Passage - Lois McMaster Bujold [73]
“It’s wonderful!” She stared at Pearl Bend, already falling behind on the far shore, and back to the boat boss, now leaning happily on her oar. “We’re going so fast!”
Berry’s agreeing grin stretched as wide as the river. “Fast as a horse can trot!”
11
The Fetch made thirty river miles before the dank autumn dusk, when they tied to the bank for the night in the middle of, as nearly as Fawn could tell, nowhere. Berry explained regretfully that she didn’t want to try running downriver in the dark—Whit’s appalling suggestion. In addition to the hazards of rocks, stumps, sand bars, ledges, and wrack, the river divided frequently around shifting islands. A boat choosing the wrong side might find itself stuck in a channel that petered out into impassible thatch, and its crew plagued with the arduous task of towing it up around the head of the island again, difficult enough for a keelboat, designed for such work, worse for a balky flatboat. Boats had been abandoned in such situations, Berry said. Fawn poked Whit to silence when he began to volunteer Dag for a night pilot. Even were Dag’s groundsense recovered to its full one-mile range, some of these islands were as much as five miles long. And the river was quite scary enough in daylight.
After that, Fawn was too busy fixing dinner to worry further. With the excitement of the day wearing off, everyone seemed glad to turn in early. In addition, Fawn suspected Dag was still bone-weary from healing the Pearl Bend woman, at some level underneath the mere physical. He seemed to wrap himself around Fawn in their bedroll more for comfort than anything else; from the intensity of his clutch he was feeling low on comfort tonight. She wondered if having Remo aboard bothered him. A curtain gave no privacy from groundsense. Although since farmers couldn’t veil their grounds at all, she supposed Remo must have shut himself off, as Dag often did, to spare himself the abrasion. Weary herself, her musings trickled into sleep.
They made a dawn start, and by midday, the clouds had thinned and the sun came through, if still a bit pale and watery, which Fawn thought lifted everyone’s moods. At Berry’s suggestion she experimented with the clever iron oven that fitted in the Fetch’s hearth, and was able to produce pies for lunch without stopping the boat. Or setting it on fire, a fact of which she was more proud than of the pies, which, truly, everyone ate with flattering appetites. In the afternoon, she found Dag taking a break from his oar, lounging on the bench on the front deck keeping pleasantly idle company with Copperhead, Daisy-goat, and the chickens. She leaned over the rail and eyed the smooth, brown water. The Fetch seemed to be outracing a sodden log, but that floating leaf was definitely pulling ahead.
“Dag,” she said, “do you think you could catch us enough fish for dinner?”
He opened his eyes and sat up. “What kind?”
“I don’t even know what kinds there are in this river. Bo was going on about how much he liked a good channel catfish fried up in a cornmeal crust. Do you think you could get enough of them to feed eight?”
His slow smile tucked up the edges of his mouth. “I could try, Spark.”
He rose and stretched, only to drape himself over the side of the boat just behind the pen, his left arm trailing down. His hook barely grazed the water. Fawn watched in sudden doubt. When he’d persuaded that big bass to leap so startlingly into their laps at Hickory Lake, they’d been in a much smaller boat, with lower sides. The Fetch’s rail seemed awfully high to expect any fish to jump over. Were catfish even the jumping sort? Fawn had a dim idea that they lurked about on the river bottom.
When nothing happened in about ten minutes, Fawn considered wandering back to her domain by the hearth to think about what she could do with bacon for dinner, again, except she was afraid Dag was falling asleep. Granted he would doubtless wake up when he hit