Читать книгу Arctic Daughter - Jean Aspen - Страница 13

CHAPTER 1

My mother once said that I must have been imprinted very early on the Arctic for I spent the first three years of my life there. As a child I can remember people asking me, “Are you going to be an author and arctic explorer like your Mommy?”

“No,” I would answer. “I’m going to be a doctor.”

In my family the role of arctic explorer was occupied. Long before I was born my parents had spent years in Alaska’s wilderness, living off the land, traveling by canoe and dogsled, and on foot. Later they pioneered in tiny planes across the vastness. Writing books and lecturing together had been their way of life until twelve years of companionship ended in an angry divorce about the time my memory begins.

I inherited the legacy. I grew up in Tucson, Arizona, listening to stories and leafing through the heavy family albums where across the pages of Life magazine little Jeanie toddles on her snowshoes. But she remained somehow out of my reach; a fairy child. Still I felt that undeniable pull, almost a memory. An eaglet hatched in a henhouse never really forgets. Across the dusty years it called, echoing between the sky and water of my restless soul—like a promise.

Yes, I was drawn to the Arctic, but not by the glamour of being an explorer. There was something more. Maybe the smell of autumn leaves or the stillness of a winter night; the faint song of running water heard even as I gazed upon the arid playground and waited out my childhood sentence in the public schools of Tucson. Perhaps it was the half-remembered family warmth of my first three years in a little cabin on Takahula Lake. Whatever drew me, it pulled me north as soon as I could fly—unerringly as the geese—to repeat another cycle. At the time, I denied any connection with my parents. Yet somehow I always knew that I would return.

My mother was also serving out her time in Tucson. She once said that she had lived her life by the first commandment, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me,” for she saw God everywhere in the natural world, and her love of nature came first, even before her children. She was a wild spirit and she fretted being shackled, as she saw it, to the demands of two small children and poverty in the city heat, away from her beloved wilderness.

My earliest memories are of wild places, campfires, and trails along desert streams. “More walk, less talk,” she would say, restricted even there by my short legs. As my legs grew, she began to dream of returning to the wilderness with her daughters. She managed to get her publisher, Little, Brown and Company, to advance the money for the three of us to canoe three thousand miles down the Mackenzie River system in northern Canada—a journey spanning two summers and resulting in her seventh book, Down the Wild River North. I was fourteen then and my sister, Annie, was twelve. Our mother was nearing fifty.

Before I turned twenty-two I put together my own expedition. Phil, my high school sweetheart and friend, was a year older. Looking at our pictures now I can see how very young we were, a couple of kids on an adventure. The year was 1972, a time when other kids our age were dying in the jungles of Vietnam. So perhaps not so young after all. I see myself with more clarity now than I did then, as if who I was to become was already in me. There I stand, a familiar stranger: a lovely blond girl of medium height, a bit chubby, with tanned skin and even white teeth. There is a sense of determination in the set of the jaw, confidence and excitement almost masking the questing in the blue-gray eyes.

Phil and I had prepared well for an extended journey into the wilderness: two years spent gleaning information from my mother, reading books, and pouring over maps. We would drift down the Yukon River, which flows westward across Alaska from Canada to empty into the Bering Sea, and then pull our canoe up a tributary north into the Brooks Range. There we planned to build a cabin and live alone for a year or more entirely off the land. The day after final exams of my junior year in college, we started north.

I have been asked why I would undertake such a journey. Why, I might counter, would any young person choose instead a mortgage and forty-hour-a-week job instead of freedom to explore a wild and beautiful land?

At 2:00 A.M. the sun was just coming up as Phil’s old pickup truck plowed through the last mudhole and into the tiny settlement of Circle, Alaska. End of the road. Three of us had driven north for ten days, Phil and I and a friend who had come along to take the truck back to Tucson. Gradually, we had left darkness behind as we neared the Arctic Circle, an imaginary line around the earth where the sun doesn’t set for one day each summer and fails to rise one day each winter. Now at last, our rutted dirt track simply vanished into the biggest piece of river I had ever seen: the mighty, muddy Yukon. Like a moving lake, it reflected the early morning sun into our tired eyes.

Phil switched off the truck’s engine and stretched. Silence rushed into the cab. We sat a moment, numb from the hours of jostling. Then I flipped up the door handle, enveloping us in the waiting mosquitoes. Within minutes we had our tents up beside the truck.

By 6:00 A.M. the sweltering heat of an early June day on the Yukon Flats drove us from sleep. We were camped on a sloping, grassy bank facing miles of open water and pale blue sky. The land spread flat and lush beneath the endless summer sun. Behind us a few tattered buildings were hidden from view in the dark spruce trees. Steam rising from the damp earth and foliage made the air heavy and hard to breath. Even the mosquitoes were hiding in the shade.

