Pender could no longer keep a steady paddling cadence. He could barely lift the paddle from the water at the end of the stroke. He labored to bring the blade forward and splashed it into the water on his fore-stroke, like a beaver tail slapping the water.
Annette thought about having him stop, but the effort was keeping him warm, and as anemic as his paddling strokes were, they helped a little.
She tried to make time. She paddled at a driving pace, switching sides when the wind and waves dictated it—three or four strokes on the right, correcting stroke on the left, two or three more left strokes, correcting stroke on the right.
Despite the loss of paddling power, they were flying across Pickerel Lake, pushed by a strong wind with occasional shirt-flapping gusts. Annette figured their speed for something around six miles per hour. Compared to maybe three or four with two healthy paddlers in still winds and seas. Yet their progress seemed agonizingly slow and, the slower she felt, the faster her mind raced. Should she run for shore? Minutes after they started paddling again, they passed the low island Pender had sighted for a landmark. It was the last place on Pickerel that Annette knew had an easily accessible campsite. The khaki woman in the solo boat twenty feet behind her had stopped moaning, but she would be freezing cold now, or in shock, or both.
The woman’s husband was sprawled in front of Annette, passed out, his body positioned under a thwart and the canoe yoke. He was in bad shape—blue lips, occasional shakes, passing in and out of consciousness. He was hypothermic or close to it. And Pender worked the paddle like a dying man, barely able to stay upright.
Should she get them to shore? Pitch a tent, pull out sleeping bags? Get a fire going?
She started to course-correct for the island and changed her mind. Did they even have a tent in any of the packs that were left? Did they have sleeping bags? Did they have food? Pender had jettisoned the only pack she knew had food in it and the gear pack that had their tents in it. Just getting these people warm might not save them. They needed calories, she thought.
They were seven miles from French Lake. Annette tried to calculate the travel time. At five miles per hour, an hour and a half. At six miles per hour, an hour and minutes. If she went for the island, it would take ten minutes to get there, ten more to get everyone on land, maybe twenty, another twenty minutes to off-load the packs and find a tent and sleeping bags. If they had a tent and sleeping bags. Another ten minutes to erect the tent. Another ten to inflate pads—if they had pads. Twenty minutes to find wood and start a fire. About the same amount of time as continuing on to French Lake. Plus they’d probably be on the island without food.
She focused on French Lake. She prayed someone would be there to put the sick and ailing in warm vehicles, whisk them off to Atikokan General, put hot fluids in them, a hot meal. God help us if no one’s there, she thought. She would have dead people on her conscience. She just didn’t know which of them would die. Maybe they all would. How would she deal with that? How could she deal with losing Pender? Not now, she thought, not after all this. They had waited a lifetime.
Thirty minutes later, she could see the two arms of land hooking across the east end of Pickerel. The one from the north stretched like a long, narrow pincer, low and flat, almost to the opposite shore. The one from the south a short, blunt point, a landmark called The Pines. Almost home, she thought. She could see the narrow passage between the points into the east bay, could visualize the quick two-kilometer crossing to the bog that marked the path of the Pickerel River. She could visualize the placid, twisting waterway ending in French Lake.
She checked the khaki man again. He was still breathing, still moving a little now and then. He was still alive. Who knew for how long? Pender was on the edge. His paddling rate had descended into a weak pantomime, seconds elapsing between strokes, his pull on the blade so feeble it no longer affected the boat.
As Annette thought it, Pender slumped headfirst toward the prow, jolting to a stop when his waist could bend no further. The paddle slipped from his grasp, splashed into the lake, and floated into Annette’s outstretched hand as the canoe overtook it. She wanted desperately to hold him and warm him and tell him how much she loved him. But there wasn’t time. They had to get to the take-out, or people would start dying.
Pender pushed himself erect with an effort that sapped his last reservoir of strength. He tried to hold himself in a sitting position, but his body had shut down. His vision turned to blackness, and he lost all feeling in his body. He could not tell up from down, could no longer hear or think or will his body to do anything. He fell backward, over the thwart behind his seat, landing on Chaos, who yelped with surprise. His back seemed impossibly arched over the thwart, Annette fearing a fracture. Seconds later, he groaned loud enough for her to hear, a painful groan, and lifted his feet onto the seat. He pushed his torso backward in the boat until his head hit the yuppie man’s body, his back flat on the bottom of the canoe, his calves resting on the thwart, his head between the yuppie man’s legs. And he passed out.
