The Cauldron

Chapter One: Put-In

The floatplane took the last of the world with it.

Kip Forster stood ankle-deep in the shallows of a nameless lake at the top of the Turnagain River and watched the old de Havilland Beaver claw itself off the water, dragging a white seam behind it. The engine noise flattened out, thinned, and then folded into the wind. For maybe ten seconds afterward he could still hear it, or thought he could. Then he couldn't, and there was nothing left but the sound of small waves slapping the aluminum hulls of two canoes and a raven talking to itself somewhere in the black spruce.

"That's it, then," Sara Dumont said behind him. "No takebacks."

"No takebacks," Kip agreed.

He turned around. Their gear was stacked on the beach in a heap that looked, as it always did on day one, impossible: four blue barrels, three dry bags the size of hay bales, a bear-proof canister, a rifle case Sara had brought and hoped not to open, two paddle bundles, a folded tarp, a coil of throw rope, an axe, a five-gallon jug of white gas, and a pelican case full of remote cameras worth more than Kip's truck.

Sara was already sorting it. She had a way of moving through a pile of equipment like water through gravel, finding the channels. She was thirty-nine, narrow-shouldered, with a wind-cracked face and gray coming in at her temples in two neat wings she never bothered to hide. Nine field seasons in the Skeena and the Omineca had trimmed everything unnecessary off her, including small talk.

"Barrel three is dinners," she said. "Barrel four is breakfast and repair. I want the camera case where I can get at it without unpacking the boat."

"You'll get at it eleven times a day."

"Twelve," she said. "There's a talus slope in the corridor I've been dreaming about since March."

Kip crouched by the canoes. They were seventeen-foot Royalex boats, scarred, patched, older than either of them wanted to admit, and he had picked them because they could take a beating and still float. He'd cut two spruce poles at the charter dock in Dease Lake and hauled them up in the Beaver's belly, and now he laid them across the gunwales and began lashing the boats side by side, six feet apart, into a catamaran.

Sara came over and watched him wrap the first joint. "Explain this to me again."

"There are forty miles of lake and slow water before the river starts to mean anything," Kip said. He pulled the lashing tight with a trucker's hitch and set his boot against the pole. "Two boats, two people. If we paddle them separately we're each solo in a loaded canoe with a beam wind, and we'll spend four days going sideways. Lashed together, it's a raft. Stable as a dock. You paddle one hull, I paddle the other, we cover twenty-five miles a day and you get your dawn surveys."

"And when the river starts to mean something?"

"We take it apart. Below the Nine Mile flats there's whitewater, and a canyon after that, and you don't run a canyon on a raft." He tied off and started the second pole. "We'll break the cat down and shuttle. Two carries, or I run one boat at a time and hike back. Slow, but nobody swims."

"You've done this canyon."

"Once. Ten years ago, low water, with a guy who's since moved to Costa Rica." He glanced up. "There are maybe six people alive who've run the Turnagain canyon in an open boat and four of them were on that trip."

"That is not comforting."

"It wasn't meant to be comforting. It was meant to be a fact."

She almost smiled. "You've gotten very literal."

"Sober does that."

It was the last day of August. The light already had that low northern slant to it, gold instead of white, and the leaves on the willows along the shore had gone the color of old brass. Somewhere above the treeline on the ridge to the east there was a bright patch that Kip had decided not to identify out loud as snow. They had, by Sara's calculation, five weeks before freeze-up made the river impassable, and they intended to use three.

He finished the lashing, tested it with his weight, and started loading. Heavy barrels low and centered. The gas jug in his hull, away from the food. Sara's camera case in a padded dry bag clipped to a thwart with a carabiner, because if the boat rolled he wanted the twenty thousand dollars of federal equipment to roll with it.

He worked the way he'd learned to work at nineteen and hadn't unlearned: everything tied, everything twice. He had spent eleven summers on fire crews and six of them jumping out of airplanes into interior Alaska, and the single lesson that had survived all of it was that the wilderness did not punish bad luck nearly as often as it punished bad packing.

Sara clipped a hair-snare kit to the top of a barrel and said, without looking at him, "Thank you, by the way. I know I've said it. I'm saying it again while there's still cell coverage in my head."

"You're paying me in oatmeal."

"I'm paying you in nothing, which is why I keep saying thank you." She straightened. "Kip. Seriously. My permit expires October first. If I don't get cameras and hair traps into that hundred-mile corridor before the snow, I lose a year, and I don't get another one—the grant runs out. Nobody else I asked would touch this river. Two people said the canyon was a death wish."

