For minutes Kate and Ruby stood pressed together, melding into one entity, one bloodstream, two hearts, one beat. Mother and child.
The return to camp was slow. The men took turns carrying Snorri. Two at a time on either side, they carried him under his armpits. His thigh was badly cut, his ankle sprained or broken. When they reached Patriot Park, they rested and ate. David cleaned Snorri’s cut and splinted his ankle. They stayed through the rainy evening and wet night.
At dawn they gathered their things. Kate and David bid an emotional farewell to Hazel and Lucas. Abandoning Hazel to life with Justice Jenkins felt like a crime but Hazel would have called it “God’s will.”
Snorri hobbled between Dom and Quinn, his ankle blue and three times its normal size. David Tanner’s painkillers weren’t strong enough to mask the pain. But on the raft was a pharmacopeia of drugs, including morphine. As soon as they reached the river, David promised Snorri a shot.
From Patriot Park they climbed the path and passed through the split in the boulder, traversed the fire road, and wended their way beside Bargamin Creek back to the river where the canyon opened to the Main Fork of the Salmon, sometimes called River of No Return.
Around them, shadows hovered in the gray light. An assembly of creatures moving toward the river, creeping to the beach, scuttling on rocks, swooping overhead, splashing and diving, stepping to the water’s edge, commencing their discourse, and filling the prelapsarian air with creature speech. Sunrise flamed on the ridges and voluminous clouds sailed by like caravels, setting out to sea.
In elementary Italian, David tried to sing, “Pace, pace, mio Dio.” His voice rising and falling with his huge feelings for it looked exactly like the beginning or end of the world.
Quinn pushed the raft away from shore into the shallows, steadying it as Kate, Ruby, and Dom with Snorri leaning across his back, waded into the water and climbed aboard. David untied the mooring ropes, shoved the raft toward the current, and hopped into the stern.
Once again, they were heading west toward the confluence of the Salmon with the Snake, toward Oregon and the mighty Columbia, on to the great Pacific Ocean. Out of nearly nowhere into somewhere, back to the human world.