“You think it was a bear?” he asked, as he struggled with his pack.
Ryan’s voice quavered on the word bear. Ryan wasn’t afraid of much, but he did have a pathological fear of bears. He’d once blasted a poor little mouse with the flare gun outside our tent when we were kids, thinking it was a bear. After all the screaming and yelling in the dark had died down he promised our parents he’d never use a flare gun again. He now uses pepper spray, and I watched as he struggled to get it out of his pack.
“I’m getting the hell out of here,” said Ryan as he moved away from the body, shook the can of pepper spray, and checked the nozzle. Not for the first time I wondered what would happen if the wind changed direction just after he used it, or the spray bounced off the bear and back at us. Three blinded creatures lashing out in panic. Charming thought. Perhaps a flare gun would be better after all. What a team we made. I was afraid of rapids and we were both afraid of bears. So why wasn’t I afraid now?
We figured our best bet to get help and still get out of the bush by nightfall was to portage our stuff and then go report the discovery of the body. The topographical map showed a lumber road near the end of the portage. We hoped we could flag down a lumber truck or something. The portage got progressively worse, with large sections of mud and swamp in the lower stretches of the trail. The rain in the last few nights had made everything a boggy, mucky mess. There were no recent signs that anyone had passed this way before us, and I wondered if the last person to travel this trail now lay dead by its side. At the end of the portage we dumped our gear and I emptied the specimens from my collection pack to lighten the load. It was pure habit. I never went anywhere without a collecting pack. You never knew what you might find.
“Cordi, why not just leave it this time? We don’t have time to collect with a wild bear out there.”
I swung the pack over one shoulder and, with Ryan twitching and jerking like a marionette on the lookout for bears, we retraced our steps back over the portage to get the canoe.
It still lay peacefully in the water, safely tied bow and stern to some small boulders where the cliff that soared above had given up some of its weight.
“You take the bow. I’ll get the stern,” I said above the din of the rapids. I untangled and untied my line and, holding tight to keep the canoe near the ledge, bent down and grabbed the gunnel.
Ryan was still struggling with the bowline. The canoe still had some water in it. We hadn’t done a good job of bailing after the last set of rapids. When we pulled it out of the water it would all come my way first.
“Hang on,” I said, as Ryan prepared to hoist it out. “No way I’m going to get soaked.”
I grabbed hold of the rock ledge with one hand and stepped into the canoe, letting the water sluice by my feet to the stern. The bailer was behind the stern seat where my bug collection was strapped and I reached back with my free hand, retrieved the bailer, and began to bail.
Ryan squatted down and held on to the gunnel amidships to steady her.
Suddenly I heard a sharp intake of breath and looked up to see Ryan reaching his free hand into a crevice among the rocks. “Would you take a look at this?”
When he pulled his hand out he was clutching a roll of film. It must have fallen out when we’d taken the packs out of the canoe. I thought of the hours of patience represented by that roll of film. He must have spent twenty to thirty hours stalking things or waiting patiently in a blind. I mentally went through all the pictures he’d taken, wondering how many of the really good ones he had almost lost. Good pictures were worth a lot of money. He had one he had sold over a hundred times, grossing twenty thousand bucks.
How the hell could he be so careless? As I went back to bailing, an osprey called out a short sharp squawk of alarm, and I looked up to see it veering away from the cliff that soared straight up above the rocky ledge where we’d moored the canoe. There was a blur of something purple on the clifftop, and as I looked I saw the cliff move; I watched as if in a trance as a boulder the size of a basketball tumbled down toward us against the cold blue sky and the unforgiving granite of the cliff face.
“Above you! Look out!” I yelled at Ryan, shaking myself out of the confusion of what I thought I had seen.
He looked up in alarm, twisting his body at the last moment, his face grimacing as the boulder glanced off his right shoulder. He slipped on the rocky ledge and fell sideways into the canoe.
The weight of his body jerked the canoe against the rock in an ugly scraping of fibreglass. My body was flung toward the rock as the canoe began to tip in toward it. I flung out my hands to grab the rock and prevent the gunnel from going under, but there was nothing to grip, and the canoe suddenly tilted dizzily in the other direction as Ryan tried to sit up.
I fought to keep myself from being flung out of the canoe and grabbed a paddle just as the current slammed against the canoe, catching the stern and swinging it around to face the rapids below.
“We’re going down backwards.” I yelled at Ryan. “Turn around!” He scrambled on all fours to the bow, now suddenly the stern, and grabbed his paddle. I just had time to glimpse an angry open cut on his shoulder and the blood streaming down his forearm before the river had us. I grabbed the gunnels, clutching my paddle firmly in my right hand, and swung my legs around in my seat so that I faced downstream.
“Jesus, Ryan, we’ll never make it!” I yelled, but my words were lost in the roaring of the raw power of the river. I looked ahead and stifled the panic building inside me.
The whole river ahead of me was torn up, shreds of water spewing everywhere, boiling, seething, and we were barrelling down toward that cauldron at a break-neck pace. Huge standing waves were breaking up in front of us, and two boulders were causing angry waves to jerk and thrash.
I gripped my paddle, eyeballed the river, and made a quick judgment, trying to remember what I had seen from the head of the rapids when we had joked about running them and I had thought about immortality. We would have to go right between the two boulders. Going left meant huge standing waves, and I could see water leaping up, the telltale signs of shallow water just beyond them. We’d never get by that. The boulders it would have to be, but we were too far right. We had to get the canoe over.
I thrust my paddle into the water, leaning way over the side of the canoe, and pulled the blade back toward the canoe to draw the bow to the left, waiting for Ryan to rudder the stern around to line us up so that we were pointed right between the boulders.
I could see the air bubbles churning over one of the rocks as the canoe swept down upon it, and just when I figured we were going to broadside Ryan pried the stern out and the canoe swept by the right boulder, missing it by inches.
I tried to remember what came after the boulders. What had Ryan pointed out? Hug the shore, take the ledge on the right, and eddy out before the waterfalls — or was it take the ledge on the left? I couldn’t remember what path to take. Everything looked so different now we were in the rapids.
Just ahead and to our right a jagged rock suddenly reared out of the water. I hoped I was right: we needed to go to the right of it, to give us a good chance of avoiding the ledge. I started paddling to draw the bow to the right, but the current was too fast and I frantically switched sides and pulled the bow left to avoid broad siding the rock. Ryan took my lead and we flew by on the wrong side.
We were in the centre of the rapids now, heading for the shelf, which I still couldn’t see. The foam and the spray washed over me as I strained to pick out our route.
And then, suddenly, I saw it: the long, low uninterrupted line of the shelf. We were too far to the right. We were on a collision course.
“Left!” I screamed into the wind, frantically leaning way out and pulling my paddle in toward the canoe to pull the bow over. The clamour of the rapids killed all other sound and my words were whipped away on the wind, but I knew, as long as Ryan was watching, that the meaning in my wildly pumping arms made it very clear