She waited until the lights of Olcott were almost invisible and she hadn’t been able to detect the shapes of the low buildings for some time. Then she set the throttle on the outboard motor, pulled out the choke, and gave a pull on the starter. The motor coughed twice, then burbled and putted. She tapped the choke in, shifted to get the propeller turning, and headed out slowly.
She listened to the motor for ten minutes at slow speed as she moved them away from the shore. It was firing evenly and it was reasonably quiet, but there was no telling what sort of gas had been in the Oldsmobile or what it would do to the motor in the long run. She ran out a few miles from shore, then slowed down again and let the motor idle. 'Give me your gun,' she said.
'What?'
She said it louder, over the sound of the motor. 'Your gun.'
He pulled his pistol out of his shirt, and she took it by the handgrips and tossed it into the dark, deep water. Then she held her shotgun out with both hands and released it at water level beside the boat. 'They won’t do us any good now,' she said.
10
The light aluminum boat slapped along at a good speed, the motor churning a white rooster tail on the black water and the hull pushing diagonal waves to the sides. The wind dried Jane’s hair and then blew it out behind. She watched Felker settle into a comfortable position with his head resting on his forearm.
Jane kept the bow pointed west, trying not to get close enough to the shore to be noticed. That was the way the canoes used to travel this lake. If it had worked for them, it would work tonight. Whatever else had changed, the lake hadn’t. The Seneca had made their canoes from the bark of a red elm or a bitternut hickory, stripped from the tree in one piece, stretched over a frame of white ash, and sewn at the bow and stem. Some of them had been forty feet long, much bigger and easier to see than this boat. All she had to worry about was keeping out far enough so that if any noise reached the shore, it was disembodied.
The incessant, unchanging drone of the motor pushing the boat through the dark made her eyes heavy. They were heading back toward the mouth of the Niagara now. Neahga. The land along the lake had changed, but from out here at night no eye could see it. The lake was the same. Jane could as easily have been wearing the gaka-ah, gise-ha, and ahdeadawesa: the skirt, leggings, and long shirt that her grandmother’s grandmother wore. They made a lot more sense for this kind of trip than a wet sweatshirt and jeans. Her clothes would have been embroidered in porcupine quills with patterns of flowers and trees, but even she would not have been able to see the colors in this darkness. She would have the gaaotages, a necklace woven of fragrant marsh grass, for perfume. Why was she thinking of perfume? It was probably the smell of the gasoline. The darkness and the persistent sound of the motor were making her drowsy, and there was something about being on the water out of sight of land. What was out of sight began to lose its reality after an hour or two.
It was easy to imagine why people would believe— no, not believe, exactly, just express the mystery of it this way—that the world was begun when Sky-Woman fell and was caught by the sea birds and placed on the shell of a gigantic turtle. Out here, where the dark sky and the dark water met with nothing in between and her mind was too tired to censor any thought that came into it, the turtle seemed no more unlikely than the Big Bang. He would be lying out here just under the surface, motionless and huge and prehistoric, like a sunken island. And for a second or two, it was possible to imagine the feeling of being the first woman, falling. Slowly, maybe because the noise of the sea birds had reached it under the water, the turtle would rise from the dark depths, at first the curved top of the shell emerging a little, the water streaming off the green moss growing on it, and then more and more of it, until —
There was a loud clunk, then a horrible scraping along the keel of the boat, and then the motor screamed as the propeller was pushed up out of the water and the intake sucked air, and then it stalled. Jane was thrown forward off the seat to the hull, and her mind shrieked, trying to break its fall. She had to fight the first, shocking feeling that somehow she had conjured the immense turtle, that because she had been thinking of it, the turtle had come. The part of her mind that worked all the time had known from the first instant that it wasn’t an imaginary creature. It was a log or a rock or something.
Felker was crammed between the bow and the first seat with his feet in the air when she saw him. He said, 'What happened?'
She snapped, 'We hit something. Are we leaking up there?'
He pulled himself up and put his hands to the hull. 'No. I don’t think so.'
'Thank you,' she muttered.
'You’re welcome.' But she hadn’t meant him to hear it. They were about five miles out. This was April and the water was like—
'—Ice!' he said. He was leaning over the gunwale and touching something beside the boat. 'It’s a big piece of ice. I can’t believe it. You hit a damned ice-berg, like the Titanic.'
Jane laughed out loud, letting the tension go out of her.
'What did you think it was?' he asked.
'You wouldn’t believe it.' She laughed harder, and in a moment she heard him laugh too. 'You sure we don’t have any leaks?'
'Wait,' he said. She held her breath. She could hear him running his fingers along the riveted seams near the bow. 'I’m sure,' he said.
She slumped in her seat. 'What a relief. At least we don’t have to worry about dying.'
'Dying? Can’t you swim?'
'Yes,' she said, 'but I don’t know if I can do five miles in forty-degree water dragging a full-grown man in my teeth like a Labrador retriever.'
'Hey,' he protested. 'I just ran ten miles through mud puddles and rowed a boat halfway across a lake. What do you have to do to impress girls around here?'
'We like it when men help us get our boats off ice cakes,' she said. 'Take an oar.'
They each pulled an oar out of its oarlock, stood up, and stuck an oar into the frosty surface of the ice floe. When Jane said, 'Heave,' the other end of it rose above the surface six feet ahead of the bow, and the boat slipped backward a couple of feet. After two more tries, the boat slid free and glided a little.
Jane said, 'I apologize,' and sat down.
'I should think so,' said Felker.
'I mean, I should have remembered about the ice when we saw there weren’t any boats moored at docks.'
'There weren’t any docks.'
'Right. People put them in each spring after the ice goes down.'
'You mean melts?'
'Not exactly. Lake Ontario is too deep to freeze much, but Lake Erie isn’t, and some of the other lakes go far enough north so that they freeze too. There’s a boom at the mouth of the Niagara to keep the ice from flowing down the river and wrecking the machinery at the power project. They open it every spring to let the last of it go.'
He shrugged. 'I can see how people around here might want to circle that date on the calendar.'
'It’s a different day every year.' She tipped the outboard motor back down into the water. 'Let’s hope we haven’t sheared a pin. If we have, maybe we’ll drift up to Montreal in a few weeks.'
'A pin?'
'For a guy your size, you really aren’t the outdoorsy type, are you?'
'I grew up in the city. When we want fish, we buy fish. What kind of pin?'
'A shear pin. If the prop hits something, there’s a little pin that breaks, so even though the propeller is stopped, the drive shaft can keep turning.'
'Why in the hell would anybody put a fiendish thing like that in a motor?'
'Just cross your fingers,' she said. She set the controls, gave a pull on the lanyard, and the motor started. She listened for a second, and it sounded strange. She shifted to engage the propeller and nothing happened. She