Feeling tired and cranky, I wandered down to the river and splashed muddy water over my face, drying it with the tail of my blue cotton work shirt. Then I brushed out my long hair, twisted it into a knot, and clipped it up with a large barrette.

Phil was already unloading our canoe and half a ton of equipment from the truck when I joined him. He looked up at my approach and paused to fold a red bandanna, slipping it over his chestnut hair as a sweatband. He was handsome in his way: heavy bones framing wide green eyes, square jaw beginning to disappear under a dark beard. The mouth was small for his face, overshadowed by a craggy nose—victim of high school sports. Phil was of average height, with a body well built and graceful, though his personal inclination was to bull his way through rather than use finesse. Perhaps his most striking feature was his eyebrows (or rather, eyebrow) for it spanned both eyes in a single, dramatic sweep.

It was hard for me to see his features objectively. Through the years of friendship, they had become as familiar as my own. We had been close since high school, hiking, rock climbing, dating. We met in the Southern Arizona Rescue Association when I was sixteen. Our friends had referred to us as “Phil-and-Jeanie” ever since, as if we had somehow joined to form a third organism. And to me, in a way we had. I wanted it to be that way. He had given me an engagement ring just before we started our journey, and the little diamond winked at me as I began unloading duffel.

We worked quietly together unpacking mounds of gear and piling it on the grass. The canoe and supplies that had crowded the front room of the little house we rented together that last semester in school now seemed to shrink before miles of open water.

My attention was interrupted as a shadow fell across me. I looked up at an older man in a dirty T-shirt and whiskers. Although his remaining hair was gray, the blistered, red face and cracked lips were those of a fair-haired person with too many seasons in the weather. From a flat, metal can he took a fresh chew of tobacco and tucked it thoughtfully under his lower lip.

“Whar ya goin’?” It came out more like a demand than a question.

I straightened slowly, wiping a sleeve over my forehead.

“Up into the Brooks Range.”

“In that?” He spat toward the Lady Grayling, our nineteen-foot aluminum canoe, lying out of her element among the dandelions.

She did look small beside the Yukon.

“I fly up in that country sometimes in the winter and hunt wolves,” he wheezed, watching me. “My neighbor, he gets lots of ’em buggers from the air, but I don’t believe in it,” he continued. “Mainly ’cause I ain’t got no plane.”

I glanced up in surprise, half expecting a grin. His face was impassive but for the slow rumination of the jaws and the shrewd china blue eyes. His self-assurance intimidated me: the solid way he planted his boots on the dandelions.

Go away, I thought. I bent over and went back to packing clothes. Choosing equipment and supplies had been no small task and this last day of organizing was important. There would be no one to help if we forgot something.

“They say we shouldn’t poison these here bugs,” he stated, still searching for something we could disagree upon. He shifted his weight, watching me work.

I nodded. “They’re a big part of the food chain,” I told him, fresh from my biology classes. Absently I scratched a welt-speckled arm.

He spit again, a stream of juice aimed expertly between stained teeth. “Shit.” He studied me a moment. “I been pilotin’ the River ’fore you was born, huntin’ and trappin’ this country.”

I followed his gaze northward over the glittering water.

“’Course I ain’t trapped now in years—not that I couldn’t still do it.” He seemed to have forgotten me, his eyes lingering on the river. “Jest ain’t the game thar was. Wolves is mostly to blame. Wolves and Indians. I could teach you young pups a thing or two about trappin’.” His attention came back to me defiantly.

“I imagine you could,” I answered in a gentler note. Then I retreated into myself until he had gone.

Soon another man appeared, slowly treading the beach with a cane. He looked to be over seventy, a tiny prune of an Indian, dark and wrinkled. He was dressed in dark cotton clothing of indeterminate color, short rubber over-shoes, and a purple baseball cap.

“You want whitefish? I give you big whitefish.” His voice was soft and difficult to catch. He glanced up at me and then politely away.

He came only to my shoulder as I ambled beside him along the beach, asking questions about the river we hoped to ascend, a tributary of the Yukon that I had chosen from a map. The only maps available were four miles to the inch with two-hundred-foot contour intervals. The river appeared to have no major waterfalls, be fairly well timbered, and to cut deeply into an uninhabited area of the Brooks Range—a mass of seven mountain ranges that extend east to west across the entire northern third of Alaska. No one we knew had ever heard of this river; few even knew of the Brooks Range. The old man beside me knew this land, but he understood very little English and merely bobbed and smiled at most of what I said.

