Arctic Daughter. Jean Aspen

the fire the evening before.

      Glancing back at Phil, I could see that he was already repacking in his mind. Net-Chet bounced forward at the sound of our voices, demanding to be readmitted.

      “No!” I snapped, unhooking her sharp claws from the frail mosquito netting. “Now go on!”

      “Looks like a nice day,” Phil announced, sitting up and reaching for his red-checked wool shirt. The faded blue T-shirt he slept in looked dingy. He stretched and glanced at his watch. Then he shook his wrist and listened a moment. “It’s dead.”

      He looked at me and we both shrugged. “Who cares what time it is,” I answered.

      “Isn’t it good to be here?” he grinned.

      “I wish I knew where here was. When do we get on the map?”

      “We’ll just have to keep comparing the map with the country until we get them matched. Our map starts on this side of the old gold town, so if we find it, we’ll know exactly where we are.”

      “Robert said it isn’t really on the river anymore,” I reminded him. I was pulling on my jeans and I lay back to tug up and zip them. “We could miss it.”

      Phil opened the tent door and crawled out on hands and knees. “I’m going to start loading the canoe,” he said over his shoulder.

      “I want to do some laundry before we start.”

      Had we known that we were scarcely halfway from the village to the old ghost town, perhaps things would have seemed different, but that morning we were full of hope.

      Two hard days and five miles later, we stood panting in the shallows, leaning heavily against the tug of the canoe while white water boiled around our knees. We almost didn’t make that one, I thought, staring back down the foaming trough.

      The principle of lining a canoe upstream is simple. The craft is worked on a long rope—one end fastened to the bow, the other to the rear thwart. When the stern is pulled in, the canoe ferries out from shore on its keel. A shifting balance of tension is maintained as conditions change. Lining works well with a moderate current and an even bottom. In rapids, however, we needed direct contact with the craft to hold her and it often took all of our combined strength.

      I caught Phil’s glance and shook my head. “Not yet.” My arms felt weak and my legs shook with fatigue. Overhead an afternoon thunderstorm growled darkly into the cobalt sky, mounting as we watched. The weather seemed to have changed as we neared the mountains, or perhaps it was only the advancing summer. A warning gust of wind swept upon us, kicking up spray and turning the river a flat, metallic gray as the sun blinked under.

      “Well, here it comes,” Phil stated as the first drops hit. He took a firmer grip on the bow decking. “I can handle it from here. Why don’t you go on up to those spruce trees and get a fire started? Here, take the tea things.”

      I gave in too easily, and tucking Net-Chet under one arm, ran wobble-kneed over the rocks for the distant forest. My feet were numb from the cold water and my pants clung to my legs. Scattered sheets of blowing rain raked the willows that crowded the nearby bar and flattened the few pioneer plants that poked between stones down on the beach. Ahead loomed the dark, thrashing trees.

      I entered the woods abruptly. Humming and swaying, the trees wrapped about me, dense and secret. I cleared a space in the thick moss and kicked into the duff. Beneath the green feathers of sphagnum moss, the years had layered a deep bed of peat interlaced with twigs and punky logs. The flames took easily to the twigs, burrowing into the dry duff with alarming speed.

      It was raining hard now. From the relative safety of the forest I could see a little figure out on the river struggling through the driving sheets. A mist rose from the rocks where the rain exploded on impact. Phil became a shadow, a small toiling wraith in a world of gray. Stinging hail joined the deluge, and Net-Chet began to whine as a fine patter sifted through the needles of our shelter. By crouching against the trunk of a tree I managed to avoid most of the rain.

      “Quiet, Net-Chet!” I turned on her. Phil was trying to beach the canoe, dragging it onto a rocky spit in search of a place to tie it. I dared not leave the fire to help him. At last he was running up the beach, blindly, head down into the rain. Poor guy, couldn’t get much wetter, I thought.

      Phil entered the forest and I seated him on a carpeted hummock of roots, close to the bole of an old spruce. He was soaked and shivering. I poured scalding water over the tea grounds in his stained enamel mug and crawled under the branches with him. His hair was plastered down and streaks of dirt drained into his beard, joining the trapped mosquitoes. Net-Chet was curled up on my only summer coat, so I squatted over the blaze warming my fingers.

      “Have some almost jerky,” I offered from a cloth sack. The mist sifting through the trees was becoming a drizzle punctuated with big drops. Lightning scared the gray world beyond the trees. “It tastes pretty good if you don’t look too close. Hey, you know your shirt is running?” I fingered a red stain around his cold, dripping wrist where the dye had leached.

      We crouched together, feeling the comfort of wet warmth pass between us, chewing raw, rubbery moose while the storm raged. “Here’s another batch,” Phil said, excising the wriggly pearl of a maggot with the point of his pocketknife.

      “Just don’t tell me about it. I’m not looking,” I replied in disgust.

      “More protein,” he teased.

      I shot him a sour glance. “The cycle is amazing when you think of it. Moose to maggot to fish food in a few weeks.” I closed the cloth game bag and slid it behind us to keep dry. I had made it by sewing two large kerchiefs together. It allowed air circulation while keeping out flies.

      The storm rode northward on an expanding evening sky as we gathered up our tea things and carried our squirming puppy back to the canoe. The clean land was tinted tangerine by a low sun. The air felt clammy on our cooled bodies, and cold water spilled into my boots as we pushed the craft back into the current. Within fifty yards we hit a rapid that swamped her. Fighting for every foot of progress, we towed her ashore and unloaded everything, spreading our belongings on the stones to dry.

      It was Phil’s twenty-fourth birthday. I baked him a cake in late evening sunlight, using our treasured flour and sugar, baking it before the fire with our folding reflector oven.

      One drizzling afternoon a few days later we rounded a bend and stood before the mountains. For the first time, no foothills blocked our view. We grounded the canoe and dropped onto the wet rocks to study the map.

      “Where do you suppose the ghost town is?” I asked Phil. “We’ve got to be getting close. Do you think we could have missed it?” We glanced from map to mountains attempting to fit it together. Somewhere nearby was the abandoned gold town. Ahead were dusky blue peaks, jagged and almost naked of trees. Behind us the shaggy, meandering shoreline was lost in a lush belt of foothills, dividing us from the past.

      “About four miles to the inch . . .” he shook his head. “It’s hard to tell. The creek we saw yesterday could be this one . . . or maybe this . . .” he traced a muddy finger along the map. “Hope it wasn’t this one or we’ve missed it.”

      “Well, I’m not going back.” It had started to rain again and Phil bent over the map, shielding it with his body. From her nest in the canoe, Net-Chet was complaining ever more insistently. The bugs were vicious on the bar, stinging as they bit into my wet face. They seemed to prefer rainy days as long as there was no wind. Irritably, I shoved Lady Grayling, stern first, into the current, playing the rope through my chapped hands to adjust the pitch.

      “I’ll take it awhile,” I said, glad for a chance to warm up. I threw my weight into the rope, running it over my right shoulder and using my left hand to control the angle. Water piled into the side of the canoe, forcing it out. The river was shallow and pebbly, hooking slowly into another broad curve. I relaxed, placing each foot with care and feeling