Specimen Song (18 page)

The forest below was the color of dark dreams, the kind you rise through to a grateful waking.

The river was past spate, dropping, milky with soil and glacial dust. Du Pré shuddered. The water was cold, cold, cold.

Black soggy trees floated on, barely breaking the surface.

There would be logjams. There would be ice jams.

I live in a goddamned desert, Du Pré fumed. I am never going to go anywhere again that don’t have prickly pear cactus in sight.

Lucky was riding up with the pilot. Suddenly, they banked and dropped, flew over a long lake, turned once more, and set down. Du Pré flopped against the belts when the Otter eased down in the water. Waves raced to the shore.

There were three Indians standing on it, their clothes so stained with wood smoke that they were the color of old bark.

Du Pré helped shove the two canoes out of the Otter’s belly, one fiberglass freighter, one fiberglass half-ton, and he got down in the big canoe and caught the duffel Lucky tossed to him.

The plane with Bart and Eloise on it set down and taxied to a stop.

Lucky tossed bags swiftly. There was a lot of gear, broken down into fifty-pound nylon bags. Du Pré moved to the smaller canoe. When it was full, he caught the paddle from Lucky and dug for shore. The day was windless. The water was clear. He saw a pike in the weeds on the bottom, broad head pointed toward a school of minnows.

The three Indians waded out till the water got up to their ankles. One caught the painter Du Pré tossed, and pulled the canoe over the gravel and duff till it halted. They unloaded the gear. Lucky nosed in to shore and the other two helped him. By the time they were through, Bart had landed.

Du Pré looked up and saw a dark figure with a rifle behind a bush. Felix. He waved but didn’t take his eyes off the far shore or the sky. So Nappy would be with the birch-bark canoes.

An hour later, the Otters were gone and the lake was settling back to glassy smoothness.

They began to portage the gear over a rise to the river’s banks. The river had cut down into the rock and soil. The two big bark canoes were moored bow and stern, and a linked boom of logs curved round them.

Du Pré hadn’t seen Nappy yet, which was fine.

I don’t see him and I know that he is here.

“Any other planes, they come by?” said Du Pré to Felix.

Felix shook his head. “Up thirty thousand feet, maybe,” he said. He kept flicking his eyes here and there. “But all they got to do is wait. We just got the one river, you know, goes the one way. So.”

Logjams, ice, cold, wet, rain, freeze-dried food, snipers, thought Du Pré. I am not an adventurous man. But I will be one. He thought of the two little girls dead and bleeding in the cabinet.

By sundown, they had the gear and canoes down to the water. They set up a camp. Lucky and Du Pré got the early watch, two to sunrise. They were tired from the flying and the lifting and hauling. Du Pré ate a can of tuna and gnawed at a roll of fruit leather and didn’t bother to find any of the Canadian whiskey he had somewhere in the mound of duffel.

He crawled into the tent and slipped off his boots and stuck them outside upside down on the boot stakes. He slid into the bag and after it warmed a little he slipped off his pants and heavy shirt and piled them under the bag’s flap for a pillow. The air was damp and close and smoke from the fire wandered in. He woke up sneezing once, then didn’t wake until Lucky pulled his foot.

Du Pré went up the river a quarter mile to a sort of blind Nappy had built, a place where he could see a long stretch of water. Lucky was over by the big lake and Guillaume was downstream, high up in a tree so he could actually see the campsite if anyone came into it. Not a really tight arrangement.

This Hydro-Quebec, they probably hire retired commandos, thought Du Pré, shivering in the frost. Why worry, I’ll be dead before I know it. He opened the bolt of the hunting rifle and checked the shell in the chamber and the safety.

Benetsee. Benetsee. I need to talk to him, even on Bart’s magic telephone. The old man would hate that thing. Any shithead can talk on it from anywhere. Don’t need the coyotes and ravens.

Nothing happened all night except that it got damned cold, and when the sun gleamed up in the east and the air inversion began, it sucked all the heat out of Du Pré’s body. He was shivering when he walked back to the camp.

They had a hot breakfast of oatmeal and raisins and coffee.

They began to sort and load.

A dead caribou floated past, bloated enough to ride high in the water.