“I catch too many fish. Only me and my wife and no dogs anymore. Every day I come ask white people if they want fish. But they say no,” he grinned, showing worn teeth. “That there my wife.” He pointed toward a tiny, fat prune just disappearing into a small cabin of unpeeled logs. “I build that one her own house. Fifty-two year we married now. Church married! But I can’t live with her.”

He shook his head stubbornly. We halted beside his leaning cache and he reached into a slimy pail to hand me a fish. Then he stooped and wiped his hands in the grass. I thanked him and returned to the beach to clean the fish.

As I scraped the large scales, my eyes were drawn back to the Yukon. I had calculated that we had perhaps a 75 percent chance of surviving, green as we were. Neither of us had even hunted big game before. I wondered if I had misjudged the odds.

By late afternoon I was dizzy with fatigue. I crawled into the truck cab and curled up on the seat to nap, rolling the windows tight against the mosquitoes. Phil was still loading and reloading the canoe, a job he wished to do alone. He was inexperienced with canoes, but had a natural ability with equipment and a tendency to take charge.

When Phil woke me it was nearly midnight and the sun was setting into the Yukon. He looked very tired. I shivered slightly in the big breath of the river, rubbing the seat print from my cheek. Time to go. We would find our own place to camp away from the curious eyes of the village. I checked around the pickup a last time for overlooked items and sleepily headed down the bank to the canoe.

“It looks awfully full . . .” I protested.

Phil nodded toward the grassy bank where, even at this hour, the total population of ten had come down to watch us sink. “Pretend you know what you’re doing,” he intoned under his breath.

Together we shoved the grounded craft and I felt the heavy gauge aluminum give under my weight before she slid free into the water. The little ship wallowed deeply but remained afloat. Gingerly I climbed into the bow. My initial alarm increased when I turned to see Phil settling into the stern. We were inches from the river.

“We’re crazy, Phil,” I declared. “We’re dangerously overloaded and we’re just going to have to get rid of some of this junk!” I had forgotten the spectators and started to get out.

But we were already underway. Quickly the current snatched our little tub and spun it from shore, sweeping us into the orange and purple sunset. As the truck dwindled into the evening, we waved good-bye. Pursued by a cloud of mosquitoes, we set forth upon the Yukon.

I glanced back at the sound when Phil started our little outboard motor. The canoe gave a sluggish lurch. As he cut back on the power with a gentle curse, we watched a wave ride easily up and over the stern. Lady Grayling settled deeper while Phil motored quietly with one hand and bailed with the other.

“Got to watch that,” he said shakily, staring in fascination at the two inches of freeboard that separated us from the river. The glossy, orange water betrayed no hint of its depth. Our little engine purred as we wove through the sky-dappled river for the fringe of faraway shore, that finely drawn ribbon of black reality that divided our world from the clouds and gave it order. The mosquitoes were reluctant to give up the chase, but one by one they stowed away or were left behind.

“We’re off at last!” I called back cheerfully. I smiled, feeling the thrill of an irrevocable choice.

Phil had finished bailing and was peering toward that phantom shore. Absently he swatted at a lingering bug.

“I just knocked my glasses overboard.”

“You’re kidding,” I said, knowing that he wasn’t. “Your new ones?”

“Yes.”

I studied the flawless surface that had swallowed Phil’s new glasses. “Let’s camp at the first spot.”

He nodded wearily.

Very soon the sun was gone, sliding into the spruce forest, and a diffused pink glow of boundless sky softened the summer. The shore we finally reached shelved gently from a willow bar into a quiet stretch of river. There we beached the canoe, making her fast to a sunken log. We snapped a fitted nylon tarp over the load and pitched our camp among the supple bushes. Without bothering with dinner, we crawled into our small, orange tent and zipped it tight against the bugs. Soon I had drifted into a sound sleep, lulled by the lap of wavelets against the canoe and the shrill cries of arctic terns as they darted for insects in the cool dawn sky.

Early day burned bright and hot when we deserted the stuffy tent for the smell of open water. I knelt in the sand, feeding sticks to a young fire and enjoying the stir of wind on my face. A gossamer mist of mosquitoes swirled in the eddy of my body, attracted by the warm animal smell.

The beach was a story of river moods, gathered from countless other shores. Along it wavered a series of parallel lines marking recent water levels in trails of twigs. Small plants were forcing their first two leaves upward through the mud. Because the Arctic receives most of its sunlight in an intense burst, plants and animals grow rapidly during the brief summer. However, environments with low productivity, such as deserts and the Arctic, are delicate, each niche being filled with a single species.

