To our immediate right was a ledge. Behind it was a protected eddy. Charley spun our canoe around into the calm water with a grace that seemed effortless.
“Do you see him?” I called above the thundering falls.
“Get out!”
“What?”
He gestured with his paddle at the boulder as we turned alongside it. I reached out with both hands and did my best to keep my center of gravity low to avoid upsetting the canoe. The next thing I knew, I was hanging from the rock with my legs dangling in the water. The surface was slick in places. I nearly lost my handhold as I began to climb. And my waterlogged boots were all but useless when I tried to involve them in my ascent.
I stood atop the ledge, squinting downstream. I saw something pale. A hand perhaps.
I shouted down at Charley, still holding his position in the eddy, “I think I see him!”
“Run to shore.”
“What?”
The ledge ended ten feet to my right. Beyond lay another, smaller ledge. Then a clump of bushes overhanging a dark, still stretch of stream. We’d cut across the river as we’d descended, and this was the far bank.
“I’ll meet you below,” the old man said.
I crept forward to the end of the ledge and found myself facing a gap of at least five feet. Under normal conditions, it would have been an easy jump. But in the dark, leaping from a slippery bit of stone, with the landing place likely to be just as slick, I had no choice but to throw myself across the divide and hope for the best.
The opposite ledge was as mossy and as treacherous as I had feared. I fell hard but not into the water.
The next leap was even farther. Easily ten feet, which meant I would be swimming, carried by the current while I tried to grab hold of one of the frail alder branches overhanging the river.
Without pausing to remove my boots, I dove in. The impact pulled the headlamp off my head.
I came up spitting, already twenty feet down the river from where I’d gone under and not at all close to the shore. I kicked and crawled and continued to drift, seemingly making no progress.
Then I saw a branch protruding from the water. I lunged and grabbed hold of it, and my momentum swung me around until I was floating on my back, facing my boots downstream.
The dead tree had toppled from the shore when its roots had been eroded. It had lost most of its branches, but I was able to use the snags that remained to pull myself along until I was looking up a leafy willow. Soon I was clawing through the waterside puckerbrush, reopening cuts on my hands and skinning my shins on hidden logs.
The wind was up, and the sky was clearing fast. Hundreds of stars had come into focus. I caught a glimpse of the Milky Way.
Eventually, I broke free of the brush and found myself standing on an almost impossibly beautiful sandbar. Over the eons, the river had twisted and turned like a restless sleeper in its bed. I stood upon a low ridge and scanned downstream only to realize that my journey to shore had carried me past the place where I’d spotted Chasse’s hand.
Just below the rapids where the Grand Laker had wrecked was another bar of gravel, almost an island, complete with a grassy crest and even a few wildflowers glowing white in the starlight. The river below was rippled but unbroken by obvious rocks. If Chasse had just made it through the last stretch, he might have washed up, alive, on this bar amid the orchids.
But there was no sign of him. Nor of Charley.
I waded out as far as I could, then plunged into the river again, using the lee of the island to avoid being caught in the current. I walked the length of the bar, following its weedy crest, my boots so full of water they squished. My movements startled a sleeping snake. It was dark, the length of my arm. I watched it take off across the surface of the water in a series of S-shaped motions. A northern water snake, native to this land.
“Mike!”
I looked up and saw Charley making his way toward me in my borrowed canoe. The sky had become luminous with constellations. My eyes had adjusted to the night. But my vision was anything but sharp. It took me a moment to realize that the old man had Chasse Lamontaine in the boat with him. The tall warden lay awkwardly, unmoving across the thwarts and the center seat.
“Is he—?”
“Alive, yes. Had a heck of a time pulling him aboard, though. The son of a bitch weighs as much as a moose calf.”
45
We laid Chasse out on his side along the sandbar. The water had leeched the color from his skin. His fingers were icicles. Because he was still breathing, albeit shallowly, we didn’t administer CPR. We stabilized his neck in case he’d sustained a spinal injury in the rapids.
I found three burn holes in the fabric of his uniform: a tight cluster over his heart. Every bullet I had fired had struck him and bounced off the armored plates. If I lived long enough, I might someday become a decent shot.
Then we waited.
Like a man with an itch, Charley tried unsuccessfully to reach for the one spot on his back his fingers couldn’t touch. I turned him around and found the hole in his coveralls where the bullet had pierced the fabric. The projectile had flattened itself against the combat vest Charley had been wearing, concealed beneath his mechanic’s disguise.
“Which letter
