“Well, shit.”
After crashing blindly through dense forest for an eternity, Pender stumbled into the open and teetered on the edge of a small bog. Probably a lake twenty years ago, now a murky swamp choked with plant life and oozing black water as viscous as oil.
He sighed. The best part of this little side trip had been the getting here. A mile with no trail, crashing through the bush, navigating by dead reckoning with a compass. Not an outing for the faint hearted. Following compass headings in dense brush and forest, with the land constantly falling away or rising, was as much art as science.
He hoisted the heavy food pack on his shoulders and started the long trek back. It would have been easier if he’d left the food pack with the canoe and his other gear, but he didn’t want to risk losing his food to a marauding bear.
As he dodged and grunted through the thick foliage and steep bluffs, he let his mind roam. Annette’s image floated forth from his memories, back when it started between them.
Sitting on the steps of the library, still arguing about the papers they were working on for Modern American Authors. It was cold. The kind of cold that brought color to the face of a pretty girl, let you see the vapors of your breath mingle with hers. Cold enough that it felt good to sit with their bodies touching because it was warm.
“Why do you argue all the time?” She was smiling, but she was serious, too.
“It brings out the best in you.”
“By making me angry?”
“No.” Pender blew on his hands to warm them in the chill. “By bringing out the real you. Making you stick up for yourself.”
“Instead of what?”
“Sticking with the script. Saying what you’re supposed to say. There’s a lot more to you than those ‘make love not war’ stiffs.”
“Those are my friends. We share an ideal.”
“No, you have the ideals. They recite the lines like parrots and wait for their hit on the roach. You have honesty and depth.”
“That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
It had never occurred to him that such a beautiful woman cared what he thought. It put her in a different context. Suddenly it was personal, and it overpowered him. His heart raced. His mouth went dry.
“What are you thinking?” There was doubt in her voice, like she wasn’t sure what he’d say. Her, the most beautiful girl on campus.
The only thing he could think of was how lovely she was and how soft her lips must be and that if she were his girlfriend, he’d be with her every minute, not like that jackass she was seeing now.
“What?” she said again. “Are you making fun of me?”
He shook his head no. Words wouldn’t come to him.
She read him. Against all odds, she read him and just like that leaned over and kissed him, soft and long. He could feel her skin, her breath, her body pivoting to his. They sprawled on the steps of the library, locked in embrace. He inhaled her scent—fresh air, faint lilacs, something else, velvety and distant.
They embraced passionately until other students started teasing them. They stood, smiled at each other a little sheepishly, and began walking. Annette abruptly stopped and turned in front of Pender.
“Was that real or are you just trying to get in my pants?”
“It was real.”
“I bet. You probably bed a different girl every week.”
“Not even every year.”
“Right.”
“I’ll wake up tomorrow still remembering what you smell like and what your body feels like, and I’ll go crazy thinking that you’re waking up with Senator Peabody or whatever your boyfriend’s name is. So, yeah, it’s real.”
She put her fingers on his lips. “Rob and I broke up a couple weeks ago.”
“You dumped Boy Wonder?”
“He dumped me.” She smiled, maybe covering the hurt. “Lots of girls are interested in him. I think he needs to take a taste test.”
“He doesn’t deserve you.”
“He’s got his faults, but his work is important. And people look up to him.”
“Yeah, people looked up to Hitler and Stalin, too. You’re too good for him.”
“Too good for the most popular guy on campus?”
“Yeah. Way too good. Too beautiful. Too smart. Too . . .” He searched for a word. “Too deep.”
“You know all this about me after one kiss?”
“No, after a month of wondering why the hell it hurt so much that you didn’t like me.”
So began their affair.
Pender’s recollections were shattered as the baseball-sized stones under his right foot gave way. He fell hard, before he knew he was falling, and hit on his back and tailbone and slid down the steep slope. The pack saved his head from banging against the rocks, but his back and tailbone were shot with pain.
He lay still for a moment, assessing the damage. His back throbbed, but he could move his fingers and toes and head. He unfastened the pack and wriggled out of the shoulder harness. More agony gripped his lower back. He had to hold his breath to withstand the shock. He calmed his body so he could breathe. When he was ready, he took a deep breath, held it, and forced himself into a sitting position. He could feel something like a red-hot poker being shoved down his spine. It made him gasp. When the worst passed, he pivoted onto his knees, holding his breath, clinching his teeth to work through the pain.
He tried to stand, cried out, and bent forward, hands on thighs, to arrest the fire shooting through his back and down his right leg. Standing brought tears to his eyes, but he willed himself to remain upright. When the initial shock receded, he tried to stretch his lower back. First he did toe-touches, then tried to swivel his hips slowly to each side, then lay down awkwardly on his back and pulled his knees to his chest. Each change of position brought agony and curses, but he pushed on.
