As he rubbed his hands together above the crackling fire, Webb made three assumptions. First of all, he assumed that Brent had not survived the grizzly bear attack. Therefore there was no need to rush to try to find George to mount a rescue mission. While Webb couldn’t help thinking about Brent, he did his best not to allow himself to feel much. Dead was horrible enough. Dead by grizzly attack was even worse. But Brent has been ready to smash Webb’s fingers and take away Webb’s music forever. Webb had tried to help Brent, but the guy had brought his gruesome death upon himself. Should Webb feel terrible for Brent or glad for himself? He didn’t even want to try to come up with an answer.
His second assumption was that if he did not dry his clothes and warm up completely, he might not make it back to the Canol Trail. There was no point in trying to rush; his near-death by hypothermia had weakened him too much to take any risks.
His third assumption was much simpler and beyond argument: since the river had washed him onto the gravel bar, he was downstream of the path that led up to the clifftop and the two bodies. One dead so long that only skeleton and rags remained. The other mangled by a grizzly.
Webb hoped he would recognize the place where he’d fallen down the cliff. All he needed to do was go upstream until he saw it, find the cliff path and follow that path in the other direction, back to the Canol Trail.
Surely the group would be waiting for him at Mile 108 where the chopper was supposed to pick them up.
But what if they weren’t? What if the chopper had arrived and taken them away? No one knew where he’d gone. To them it would have been like he’d simply disappeared.
But no, wouldn’t they look for him?
Except where would they start looking?
Thinking about that made him uneasy, and he started to second-guess whether he should spend an hour or two in front of the fire to get completely dry.
He was beginning to feel stronger, wasn’t he?
He rubbed his hands again, looking at his fingers as if seeing them for the first time. He shuddered, wondering what it would have been like if Brent had crushed them slowly with the rocks.
It made him think of the knife that had saved his life, the knife he’d pulled from the ribs of a skeleton. Had it been someone working the Canol Trail all those years ago? But how could his grandpa have known about it? Webb had heard a lot of stories about his grandpa’s travels, but not one that put him here in the Northwest Territories. Had his grandpa been here once and kept it a secret from the family?
He looked more closely at the knife.
And saw three initials. DAM.
David Adam McLean.
His grandfather.