Free Once Upon a River by Bonnie Jo. Campbell

the concrete chunks, the riprap they’d piled along the riverbank. The river persevered, Grandpa had said, and people would eventually give up. Margo remembered thinking she would not give up on making the river her own. It occurred to her now that Grandpa might have been speaking about his own house, the big Murray house, being eventually swept away. He might have been saying that the Murrays would not always be kings of the river. What had seemed permanent to Margo, the Murray river paradise, could have seemed fleeting to the man who’d created it.
    By the afternoon of that second full day of rowing, she was tired and hungry beyond any exhaustion or hunger she had known. With each pull of her oars, she felt herself liquefying. A few times she paused and put her hands into the water to soothe them. When snow began to fall around her, she wondered if she might dissolve before she got where she was going, like the big flakes that fell on the water. When her legs cramped, she slipped backward with the current for a while, watched the same trees she had just struggled to pass fall behind her. She slipped easily by a whitewashed dock she had inched past with such effort a few minutes ago. She passed a great blue heron, four feet tall, standing in a few inches of freezing water, and the sight startled her awake. Before she let herself get carried away, she guided her boat to a sandbar. She turned to watch the heron, which should have flown off south months ago. The bird stiffened all the feathers on its head and neck and then stabbed at the water. It gulped down a finger-length fish and flew off upstream. Margo opened the plastic bag Junior had given her. She took the joint out and lit it with a safety match from her backpack. She smoked half of it, hoping to numb herself, and when it made her feel sick, she tossed the rest of it into the water. Within minutes, she was even hungrier.
    She was light-headed at dusk. The marijuana’s pleasant effects had worn off hours before, and she was left with an emptiness that began in her growling stomach and stretched all through her. The water jug, too, was empty. It was well into night when a familiar cabin on stilts rose before her like a miracle, with its windows of dim, wavering light. She rowed past it to give herself room to maneuver, but when she stopped rowing she slipped downstream too fast and had to approach again. She tried to flex her fingers on the oars, but they had frozen into a curled position inside her leather gloves. The times she had seen this place with Grandpa, it had been daylight. The flickering lantern light made the cabin look mysterious. Brian had invited her to come for a visit, but she’d imagined sneaking in while he was gone. From here it was only a few miles more to Heart of Pines.
    She rowed past the cabin again, guided herself toward the water’s edge, and then grabbed the wooden dock as it came toward her, almost pinching her hand between the boat and the dock. She tied up beside the Playbuoy pontoon she’d seen a few days ago. Tied on the other side of the dock was an aluminum bass boat. The pontoon tapped against her boat a few times, but its prow was tucked close to shore. She approached the cabin on foot, carrying only the rifle and making as little noise as possible. She could hear men’s voices as she climbed the wooden steps. The smoke churning from the cabin’s chimney smelled of cherry wood. She noted a hip-high stack of split logs filling the space between two trees a few yards from the cabin. The primitive place seemed all set for winter, giving the impression that somebody was planning on living there rather than just visiting on the weekends. A clothesline was strung near the dock. There was a five-quart plastic bucket of clothespins just outside the porch door, under the overhang of the tin roof. Margo entered the screen porch silently and stood outside a glass-paneled door for a few minutes. She made out Brian and his brother Paul