Free Wintering by Peter Geye Page B

reading, his father said, “Dead west.”
    Gus held the compass up anyway.
    “Dead fucking west,” Harry told him.
    “Biwanago goes east and west,” Gus said.
    “It’s not Biwanago, Gus.” Then Harry gripped his paddle and dug in for a hard pull.
    —
    But it was Biwanago. Most likely, anyway. They cut through that misty morning for another half hour before the fog was gone all at once. Not like smoke rising, which was what Gus was used to, but as if it had been shattered and shot across the water like blowing snow. Green pines suddenly came into view against a soft blue sky, the trees here dense and unbroken.
    They paddled until they came to a point of gnarly granite. Gus moved ahead of his father without a word and passed into a long, narrow bay. Before he was halfway across he heard rushing water. He turned to look at his father, who had his ear canted toward the sound as though God himself were whispering across the water.
    “Hear that?” Harry said as his canoe slid beside Gus’s.
    “Yup.”
    “Sounds heavy.”
    Now Harry pulled out his compass, took his measure, and looked up at the sky. Their canoes came together and Gus made them trice by hooking his paddle over his father’s gunwale. The air was as still as the inside of a church. They sat in that stillness for a moment before Gus noticed that their canoes were being pulled slowly toward the sound of the rushing water.
    They put ashore well above the falls. Gus could see the mist rising downstream. Harry was hunched over the strap of his Duluth pack, and when he stood he had the book of maps in a grip so tight Gus thought the veins in his hands might burst.
    They walked the rocky shoreline to the sault. The first chute dropped five feet into a roiling white pool before spitting out into a hundred yards of churning water, its narrow path pocked with boulders and laced with fallen trees. At the end of the view, where the water veered west, it also appeared to slow down and smooth out.
    Harry looked back toward the big lake behind them, tapping the moose hide onto his freshly shaven chin. “How in the hell did we miss it?”
    “Miss what?” Gus said.
    “The divide, Gus. The height of land.” He thumbed through the pages and mumbled something Gus couldn’t understand. Then Harry shook his head fiercely, glanced heavenward, squatted, and cupped a handful of water up to his mouth. When he stood back up, he said, “Maybe it’s time we turned around, eh, bud?”
    Gus spun to face him. “You mean go home?”
    Harry arched his eyebrows.
    “Are you kidding me?”
    “We’re in a spot here. A hell of a spot. This”—he pointed down at the water, spread his arms toward the forest and sky above, and shook the book of maps like a pastor wielding the Bible—“is not where we are.”
    “Of course this is where we are,” Gus said. “It’s where we’re supposed to be, too.” Though they were back on course, where they wanted to be, Gus recognized it as the most dangerous place he’d ever been. He felt charged, electric, like some current as strong as the river’s was coursing through him. “The mouth of the Balsam River. Right on course.”
    Harry pocketed the maps and turned to face the rapids. “I do reckon this is the Balsam, Gus. But think about how we got here. It’s blind goddamn luck. Right now, from here, we can feel our way home. Before we get into real trouble.”
    Gus laughed. “Haven’t you been talking all this time about the authentic experience? About La Vérendrye and Thompson and the voyageurs? You and me. Right here. Unsure of our maps? Winter nipping at our heels? ‘We’re winterers!’ you said. You must have said it fifty times.” He said all this at once and didn’t wait for his father’s response. Instead, he pushed past him and marched back up the shoreline. When he reached his canoe he hefted the first Duluth pack from it, shouldered it, pulled the tumpline over his forehead, walked toward the edge of the sault, and