Kurt ignored it, and the alpha paused, mid-charge.
Kurt didn’t care whether it jumped him. If it did, he would fight it, throw the coyote aside as easily as he might a limp rag. For he was imbued with hope, enough strength to go on.
This was no longer the innocent land that had lured Kurt and the merry band of utopians. These woods were outfitted, Kurt having worked with the intrinsic topography until it suited his needs and desires. He had built a maze, the prize at the end his camp.
Which had suddenly become relevant because the odor Kurt had just detected represented mankind’s greatest accomplishment and the dawn of civilization. It signaled human presence in a way that nothing else could.
Smoke from a campfire.
Chapter Sixteen
Branches snapped, and twigs broke off and rattled to the ground. Suddenly, the whole island was alive with sounds. Some nocturnal animal skittered, and a trio of birds exploded into flight. Thank goodness for the starlight, which made it bright as day when it had to be eleven o’clock or later. Natalie saw the outline of the man clearly when he emerged from the stand of trees a few yards away.
It was Forrest.
“Ahoy, paddlers,” he called, walking toward them.
Natalie turned to Doug and frowned. He looked as confused as she felt. No, not confused—Doug actually appeared to be a bit annoyed.
But he said, “Hi there,” in a genial enough tone.
Forrest was dressed in the same clothing he’d worn when they met earlier at Off Road Adventures. Could that have been just today? It felt as if eons had passed, as if Natalie and Doug had already been married for years, journeying downriver forever.
Forrest swung a bright plastic paddle in a gesture of hello. “Just wanted to see how you two were doing.”
Doug took a few steps closer. “You always check up on your clients at night?”
Don’t be so confrontational, Doug, Natalie wanted to tell him. Discretion is key, because am I the only one getting that this is a little strange?
But she didn’t say anything. From the moment she and Doug had fallen in love, Natalie had known she could never be two things to him: neither as fragile and dependent as his mother, nor as strong and in control as Doug was used to being. It left Natalie a narrow and constricted band in which to function. She was walking that high wire now.
“You seemed a little…uncertain,” Forrest replied, focusing on Doug and speaking in a careful tone. He probably didn’t want to offend Natalie since of course it was she who had been nervous. “So I wanted to make sure everything was as expected. That you were keeping the course.”
Doug gazed at him levelly.
Forrest strolled over to where they’d pulled the canoe up on shore and ran his hand over the hull. “Boat looks good. Untouched. You must’ve had an easy paddle.”
Doug still didn’t say anything. He was deciding what to do, Natalie thought, computing different courses of action. And she was waiting for him to act.
But their guide didn’t seem threatening in any way. Just a little overzealous. Maybe he was going for a promotion. Or maybe someone had been hurt on an Off Road expedition, and all the employees were on high alert.
Once the silence had gone on long enough to fray, Natalie ventured, “How did you know we’d be awake? It’s practically midnight.”
“I have a group paddling just a little ways west of here,” Forrest said easily, pointing in the right direction. “We saw the smoke from your campfire. I figured you must be staying up late, enjoying the privacy.”
Doug’s voice finally seemed to return and he said, “We were enjoying it quite a bit. Till you showed up.”
Now Natalie couldn’t keep from crying out. “Doug! Don’t be so rude. I, for one, appreciate the extra care and attention.”
After a moment, Forrest looked away from Doug and smiled at her.
Natalie tried to smile back. Weird, this is weird, even if I’m trying to pretend that it’s not. Then she thought to ask, “How long have you been here?” Had it been Forrest she’d heard from the water? Wandering around on this tiny divot of land for long enough that Natalie and Doug had had time to cuddle by the fire, trading mutual confessions?
Forrest frowned. “Not too long.”
Doug switched his gaze back to him.
“I mean, I did paddle around for a little while,” Forrest said after a moment. “Pretty spot.”