Like the last time, Du Pré and Nappy would ride point and Bart and Bart’s magic telephone would ride in the rear. The only person who was on this trip who was inexperienced, Bart could be expected to float past the others if anything happened.

“We dig you a nice grave,” said Du Pré.

“Fuck you,” said Bart.

Du Pré and Nappy shoved off and floated out to the fastest current. They swung to and headed downriver, getting perhaps a mile ahead of the others, so that if there was a bad spot and they dumped, one or another dripping scout could make it back upriver to warn the rest of the party.

“Let’s not go over,” said Du Pré to Nappy. “I don’t want to do this whole trip with my nuts up between my lungs.”

“Yo,” said Nappy.

The river was straight and smooth. It cut some, but not much, into the shield rock of eastern Canada, tough granite. The soil was not all that deep and the trees were not as large and more closely bunched than in the great forests to the west.

Hunters would starve here, Du Pré thought. This is some tough country, green or not.

Rafts of slush bobbed in the calmer waters toward the shore.

The forest was silent—no birds, no squirrels chirring indignantly at invaders. The sun rose higher and the fog rose, tendrils and tentacles writhing in the sun.

They hove to at the end of a long, calm stretch and waited till the first of the freighters came into view. The paddlers didn’t wave, so everything was all right.

Du Pré’s hands were stiff and he had a cramp in the left one, a knotting charley-horse. He pressed hard against the thwart to stretch the muscles.

They ate a little while paddling. When the sun was two hours from setting, Nappy pointed to a flattish meadowland with a couple sand eskers running at the far side. They were even and looked like berms.

“What did these?” said Du Pré to Nappy.

“Old riverbeds used to run on top of the ice,” said Nappy.

Tough country, Du Pré thought.

By the time he had finished his cigarette, the other canoes were nosing in.

He went down to help off-load.

He looked at the sky, hoping for ravens.

T
HEY APPROACHED THE GREAT
bay. Two weeks on the river and they had not seen anything threatening. A TV crew had descended once, planes flopping down, but the weather turned nasty and the pilots took off, with the cameramen shooting and cursing.

Du Pré stood up and dropped his pants and mooned them.

“They don’t use that on the five o’clock news,” said Du Pré.

Nappy nodded; he was giving them the finger.

No nothing. Not a trapper or a fisherman. The season was too late for good fur and too icy for good fishing. The bugs were just beginning to bloom in numbers.

Lucky fretted. He had expected more coverage—more TV crews, more ink, more everything.

“If there is no one there, we did this for nothing,” Lucky said. He was so upset, his cup of coffee lopped over the rim.

Maybe this Hydro-Quebec bought everybody off, Du Pré thought. They probably do that sort of thing, they planning to spend $20 billion. Also New York, they need those hot tubs and lights.

Bart was talking to Michelle. Every time they stopped, he punched in a number and there she was, usually. She could call back, too.

No Benetsee, no nothing in Washington, no Paul Chase, who for all they knew was a day behind them or something.

Maybe Chase come busting out of the side waters near the river’s mouth, Du Pré thought, but I think they will be waiting for him this time. That woman reporter is nobody’s fool.

What a world, this twentieth-century. Du Pré tried to think of something he liked about it. He thought of duct tape and the penicillin, since he had gotten a good case of clap once. He couldn’t think of anything else right offhand.

There was a town, Kuujjuarapik, just norm of the river’s mouth.

Maybe two days down the river to the bay, Hudson Bay, shallow and mean with storms and shoal waters.

And then the skies were full of helicopters and little floatplanes and Lucky quit spilling his coffee.

Reporters paddled out in little rafts, helicopters flew down close enough to nearly capsize the canoes.

The party paddled past, smiling. When they pulled into the last camp before the bay, the newspeople converged like flies on a nice cat turd.

A couple of the smarter crews brought food—fresh fruits and vegetables and ice cream, steaks, booze. Bribes.

Du Pré and Nappy still stood watch.

Much easier now for something to happen, maybe, or maybe it would happen down at the bay, or not here in Canada at all. Maybe, Du Pré thought, I am wrong about everything.

Bart wandered out to where Du Pré was sitting, rifle across his knees, with half a bottle of whiskey and a plate of food. He let Du Pré eat and have a couple snorts and then he dialed Madelaine.

