It was still raining at 4 A.M. when Ben woke Harry. The rain was a steady thrum with the taste of sleet in it. Full dark, and a north wind rattling the tent walls. He handed Harry a cup of hot tea, black and bitter as the weather. Two hours until sunrise. “There’s that little inlet downstream aways,” he said. “Good spot to set out the blocks. I heard ducks moving awhile back, high on the wind, a big flock of ’em.”
“What flavor?”
He shook his head. “Too dark to see, but from their talk I’d swear they were bluebills.”
“Scaup? But it’s way too early for them, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, they usually don’t show till November, when there’s skim ice on the water. But with this freaky weather we’ve been having lately, who knows?”
“Global warming,” Harry said. “It’s fucked everything, even the seasons.”
They ate another thrombotic breakfast—fried eggs, fatty bacon, toast slathered with butter and hunks of rattrap cheese to top it off, delicious—then broke camp, loaded the canoe, and set off downriver. Jake could hear the ducks pass overhead. Silk slashed by a knifing wind. He looked up into the rain and shivered. He whined and mumbled to himself. Waiting.
Short of the cove they pulled ashore. Ben tied the canoe to an ice-sheathed popple trunk and they pulled out the bag of decoys. They waded down the bank to the inlet, skidding on shallow rocks. The water was cold through their waders. A small knot of ducks held against the northwest bank, heads tucked snug beneath the random wind. Redheads or canvas-backs by the way they swam, blocky and low slung, tails down in the water. It was still too dark to distinguish color.
“We’ll have to move them out of here,” Ben whispered. “That’s where I want to put the spread.” He sent Jake around the inlet with instructions to spook the ducks. When they’d flown, the men moved. They waded out into the lee and placed the decoys, unwinding anchor lines stiff with frozen sleet. “Leave a nice-sized hole in the middle of the spread to draw new arrivals,” Ben said.
“Yeah, Benjamin, this isn’t the first time I’ve ever been duck hunting.”
“Sorry, Doc.”
Back on the bank they cobbled together a makeshift blind of juniper branches. Ben hacked them with his K-Bar and Harry stuck their butts in the mud, interwove the tough, soft-needled branches. Then they sat behind their dark green wall and shivered, waiting for first light. From time to time, eyes cocked skyward under the brim of his cap, Ben gave a come-hither purr on his call, alternating it with a low throaty whistle or a loud, impatient scaup! scaup! scaup!
The sky overhead was shading from black to charcoal gray and then they could see streamers of low black ragged cloud wavering across it from the northwest. Fine weather for ducks. Shifting clots of them blew through, yammering at each other, too high and determined just yet to respond to the call’s seductions. Then a band of pale light appeared above the eastern horizon.
They crouched lower in the blind. Ben called, two loud blats. Jake shuddered. Harry put his hand on the nape of the dog’s neck and felt its warmth melt the sleet. “Easy boy.” Ben’s upturned eyes were fixed on something now, they circled, the call purred again, soft and happy. He nodded his head. They were coming. Harry kept his head down and listened, heard a rip overhead, the soft quick flap of slowing wings. The birds circled once, twice, then on the instant they were committed.
The old men stood and there they were, a dozen bluebills cupped and dropping toward the water, black chests and glossy dark green heads, white breasts and wings, scrubbing off speed, tilting from side to side, webbed feet the color of cold slate sprawled out before them like dive brakes. A perfect toll.
They fired and fired again.
Four birds hit the water.
Ben threw a hand signal. “Fetch dead, boy.”
Jake was over the top of the blind and gone in a long, low racing dive, murmuring low in his chest. He’d marked the birds as they fell and surged toward them, ignoring the decoys.
The men broke their guns and pocketed the hot, still smoking hulls.
“Six ducks each is the limit” Ben said. “But I call this a day.”
Harry agreed. “We can’t eat more than two apiece.”
By the time Jake had the ducks ashore they had torn down the blind, recovered the decoys, and were ready to go.
“What’s next?”
Ben looked out into the mainstream, the racing whitewater. “Gitche Gumee.”
A fast hard run with the power of the Firesteel fueling their arms and backs. Wind and rain slashed their faces. The salmon were running too, but against the current. The men could see them working along the bottom, dark bronze with the mating urge that would end in a tattered, misshapen death. Brighter fish too, bigger and stronger than the kings and cohoes—steelhead. But a madness was in the men now, the fury of the river, and they could not pause for the cerebration required: fly selection, casting angles, knots and mends and retrieves. You move when the mood is upon you. All urgencies end in death. Upstream or down.
The river sweeps left, then right. In the distance the men can see the highway bridge and beyond it the combers of Gitche Gumee whitecapped and booming as they emerge from an endless fog-bank. The canoe is moving fast on the strength of the Firesteel, closer, closer—a quarter mile to go now, two hundred yards . . .
Parked at the bridge is Ben’s rust-scabbed Ford F-250. Men in camouflage slickers stand in its lee, huddled low against the rain. They carry rifles. Squatting on its skids beside the highway, Cardigan’s helicopter, the color and shape of a wet sand dune. Its rotors are idling. Someone spots the canoe and points. His words are carried away by the wind. A figure emerges from the truck. Cardigan, dressed in a Barbour coat. He trots over to the chopper and climbs aboard. Little Ned reaches out from the cockpit to give him a hand up. The men with the rifles fan out, sprawl prone behind the riprap in shooting positions. The Huey lifts off, tilts sideways against the wind, and whupwhups its way toward the canoe.
“You men are under arrest.” Baby Ned on the bullhorn. “You are fugitives from the law. You killed game out of season. You trespassed on posted property. You murdered a helpless and valuable research animal. You discharged a firearm within 100 feet of an occupied dwelling. Throw your weapons over the side and pull in to the bank immediately. Or we will commence firing.”
The Huey hovers overhead now, the downdraft from its rotors further roiling the water. Gun muzzles protrude from the side hatch. Cardigan kneels in there, haughty and triumphant. The chopper veers off to achieve a better firing angle.
Ben flips Fritz the finger and the guns open fire. A gust from the lake whirls fog around the chopper and tilts it off balance. Harry grabs his shotgun and fires a load of goose shot at the blurring rotors. One of the blades sheers off near the rotor cap and the helicopter veers landward. The rifles from the shore pop shots at the bouncing canoe but the bullets fly wide or ricochet off the water—they score not a single hit.
The debate is over. They’ve reached the twisted, rain-swollen stretch of raging rapids that nearly killed them fifty years ago. The Haystack looms out of the fog. They can still opt for an easy way out, leave the river and surrender, or hit for the far bank, split into the woods, elude Cardigan and his thugs, and hike to the highway, hire someone in town to drive them to Canada.
But they cannot do that. Boys will be boys.
They see Gitche Gumee glimmering cold and black as steel beneath the mist. It draws them on as it always has.
Beyond the fog bank, far far away, lies Canada. Or possibly death.
One last shot of adrenaline before they go.
“Fuck it,” Ben says. “Don’t mean nothin’. Drive on.”
Jake thumps his tail in agreement.
The paddles dig for darkness.
It never ends in comfort.