The River at Night(20)

“Don’t you think it’s a little weird that they’ve left us behind like this?”

“You know they’re going to do what they’re going to do.” She put the knife and moleskin back in her pack, sat back on her haunches. “Let’s just enjoy the ride, okay? I mean, look at this place.” She laughed and threw up her arms. “This is soooo not my marriage, not my bills, my PTO conferences, my job. It’s our adventure, Win.”

“But you won’t leave me behind, will you?”

She looked at me. “Of course not.”

“Rory has a gun. I saw it—”

“How did—”

“It looked like he was keeping it hidden.”

She shrugged and reached for her socks and boots. “We’re in Maine, Win. In the woods. It’s not a bad thing to have.”

? ? ?

Back on the trail, we fell into a rhythm of walking together, me several yards behind but always keeping Sandra in view. I think we were both too tired to talk. We tramped through a marshy area, then across a series of wooden boards laid down over stretches of mud. I spotted cloven footprints deep in the black ooze and showed them to Sandra. We agreed they were deer, or maybe moose, but neither of us had any real idea.

The swamp gave way to old-growth groves of hardwood and birch trees. Orange and yellow mushrooms popped up in the rich decay of fallen trees, while chipmunks crisscrossed the trail at every turn.

As we climbed higher, the hardwoods thinned out, and we wandered among shoulder-high fir and spruce. Soon, even the conifers fell away. Above the tree line now, we walked on bedrock, scree kicking back behind us. Fairy-green lichen jeweled stone outcroppings. The air freshened on the ridge. To all sides, undulant mountains in heartbreaking shades of blue rolled off into soft clouds. The view stunned me, and I gasped. I don’t know why I was surprised to find such beauty. We followed the cairns that marked the trail—Pia had told us this curious name for these little piles of rocks—pausing to put on our fleeces as a cold wind whipped across bare stone.

Sandra and I stood side by side and looked down. A few hundred feet below us, a river, swollen and churning and alive, rounded a bend and plunged into pine forest. Even from our elevation we could see whitecaps. My stomach tightened. Through a break in the canopy of green just below us, smoke drifted up into the late-afternoon sky. As much as my feet screamed from inside my shoes as we descended the ridge to the campfire, I relished a small, private flame of pride that I had made it this far into this strange new world.





10


I thrashed my way along the last of the trail, which angled steeply down, following glimpses of Sandra as if she were my talisman. The thought that we would find food and shelter in any form gave me renewed energy. With every step the sound of the river grew louder until it inhabited the air around us.

In minutes Sandra and I stumbled into a clearing. An explosion of colorful gear took up much of the open space, except for a fire that burned cheerfully in the center of a circle of rocks. Six o’clock sun painted long shadows across the confusion of tents, backpacks, and sleeping bags. An orange-and-yellow raft with bright blue handles leaned up against a stand of trees. Five oars rested on the ground next to it. Rachel, cursing, knelt on one of two tents spread flat on the ground. She glanced up at us. “Wow, finally. I was about to start back and look for you guys.”

Sandra laughed as she let her pack slide off her shoulders onto a nearby rock. “Nice to see you too, Rachel.”

“Where’s Pia and Rory?” I asked.

Rachel looked up at me from her hands-and-knees position, her glasses slightly cockeyed on her still-mud-streaked nose and forehead. It occurred to me that here was a woman who might not age well, especially in the face. Too many of her emotions already lived there in ever-deepening lines around her eyes and mouth—even at age thirty-seven. But I loved her scrappy toughness; in fact, we all made fun of her for injecting her own Botox, and most of the time she took our ribbing with surprising good nature.

She sat back on her haunches. “Rory’s ‘showing Pia the river,’?” she said with heavy use of finger quotes. She rolled her eyes and got back to work on the tent.

I listened to the river, a constant but not unpleasant roar through the woods beyond us. Sandra pulled out a bag of raisins from her pack and offered me some. I couldn’t believe how hungry I was. The curved spine of Rachel’s tent sprang up with a snap.

“Would I be interrupting anything if I went down there to check it out?”

Rachel shrugged as an answer before disappearing into the tent. After a moment she crawled out, grabbed her sleeping bag, scuttled back in, and zipped the screen shut.

“Okay, we’ll be right back,” I said to the tent.

Though there was no trail I could detect, Sandra followed me through a short stretch of dense growth toward an opening where leaves glimmered, catching and holding what daylight remained. I had a vision of forest creatures watching us as we blundered toward their watering hole, fleeing back into the woods or standing, unblinking, one soft paw raised in wait.

I burst through the opening, landing on a narrow strip of sandy mud that gave under my shoes, so I launched myself onto one of hundreds of smooth stones scattered across the shallows. Silvery water trilled over rocks, never more than a couple feet deep as far as I could see, but the river was so much wider than I had imagined! Broad enough to surround a twenty-foot island shaggy with young cottonwoods, roots exposed in shallow soil eroded by the current. Basking in the sun’s last rays, Pia lay stretched out on a slab of shale in the middle of the river, one knee bent and one arm flung over her eyes. Perhaps asleep, perhaps not. A metal bucket sat next to her bare feet.