IT TOOK TWO DE HAVILLAND Otters to ferry the gear and the people to the canoes waiting in the malevolent forest along the Rivière de la Baleine. One whale, not two, or many.
The forest below was the color of dark dreams, the kind you rise through to a grateful waking.
The river was past spate, dropping, milky with soil and glacial dust. Du Pré shuddered. The water was cold, cold, cold.
Black soggy trees floated on, barely breaking the surface.
There would be logjams. There would be ice jams.
I live in a goddamned desert, Du Pré fumed. I am never going to go anywhere again that don’t have prickly pear cactus in sight.
Lucky was riding up with the pilot. Suddenly, they banked and dropped, flew over a long lake, turned once more, and set down. Du Pré flopped against the belts when the Otter eased down in the water. Waves raced to the shore.
There were three Indians standing on it, their clothes so stained with wood smoke that they were the color of old bark.
Du Pré helped shove the two canoes out of the Otter’s belly, one fiberglass freighter, one fiberglass half-ton, and he got down in the big canoe and caught the duffel Lucky tossed to him.
The plane with Bart and Eloise on it set down and taxied to a stop.
Lucky tossed bags swiftly. There was a lot of gear, broken down into fifty-pound nylon bags. Du Pré moved to the smaller canoe. When it was full, he caught the paddle from Lucky and dug for shore. The day was windless. The water was clear. He saw a pike in the weeds on the bottom, broad head pointed toward a school of minnows.
The three Indians waded out till the water got up to their ankles. One caught the painter Du Pré tossed, and pulled the canoe over the gravel and duff till it halted. They unloaded the gear. Lucky nosed in to shore and the other two helped him. By the time they were through, Bart had landed.
Du Pré looked up and saw a dark figure with a rifle behind a bush. Felix. He waved but didn’t take his eyes off the far shore or the sky. So Nappy would be with the birch-bark canoes.
An hour later, the Otters were gone and the lake was settling back to glassy smoothness.
They began to portage the gear over a rise to the river’s banks. The river had cut down into the rock and soil. The two big bark canoes were moored bow and stern, and a linked boom of logs curved round them.
Du Pré hadn’t seen Nappy yet, which was fine.
I don’t see him and I know that he is here.
“Any other planes, they come by?” said Du Pré to Felix.
Felix shook his head. “Up thirty thousand feet, maybe,” he said. He kept flicking his eyes here and there. “But all they got to do is wait. We just got the one river, you know, goes the one way. So.”
Logjams, ice, cold, wet, rain, freeze-dried food, snipers, thought Du Pré. I am not an adventurous man. But I will be one. He thought of the two little girls dead and bleeding in the cabinet.
By sundown, they had the gear and canoes down to the water. They set up a camp. Lucky and Du Pré got the early watch, two to sunrise. They were tired from the flying and the lifting and hauling. Du Pré ate a can of tuna and gnawed at a roll of fruit leather and didn’t bother to find any of the Canadian whiskey he had somewhere in the mound of duffel.
He crawled into the tent and slipped off his boots and stuck them outside upside down on the boot stakes. He slid into the bag and after it warmed a little he slipped off his pants and heavy shirt and piled them under the bag’s flap for a pillow. The air was damp and close and smoke from the fire wandered in. He woke up sneezing once, then didn’t wake until Lucky pulled his foot.
Du Pré went up the river a quarter mile to a sort of blind Nappy had built, a place where he could see a long stretch of water. Lucky was over by the big lake and Guillaume was downstream, high up in a tree so he could actually see the campsite if anyone came into it. Not a really tight arrangement.
This Hydro-Quebec, they probably hire retired commandos, thought Du Pré, shivering in the frost. Why worry, I’ll be dead before I know it. He opened the bolt of the hunting rifle and checked the shell in the chamber and the safety.
Benetsee. Benetsee. I need to talk to him, even on Bart’s magic telephone. The old man would hate that thing. Any shithead can talk on it from anywhere. Don’t need the coyotes and ravens.
Nothing happened all night except that it got damned cold, and when the sun gleamed up in the east and the air inversion began, it sucked all the heat out of Du Pré’s body. He was shivering when he walked back to the camp.
They had a hot breakfast of oatmeal and raisins and coffee.
They began to sort and load.
A dead caribou floated past, bloated enough to ride high in the water.
Like the last time, Du Pré and Nappy would ride point and Bart and Bart’s magic telephone would ride in the rear. The only person who was on this trip who was inexperienced, Bart could be expected to float past the others if anything happened.
“We dig you a nice grave,” said Du Pré.
“Fuck you,” said Bart.
Du Pré and Nappy shoved off and floated out to the fastest current. They swung to and headed downriver, getting perhaps a mile ahead of the others, so that if there was a bad spot and they dumped, one or another dripping scout could make it back upriver to warn the rest of the party.
“Let’s not go over,” said Du Pré to Nappy. “I don’t want to do this whole trip with my nuts up between my lungs.”
“Yo,” said Nappy.
The river was straight and smooth. It cut some, but not much, into the shield rock of eastern Canada, tough granite. The soil was not all that deep and the trees were not as large and more closely bunched than in the great forests to the west.
Hunters would starve here, Du Pré thought. This is some tough country, green or not.
Rafts of slush bobbed in the calmer waters toward the shore.
The forest was silent—no birds, no squirrels chirring indignantly at invaders. The sun rose higher and the fog rose, tendrils and tentacles writhing in the sun.
They hove to at the end of a long, calm stretch and waited till the first of the freighters came into view. The paddlers didn’t wave, so everything was all right.
Du Pré’s hands were stiff and he had a cramp in the left one, a knotting charley-horse. He pressed hard against the thwart to stretch the muscles.
They ate a little while paddling. When the sun was two hours from setting, Nappy pointed to a flattish meadowland with a couple sand eskers running at the far side. They were even and looked like berms.
“What did these?” said Du Pré to Nappy.
“Old riverbeds used to run on top of the ice,” said Nappy.
Tough country, Du Pré thought.
By the time he had finished his cigarette, the other canoes were nosing in.
He went down to help off-load.
He looked at the sky, hoping for ravens.