Ten minutes later, Pender rolled onto his knees and used a sapling to lift himself to a standing position. The pain was almost tolerable once he was erect, but each change of position brought body-freezing tentacles of anguish. Holding the sapling, he tested his ability to take steps. When he thought he could walk, he eyed the food pack. He thought if he could get it on his back without passing out, he could make it the rest of the way.
He positioned the pack on a gentle slope and sat in front of it, yelping and seeing stars as he swiveled into place. He looped his arms into the harness, and when he felt he could handle the pain, he struggled to his feet. Lightning bolts shot through his back with an intensity that made him hold his breath. It passed, but he knew his first step downhill would be excruciating. He focused on the next step, then the next, swinging his hands from tree to tree as he slowly shuffled down the slope. He scaled down one slope and up the next one. By the time he got back to his gear, the piercing fire in his lower spine that made him curse and tear up had given way to a throbbing ache.
Pender had hidden the rest of his gear just inside the tree line to avoid attention from rangers or passing trippers. As he reached it, his peripheral vision picked up movement on the lake. He slid behind cover and watched a canoe moving north at a rapid clip. He blinked. The paddlers looked a lot like the fat fishermen, big and strong and fast.
Jesus, he thought, could it be? How in the hell would they figure him for this lake? There were dozens of other possibilities. Maybe a hundred. And how could they have this much time? It wasn’t like he’d stolen the family fortune or something.
As they disappeared in the northern reaches of the lake, he wondered what he should do. He needed to paddle for the rest of the day to make his rendezvous with Annette on time, but he wasn’t sure he could paddle at all. Even if he could, in his damaged condition, if the fat boys saw him, they would overtake him easily, and he was in no shape to defend himself.
He pulled his gear farther back into the tree line and looked for a place to camp.
Annette paddled the solo canoe with easy efficiency, spacing short, smooth paddle strokes to get the maximum glide from her boat. By lunchtime she had already covered ten miles of open water and portaged into the first of a chain of small lakes. She paused to update her trip planning book occasionally, noting the condition of established campsites and portage trails along the way.
As Annette’s mind wandered from thought to thought, she imagined running into the arrogant Stuart party; they had come this way a few days earlier. She imagined finding them in trouble and having to blow off Pender to get them to safety.
She pushed the thought from her mind.
At the far end of the lake, she scanned the shoreline for signs of a creek, found it, a dark opening in the tree line flanked by a large sloping rock on one side and a pine forest on the other.
As she approached the take-out, a huge bull moose lumbered out of the brush into the shallows and stared at her. Annette stopped her canoe abruptly, keeping a respectful distance from him. He was all of six feet tall at the shoulder, and his antlers reached close to ten feet high. He weighed more than a half ton, and he was the king of the northwoods. Only a fool would challenge him.
The moose plunged his head into the water and emerged with a mouthful of shoots. He eyed her casually as he chewed, no fear in his gaze, not even wariness. After another mouthful, he moseyed off, slower than slow motion, and faded into the woods like a ghost—one moment a lumbering giant, the next, a memory.
Annette paused a beat to savor the encounter. As often as she had come upon moose and bear and otter and the other creatures of the Canadian Shield, it never got old. The encounter jogged her memory of another meeting, one she’d never forget. It had come deep in the park on a solo trip just like this one. She had passed close to a wooded island just a few feet from the mainland and looked up to see a mother wolf staring at her while her cubs rolled on the ground behind her, playing, oblivious to the human interloper. Mama Wolf had been on full alert, her ears up, her eyes never moving from Annette. But she was curious, too. She probably had never seen a human so close before. Annette had stopped and stared, letting her mind take in the details of the wolf, her bright eyes, her elegant coat, clean with just a few fringes of molted hair from the summer shedding, long legs, strong body.
“You are so beautiful.” Annette had spoken softly to the wolf, hoping to extend the moment. She kept speaking, putting into words the beauty she saw, how cute the cubs were, how much she hoped they would all survive the winter.
It had lasted for just a minute. Then the wolf had gathered her cubs and trotted them down the shore, across the channel to the mainland, and disappeared into the forest.
Annette had dreamed of that encounter many times in the intervening years, and the familiar memory got her through the short portage into the next lake. She handled the weight of her pack and canoe with the ease of a young man in good shape. Only a few other local women could haul such a big load such a long distance, and they were in their twenties or thirties. When it came to paddling and portaging, Annette was in a granny class all by herself.