It was a pretty spot, and yet Natalie had a cold, alien feeling then—as if she were missing something, that there was more to this encounter than she could fully parse. But she had no idea what it might be. And then a possibility occurred.
Had Doug asked the guide to check on them? Maybe her husband was concerned about their ability to accomplish what they had to out here, but didn’t want Natalie to feel insecure. It would explain Doug’s air of distance, the sense of something unsaid that had been troubling Natalie all night. He’d been expecting Forrest’s arrival, and clearly the guide had gotten delayed for some reason to have arrived this late.
Forrest began backing away into the copse of trees, paddle lofted high and resting on his shoulder. More branches split in two and leaves flew free as the blade struck them.
Doug turned to gaze off at a distance, where a globule of moon trembled in the sky, so it was Natalie who bid the guide goodbye. “Thank you!” she shouted as foliage and tree trunks swallowed Forrest’s form. “But we’re fine!” She gave a little wave, then walked over to her husband, tilting her head so that it rested on his shoulder. She looked up at Doug and spoke in a softer tone. “We’re really fine.”
They fell back to sleep in the pearlescent light, Doug explaining drowsily that they had an easy paddle to Snowshoe the next day.
“Great,” Natalie murmured. “We can sleep in.”
“No alarm clocks in the wilderness,” Doug said, rolling over and kicking his legs free of the sleeping bag.
Natalie hooked her calf over his. She’d expected to drop off immediately, but thoughts and questions nibbled at her fatigue. Did it matter if her husband kept small, inconsequential details from her, especially if his reasons for doing so were well-intentioned? What if he hadn’t revealed every aspect of his past? No one liked to dredge up painful memories, especially not men who’d had to deal with things at way too young an age, as Doug confessed tonight that he had.
Still, it took until her husband had lapsed into a steady stream of snoring before Natalie was finally able to drift off to sleep as well.
• • •
Coffee brewed over an open fire tasted like heaven, just as Doug had said. Natalie drained her camp cup and polished off the last peach while Doug positioned their packs inside the canoe. You couldn’t take much in the way of fresh fruit or veggies on a camping trip. From now on, it’d be freeze-dried nuggets from pouches, unless they found a patch of wild raspberries or blackberries, ripe early in the season.
Natalie kicked soil over their fire, making sure the final ember was dead, then checked their route for the day on the GPS. She made her way to the river through strands of grasses and broken sticks, detritus that had settled in the wake of last night’s passing storm.
Condensation freckled the glossy wood of their canoe, the consequences of a dewy morning. Each leaf bore its own silvery web, and the whole shoreline glittered.
Natalie crouched to rinse out her cup before stowing it inside the pack. They had a decomposable bag for trash, and she dropped her peach pit inside, this trip’s first offering. Last night, they had eaten every scrap, preserving the rind of cheese for chili tonight. Natalie handed Doug the GPS so that he could tuck it away in its case, then settled herself in the front of the canoe and picked up her paddle.
As wild and tumultuous as last night had been—the storm, her swim, and then that unexpected visit from their guide—today was calm and still. A faint apricot glow lit th
e sky, and the day ahead had a comfortable, almost predictable quality to it. Natalie could imagine life out here taking on the semblance of routine. Paddle, eat lunch outdoors, make camp, sleep beneath the stars. It made sense in an elemental way. Every act was motivated, had a reason, unlike a lot of things back home.
The surface of the river was like glass when they entered; their paddles broke it with a crystalline plinking.
They began hearing the whitewater a half mile before they saw it.
Chapter Seventeen
“That’s Class II or III?” Natalie shouted over the river’s rush. “Really?”
“It sounds worse than it is,” Doug called back to her. And then, “Stop paddling.”
Natalie obeyed instantly, turning to snatch a peek at Doug before facing front again. It sounded like Niagara Falls lay up ahead, and she wanted to be able to throw herself out of the canoe, swim for the bank before they went over.
Doug thrust his paddle deep into the water, positioning the canoe laterally and keeping them still. “Let me give you a few pointers.”
