The River at Night(30)

“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.

Rory yelled over the water, “Wini, pull back! Backpaddle now!”

I did it but it felt wrong, as if I was just going with the river and what was the point of that? Pia and Rachel dug forward with everything they had while Sandra backpaddled with me. Our strokes felt uncoordinated and mindless, like we were all steering different rafts and Rory’s commands were gibberish. We found ourselves turning again until we raced sideways to the current, which began to push my side of the raft up and out of the water. Out of instinct I stood and heaved my body weight down on the hard rubber lip of the raft and watched Sandra do the same. Waves of cold water smacked our faces, washing over us, soaking us through.

We all cried out because what else could we do? We screamed out of fright but also a keen excitement—these were roller-coaster screams, zip-lining screams, taming-the-wild-Appaloosa screams; as out of control as we felt, we still had faith in Rory and his ability to harness the surging waters beneath us.

And then—bang!—we stopped, jammed sideways into a fallen tree, its long, heavy limbs combing the blue water that pulsed over them and muscled underneath, the raft shuddering and rippling as the river strong-armed us in place.

Rory leaned into the tree, one hand on a bright blue D ring. “Everybody all right?”

Stupefied, we all nodded. He vaulted out of the raft on the side closest to the bank and stood up. I was shocked to see the water was only waist-deep. Behind him the root system of the fallen tree loomed above us like a colossal black claw.

“Ladies,” he called to us over the noise of the river, “I’m not sure what happened here, but whatever it was, it can’t happen again, okay?”

We looked at him as if he were God.

“Actually, that’s not true. I know what happened. Sandra, what the hell were you doing back there?”

“I’m sorry,” she said, shivering. “I think I saw something.”

We all waited for her to elaborate. She didn’t.

“Like what?” he asked.

“A person or something.”

“Really.” Fear registered briefly on his face, followed by a look of impatience. “Nobody lives out here, trust me. Maybe it was a deer, or a juvenile moose, something like that?”

She gave her head a quick shake. “I don’t know. It was so fast. I could have been wrong, I guess.”

“How do you know nobody lives out here?” Rachel squinted in the glare, water beading on her lenses.

“We’re twenty-five, thirty-five miles from anything. We’ve got animals for company, that’s it.”

Pia looked at him, still visibly crushing. I started to wonder, Maybe she really does like the kid, in some kind of a real way, and vice versa. Hell, they both loved the outdoors; even beyond the sex there seemed to be a kind of sparkly repartee. Why was it so impossible for any of us to grant them the possibility that they might have something good going after all?

“I’m going to free us up from here,” Rory said. “Push us out. But you have to be ready. We’re about ten minutes from the Tooth. It’s our first white water, Class III, mostly, some II. It’s not our hardest today, but it’s not our easiest, because, guess what, I can’t arrange things in order of difficulty, ’cause this is nature. So I don’t care what you see, hear, feel, or whatever happens, you do what I say, when I say it, exactly how I say it. Are you with me? Are we good?”