He shook his head in commiseration, grinned suggestively, blew me a kiss, and turned to leave, but then couldn’t resist a final jab. Did he know the damage his words were doing, or was he biologically incapable of comprehending?
“I’ve had two papers accepted, you know, and I drew Jefferson’s animal behaviour course this year — hard to make a course like that bomb out, eh? But who knows? Maybe you can do something with the insect taxonomy course that will blow us all out of the water.” He disappeared down the hall, leaving me shaking with frustration at myself for letting him see my shock and the stinging tears in my eyes. At times like this I felt like a real loser even though I knew the jerk was exaggerating. I was good at what I did. I just had to convince myself of it somehow.
I tried to shift my focus away from my depressing thoughts and glanced at Ryan, who was securing the canoe. He had a million new freckles on his arms, legs, and face from the endless days of sun, and the rusty red baseball cap that hid his unruly red-blond hair seemed to have done little to prevent the sun from bleaching most of the red out. I smiled and remembered trying to count all those freckles once when we were kids on the farm: it had been like counting the grains of sand on a beach. We were so different, he and I.
I sighed and got up to tie my line around a large boulder at the base of a cliff that soared above us. The jumble of rocks at its base had once formed part of its face, now battered, craggy, and forlorn from years of losing pieces of itself.
The entrance to the portage trail was framed by the huge trunks of two large pine trees on a height of land. Ryan turned on his heel and disappeared into the woods to scout the rapids. I followed him down the soft earthen trail and saw him veer off the path in the direction of the rapids. We broke out of the bushes onto some sun-warmed, rust-streaked granite rocks overlooking the full force of the rapids.
“Would you take a look at that!” yelled Ryan from his position atop a huge boulder.
The words were whipped away by the wind and the thundering roar of the rapids. I clambered up beside him and looked at the roiling mass of suicidal waves at our feet. I glanced apprehensively at Ryan out of the corner of my eye. He was eyeballing the rapids with the look of someone possessed, and when he caught my glance I rolled my eyes in exasperation.
“No way, Ryan.”
“Aw, c’mon, Cor.” He gripped my arm and pointed. All either of us could see was the ominous white cauldron of water, torn here and there by jagged rocks and a fallen tree hanging out over the water. Further down I could just make out the telltale line where the river suddenly dropped from view as it plummeted over a series of unseen cliffs.
“We could canoe this far side,” said Ryan eagerly. “See? Over here. We take the route between those two boulders, veer sharply left to miss all the mess close to shore there, and then angle back to miss the shelf. We hug the shore and find a backwater just before the tree and the falls. Easy!”
“That’s what you said about the last one,” I yelled, “and we nearly skewered the canoe on that godawful rock just past the mini ledge!”
“Whose fault was that? You were in the bow!” shouted Ryan.
“Don’t remind me,” I said. I hated being in the bow, being the first one down into a boiling cauldron of water, madly trying to take the correct route to get us through. The person in the bow never got the respect they were due. All the stern had to do was follow the bow’s lead, but the bow? The bow had to choose the right route, usually with split-second precision and twenty-twenty vision, neither of which I was particularly blessed with.
“It didn’t look like a ledge when we scouted it!” Ryan protested as he looked back at the river, a look of disappointment on his face.
“You’d canoe Niagara Falls if you could,” I said, knowing there was a spark of truth to it. Ryan seemed to have no strong sense of his own mortality, but fortunately it wasn’t contagious. I suffered from no such illusions of immortality, especially when it came to a wet death.
I looked at the river again, shivering suddenly, as if the water already had me in its grip. “This’d kill us,” I said, and I shivered again as the spray misted my face and left me feeling strangely apprehensive.
Ryan suddenly caught me by the wrists, shaking me out of my thoughts, and pulled me close, whispering in my ear, “Lighten up Cordi, I’m only joking.”
He jumped off the boulder then and headed back into the coolness of the woods. Of course he was only joking. I knew that, so why had I let it bother me so much?
“Come on, lazy, let’s get the packs,” he shouted.
“Lazy? You call me lazy?” I yelled at Ryan’s disappearing back. “The only reason you wanted to run these rapids was so you wouldn’t have to portage the canoe.”
I could just hear Ryan’s answering chortle as I ran to catch up.
The sun was at its hottest, directly overhead, and the water looked deliciously cool as it gently cradled the canoe, but there was nowhere safe to swim, hot as we were. We’d just have to scout around for a good spot at the other end of the portage. Ryan’s pack was now light enough for him to hoist it onto his back without my help. Most of the food from our two-week trip was gone, but my pack — with the tent, sleeping bag, clothes, and my small collecting pack — remained the same. Ryan, no doubt feeling guilty, helped me on with my pack, which practically dwarfed my 5’6”, 120-pound frame. After two weeks I’d adjusted pretty well to the heft of it, and the growing strength in my arms and legs felt good. I adjusted the wide shoulder straps and pulled the leather tumpline over my forehead to take some of the weight off my shoulders and then took off ahead of Ryan.
I padded softly down the narrow trail, the needles of the pine trees on either side jiggling in the sunlight, dancing and leaping in the wind and sending shadows skittering across the path in front of me.
I slithered down a damp, rocky incline and felt the pack try to take me in one direction. I lurched the other way to compensate, just as a green beetle gyrated past my nose and landed ten feet in front of me, right on top of a large piece of some dead animal, its smell ripe and pungent. I came to a sudden halt, struggling to keep the pack’s momentum from taking me with it.
“For God’s sake, Cor. Give me some warning, will you?” said Ryan as he endeavoured to stop himself from slamming into me. But I ignored his flailing and kept my eye on the bug. I didn’t want to lose it.
“This one’s a beaut!” I said.
Ryan struggled up beside me.
“What’s a beaut?” He stopped dead, as the stench reached him. “Oh, Jesus! What’s the stink? Who died?”
“Probably part of a raccoon or porcupine, or maybe a deer. But there’s no hair so it’s impossible to tell.”
“You would call a dead raccoon a ‘beaut.’”
“Not the animal, Ryan. Take at look at what’s on it.”
“Oh, gross. This is revolting, Cordi. How can you stand the stink?” Ryan pulled his shirt up over his nose. “It’s crawling with bugs!” he said in disgust and looked away.
“They’re not bugs —”
“I know, I know.” Ryan cut me short, pitched his voice higher, and I heard my own words coming back at me. “‘All bugs are insects but not all insects are bugs.’ You biologists are all alike. But to me a bug is an insect is a bug. It’s such a good guttural sound. Why waste it? You can really wind your disgust around that one little word: bug.” He dropped his voice so low that “bug” came out sounding like a twin of “ugh.”
Ignoring Ryan’s diatribe, I pointed at the big green beetle balanced on a piece of the dead animal, its little antennae quivering in the wind, but Ryan kept his back studiously away from the beetle and moved upwind.
“Oh,