Black Antler

Chapter 1: The Put-In

The water was the color of black tea where it pooled against the landing, tannin-dark and cold even in July. Lewis Pollard knelt on the aluminum dock and dipped his hand in up to the wrist, feeling the chill climb through his bones. Six months ago, he couldn't have closed his fist around a coffee mug. Now his fingers worked fine, pale and thin but functional, curling against the current.

"You planning to commune with the lake or help me with this food barrel?" Kevin Sanford called from the gravel lot above.

Lewis stood and wiped his hand on his shorts. Kevin was wrestling a blue sixty-liter barrel from the back of his truck, his face red beneath his ball cap. Behind him, the town of Flin Flon sat low against the horizon, its smelter stack cutting the sky like a gray finger.

"Coming."

They'd driven eleven hours from Winnipeg in two vehicles — Kevin's truck pulling the canoe trailer, and Nate Dumont's old Subaru packed with the remaining three passengers and enough dry bags to fill a closet. The plan was simple: seven days on the water, five lakes connected by portage trails, ending at a fly-in lodge on Burntwood Lake where a floatplane would carry them back to civilization. Kevin had organized the whole thing. He'd printed laminated maps, calculated portage distances to the meter, and assembled meal plans with the precision of a field general.

It was, he'd told them all in the group chat back in February, exactly what Lewis needed.

Lewis wasn't sure what he needed. He was thirty-seven years old and eleven months clear of Hodgkin's lymphoma, and most days he felt like a house that had been gutted and reframed but not yet drywalled — structurally sound, technically livable, but full of gaps where the wind came through. The oncologist had used the word "remission" with a careful smile, and Lewis's wife, Dana, had cried in the hospital parking garage, and everyone had treated it like an ending. But Lewis knew it wasn't. It was a pause. The disease could come back. It probably wouldn't. But it could.

Kevin didn't understand pauses. Kevin understood momentum. He was a project manager for a construction firm, built like a shorter, stockier version of the football player he'd been at the University of Manitoba, and he believed that problems were solved by moving through them at speed. When Lewis had finished his last round of chemo, Kevin had called him that same evening.

"Remember Aikens Lake? 2009?" Kevin had said. "We're doing that again. Bigger. Better. Deeper into the bush."

"Kev, I can barely walk to the mailbox."

"That's why we're going in July. Five months to get your legs back. I'll plan everything. You just show up."

And here he was. Showing up.

The others arrived at the dock in stages. Beth Neilson came first, her auburn hair pulled back under a wide-brimmed sun hat, carrying two paddles over her shoulder like a yoke. She was the only woman in the group, though she'd never seemed to consider that remarkable. She and Lewis had been friends since undergrad, long before she'd married and divorced a tax attorney and moved back to Winnipeg to teach high school biology. She had a calm, observational quality that Lewis had always admired — she noticed things other people missed and mentioned them only when it mattered.

"The lake looks good," she said, setting the paddles against the dock railing. "Dark, though."

"Tannins," Lewis said. "Bog runoff."

"I know what causes it. I'm just saying it looks like something you'd scry with." She smiled. "How are you feeling?"

"Fine."

"Lewis."

"Nervous. Excited. My arms are going to be useless by day two."

"Mine too. We'll suffer together."

Nate appeared next, hauling a pack that looked too heavy for his frame. He'd always been the leanest of the group, wiry and quiet, with dark hair he kept long enough to tie back and features that showed his mixed heritage — his mother was Scandinavian-Canadian, his father Métis, from a community up near The Pas. Nate worked as a sound engineer at a recording studio in the Exchange District, and he had the demeanor of someone who spent his professional life listening: attentive, reserved, slightly removed.

Today, though, the removal felt different. He'd been quiet on the drive up — not his usual comfortable silence but something tighter, wound around itself. Lewis had noticed him staring out the window at the boreal forest as it thickened around the highway, his jaw set, his phone dark in his lap.

"You good?" Lewis asked as Nate dropped his pack on the dock.

"Yeah. Just tired from the drive."

It was a lie, and they both knew it, but Lewis let it go. There'd be time on the water.

Ian Gillespie was last, and he was already drunk.

Not falling-down drunk. Not slurring. But Lewis could see it in the looseness of his movements, the slight overcorrection when he stepped from the gravel onto the dock planks. Ian had a tallboy of Kokanee in his hand, half-finished, and another tucked in the cargo pocket of his shorts. He was a big man, six-three and broad, with a red beard going gray at the edges and the kind of perpetually sunburned complexion that made him look like he'd just come in from a windstorm.

"Gentlemen," Ian said, spreading his arms. "And Beth. The wilderness awaits."

"It's ten in the morning," Beth said, eyeing the beer.

"It's vacation."

"It's a canoe trip. In the backcountry. Where the nearest hospital is a floatplane ride away."

"Which is exactly why I'm relaxing now. Responsible front-loading." He grinned and took a long pull from the can.

Kevin appeared at the top of the dock ramp, wiping his hands on his shorts. "Canoes are loaded. Three boats: I'm with Ian, Lewis and Beth, Nate solo in the small one. Sound good?"

"Sounds like you've already decided," Ian said.

