Personally, I was having trouble with the Hungry Motherfucker and the Tooth, but I kept my mouth shut.
“After the Staircase, there’s a lot of smaller rapids I didn’t bother to name, three, four miles. Some shallows, some swamp, some rime, like where we are now. We take out and camp at this place I call the Willows because there’s this grove of them. Really beautiful. On Monday we glide on down to our takeout, a mile or so, which is here.” He pointed toward the bottom left corner where a smiley face was drawn in. “My dad’ll be waiting for us with plenty of cold beers and tons of food.”
“I have one more question,” Rachel said as she got to her feet and brushed the dirt off her clothes. “Why are you hiding your gun from us?”
“Rachel, he’s not—” Sandra started.
Rachel held out her hand for silence. “Let him talk.”
Rory’s puppyish mood vanished. He ripped at the Velcro on one of the corner pockets of the dry box, pulled out a hard leather case, and opened it up. A pistol was strapped to one side while rows of handgun magazines filled the other.
Rachel frowned. “Still doesn’t seem necessary—”
He shut the case, slipped it back into the dry box. “It would be pretty fucking stupid to be out in these woods without a weapon.”
“All we’ve seen are raccoons and chipmunks.”
He snapped his life jacket closed, tugged hard on the straps to adjust it. “Just because you can’t see animals doesn’t mean they aren’t out there, watching. Smelling you. Moose? Bear? Wolves? They know we’re here. They’re watching us now.”
I felt my breakfast ripple up my throat. I barely made it up the bank and into the woods before it all came out of me, the bits of orange, blobs of pancake, all awash in syrupy-coffee bile. It was pure terror, I knew it. The sun baked the back of my neck as I heaved again, till nothing was left.
I felt a soft hand on my back.
“Are you okay?” Sandra handed me her water bottle. I took a swig, swirled out my disgusting mouth; spat.
I stared into the wall of trees, at the hidden creatures watching us. “I can’t do this. We’re not even talking to each other. It’s not safe.”
“We’ll be fine. We have to get Rachel to chill out. I’ll get her alone at lunch or—”
“She okay?” came a voice a few yards away. Rachel appeared, knee-deep in ferns, her serious, fine-boned face framed by cleaving shadow.
“I’m fine,” I said, my voice thin and weak.
“Then we’d better get going. Those guys are already in the raft.”
15
In seconds the power of the river moving beneath me silenced every thought in my mind. The bank receded quickly behind us. At only a couple of feet deep and around forty feet across, the river rested like a giant in its rough bed of granite and slate, murmuring and turning, dreaming its big-water dreams of endless falling and flowing, gathering its strength for horrors none of us could imagine. Reeds that had stood tall near the banks were now flattened by the current.
I know we all felt it—even then, while the titan was sleeping—that there was a force larger and terribly powerful in charge that we’d better heed above all our petty infighting. The impression of riding something sensate was unmistakable; even when we steered the raft with our oars and Rory’s terse direction, the river had its own idea of where we would go and what would happen to us. Still, I did my best to master the stance Rory had demonstrated in his lesson: arms straight out, paddle flat and dug in deep, then pull. We did what he said, exactly.
The water deepened, turned bluer, brown river stones vanishing in the depths. Whitecaps foamed at the crests of small finlike waves. Rory rode high in the stern behind me, Sandra in front and on the right, Pia to my left, Rachel in front of her. We were bottom-heavy in the center with all the gear; Rory called to us to sit higher on our seats. For a few minutes, we seemed in balance, paddling easily together, but then Sandra abruptly stopped rowing.
“Forward right, dig!” Rory called to Sandra, who sat with her paddle over her knees just long enough for the back of the raft to swing in a sickening arc to the left, turning us. “Sandra, wake up! Come on, pull it! Dig hard, Pia, now!”
But Sandra sat craning backward in her seat, peering into a patch of forest that retreated swiftly behind us, until the raft spun around and we found ourselves racing backward, rolling over small boulders we couldn’t brace ourselves for because we faced the wrong way, whipped along by the vigorous current.