. We tried to warn them.”
Jack didn’t want to throw shadow onto the trip; there was nothing worse on any expedition than a naysayer. But now he kind of wished they had found whoever it was and that they’d had a sat phone and they could call into Pickle Lake. Maybe not for a plane, but at least for an update on the fire, which he was sure the Fire Center must be monitoring.
The hair standing up on the back of his neck, the goosebumps, he’d learned not to ignore them. It was almost like a distant ringing of alarm bells somewhere deep at the base of his skull, which he could hear if he listened. But they didn’t have a sat phone and the couple was nowhere and they’d already made their decision to leave the lake and enter the river. Which was a funnel of current and committed them to two weeks at least of swift water and portages around bigger rapids. He didn’t say a word; this time he kept his mouth shut.
“Wanna make camp here?” Wynn said. “That’ll give us plenty of time tomorrow to get across and down to the falls, and we can take our time and be really careful.”
“Okay. Hey, Big One?”
“Yeah?”
“Nothing.”
Wynn lowered his tea and studied the side of his friend’s face. Under the week of beard the prominent cheekbones were deeply tanned, the straight nose sunburned, the crow’s feet at the corner of his almost black eye a spray of fine wrinkles, paler than the skin around them; his tendoned neck was smattered with small sun spots. He hadn’t earned any of those learning to canoe at summer camp or attending the National Outdoor Leadership School. Wynn envied him. He thought again how being outside, sleeping under stars, cooking on a fire, were as natural to Jack as breathing. He’d been on horse pack trips with his family ever since he could cling to the back of a green-broke mare. And he didn’t seem to mind being cold and wet or exhausted the way other people did. It wasn’t fun, but then life wasn’t meant to be that fun. That was the difference, Wynn thought. For Jack, stuff like cold and hunger didn’t have a value, good or bad, they just were, and it was best if they didn’t last that long; but if they did, as long as one survived them, no harm, no foul. It gave Jack a strength, a temper, that Wynn admired. At about five-ten, Jack was almost six inches shorter than Wynn. Wynn could grunt a car out of the mud, but Jack was lighter and leaner and could run faster, and Wynn knew he had that toughness that was bred in the bone. So when Jack was troubled, Wynn paid attention.
“What are you thinking, Cap?”
Jack shrugged.
“You’ve got a bad feeling?”
“Maybe a little.”
“Me, too. The fire, and those guys were creeps. It’s all gotten weird. But we don’t have much choice, do we?”
Jack turned his head. In the bright sun his dark eyes were clear and full of lights. If he was worried, he was also partly amused. At how shit stacked up. “Nope, we don’t,” he said. “Which means we don’t have to decide a thing.”
* * *
They had plenty of staples, black bean powder and quinoa, rice, macaroni, lentils, even pounds of jerky. They had also brought some fancy premade freeze-dried meals for variety and relief, and they decided that night to make turkey à la king. They ate it with relish, and Wynn mixed lemonade powder in a water bottle and they poured it into their cups and added a splash of Jim Beam from a plastic flask. There’s always relief in committing to a decision, even when there’s no choice.
Neither of them understood why it was called turkey à la king. Wynn pointed out that it seemed to be French and king was masculine and so it should be le king. Jack said that à la is like the au in au gratin, meaning “made with,” which must mean that there were bits of the king in the food. He admitted that it had been his favorite meal at Granby Public Schools.
They pitched the tent in a cove of spruce off the beach. Neither of them felt like fishing, though they saw fry darting in the tea-colored shallows of the creek. They read and smoked their pipes. What wind there was died to a breath they could barely feel. The sky was clear and cloudless. The last light slid down to the edges and slipped onto the silvered lake which bore it without a ruffle. Also the reflections of the first stars. The cold came on fast and they knew it would be another night of frost.
They kicked up the fire and added driftwood and sat in the heat. Wynn pulled out the pages he had torn from a book called True Tales of the North: Ghosts, Witches, Spirit Bears, and Windigoes. It was written in 1937 by an amateur anthropologist named Spencer Halberd Knight. Jack had teased Wynn about the name—“If that’s on the sonofabitch’s birth certificate I’ll eat that chapter”—and about Wynn’s habit of tearing books apart for his trips—“You must’ve grown up with a hell of a lot more books than I did. Whyn’t you just let them live out their natural life?”—but he’d asked sheepishly if he could read the pages when Wynn was done. The wood was dry and burned bright and Wynn turned sideways on the log they’d pulled over for a seat and scanned the first page.
“I was telling you, there’s a whole chapter on Wapahk. That’s some dark history up there.”