Chapter TEN
Dear Caleb: I had surprise company today. She didn’t stay long, which I’m glad about, but she definitely kept me from being bored.
And now he was, at last, alone.
He held the canoe in the lily pads and let the smoke from the small fire in the can blow over him and take the mosquitos away. There were fish everywhere. Hiding beneath the pads he could see dozens of bluegills and other panfish—sunfish, he thought, from the yellow flash of their bellies when they turned suddenly—and now and then a northern pike hunting the lilies would hit them and scatter them. He would take some later for food but it was only midafternoon and the plane had just gone—he thought he could still hear the engine—and he had time to move to the end of this small lake before dark and time to camp.
He smiled remembering the pilot when they’d landed. He had dropped the other two men off first—a lighter plane used less fuel—so the two of them had been alone for the flight. It had taken forty minutes or so to fly a hundred miles and the noise of the engine was loud so they didn’t speak much.
At one point the pilot leaned over and yelled, ‘‘You sure you’ll be all right alone up here?’’
As right as I’ve ever been, Brian thought, and was going to yell it but simply nodded and that was all their conversation until they landed and taxied to a stop at the end of the lake.
‘‘You’re here.’’ The pilot took a map from a folder in the back and handed it to Brian. ‘‘This little lake is called Payson Lake. You need to work this stream north up to Liberty Lake and then this series of chain lakes’’—he unfolded the map—‘‘up to Williams Lake. The Smallhorns are in camp here. They were at the northeast end but it’s a fish camp and they move around the lake. You can see it’s a big lake—I think eight or nine miles long and a couple wide—so you might have to look for them.’’
He gave Brian the map and helped him unload his canoe and put his gear in it. Before doing anything else, still standing on the float of the plane, Brian folded the map so his locale was faceup and put it in one of the plastic bags to keep it waterproof. Then he waded ashore.
‘‘See you in the fall,’’ the pilot called.
He waited until Brian was well away from the plane, then fired up the engine and took off without looking back.
Brian had moved at once to the shore of the small lake, pulled the canoe up on a grassy flat area and repacked his equipment. He tied everything that was loose in the canoe to the cross-strut and covered it all with the tarp except for his bow and the quiver of arrows. If he fell or the canoe rolled he would not lose all his gear. He strung the bow, made certain the string was properly nocked at both ends, and put it within easy reach on the tarp. It wasn’t tied down but the bow and arrows floated and wouldn’t be lost if the canoe rolled over suddenly.
It was hot and Brian stripped to a pair of shorts, taking his T-shirt off and rolling it under the tarp. The life jacket was nearby but since he would be working near the shore in three feet of water and then up a small creek he didn’t feel like wearing it. It was not the safest thing to do—and he would wear it if he started into deep water—but the sun felt so nice on his bare skin that he wanted to be free for a time. For the same reason he took off his cap and rolled it up in a side pocket on one of the packs. The flies and mosquitos were bad—as bad as he’d ever seen them—but the little whiff of smoke now and then from the can in the bottom of the canoe kept them at bay.
He did not hurry. He thought he might never hurry again and he quickly dropped into what he sometimes thought of as woods time. It wasn’t about time so much as about knowing what was happening and where it was happening. He often remembered the wolf he had seen moving through the woods, listening to everything, seeing everything, taking its time to not miss whatever there was to see.
Brian did that now. A leaf that moved, a small bit of wind, the cry of a small bird—he breathed slowly, quietly, and paddled the canoe gently along the shore. He saw and heard it all, was as absolutely tuned to the woods as he’d ever been, and so was completely surprised when the deer jumped into the canoe.