Nash bent over the young guide, unsnapped his life vest, and began chest compressions. “Come on,” he whispered. “Come on. Come on.” Water seeped from Blake’s mouth, but he didn’t move or breathe.
Carlyle studied his watch as Nash worked on Blake. Finally, he said, “It must be fifteen minutes since he went under. That’s enough.”
Nash, ignoring Carlyle, continued CPR for another two minutes.
“Keith. He’s gone. Stop.” Carlyle, his feet numb from the cold, put his right hand on Nash’s shoulder. “You did everything you could.” Betts picked up a paddle and began abusing a jack pine. His tirade over, he slumped to the ground.
Nash leaned away from Blake but kept his right hand on the body.
“Let me see him,” Carlyle said. He bent over and took off Blake’s helmet. The right side of the kid’s face was stove in. His eye was bloody, the teeth broken and mangled. “How the hell did this happen?”
“Who the hell cares?” Nash said. “He’s dead.”
“Give me a minute.” Carlyle trudged upstream through the forest parallel to the chute, pushing aside low-hanging limbs, for another twenty yards. The Hudson, two steps to his right, roared past him. Dead leaves and branches littered the ground. Sunlight reflecting off the river cast dark shadows on the woods.
Had he had come too far? He stopped, scanned the ground around him, and spotted the trunk of a slender pine lying in the snow. The bottom portion of the tree hung no more than eighteen inches over the current, just enough in the confined space of the chute to have caught an unwary guide or one of his passengers.
Carlyle stared at the tree. He walked around it and kicked at the snow-covered branches. Before leaving, he grabbed one and pulled, but the sapling, frozen to the ground, would not budge.
Carlyle made his way back to Marshall and his crew. “You won’t believe this. He hit a log. Come back there with me; I’ll show you.”
“Are you nuts? We’ve got forty people sitting over there. A couple of them are hysterical. If we don’t get out of here, they’ll freeze to death. Let the authorities take care of it.”
“DEC is going to demand a full report,” Carlyle said.
“Come back tomorrow if you have to,” Nash said. “We’ve got to get everyone back to North River now.”
“Then you’ve got to wait a couple of minutes,” Carlyle said. “I need to look at the site again before we leave.”
Marshall grabbed his arm. “Get in that boat now.”
“We can’t leave that log there. What if someone else runs into it?”
“Did you hear me?” Marshall said. “Let the rangers deal with this. It’s their problem. They’ll move the goddamn tree.”
“You’re making a big mistake. This is the second death this week. Someone’s going to catch hell if we don’t do everything we can to explain what just happened.”
“I swear I’ll leave you here if you don’t get going. Now.”
Carlyle took two steps toward the log before spotting the DEC raft approaching. Dave Reed, a forest ranger, walked over to Marshall. “We’ll handle this now. Move the body into my boat, then get your people out of here.”
Two minutes later, a helicopter circled the site and hovered over the gorge. The DEC boat carrying Blake’s body in a litter moved into open water and began working its way upstream. As the chopper crew winched the basket up, the blue and gold state police craft, buffeted by cross winds, shuddered. Blake’s body grazed the top of a spruce, swayed unsteadily for several seconds, then disappeared into the helicopter’s open side door.
Reed’s boat worked its way back downstream toward Marshall’s group.
“What are they going to do with the body?” Carlyle said.
“He’ll go to Glens Falls for the autopsy.” Reed turned to Marshall. “We’ll meet you at the inn at five. Have your guides there. And get all your papers in order.”
“What papers?”
“Your operator’s license, insurance documents, training records, and Red Cross certificates. Everything that supports your outfitter application.”
Marshall said, “What’s going on?”
“Ryan, you’ve lost two people this week. You can’t expect us to ignore that.”
“Am I going to lose my license?”
“Just do what Carlyle says.”
“For Christ’s sake. I can get my people back to North River.”
“If you run everything by Carlyle, you’ve got no problem.”
As soon as Marshall and his guides returned to their boats, Carlyle spoke to Blake’s crew. “We don’t know how this happened. But please, don’t ask us to talk about it now. We’ll have you off the river in three hours.”
A young woman, her hands shaking, said, “Just get us out of here, please.”
Carlyle said, “One more thing. DEC and the state police are going to conduct an investigation. If they contact you, tell them everything you remember about the trip, Blake’s behavior most of all.”
“What should we say?”
“That’s up to you. A young guide just died a half-hour ago. I need you to help us understand why that happened.”
By the time Marshall’s five boats approached North River at three that afternoon, the sun had disappeared behind Black Mountain. It was forty-nine degrees, and a fifteen-mile-an-hour wind was whipping up whitecaps on the Hudson.
Marshall’s stunned clients had said little that afternoon. When they reached the beach, they dropped their gear and walked silently up to a waiting bus.
Guides and outfitters from other companies, Marshall’s staff, and the media, some fifty people in all, stood in silence on a slight rise overlooking the take-out. Alan Metzger, a reporter from a local paper, shoved a microphone toward Betts’s face. “Can you tell us how he died?”
“If you don’t get that thing away from me, I’m going to give you a colonoscopy with that mic.”
Saying nothing, Carlyle marched past the line of microphones and cameras.
Wearing waterproof boots, a yellow backcountry shell over a pile jacket, and fingerless gloves, Karen Raines was waiting for him near the road. She had a BlackBerry in her left hand. “How the hell did that happen?”
He told her about the accident and his attempt to examine the site.