Annette stifled an involuntary moan. He was dying. And there was nothing she could do. He would be dead before . . . The thought made her choke. He might be dead now. She cursed the khaki couple in a silent rage. She cursed them and all people who gave nothing and took all. Pender was right. They were everywhere. Self-absorbed morons entitled to whatever they wanted, when they wanted it. The warmongers in the U.S., the ruthless capitalist wannabes in Ontario with their contempt for wilderness, their obsession with strip-mining and clear-cutting and “monetizing” the people’s assets.
Her rage fueled a furious paddling cadence. They were on the pinch point in minutes. She knifed through the pincers, cutting left around one point, then a circle turn ninety-degrees to head east-northeast again. It was a perilous turn. For a few seconds, they were broadside to the waves. The water lapped at the very top of the canoe. She feared her boat would take water, maybe enough to drown the two men, maybe just enough to send them into full hypothermia. She wondered if the waves and wind would somehow capsize the boat with the yuppie lady in it. If that happened, Annette knew she would leave the woman to her own fate. You were right, Gabe, she thought. Sometimes there’s no right answer.
Minutes later, she entered the Pickerel River delta, a soggy, confusing lowland filled with reeds and marsh plants. It was a classic bog waterway, twisting and turning in every direction, its current almost invisible. From countless journeys through the marsh, she knew the river cut south from the opening, even though your eyes told you it had to be the body of water continuing north-northeast. Annette slowed her hull speed to make sure she had plenty of space for her train of canoes to negotiate the tight curves. Fifteen minutes later, the river opened to a pond, the southwest terminus of French Lake. Home at last!
Spirits buoyed, she searched the far shore for any sign of human help. She started to cut northeast toward the park pavilion, where there would a be telephone and maybe a ranger, then saw two human figures on the sand beach near Baptism Creek just a hundred yards or so to her right. There was a parking lot just above the beach. She tried not to hope one of the people was Christy, just hoped they had a car or a van and a willingness to help.
Annette glanced again at Pender and the yuppie man. They looked dead. Their faces were an unearthly white, their lips blue. She couldn’t tell if they were breathing. She charged for the beach, hoping the figure there that looked like Christy was Christy.
Fifty yards away, she could see that it was Christy and she was yelling to someone back up the wooded trail behind her, a short trail that led to the parking lot. Chalk one up for a benign, interactive god, Pender, Annette thought. As she hit the sandy shallows, Christy splashed into the water to pull the canoe ashore, Chaos leaped out of the canoe and ran mindlessly on the beach. Eric, Annette’s CSO assistant, burst onto the beach from the trail.
Annette fell into Christy’s hug and then leaned on her daughter to get out of the canoe.
“These people are dying,” she said. “We have to get them to the hospital.”
Christy looked at the two men in the bottom of her mother’s canoe. “They might be dead, Mom.”
Annette felt Pender’s wrist for a pulse. It was there. Faint, very rapid. Not normal but not dead.
“Is that Gabe?” asked Christy.
Annette nodded, choked on a sob, moved to the yuppie man and checked his pulse. It was faint but stronger than Pender’s. It figured.
Eric trotted to join them. He waded into the water, looked at the bodies in the canoe, turned pale, ran up on the beach, and vomited.
“They aren’t dead, you idiot,” Christy yelled at him. “Help me get them up to the van.”
Annette reeled in the solo boats, beached Pender’s long, slender vessel, bent to check the khaki woman’s pulse, trying not to think that if anyone deserved to die, it was her. When Annette grasped the woman’s wrist, her eyes opened, clear and blue. She blinked a few times. “Where are we?” she asked.
“We’re at French Lake. We’re taking your husband and my friend to the hospital. Can you walk?”
The woman struggled to a sitting position. “I’ll try.”
Annette helped her sit on the beach, then joined Christy and Eric to carry Pender and the khaki woman’s husband to the van. She came back to help the woman negotiate the trail to the van and gestured for her to sit on the seat where her husband lay.
Annette called Chaos, who jumped into the van and began investigating every nook and corner. She slid into the farthest seat, where Pender was lying, eyes closed, skin deathly white. The khaki woman was still standing in the open door frame, disoriented, reluctant to sit next to her husband, who looked dead. “We’re leaving right now,” Annette screamed. “Get in!”
