They saw the patches of bright fireweed and the wall of woods, and shallow bays with stony beaches sometimes backed by fringes of tall tawny grass; they saw rocky coves with deadfall spruce lying across black boulders and bleached like bones, and low patches of vegetation between the rocks on the shore that they knew were lowbush blueberries.
If they were tempted to stop and pick they didn’t say it. They were feeling pressured now. What they had wanted by giving themselves almost a month, more, to cross the lakes and run the river was a voyage with no hard end date. They left the flight out from Wapahk open-ended—they’d call when they got to the village—and they’d planned a leisurely pace with short days whenever they wanted. With layovers in camp to hike, to hunt if they felt like it, to forage for berries, to rest and smoke their pipes and take their ease like Huck Finn or Stubb—the pipes were anachronistic and they loved them, to recline in camp and puff a vanilla tobacco mix made them feel like old explorers. They hungered to immerse themselves in the country without the hurry of a jammed itinerary. They’d even left their watches, trusting their sense of time to the sun and stars when they could see them and to their bodies’ rhythms when they couldn’t. Most of their previous river trips had been a hustle, because they were students with jobs and so their time off was short. They wanted to try this, to feel what it was actually like to live in the landscape a little. But now everything had changed. The fire they’d seen the other night and the early frost had changed it.
They paddled back a hundred and seventy degrees from the way they’d come, which angled them toward shore, and they thought it was odd that they hadn’t seen any sign of a recent camp or crossed tracks with another canoe. A small tributary creek wound out of the woods and across a broader beach and they decided to stop and make a fire and have tea and think about things. Normally they might have fished the side slough but now they didn’t. It was a darker color than the lake which had hued to an opaque green in the early-afternoon sun. The creek was brown with tannin, and they’d often had luck catching brookies in the smaller tributaries, but neither of them pulled out his rod.
There was plenty of wood. They were on the leeward shore and the driftwood wracked up on the stone beach like the flotsam of a tide line. There were the skeletons of fir trees that silvered smooth and hard, and the carcasses of birch that rotted, still sheathed in their skins of powdery white bark. Piles of smaller sticks seasoned in the sun and wind and they cracked over Jack’s knee like a gunshot. He gathered an armload while Wynn stood in his rubber Wellington boots a few feet into the water and scanned with his binocs up and down the shore and over the jade water toward the mouth of the outlet. Jack noticed that he often did that—stood a foot deep in the shallows when he could just as easily have stood on shore—and it amused him. Just as Jack was comfortable with heights and exposure, Wynn loved to be immersed whenever he could, and never minded the chaos of whitewater—it’s when he seemed to come most alive. The same for fishing: Jack would rather fish a river from the dry bow of an oar boat, while Wynn preferred to be thigh-deep in a stiff current and wading. Jack chalked it up to landscapes of origin—he was raised in the heart of the Rocky Mountains and that’s where he was comfortable. High desert, higher peaks. Wynn’s world had been a country of brooks and rivers, ponds, lakes; a world of water.
Wynn kept a finger on the focus knob and moved the binocs over the northern shore. He could not actually see the cut where the lake emptied but he knew where it was from the map. It was beside the hump of a glacial moraine that in another epoch had been a pile of tumbled rocks and was now softened with moss and trees. They had been so close to it earlier in the morning and it was now about five miles distant. It’s where the river started, and a mile and a half down the river were the first big falls, a terrible stepped rapid that had killed four canoers last year who had missed the mandatory portage on river right. But it was very swift water above the drop and the left bank was a sheer ledge with no place to pull out. One of the biggest warnings in any description of the entire river was to be far to the right in the mile below the lake.
A pair of mergansers winged into the field of Wynn’s glasses and out of it, beating fast southward. He scanned east and caught a big raptor circling; he followed it and it flashed white and he was sure it was a bald eagle hunting.
But no canoe. Wynn gave up, and Jack knew what he was going to do next and he did. He set the binocs on the rocks where they wouldn’t dangle off his neck and then he squatted and began prospecting for stones up and down the beach. He gathered armloads. Not just rocks but sticks, two feathers, probably osprey and crow—and he knelt and stacked the stones into two piles, less like cairns than funeral mounds, and channeled the water around them and lay the feathers in the channels like boats. “Longboats,” he muttered to himself, but Jack heard him. “Like a Viking funeral.” If Jack hummed, Wynn talked to himself, especially while making his Thingamajigs. What Jack called them. Wynn was crazy about Goldsworthy, the environmental sculptor, and was in awe of the ethic of ephemeral art, from Buddhist sandpainting to the sapling moons of Jay Mead. The untethering of ego: the purity of creating something that wouldn’t even be around to sign in a matter of hours or days. What that said about ownership and the impermanence of all things. He was less impressed with the extravagant shroudings of Christo, which he thought were grandiose and domineering.
Squatting there at water’s edge, Wynn reminded Jack of a little kid at the beach with a bucket and pail. He was just as absorbed and happy. “Aren’t you even going to take a picture?”
Wynn looked up, shrugged. He had a goofy smile, like someone caught in the act of talking seriously to a chipmunk.
Jack started a fire. It popped and blazed and he dipped the kettle and arranged two flat rocks beside the flames and with a stick he raked coals and burning sticks into the gap, over which he placed the pot. The water boiled fast and he flipped up the wire handle with his stick and lifted it onto one of the rocks and went to the canoe and dug tea and brown sugar from a plastic box they used as a day bag. There were two emergency blankets and waterproof matches and a tube of firestarter in the bottom of it. And a packet of food, rolled oats and sugar, power bars, freeze-dried fruit, and a few meals; enough for maybe three days for the two of them. Also a signaling mirror and a small compass with no bezel. He dropped the tea bags into the kettle and sat on a smooth log in the bright sun and watched the lake.
There is no place I’d rather be, he thought. And also: Something is not right. He could feel it on the back of his neck, almost the way the hair prickles and rises just before a lightning storm in the Never Summers back home. Just before he stepped into a Montana clearing straight into the glare of a grizzly. He’d always had it, that sixth sense—some people do—and he thought it had saved his bacon more than once. He’d had it the morning he was eleven and a young mare had stumbled on the slick rock of an angled slab above a raging summer creek. Now he felt the heat rise in his neck and he shoved the image away.
He breathed. Nothing more peaceful, he thought, than right now. He could hear bees humming in the fireweed and asters behind him. The tea was brewing, the lake glassed off, a white sun hung midway to the woods and warmed the stony shore. His clothes were almost completely dry. His best friend was thirty feet away, evidently just as content. Nothing better than this. What he liked to say to himself.