Jesus, what was I doing here? This couldn’t be happening to me. I felt as though I was being pulled apart and I was getting tired. All I wanted to do was sleep. The sun was overhead now, lunchtime. It seemed that years rolled by and I lived in a dream, and the dream got lighter and lighter, and then I felt the pressure of the rope and saw it tighten over the horizontal trunk of the tree above me. I felt some branches in the water tighten over my chest and the pull of the backpack on my shoulders. I lay suspended between two forces and waited. Suddenly Ryan was back, his hunting knife in his hand.
He yelled something at me and motioned to the straps on my shoulder. I felt his hands then as he groped for the straps and suddenly I swung forward with the current as the backpack released me. The branch slid through my hand as I struggled to hold on. And then the rope jerked me to a halt.
Ryan was hauling on the loose end trying to winch me out of the water, but my mind was floating up there with the sun as I clutched the underwater branch in my hand, as if it were the lifeline and not the rope.
“Let go, Cordi!” bellowed Ryan “Let go. For God’s sake, Cordi, let go!”
I could feel the sun and wind on my face and the roaring, rasping power of the water. I didn’t want to let go of my branch. It was my lifeline, wasn’t it?
“Let go!” The terror in Ryan’s voice seared into my brain; like an automaton, I reacted instinctively to the insistent fear in that voice, and I let go. Suddenly I was free of the river, winched back to safety, coughing and retching in the blessed sunshine, my mind numb. Ryan hauled me out of the water onto the tree trunk and hugged me in a grip almost as fierce as the river had hugged me moments before. I was awed by the tiny distance between life and death.
My legs felt like cement blocks as we struggled together along the fallen tree toward shore. We collapsed in a heap in each other’s arms on the sunlit rocks, inches from the water. We lay there side by side, holding each other, shivering, and neither one of us spoke. The sun still shone, warming us. The wind still blew as though nothing had happened, and yet we had nearly died.
I watched the slight breeze shifting the leaves overhead, smelled the soil and the leaf litter, felt the soft, rich earth beneath my clammy, clothes-covered body, felt the scratches on my face, the ache in my limbs, the warmth of the sun as the roaring surge of the rapids, constant and rough, thundered in my ears, setting my whole body on edge, the vibrations of that power dancing in my head, my body like a dishrag. I was limp and spent, but my mind was suddenly a kaleidoscope of thoughts, each one leading inevitably to the next, like water over the falls. I saw again the cliff that had risen straight up out of the bedrock by our canoe, jagged and crumbling, a scree of broken rock with boulders at its feet. I saw again something move at the top of the cliff and a flash of purple, caught and held by the sun, just before the boulder had come crashing down.
I lay there and heard the rapids calling my name, whispering death. I saw again the dead body, the pack in the tree, the aching emptiness of the camp, the golden fathomless stare of the cat, the chocolate bar — and the flash of purple where purple shouldn’t have been.
“We could have been killed.” Ryan’s voice was quiet, almost a whisper, and he rolled over and stared at me as he cradled his injured shoulder. His words hung between us, riding the roar of the rapids and magnifying the uneasiness I had felt at that deserted camp into the first tiny germ of fear.
chapter four
“What the hell are you doing in my truck?”
The angry voice bellowed through the woods, and I nearly dropped the radio phone that I was desperately trying to use as I let out an involuntary yelp.
An enormous man stood at the edge of the woods where the trail I had taken, after splitting up with Ryan to find help, had met an old logging road. He was clenching his huge meat cleaver hands, and the tendons in his bull-sized neck stood out like ropes tightened to the splitting point. I did drop the phone then. I could only imagine the angry expression on his huge face because it was covered completely in thick black curly hair, from the enormous mustache to the bushy eyebrows to the hair sweeping over his forehead like a waterfall. The weight of hair on his face alone looked heavier than I am. His small dark eyes looked incongruous in the huge face. Maybe in his genetic code eyes had been considered a perk and he’d cut back to save costs so that the rest of his body could be massive. They glinted at me like mica, as hard, dense, and unfeeling, the thoughts reflected there cold and inflexible, thoughts known only to himself, building up like steam behind his eyes.
I slowly got out of the truck, hands in the air, never taking my eyes off the guy, and very aware of my smaller size. Every movement was slow and deliberate. Like an unwanted stampede of butterflies I felt my body jarred by a shock of madly fluttering fear. If someone had just tried to kill us back there at the rapids, this guy was the perfect candidate. He’d had plenty of time to get back here ahead of us, and he was angry as hell. My thoughts were making me more and more nervous until it occurred to me that if he’d really wanted to kill us it would have made more sense to ambush us on the portage. Why wait until we left the portage for a road and risk having someone else chance upon us? I felt an enormous sense of relief at my own logic, but it was short-lived. I’d forgotten the critical information that he would have assumed we were both dead. I wished to God Ryan and I hadn’t split up to look for help.
I leaned against the open door of the truck, more to keep my legs from shaking than anything else, as the behemoth approached me. I thought about turning to run, but he reminded me so much of a bear that illogically I felt that that would just ensure my annihilation.
“Get your bloody hands off my truck,” he said in a strangely quiet voice. I preferred the roar. He grabbed the door that lay between us before I had a chance to move away, and I felt his strength through the door as he bumped it into me, catapulting me backwards as I flailed out to keep my balance. He eyed me over the top of the door, his hands gripping the edge of the partly opened window. They were huge with great ugly red newly minted scars slicing up from his fingers through his massive forearms. I looked behind him, hoping to see Ryan. I took a deep breath because that actually works sometimes and backed further away from the truck as he slammed the door shut with such force that the truck shook, and the sound fled down the road with its own echo on its heels.
“Sorry!” I held up my hands again, fear melting my legs into shaking jelly. Terribly undignified, but then my knees always knocked at public speaking contests at school. I pulled myself together and blurted out, “Sorry, but there’s been an awful accident …”
The man suddenly moved closer to me and I instinctively stepped back, but he followed and stood towering over me.
“Who the hell do you think you are?” He kicked the stones in front of me with his elephantine foot and they bit into my legs like needles. “You got a lot of nerve. You and your bloody tree-hugging friends.” His face was red and sweaty, and I could smell his anger mixed unpleasantly with my own fear. This guy was unpredictable, the rage smouldering behind his eyes, barely under control. Yet he wasn’t behaving like a man who wanted to kill me. He was more interested in his truck than in me. This gave me some confidence.
“I don’t know who you are, but I sure could use some help right about now.” My voice broke on the last word and I hurried on, hoping he hadn’t noticed. “I’m sorry about your truck but there’s a body up in the bush and I need a phone to call the police. Your truck was the first thing I came across and it has a phone. I need it.”
He glowered at me.
“Yeah sure, lady. I’ve heard ’em all,” he said, but his anger spluttered. He was about to say something else, seemed to think better of it, and said instead, “What body? Where?” His eyes narrowed to pinpoints, his anger suddenly turning into sharp-eyed interest, and something more. Was I imagining it? Or did he already know something about the body in the woods?
“It’s back up the portage trail, above the falls, maybe a mile. There’s a camp up there.”