Jack huffed a breath. “But we don’t want it to get colder, huh? I mean, for the whitewater. Or snow. That’s funny, isn’t it?”
“Nothing seems funny.”
“I wonder what happened to those people.”
* * *
They hiked back to the boat. They didn’t talk as they zipped up and clipped the waist belts of their life vests. They were about to get on moving water. The vests were light, fitted lifejackets made for paddling. They hadn’t worn them on the lakes except for the day of storm but now they did. Even in flat swift current a fast eddy turn could capsize a canoe. They were both thinking that in ten minutes the die would be cast. They’d shove the canoe into the current and head downriver, and the option of trying to find the couple, or whatever they were, and calling in a ride from their sat phone would be gone. Most everyone these days carried a phone. Except them. Except diehards nostalgic for the days of the voyageurs. Neither said a word. They’d made their decision, their nondecision; there was nothing else to do. They could try to paddle hard, harder than they ever had, and make longer days. And get to Wapahk as fast as they could. They could try to beat the fire.
Without a word Wynn went to the stern and found the cam straps and began lashing in the food and clothes barrels. He buckled in the extra lifejacket. Carrying one was required on certain rivers and it had become a habit. He ran a strap through the waterproof soft case of their rifle and snugged it tight, just ahead of the stern thwart, right side. He made sure the clips that opened the bag were easily accessible. He wasn’t sure why. He just felt better knowing he could grab the gun fast.
They had brought the rifle to shoot caribou and to protect against bears near the bay. Nobody used to, but the warmer winters had changed everything. With the ice regime changing, the lean summer season for the polar bears was extended, and hungry bears in early fall were known to rove upriver looking for food, sometimes as far as fifty or sixty miles. Some were near starving and would eat anything that moved. There were also wolves and black bears, though neither Jack nor Wynn seriously thought of those as a problem. The unspoken reason for having a gun was that neither felt comfortable going for a long trip into the northern wilderness without one.
CHAPTER THREE
When Jack’s mother died, Jack’s father, Shane, stopped talking. It wasn’t like Jack was missing much—his father had been a man of few words, unlike his father’s brother, Lloyd, on the next ranch over, who could talk the bark off a tree. But later, over the years as his voice returned, Shane had told Jack stories about Uncle Lloyd, and whenever they were all together Jack could see how much his dad loved him. Shane told Jack that growing up he had not resented his older brother’s volubility, he had admired it. They were Irish twins, eleven months apart, and Shane said he would often find himself in a circle of mutual friends listening to Lloyd tell a story he knew was wildly embellished. Lloyd might be recounting a ride through the Devil’s Thumb lease with their cousin Zane, intoning, “Well, Zane, you know he’s a gangly sonofabitch, shot up so fast in high school they had to climb halfway up his backside to find a place to hang his asshole.” Laughter. “He was riding ahead of me on the trail, turned back and was trying to tell me some goddamn thing, and he hit the limb of this cottonwood and it knocked him out of the saddle. Well, you know he may not be that smart but he’s quick as a snake in a boot and he grabbed that branch and he was hanging there squirming and I just rode on under and picked him up. There we were, riding together like newlyweds. He was half up on Shirley’s neck and I squeezed him around the waist and said, ‘Well, this is cozy. How’s that saddle horn feel…’?” Laughter.
Shane said it wasn’t quite the way it had happened but it was somehow more true to the moment than if Lloyd had just told it dry, and it was way more fun. Jack did notice one thing, and it was something he loved about his uncle: Lloyd never embellished the bones of a hunting or fishing story. The fish never got bigger nor the rack of the bull elk wider. Inches, feet, miles, weather, were all surprisingly accurate. Shane said that Lloyd had once told him that a great storyteller had to know when never to lie. “Hunting and fishing’s so much fun,” he said, “only a pissant needs to lie about it.” Jack could see that in all his father’s dealings with Lloyd—splitting up the ranch after their parents died, sharing the lease, covering for each other in calving time, and coping with irrigation—Shane trusted his brother more than any other person on earth. Jack knew that Lloyd made life more fun, it was that simple, and without ever compromising the dead seriousness of it. That was a person to ride the river with.
Jack’s father may have blamed himself and gone just about mute, but so did Jack—blame himself. That morning he had insisted on acting like a big man and taking up the rear. He’d never done it before. His gray, Duke, was much more athletic than sweet lumbering Mindy—if it had been him behind his father when BJ balked, Duke would have kept his footing. It was his fault for trying to be bigger than he was. His damn fault. In truth, at eleven he was already a constitutionally modest kid, and the accident just reinforced his aversion to drawing attention to himself or overreaching. He liked to be good at what he did—both his mother and father had instilled the value of that; there was nothing really more important other than treating animals and people with decency and respect—but not a lot of people had to know about it. What good did bragging do anyway? He had a few good friends who respected him and would do anything for him. Why did anyone else need to be impressed?
When he opened the envelope that said he’d gotten into Dartmouth, his father didn’t hoot or take him out to a celebratory dinner at the Tabernash Tavern; he looked at him with an odd expression, half pride, half sorrow, and said simply, “Your mother would be over the moon.” Over the moon. She was over the moon. It was almost exactly how he had been thinking of her these past years. When he walked halfway to the horse barn on a cold night and stood in the frozen yard and watched the moon climb over Sheep Mountain, he sometimes whispered, “Hi, Mom.” He wasn’t sure why, it just seemed that if she were to be anywhere it would be there. Maybe it was because his favorite book when he was very little was Goodnight Moon. She had read it to him over and over, and after she drowned he kept the battered copy on the little shelf above the bed and sometimes fingered the worn corners and flipped through it before he slept.