"Two people were being sensible."

"And here you are."

"Here I am," he said.

He didn't tell her the rest, which was that he'd been sitting in a rented room above a hardware store in Dease Lake when her email came in, six weeks sober, with a calendar on the wall in which every square was identical and empty. He had read it four times. Then he had gone downstairs and bought a hundred feet of quarter-inch rope and started making a list, and the list had been the first thing in a year that felt like a reason to be awake.

They pushed off at two in the afternoon.

The raft handled like a piece of furniture, but it went where they pointed it. Kip paddled the right hull, Sara the left, and for the first hour they got in each other's rhythm wrong and clunked their blades and laughed about it, and then somewhere around the second point of land they found the beat and stopped talking. The lake narrowed. The outlet appeared as a green tongue between two sand cutbanks, and the current took hold of them so gradually that Kip felt it in his shoulders before he saw it in the water — the paddle suddenly doing less work for the same result.

The Turnagain gathered itself and began to run.

It was a beautiful river. He had forgotten, or had made himself forget, how beautiful. It ran clear over rust-and-cream cobble, wide as a highway in some stretches, braided around gravel islands in others, and the spruce came right down to the edge and leaned over the water with their roots showing like knuckles. Twice in that first afternoon they slid past bull moose standing chest-deep in backwaters, ears swiveling, unbothered. A bald eagle dropped off a snag and paralleled them for a quarter mile at head height, close enough that Kip could hear the individual creak of its wings.

At six o'clock Sara pointed at a bar on the inside of a bend with a flat shelf of dry grass above it, and Kip angled the raft in, and they made the first camp of the trip.

Camp had a liturgy. He had run guided trips for eight seasons and he could not break the order even when he tried: boats up and tied off first, in case the river rose in the night. Kitchen a hundred meters downwind. Food hung or canistered. Tents on the high ground. Fire only in a pan, only on gravel, only below the high-water line.

Sara set up the little stove and put water on for rice and lentils, and Kip walked the bar with an eye out for tracks. He found wolf, a big male, the prints as long as his palm and already half-dry at the edges. He found moose. He found, in a wet patch by a side channel, the perfect five-toed asterisk of a grizzly's forefoot, which he measured with a paddle blade and decided was two days old and none of their business.

When he came back the sun was going down behind the western ridge and the whole sky had gone the color of a struck match.

Sara handed him a bowl. "Anything?"

"Wolf, moose, bear."

"No gulo."

"Not yet."

"Gulo gulo," she said, with the tenderness some people reserve for their children. "Ten kilograms of bad attitude. There might be three hundred left in this whole management unit and nobody can tell me for certain, because nobody has ever surveyed it, because it costs forty thousand dollars to fly a crew in here and I have eleven."

"And a guide who works for oatmeal."

"And a guide who works for oatmeal." She scraped her bowl. "Fourteen camera stations. Six hair traps. If I can document natal dens — actual dens, with kits — the whole watershed becomes something people have to argue about instead of something they can just sign away."

Kip ate. The lentils were bad and it didn't matter. Overhead the first stars came out hard and white, and the temperature dropped ten degrees in fifteen minutes the way it did up here, and the river talked to itself in the dark.

"Sara."

"Mm."

"Nobody knows we're here." He said it mildly, the way you say a thing you want a second opinion on. "I filed a float plan with the charter company and left a copy with the woman who owns the room I'm renting. You?"

"Two colleagues in Prince George and a research coordinator who checks his email once a week." She patted the pocket of her jacket, where the satellite messenger lived on its lanyard. "And this. Every night at nine, a check-in and a position. If the check-in doesn't come for two nights, my department calls Search and Rescue."

"Two nights."

"Two nights," she said. "That's the protocol. Don't look at me like that. It's better than most people get."

He nodded and let it go, and washed the pot in the shallows with sand, and hung the food, and lay in his tent listening to the river.

He did not sleep for a long time. That was normal. What was not normal, or was becoming normal, was the way his body kept expecting something at eleven o'clock at night — the small chemical appointment he had kept every evening for fourteen months. He lay in the dark and felt the absence of it like a missing tooth, and made himself count the sounds instead. Water on stone. Wind in spruce. A loon, far off, on some pothole lake beyond the trees.

One hundred miles of river. Three weeks. No roads, no radios, no bars, no one.

He had come north to be somewhere that would not let him lie to himself.

He fell asleep around two and dreamed, as he did most nights, about smoke.