“Du Pré!” said Madelaine, “You forget what your Madelaine look like. I see you on the TV! Your clothes need a wash.”

“So do I,” said Du Pré.

“I can’t find Benetsee and no one else can, either,” she said.

Maybe the old bastard was dead and the coyotes had dragged him to a den and he was just a few stumps of bones. Could be.

But he could have said good-bye somehow. He die, his own time.

What am I doing here?

“Damn,” said Du Pré. “I miss you.”

“Yeah,” said Madelaine. “Since I see you so long ago, my hair gone all white, my tits down to my knees, and I got no teeth.”

“My dick fell off,” said Du Pré. “I got this fungus.”

“You come right home, Du Pré,” said Madelaine. “Them Quebec girls can’t last.”

She hung up.

Du Pré had a tight feeling in his chest.

“Mr. Du Pré,” said a woman’s voice behind him, “I need to talk to you. We met in York Factory, remember?”

The woman reporter who’d stayed to get the story on Chase.

“Why did you come on this trip?” she asked.

See if I can kill some bastard killed some people, Du Pré thought.

“I wanted to see this country,” said Du Pré. “Pretty fine country to drown, you know.”

The reporter looked at him.

“What do you think of Hydro-Quebec’s plan?” she said.

“I think we have destroyed enough of the world,” said Du Pré. “We maybe ought to take better care of it.”

“Are you part Indian, Mr. Du Pré?” she asked.

“I am Métis,” said Du Pré, “Red River Breed. Twice we rebel against them English. My people came down to Montana from Canada after the second one. Lots of distant relatives up there.”

“Is the Métis a tribe?”

Du Pré thought.

“I guess so,” he said. “We fight them Sioux and Assiniboine and Gros Ventre pretty good.”

“Where is Paul Chase?” she said. “I thought he’d be here at least by now.”

So did I.

“I have not seen him,” said Du Pré.

“You sitting out here with a rifle because of Chase?” she said. “Guy’s got no more guts than a Junebug.”

“Lots of people don’t want us to be doing this,” said Du Pré. “There is a lot of money here.”

“Tell me about it,” she said.

Du Pré rolled a smoke. He felt like a fucking fool.

“I am going back, get some whiskey,” said Du Pré.

They walked back toward his tent. The light was bright and the evening cool hadn’t started, but it felt like it would frost good tonight.

The reporter took a tin cup of whiskey, nodding at Du Pré.

“What about the murders?” she said.

“Police are working on them,” said Du Pré. “

“So are you,” said the reporter.

“I am just here paddling.”

“I come from California,” she said. “On the back side of Shasta. Cattle and sheep country. Isn’t like California at all. Not many people. My daddy once killed somebody. For trying to molest me when I was a kid.”

Du Pré waited.

“He didn’t say anything about it and no one pinned it on him and he died without telling me he’d done it. But he had this look in his eyes, Mr. Du Pré. He was out of another time and he had killed someone and he would again and ask no one’s leave if he felt it right. You have that same look, Mr. Du Pré.”

“I am tired,” said Du Pré.

“My card,” said the reporter.

Anybody turned up dead, I’d best call, I guess, Du Pré thought.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” said the reporter. She was a very pretty woman with very hard green eyes. Laugh lines.

She walked off.

Du Pré stared at the card in his hand.

Helicopters. Lights.

Bullshit.

Frost.

L
UCKY HAD THOUGHT ONLY
as far as descending the river. When Du Pré asked him what arrangements there were for getting back out, Lucky smiled sunnily and shrugged.

Du Pré was enraged. He went down to the shingle and walked along, kicking stones. Bart came up behind him, laughing.

“It’s all right,” he said. “I called, they’ll be here for us tomorrow. Calm down. Lucky put all his thoughts into the trip and nothing more.”

“His goddamn antenna fell down,” said Du Pré. He was out of bourbon, too, and there was nothing available in the settlement. The Inuit forbade alcohol.

All the newspeople were gone. There wasn’t anything to do.

There is something not right about all of this, Du Pré thought. I am tired and disgusted and I just wish that I was moving somewhere. Just moving.

What’s not right? I need Benetsee.

He thought of the mangled, tortured bird. Some sick bastard did that.

That woman reporter, she was right—it is not Chase. He is sick and treacherous, but he is weak.