Here one could see the progression of life. Hardy, young willows formed a living net of fluttering green that locked down the sand with tough, red roots. Behind these stood older willows and the fast-growing balsam poplar, and sheltered by the poplar from the careless river, a two-foot forest of young spruce pushed through to claim the future.

I leaned contentedly back on my ankles and buttoned the throat of my denim shirt against the bugs. We were finally underway. This trip had started in my head, and we had taken one step after another to find ourselves here. That is what it takes, I thought: imagination and tenacity.

Phil dropped an armload of firewood and grinned down at me. It was the first smile I’d seen in days. “I want to repack the canoe after breakfast,” he said. “It’s poorly balanced. I think less weight in the stern would help.” He had found his spare glasses—climbing goggles with dark prescription lenses. To save space, he had a set of clear lenses that could be inserted. Phil often forgot to wear glasses, as his driving record attested.

“I’ll make us some breakfast, if you want to get started,” I offered.

All our bulk staples—like cornmeal, flour, and sugar—were packed in square, five-gallon cans. We had designed a grub box, already dubbed “Wonderbox,” with racks of plastic bottles to be refilled at intervals for easy access in camp. Freeze-dried camper foods were just coming onto the market and were far too expensive for our budget. I had also reasoned that we could pack more actual food as bulk staples. We hoped to supplement our supplies with rabbits and fish during the summer, and would of course need big game before winter. My mother had told me that an active person consumes his weight in prepared food each month, but a canoe’s capacity is small—even ours with its eleven-hundred-pound limit.

Into a bucket of boiling water I dumped a handful of dried and salted horse meat, an animal we had bought and butchered for the trip. At forty-seven dollars it was protein we could afford and had furnished our first butchering experience. We had oven-dried the meat with much salt and then broken it into chips, which I planned to use in cooking until we found game. I was inexperienced in cooking with staples, and Phil was useless. To the boiling horse meat I added flour, lard, salt, and pepper to make a kind of horse-chip gravy. I stirred the pot and bedded it in the coals to simmer. Then I stripped off my clothes and dashed for the river. Phil was still repacking.

“Come and have a bath,” I called, safely submerged. “You’ll feel much better.”

“When I’m done,” came the voice from the duffel.

I upended with a splash, driving the mosquitoes from my scalp. “Come on, you’ll enjoy it.” I could imagine the specter of my disembodied head floating on a swirling sea of cocoa amid its own little, black cloud.

Reluctantly Phil undressed in the smoke of the fire (mosquitoes avoid smoke) and proffered one toe to the river. “It’s cold!” he accused me. He wasn’t big on water under any circumstances.

“Just rush in and get it over,” I advised him. The cloud of bugs was settling contentedly onto his naked skin. With a grimace, he splashed through the water to join me.

Later I stood beside the driftwood fire as Phil brushed out my long hair. Over us, a cruising gull dipped sharply, head pivoting in keen interest, white on blue. The sudden hiss of the pot shifting startled me and I shoved a stick under the bail, lifting it to rake out more coals.

Thoughtfully my eyes trailed over the muddy beach where the tools and supplies that were to see us through a year alone were heaped in the sunlight. Every item had been chosen with care, from the folding sheet-metal Yukon stove for the cabin, to down clothing and rifles. We had discussed our possible needs at length, each of us making decisions in the areas we were most familiar.

Phil was arranging the load in layers. On the bottom were the water-tight five-gallon cans of food and winter clothes as well as the gas tanks he had built to fit the canoe contours. Items like axes, wire, saw blades, one hundred feet of half-inch polypropylene rope, snowshoes, and a few traps were stuffed down beside these. Many kits, such as sewing, photography, medical, maps, journal, and personal items were packed in a middle layer. On top would be everyday items: tent and sleeping bags tucked into a canvas duffel sack, jackets, and a large Ensolite pad for the tent floor, rolled and tied. All the cookware nested into a seven-gallon kettle we called “Mightypot.” To ensure that equipment would not be washed overboard in case of capsize, everything was lashed in.

This was our future. There were wicks for the tallow candles that we hoped would light our winter and a few special books. We needed fuel for the secondhand outboard motor and rope for pulling the canoe during the later stages of our journey. We had winter clothing, backpacks, and canoe patching materials. There were knives and whetstones, files, matches embedded in wax, an auger, tin snips, nails, hinges, bullets, panes of Plexiglas for cabin windows, measuring tape, and nylon twine. We had a fish net, binoculars, rivets, a plastic tarp to waterproof the sod roof, window putty, four small bottles of military mosquito repellent (the strongest available), film, and a small gas lantern: in short, everything we could conceive of needing and fit in a canoe.