"I have. That's what happens when you show up last." Kevin looked at the group, and for a moment his expression softened from its usual managerial efficiency into something genuine. "Listen. I know it's been a while since we've all been in the same place. I know things have been — look, Lewis went through hell. We all watched it. And I just want to say, before we get on the water, that this matters. Being here. All five of us. It matters."

A beat of silence. The wind moved through the spruce trees behind the lot, carrying the mineral smell of the lake.

"Christ, Kev," Ian said. "Save the toast for when we've got whiskey."

But he was smiling, and so was everyone else, and Lewis felt something loosen in his chest — not the anxious knot that had lived there since his diagnosis, but something older, something that had calcified during the years when these people had been names on a screen instead of bodies in a room.

They pushed off at half past ten, three canoes cutting dark V's across the surface of the lake. The sky was enormous, a prairie sky stretched even wider by the flat expanse of water, and the only sounds were paddles dipping and the occasional cry of a loon somewhere in the reeds.

Lewis sat in the bow of the middle canoe, Beth behind him in the stern. His paddle felt good in his hands. His shoulders would ache tomorrow, but right now the motion was clean and rhythmic, and the water parted easily, and the shoreline slid past in a continuous scroll of spruce and birch and granite.

For the first time in a year, he thought: maybe Kevin was right.

Maybe this was what he needed.

The first portage came at noon — a four-hundred-meter trail between the put-in lake and the next one north, marked by a faded orange blaze on a spruce trunk. They unloaded the canoes and began the carry. Kevin had packed the food barrels and heavy gear into portage packs with tumplines, and he distributed the loads with the same brisk efficiency he brought to everything.

Lewis took a pack and a paddle and started up the trail. The path was narrow and rooted, climbing a low ridge before dropping to the next lake. Within fifty meters, his legs were burning. Within a hundred, he was breathing hard. The pack straps bit into his shoulders, and he could feel the weakness in his core — the muscles that chemo had eaten and months of recovery had only partially rebuilt.

Beth caught up to him at the ridge.

"Take a break," she said.

"I'm fine."

"You're gray. Sit down."

He sat on a flat rock and let the pack rest against a tree. The forest was thick here, the canopy closing overhead in a lattice of green. Somewhere below, he could hear Kevin barking instructions at Ian about how to carry a canoe.

"You don't have to prove anything," Beth said, sitting beside him. "Not to Kevin, not to anyone."

"I'm not proving anything. I'm carrying a pack."

"You're carrying a pack like it's a personal challenge. Take the lighter load next time."

He looked at her. She was sweating, her hat pushed back on her forehead, and there was a smear of mud on her cheek. She looked exactly like she had at twenty-three, portaging into Aikens Lake, except for the fine lines around her eyes and the steadiness in her gaze that came from fifteen years of managing teenagers.

"Okay," he said.

"Okay."

They finished the portage. The second lake was smaller and rounder, ringed by granite cliffs on the north side and a marshy delta on the south. They paddled across it in forty minutes, the sun high and hot, and made camp on a flat rock shelf that jutted into the water like a stage.

Kevin had the tents up before anyone else had finished unpacking. Three tents: Kevin and Ian in one, Lewis and Nate in another, Beth in the third. They cooked dinner over a camp stove — freeze-dried chili that Kevin had tested at home and pronounced "adequate" — and sat on the rock shelf as the sun dropped behind the treeline.

The lake turned from black to copper to black again. A beaver surfaced near the far shore, its wake a perfect V. The loons called, that wavering, lonely sound that belonged to the northern lakes and nothing else.

"This is it," Kevin said, leaning back on his hands. "This is what I'm talking about. You can't get this in the city."

"You can't get cell service, either," Ian said. He'd moved on from beer to a flask of rye, and his voice had taken on the rounded, generous quality it always got when he was well into a drink. "I told my ex I'd call the kids tonight."

"You told your ex you'd be unreachable for a week," Kevin said.

"Did I? That doesn't sound like me."

"I watched you send the text."

Ian shrugged and took another pull from the flask. "Well. They'll survive."

Beth caught Lewis's eye across the fire. He read her expression clearly: she was worried about Ian. They all were, in the way you worry about a friend whose problems are visible but undiscussed. Ian had been drinking more since his divorce two years ago. He'd gained weight, lost his job at the engineering firm, picked up contract work that kept him busy but not stable. In the group chat, he was the same loud, funny Ian he'd always been. In person, the cracks showed.

Nate sat slightly apart from the group, cross-legged on the rock, his plate untouched. He was staring at the treeline on the far shore.

"Nate," Lewis said. "You okay?"

Nate blinked and looked at him. "What? Yeah. Sorry. Just thinking."

"About what?"

"Nothing. Old stuff." He picked up his fork and began eating, mechanically, without looking at the food.

Lewis let it go again. The darkness settled. The stars came out — not the pale, scattered stars of Winnipeg but the full, crushing weight of the northern sky, the Milky Way a bright river overhead. They sat and watched it, five old friends in the wilderness, and for a while nobody spoke, and the silence was the good kind, the kind that meant you were comfortable enough not to fill it.

Lewis went to bed feeling better than he had in months. The sleeping bag was warm, the pad was thick enough to cushion the rock beneath, and the sound of the lake lapping at the shore was steady and hypnotic.

He slept deeply and without dreams.

He didn't know, then, that it was the last good night's sleep he would ever have.