Natalie gave a single tremulous nod. The roar of the river had become constant white noise in her ears, although it alarmed her anew each time she focused on it.
Doug grinned. “You’re going to laugh at yourself when you see what we’re up against. The rafting trips we’ve been on were ten times wilder. Well, two or three times anyway. Class V.”
His math didn’t seem quite right, but as if for proof, Doug unzipped the pouch from Off Road and withdrew the little black case, powering on the GPS device.
He showed Natalie the screen.
She shrugged, though the tiny dot displaying exactly where they were at this moment was oddly comforting. “That thing only shows macro topography.”
“My point exactly,” Doug replied. “If there were some huge waterfall or something up ahead, we’d see it on the screen. An upgrade from flat to riffles, no.” But the effort required to hold them in place against the current was clear. Doug gripped the paddle so tightly that his hand leached of color.
“So how do we do this?” Natalie asked. “I mean, when we went rafting, there were like eight of us in the boat. Plus a guide.”
“Your job is just to keep paddling,” Doug said. “I’ll steer from back here, and the river will do the rest. Sound good?”
Natalie sunk her paddle into the water again, her hands sweaty upon the handle. The current instantly tugged the blade forward, and she had to lunge in the canoe to make sure the paddle wasn’t sucked away downstream. Natalie grabbed for it, bringing it back under control. Same stroke she’d been doing then, only a lot swifter.
“Okay?” Doug called as he loosened his grip. The canoe strained like a racehorse at the gate.
“Okay!”
They struck out.
It was more fun than Natalie could’ve imagined. Better than rafting because she had so much power, such control.
In the sunlight, the river sparkled like the silvery, speckled back of some great fish. And Doug had been right—the whitewater wasn’t overwhelming. If not quite riffles, then ruffles. But there were boulders that formed narrow chutes, shunting their canoe along at a good clip. At one point, the body of water took a downward jog—the canoe staying level for a splinter of time, with the prow hanging over nothing but air—and then they were past it, a swirl of water catching Natalie clean in the face.
“This is great!” she shouted, blinking to clear her vision.
There were just one or two more rolls up ahead, spitting out glistening drops. After that, the river returned to its former, carpet-flat state. Natalie braced herself, submerging her paddle. The current moved so fast, it was as if she were pulling the blade through something thick, with substance. Bread dough or solidifying cement.
The back of the canoe spun out, a carnival ride wiggle-waggle, and Natalie laughed with sheer delight. “Doug, you’ve got us, right?” she shouted, facing intently forward. She wondered if there would be more rapids, if not on this stretch, then on the next, the one that led to their put-out. Oh, but she didn’t want to think about this trip being over; it’d been even better so far than Doug had led her to believe.
The canoe straightened out, and Doug yelled loudly enough that she heard him over the rollicking water.
It didn’t sound like a shout of happiness.
The whitewater required focus; Natalie could only twist around for a second. Just long enough to see Doug clutching his paddle in one fist, while his other palm lay open and he stared down at the river with an expression of stunned horror.
As soon as Natalie caught his eye, Doug attacked the current again, wrapping both fists around the paddle. But in the second that he’d stopped controlling the canoe, they’d gotten too close to a rock, which loomed like a mottled, rising moon just ahead.
“Doug!” Natalie screamed. “Steer!”
Her husband shifted course expertly, the canoe sheering off with a mere foot between it and the boulder. Natalie shuddered, suppressing an image of the collision that would’ve serrated their boat’s glossy coating, splintered its wood. But Doug made the maneuver appear effortless, outwitting the river’s obstacles with apparent ease.
Only his face told a different version of things.
No time to ask what had happened. Behind the rock, a final roll of water hurtled itself forward. They caught the spray at an angle, and the canoe threatened to tip. Natalie threw herself to the side that was about to lose contact with the surface of the river, and the boat righted itself. Whitewater broke over the rim of the canoe, putting two inches of sloshing liquid into the bottom, and then they were through the rapids and floating gently downstream.