Like many partners, we tended to specialize. Phil was physically stronger than me and good at building things. I, with my knowledge of the North and my dream, was the momentum behind our trip. And somewhere, unseen, was my mother with her stories and advice.

When repacking was completed and cargo again towered over the little craft, we turned to enjoying our breakfast. It was terrible. The jerky was the texture of cardboard and so salty as to be nearly inedible. Above us, arctic terns hovered and wheeled—dazzling flashes of life engrossed in their great summer task, a job of such importance they had flown from the Antarctic, a round-trip of thirty-six-thousand miles, for these few weeks of sun and insects to perform it. In all the world, only terns can make more terns.

It was afternoon before we got underway. As camp swept behind on a sea of dancing sun diamonds, we discovered that we were not yet across the river. In fact, with the kaleidoscope of wandering channels, big islands, merging backwaters, and sloughs, being “on shore” was a matter of definition. From the air, this area of the Yukon Flats resembles a plate of spaghetti, but we were comfortably ignorant of this for the map that might have helped had somehow been forgotten in the truck, a mistake that could well have proved fatal. God looks after fools, they say. But not always, I have come to find out.

As we slowly motored, we searched for that elusive other shore and our next landmark, the small town of Fort Yukon, some days travel away. When we stopped the engine far from land and drifted, we found ourselves on a smooth lake of sunlit water melting into flat, blue sky where magic islands seemed to float. Only the uneasy boils on the smooth surface and hypnotic hiss of silt against the hull told of our travel.

Night had already settled upon the lands to the south while our tireless sun circled the sky, dipping northward as evening descended. From shore came the first sigh of cool dampness as the earth awoke from its afternoon doze. We spun past high cutbanks anchored in shadow and guarded by fallen trees, “sweepers” thrashing in the current. It was no place to practice our beaching techniques. Here, close to land, we were suddenly reminded of the speed and power of the water. The dark shore seemed ominous after the innocent dazzle of the river. I squinted and rubbed my salt-crusted eyes, searching the shadows where soon we must land. I ought to have a hat, I thought irritably. Uncertainly, I chewed my lower lip where the skin was already peeling. A few more days of this and I’ll be fried. I had forgotten the Arctic could be so hot.

A riffle broke the surface ahead and the cutbank suddenly dropped to meet it. A cutbank is where the river is eating into the shore, leaving a raw drop. “There!” I called, pointing.

Phil turned the canoe sharply upstream before nosing in to shore. Our motor conked out in the thick silt and in slow motion we slid to a stop in shallow water. It was the end of the day and we both had dry feet. We glanced at one another and shrugged.

The medium through which our canoe would not pass was far from solid. I climbed stiffly overboard and felt the penetrating stab of boots filling with cold water. Last bubbles of air hiccuped free as together we dragged our load further aground.

“Bugs!” I had forgotten them.

“I can unpack. You start a smudge fire,” Phil urged, then choked on a mosquito.

Waving my arms futilely, I snapped off twigs from the lower trunks of spruce trees for a fire. The bank was a snarl of dense trees, matted with the wreckage of spring breakup and still slippery with mud. Yet already plants were shooting up, pushing aside their dead in the wild summer urge to grow. I cleared a space in the underbrush and soon had a fire billowing smoke from a pile of waterlogged wood. The mosquitoes were thinning when I skidded down the short cutbank to help Phil.

“Empty the cooking things out by the fire and fetch a bucket of water,” he called back as he lugged duffel up the bank, churning through dark mud. “I’ll get the rest.”

I noticed he had secured the canoe in three separate places, apprehensive that it might get away during the night.

“Think I’ll try to find us a rabbit while you start supper,” Phil said. I was staking down the tent floor in a thicket of wild roses. He joined me on his knees, pulling his pliers from their holster to nip off the thorny bushes. I could see that he was eager to be off.

“Yes, you go ahead. I can finish pitching camp.” I felt somehow disappointed to be left with the camp chores while he went off hunting. I didn’t plan this trip to be left out, I thought resentfully.

I watched him pick up my old .22 rifle, holding it comfortably in one hand. It was the same gun that my mother, little sister, and I had carried to the Arctic Ocean in our canoe.

“Phil, please don’t lose sight of the river. A person could really get lost in this jungle. There just aren’t any landmarks.” The dank forest crowded thickly to the water’s edge.

“Doesn’t look much like rabbit country either, does it?” He squatted by the fire to dig through the journal box and paused to hold up his compass. Then he repacked the box and levered the lid shut. In a moment he had disappeared.

Soon I finished pitching camp. I stirred dinner, a horse chip-and-rice dish, before moving it onto coals away from the main fire. Then I got out the tackle box. It would be fun, I thought as I rigged my pole, if I caught a fish while he was gone.

