Where the River Ends - Charles Martin [37]
After a moment she asked, “What’s the need?”
I shrugged. “Take a deep breath.”
She frowned.
“Go ahead. Take as deep a breath as your lungs will allow.”
She inhaled deeply.
“Now hold it.”
Thirty seconds passed.
“Keep holding it.”
Her face began to turn red. At a minute she let it out and sucked in a long breath.
I nodded. “That’s the need.”
10
JUNE 1, EVENING
We slid onto the beach around dark. I checked the GPS. “Distance traveled” read 9.6 miles. Not good. I needed to rethink how we did this. I could travel half again as fast with only one canoe. Problem was, we needed that second one to make it to the ocean. I would just have to walk and paddle faster, which was going to be difficult given that I was out of practice and out of shape.
I spread a bed on the beach for Abbie, propped her up and then started searching for wood. I built a small fire to warm us and fend off the mosquitoes and gnats. Night on the river can be tricky. It’s Africa-hot during the day, but mountain-cool at night beneath the trees.
Riding in the canoe had worn her down. A lot. She closed her eyes and lay perfectly still. Around nine, she said, “You need to eat something.” Her mouth was cottony dry and her breath had a weird metallic smell.
The thought hadn’t crossed my mind. “I’m not too hungry.” I held a mug to her lips and she sipped.
“You just pulled two canoes and me ten miles down this river.” I straddled a log, pulled the lid on a can of peaches and ate slowly. She opened one eye. “That’s not going to cut it.”
I finished the peaches, zipped open the tent and lifted her slowly off the beach. I laid her inside, then boiled water in the Jetboil. While it cooled, I zipped us inside, then slowly slid off her clothes. She whispered, “You’re getting good at this.”
“Practice.” Her fentanyl patch needed changing so I peeled off the old, swabbed the skin on her arm, dried it and applied a new one. I slowly wiped down her arms and legs, toweled her off, slipped her head and arms through a T-shirt and zipped her inside a single-layered fleece bag. In the last several months, she’d quit sleeping in anything that placed pressure on her skin—said it felt like it was cutting into her. I tied the scarf loosely around her head and pointed. “I’ll be outside.” She squeezed my hand and turned on her side.
I stoked the fire, dragged a dead limb from behind some palmetto bushes, laid it across the fire and then sat on a log, swatting mosquitoes and counting what few stars I could see through the canopy. An hour later, I heard a stick crack. Having spent enough time in the woods, I could hear the difference between a small twig under the foot of a squirrel and something larger, broken under the weight of a larger foot. This far out in the boonies, it wasn’t uncommon to bump into feral hogs, deer, armadillos, raccoons, wild dogs, even a bear, so I slung the shotgun and scanned the bushes with the flashlight. When I saw nothing, no two eyes staring back at me, I worked the slide action on the shotgun—loading the number 8 birdshot into the chamber—thinking the sound alone might deter something looking for a meal. I had loaded the first round birdshot, the second two as buckshot and the last two as rifled slugs. My thought process was deter, stop and kill. Number 8 would kill most anything in these woods, if close enough, as would the buckshot. The slugs were insurance because they