“Doug,” Natalie said, her teeth knocking together. She was too shaky to try to make it back to him in the stern. Her clothing was soaked, her Norlanders submerged on the floor of the canoe. They were going to have to paddle over to the bank, overturn the canoe to get the water out. “What happened back there? What did you see in the river?”
“I didn’t see anything,” he said stonily. “I dropped something.”
• • •
They weren’t lost, Natalie kept reassuring herself, after Doug revealed the item that had fallen out of his hand. The worst possible thing to lose. Not cash, or the credit card, matches, or their knife. The GPS.
Still, they knew exactly where they were, only had to retrace their steps to return to their starting point and find their way out again.
Not their steps. Their strokes. And of course, you couldn’t paddle upstream. Which meant she and Doug were going to have to wend their way back on foot, a route that wouldn’t come close to mirroring the one they had just taken by water. A knot of panic cinched inside Natalie’s chest, and she made herself turn away from her husband, lest he see the expression in her eyes.
They paddled over to the lower depths, their canoe scraping bottom, and stared despairingly upriver.
Doug got out first, pulling the canoe onto shore with Natalie still inside it.
“Let’s try and look,” she suggested, a high, artificial note of brightness in her voice as she climbed out.
They trudged through the shallows by the riverbank. How many millions of gallons of water were plummeting by right this very second? Even if the river hadn’t been moving so fast, spotting a small object in it would’ve been impossible.
Natalie got down on her hands and knees, combing through the mud on the river floor. She had to take some kind of action, even if it was pointless.
Doug’s hand dropped heavily down upon her from above. “Nat.”
She kept digging.
“Nat,” Doug said. “Stop it. It’s gone.”
He turned and headed back to the boat, where he busied himself with tasks. He laid their packs on top of two sun-warmed rocks to dry out. Then he overturned the canoe, fighting its weight until water s
pilled out with a gushing sound.
“Why did you have it out anyway?” Natalie asked as neutrally as she could. “There was no navigating to do.”
“I know,” Doug groaned. “It was stupid of me. Idiotic. I must not have zipped the pouch all the way. And everything loose got jogged around in that first big roll. I saw the case as it went over.”
I thought you said there weren’t going to be any big rolls, Natalie thought but kept from saying out loud.
Suddenly, Doug clapped his hand onto the bottom of the overturned boat, striking it with a thud. “Wait a minute!” he cried. He turned around fast, kicking up splashes as he climbed onto the bank.
Doug went for the nearby rocks where their packs were sunning themselves, and revealed the pouch from Off Road. Natalie’s heart sparked. He had remembered something, there was a secret, sealed compartment, the GPS wasn’t gone after all.
But instead of the device, her husband came out with a ziplock bag. “The maps,” he said triumphantly. “The guide said we could use these just as well. He said the GPS sometimes doesn’t even work out here at all.”
“It was working pretty well for us,” Natalie replied, knowing she should’ve bit back that comment too. But the GPS had, in a short time, become something she depended on, like a cardiac patient would his pacemaker. Its loss felt monumental. This trip was going to take on a whole different quality now, the two of them no longer linked to civilization by a single artifact of the modern-day world.
Doug gave her a look. “It might’ve stopped. Or lost charge.”
Natalie couldn’t tell whether he was trying to gloss over what he had done—cast the mishap in a less catastrophic light—or if he wanted to make her feel better.
“I can’t read maps,” she said. This hadn’t been something she’d talked much about with Doug—who had done the navigating on the couple of camping trips they’d taken—but it was actually a near-phobia for Natalie, some kind of learning disability, like map dyslexia. Her former friend Val was dyslexic, and the way she described sweating, being completely unable to focus, when faced with text was a lot like how Natalie felt about maps. “I actually failed geography in sixth grade.”
Wicked River Page 9