Away from the smoke, I was again immersed in a sea of mosquitoes. Carefully, I traversed the broken bank seeking a spot to fish. None seemed promising. My first cast sank through shallow, muddy water and hooked into a submerged log. I wallowed out to retrieve my lure. After a few tries I retreated to the fire.

Time dragged. I glanced at my watch. Where was Phil? I wondered, awash with irritation and concern. Positioning another log on the blaze, I wagged to keep my body in the smoke and face free as I sifted the forest noises. Evening cool was definitely upon us now, and a damp breeze from the darkening woods crept out over the gold expanse of moving water. I watched the current, caught in its timeless song. Rivers are important to me. At night I often dream of drifting down rivers, the adventure of each bend unfolding before me. I have since childhood. They are the living blood of the earth. More than just moving water, there is something grand in their presence.

I sniffed the night, listening uneasily for Phil. Surely he had sense enough to stay near the water . . . ?

My mind wandered to my fourteenth summer and canoeing the Slave River in Canada. Or was it the Mackenzie the following year? I know it wasn’t the Peace. The country had this same wild look—a summertime rain forest, flooded in breakup, strangled in vegetation. The sky had been rich blue that day, piled with cotton clouds. I had wanted to hunt rabbits (I never got one that year, but I looked) and I recall my mother saying:

“Jean,” (she always called me that) “don’t lose sight of the river or you may never find it again.”

“Okay, sure,” I had answered, impatient to be gone.

“I mean it now,” she insisted, peering wisely over her reading glasses and laying aside her journal and pen. “You don’t know everything yet.” She remained sitting cross-legged in the moss by the smudge fire looking up at me—a plump, middle-aged woman with red hair. It is curious how our relationship reversed that summer, my aging mother suddenly depending on my strength and judgment.

Shooting her a look of annoyance I had taken that .22 (old even then) and started downstream. Over the river, thunderheads were building. The going was rough along the high cutbank and soon I met massive driftwood barricades, which forced me inland.

The forest had been gloomy in the hush of oppressively wet air. I followed the debris until I discovered a place to crawl over it. Here I turned back toward the river only to be checked once more. I found myself bashing through ever denser thickets. Finally I decided I would have to turn around.

Still I didn’t emerge on shore. A gnawing fear whispered inside me, growing with the wind that rocked the spruce tops way above my head. I was suddenly aware of the rapidly changing sky. Lightning flashed and the first big drops splattered between the trees. Could I be mixed up? I glanced about, really frightened for the first time, listening for the river. Now the wind spoke and every tree complained darkly under the burden of it. The mosquitoes had vanished. Nearby something cracked explosively before the singing air. Tears streaked my scratched cheeks as confusion gave way to terror. Slowly I rotated and each direction looked identical.

I don’t recall how long I wandered or if I prayed. Time means very little in such moments. I only remember my first glint of open sky. Heedless of the grasping branches I scrambled forward and burst into the face of the storm. The river! Despite my backtracking, I felt certain that I was still below camp. I scurried upstream along the bank, pelted by hail and spray. But no camp came into view.

“Mother!” I bawled into the wind, pivoting in frightened indecision. “Moth . . . ther!”

As if in answer, I heard the tiny “Pop!” of a rifle out of the gray ahead. I scrambled over the last few obstacles and found myself in camp.

I hugged my mother, feeling safe and foolish.

“Come on, let’s get out of the storm,” she had said warmly, ignoring my tears and drenched clothes. She put her arm about me and started for the tent. “I fired the .30-06 hoping you could hear it over the thunder.”

I never forgot it. But now where was Phil?

The fire glowed red in the midnight dusk. Uneasily I rose for another bundle of sticks. I listened: nothing but the faraway call of geese, the hum of insects, and the muted crackle of fire sluggishly pushing smoke into the calm air. What if he doesn’t come back? At last the thought surfaced in a black wave. What would I do? I could never find this place again if I went for help, and what good would it do anyway? I would wait here all summer if need be, but oh, please God, bring him safely back!

I was digging out my mother’s .30-06 when Phil appeared in camp, heralded by clouds of fresh mosquitoes. He took a breath and plunged into the smoke.

“What happened?” I asked as he propped the .22 against a log. His dirty face was scratched and his hair was matted with twigs. Gently I drew my arms about his waist and he stroked my hair. For a long moment we stood there, holding to the security of each other’s warmth.

“Come sit down,” I said at last, taking his hand.

“I’m sure glad I took the compass,” he admitted sheepishly. “There was a time when I was certain that the compass was wrong, but it seemed unwise to argue with it.”