The woman started to object.
“In or out! We’re leaving!”
Eric watched the interplay with an open mouth. Christy slid behind the steering wheel, a grim smile on her face. “All aboard!”
The woman got in, fumbled with the door. Eric got out, closed it, and then got back in. Christy sped out in a cloud of rocks and dust, Eric grabbing for his seatbelt, the yuppie woman pitching against the seat.
Annette covered Pender’s upper body with her torso and tried to rub his arms and legs with her hands. His breathing was shallow and weak. She thought he might stop breathing at any moment, thought about what she should do then. Artificial respiration? Strike his chest to stimulate the heart to beat again? She tried to visualize it. She was crying aloud. Couldn’t stop. It was the only thing keeping her going.
Christy made the run from to Atikokan at 140 kilometers per hour on Kings Highway 11.
Atikokan General Hospital was a rural, forty-one-bed facility with a staff of a half dozen family-medicine doctors dispensing care to the several thousand residents of Atikokan and thousands more spread across hundreds of square miles of the Canadian Shield. The derecho had kept the staff hopping, though—miraculously—only a few Quetico canoeists had been seriously injured, none fatally.
Christy called ahead, so the on-call physician and two EMTs were waiting as they pulled in. They rushed Pender and the khaki man, still unconscious, into the ER on gurneys. The khaki woman entered in a wheelchair.
Thirty minutes later, the physician came out to the waiting area to speak with Annette and Christy. In a small town, Dr. Mary Bonet was their family doctor and a friend.
“They’re alive, but it’s going to be touch and go for a while,” Bonet started. “They’re both hypothermic. We have them on oxygen and IVs, and I’ve started them on antibiotics. We packed them in heated blankets to get their body temperatures back to normal. I’m especially worried about the older man. He has chest congestion and a fever, and his pulse is racing. He could be developing pneumonia.”
“But he’s going to be okay?” Annette asked.
“It’s too soon to tell. He’s in trouble. We’ll have to monitor him closely for the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours.”
Annette closed her eyes and pursed her lips. Good God, not now.
Bonet paused for a moment. “The woman’s health is okay, but she is very agitated over the loss of their equipment and the fact that they are going to miss an important series of dates in various places. She may need to be sedated.”
Annette shook her head.
“Are they customers of yours?” Bonet asked.
“No,” said Annette. “The older man is a friend of mine from long ago. He was my college boyfriend. We ran into that couple on the portage into Pickerel and then fished them out of the water when they capsized. I don’t know anything about them except the lady wore the most stylish clothes I’ve ever seen in the wilderness, and she acted more like royalty than a canoe-tripper.”
Bonet’s eyes widened. It wasn’t like Annette to take such exception to anyone.
Annette hung her head and cried. Christy put her arms around her mother and held her. Bonet put one hand on Annette’s back, her other on Christy’s. “Don’t give up hope,” she said. “He’s in good shape. He’s got a chance.”
“He risked his life to save those fools,” Annette sobbed. “Can you believe that?”
When she recovered, she sat with the registration clerk. The information she had to share was sketchy. She presumed the khaki people’s identification documents went down with their gear in Pickerel Lake, and she knew Pender’s went down when he jettisoned the packs to save the yuppie man. It was surprising, really, how little she knew about Pender. She gave the clerk his name and his last known address, along with the certain knowledge that he didn’t live there anymore. She didn’t know where he was headed after his canoe trip, but she had invited him to stay at her place while he figured things out.
Annette asked about the other members of the Survivors Club. Bill had been treated and released for a broken collarbone. The camper with the head injury had been flown to a larger hospital with neurological specialists. The others just had minor bumps and bruises.
Afterward, Christy told Annette to go home, shower, change into clean clothes, and get something to eat. “I’ll stay here, and I’ll call you if anything changes,” she promised.
For the first time in days, Annette took notice of herself. Her clothes were rumpled and smeared with tree sap and soil, her hair matted and hanging askew. She could see blisters forming on her toes where the sandal strap rubbed. Her hands were sore from gripping the paddle. Her arms and back ached from the hours of hard paddling. She was glad there was no mirror handy. Her face must look like a Halloween mask. She nodded to Christy and thanked her. “Ask them to set up a chair or a cot or something in Gabe’s room if you get the chance, okay?”