“Dinner is ready.” I placed the cooking pot between his feet and pried up the lid. Steam enveloped him, fogging his spare glasses a moment. I seated myself across from him and smiled mischievously. “Let me tell you a story,” I said.

As the days slid by under that constant sun, we fell into a rhythm with the river: a watchful harmony, an unequal truce. On a horizon of determined water we floated timelessly toward the sea, past hundreds of sunbaked islands, dense forest, hidden channels, eddies and submerged logs, crumbling cut-banks, and sandbars. The earth and sun stood still amid vast plains of water-sky where giant islands rode slowly up to meet us, then dwindled behind into yesterday. And above the silence we could feel a careless song of power.

That song was with us always, even as we slept, one ear tuned for the canoe. We heard it by day as we drifted beneath cutbanks where muddy water sucked at the earth and trees held desperately to one last season, their boughs weighted with cones the dying offer. A wall of earth would suddenly collapse, rending the thin carpet of roots, sending spray upward as the earth slid into the river. We felt small, a speck of flotsam adrift in time and space. The river’s song was with us, too, far from land in the whisper of silt against the canoe and the gentle swirl of the current.

From shore came the smells of a breathing forest under a midday sun, of balsam poplar, spruce, and something akin to fresh, hot caramel candy. A solemn train of dark spruce trees slid past, interspersed with the bright green flurries of new sandbars covered with willows. A venturesome yellow butterfly lilted toward us, alighting as a splash of living butter on our silver bow.

Drowsiness would steal upon us in the warm, still air; a trust in this big, friendly river. Then from nowhere a tremor would slam through the canoe, swinging our stern crazily sideways, shipping water as we collided with an unseen bar. In panic we would fight the current, leaping overboard into the soft, invisible sand, shocked at our speed. I would brace against the straining craft while Phil changed another shear pin. Our old outboard didn’t have a clutch, so the propeller turned as long as the engine was running. The “shear pin” was designed to break whenever the screw hit something. Once the pin was replaced, we would lead Lady Grayling into deeper water and climb aboard, gushing water from our boots, and be off again, not a visible speck of land for a mile on either side.

One evening we camped on the head of a sandbar that had recently emerged from spring flood. Bars are new land, a gift from the river. Bedraggled willows in full leaf were knitting over the scars of breakup, healing the ice-furrowed ground in shimmering layers of green. How resilient they seemed! We sat before a driftwood fire enjoying the breeze that kept away the mosquitoes. The island clove the current, brushing aside the Yukon. This combined with the breeze to give an illusion of motion, as if the island itself were traveling upstream through the water.

“But our civilization cuts us off from nature,” I was arguing, “and from one another. Compare your relationship with other drivers to your interaction with people walking.”

Phil leaned contentedly against a bleached and battered stump, digging his bare toes into the warm sand. His feet, broad and flat, turned decidedly inward.

“You can’t just throw it out,” he answered. “After all, you’ve never plowed with a stick . . .”

“Even our play is organized,” I broke in. “There is no spontaneity. What price do we pay for our physical comfort? What is ‘quality of life’? Primitive people were able to spend more time together. They had a sense of community that we’ve lost. I’m not certain our toys are worth what we pay for them.”

Phil was looking his old self as I watched him through the hot blaze of our fire. He was very brown, the light eyes striking in his tanned, bearded face, and looking slightly owlish behind spare glasses. His dark hair was already frosted red-gold by the sun. Mine was nearly white on top.

I pulled off my soggy boots, summer “shoepacs” with leather uppers, rubber bottoms, and felt insoles. Thoughtfully I wiped the lint from between my toes. Good feet, they have given me faithful service and often been hard used. It felt good to let them dry and air after days of wet boots.

Tasting my tea (saccharin-sweetened to conserve sugar), I settled the white enamel mug beside me in the sand. A few feet away, Lady Grayling rested, belly in the mud, while bright ripples of late afternoon sky and water reflected over her sides. Already a waterline two inches below the gunwale marked our loaded freeboard. Nearby, a distraught sandpiper teetered along the shoal, piping her discomfort at our presence.

“Each generation must examine its world and choose,” I said, flashing Phil a glance. I do interrupt too much, I thought. Now he’ll give me the silent treatment. “Coyotes may adapt to the L.A. freeways, but we build them.”

Phil was studiously pruning his ragged cuticles with a pocketknife. His nails were still grease-stained, and I wondered idly how he managed to maintain this trace of his old life as a mechanic.

“We throw away our power as individuals for a feeling of security,” I continued. “We have somehow lost our sense of communion with the planet and with each other.”

I stared moodily into the flames, watching sticks disintegrate under their almost invisible touch. Water had leached the driftwood, leaving it porous and brittle.

At length he snapped his knife shut. “Finished?”

“Yes.” I kept my eyes on the fire. A frantic colony of ants boiled from one end of a log, driven out by heat and smoke. Taking a twig, I helped the survivors to safety, knowing that an ant without its colony is dead. They are not individuals in the same way we are.

“You cannot separate yourself from your culture,” he told me. “It’s sophomoric to propose simple solutions. What you’re talking about isn’t just a matter of technology.”

“Maybe,” I conceded, “but I’ve had it with the artificial culture we have built. I’ve had it with forms to fill out in triplicate and rules. I would rather risk being killed than have a government restrict me for my own good.”

“It’s more complicated than that,” he insisted. “Regulations are meant to protect others from you as well.”

I snorted in exasperation. “I know there are good reasons behind most laws, but the result is a bleak world devoid of creativity and personal responsibility. Kids might fall out of trees and parents might sue—so down come the trees. School yards look like prison camps.”

“Parents do sue . . .”

“Bleak.” I interrupted again. “Who wants to grow up, no matter how safely, in a bleak and joyless world?”

I took a deep breath and let my eyes rest on the beach. It was so quietly itself, undisturbed by my arguments. “Phil, I need to know what being an animal means before I can understand what it is to be human. I want to be like these willows, sinking my roots into the earth and knowing the direction of the sun. I can’t do that in the city.” I studied him, this stranger that I wanted to spend a lifetime with, wondering if we can ever know anyone.

Whatever Phil was thinking, he only said, “I’d like to try to photograph the geese before dinner. I didn’t hear them leave.”

He pulled on his wet socks and boots and set off across the twenty-acre bar, camera and lenses slung around his neck, leaving large, pigeon-toed tracks in the sand. I smiled at his retreating back, thinking of the wise, old honkers I have chased.

There were sociable congregations of Canada geese on the Yukon, and nearly every sandspit boasted a wary clan. My mother had called them “bachelor birds,” for they were not nesting. The breeding pairs were already established on ponds inland. Geese see everything and soon I heard the excited bark of many voices followed by the flip-flap of weighty bodies becoming airborne. With every wingbeat their beaks opened, warning other geese up and down the river. The cry was taken up on neighboring islands where black stalks of agitated necks bristled, before they too burst into flight.

Theirs is a world of sky and water. I marveled at the V of poetry staining the late afternoon where parting notes still lingered. I focused on them, drawing my mind to a point. Perhaps it is a question of vision, I decided. Some people find more inspiration in their backyards than others do in the Himalayas. Still, wouldn’t it be easier here? The wild geese of my school years were the silver Vs of fighters blasting out from Davis-Monthan Air Force Base.

Smoke curled with the steam from our unmistakable horse-chip dinner as I sat in stillness beneath a hemisphere of sunset and birds. When you live under it, the sky makes up half your life. Down the beach I could see the silhouette of Phil returning, looking small yet somehow complete, at home here as much as I. He greeted me with a soft smile and a handful of wildflowers and then joined me at the fire to recount the things he had seen.

I finished eating and handed the blackened pot and spoon to Phil where he sat tracing circles in the cooling sand with a polished stick. Across the channel an elevated cutbank stood sharply defined by the sinking sun. I could see that it had been the site of a burn in recent years. It was clothed in vigorous new bushes, wildflowers, and the carcasses of trees that had once lived there. A time for everything, I thought. Some life thrives only on old burns.

“I wonder if seagulls are good to eat or legal to shoot,” I said, breaking the stillness.

“Probably not much there but feathers,” Phil replied, roused from his own contemplations.

“I bet they taste fishy. At least it would be fresh meat.” I had been raised believing that milk, eggs, and meat were the only proteins and hadn’t known to pack more whole grains and beans. We had fallen into the habit of two meals of horse chips a day. It seemed a bother to stop for lunch, and we were also conscious of conserving food.

“We do need some fresh food soon,” he agreed, “to improve our outlook as well as our diet.” We had yet to catch a single snowshoe hare or fish—not a promising omen for people who intended to live off the land.

“Why don’t we try to camp in a slough tomorrow and set out the fish net,” I suggested. “There’ll be LOTS of bugs, but we won’t catch anything here. At least not without fresh bait. The current would carry our net away or shred it, and it’s too muddy for fish to see a lure.”

“Okay,” Phil nodded in agreement.

I rose from the chilly ground and dusted off my trousers. My clothes were sooty and stained from life on the ground, but it didn’t seem important. A lone duck flapped overhead, going somewhere. He veered sharply off to the north when he spotted us, members of a species universally shunned. I watched him, thinking that ducks were never meant to fly. But they do.