The fire was a small, good thing. He had his spinning rod with him, always had his spinning rod, and he figured he'd make lunch simple. Three casts with an orange Mepps spinner and he had a grayling to toast on a stick, and that was so good he switched to a heavier rig and a silver spoon with a bit of green glitter in the center of it to represent the eye of some half-formed oblivious creature of the shallows, and flung it out in the hope of pike for dinner back at the cabin. Out it went with a hiss and a distant splash, and it came back with a whisper, over and over, and all he could think about was Pamela, Pamela in Howard Walpole's three-room cabin with the blond grizzly rug in front of the stone fireplace he used to supplement his stove because he liked the aesthetics of an open fire for all his grease and the raw-boned stink of him. But Pamela would never choose a man like that, skinny, flat-headed, dumb as tar, no matter how much he'd made on a lucky placer strike two years back or how many conveniences he built into his cabin, would she?
It was a question that tormented him all the dilatory, headachy way back up the river, and it tormented him even after he got a pike as long as a Louisville Slugger to rise up out of a hole under a cutbank and take the silver lure in its spiky dentition and leap clear of the water half a dozen times. Maybe he forgot about it-about her-for the space of five minutes there as he worked the canoe into shore and wrestled the thing up out of the shallows like one long whipcrack of muscle, but he thought of her again when he slipped the knife from the sheath and inserted it between the pike's eyes and drove it in till the muscle went slack.
That night he nursed two beers, fed the dogs and set snares for rabbit where there was sign along the far verge of the garden. It was warm, and he didn't bother with a fire. For dinner, it was cold beans and petrified biscuits the mice had gnawed around the edges-he didn't feel up to the smell of fish frying in a pan. He woke once in the middle of the night to a frenzy of barking and stepped out on the porch with his rifle in the pale half-light of three A.M. to see a bewildered moose-an old cow, something under eight hundred pounds and fallow, from the look of her-planted in the center of the garden, her legs like saplings growing out of the sea of black plastic. His first impulse was to shoot her, but he resisted. You didn't shoot moose during Ducks, didn't shoot moose until fall, when the meat would keep. Not to mention that it was out of season and the country was just beginning to set the table for the big summer-long banquet of ducks and geese and salmon and berries. So what did he do? He wasted a bullet and scared the thing off in the fond hope that she would avoid this place like the plague. Until fall, anyway.
In the morning he fired up the stove and made himself coffee and two pike fillets rolled in flour and bread crumbs and fried in an inch of snapping Crisco, and sat in the doorway of the cabin slapping mosquitoes and watching the rain clouds gather and swell over the river. He didn't feel right, and it had nothing to do with the tear he'd been on the other night either. What it had to do with was Pamela. He could smell her, a lingering female aura that was caught in the furs of the bed, in the ambient odors of the place, and if he looked over his shoulder to where she'd been sitting two mornings ago, he could almost see her there too. Pamela. She was his, no doubt about it. _You've got nothing to worry about, Sess,__ isn't that what she'd said? But then Howard Walpole's grinning fleshless face rose up before him, superimposed over Richie Oliver's solemn bearded gaze: What if she'd been lying to him? Mollifying him? What if she was just being polite?
Before he knew what he was doing, he was back on the river, moving with the current, moving fast, the near bank racing along beside him and the wind rushing at his face. Howard Walpole's place was below town, near the mouth of Junebug Creek, and it was set back on a bluff that commanded a hundred-and-eighty-degree sweep of the river. Worse, it featured double-insulated windows shipped all the way up from Oakland, California, that gave Howard a full, unobstructed, breakfast-lunch-and-dinner view of anything moving along the shore or out on the water, and Howard always kept a good pair of Army surplus 7x42 binoculars ready to hand. Sess was thinking about that as the rain started in and the wind begin to flail his face and hands with cold hard stinging pellets that were less like rain and more like sleet than he'd care to admit. No matter, he thought of Pamela, and kept close to the bank where the wind wouldn't discover him as readily.
It would be a major embarrassment-life-quenching, horrific-to be caught anywhere within ten miles of Howard's place, the kind of thing he'd never live down, not in a thousand years. If anybody saw him out there-if Howard saw him, or Pamela-he'd have to move out of the country altogether, go find himself a room in the heart of some run-down collapsing urban jungle like Cleveland or Brooklyn or some other godforsaken place where the rumor of it would never reach him. But there was no turning back now, and as the morning rectified itself into afternoon, he slipped past Boynton on the far side of the river in a heavy shroud of weather.
He didn't know what he was doing, didn't know what he expected, didn't have a plan or hope. He had binoculars of his own though, and he was as good on the river and in the woods as any man in the country, except for some of the old-timers, and the old-timers were too old to be good anymore. When he passed Ogden Stump's fish camp, deserted this time of year, he knew the next bend would take him within sight of Howard Walpole's place, so he trailed his paddle and pulled into shore. He didn't have to hide the canoe, but he did-what if Howard was taking her for a scenic ride upriver or somebody went by collecting driftwood and saw it there? — and then started along the mud bank with his ancient.30–06 Springfield rifle in one hand (for bear discouragement, only that) and his binoculars in the other.
It was raining hard now, raining as if it were water human beings breathed and not air, and though he was wearing his olive green poncho and a cap under the hood of it, he was wet through to the skin from the waist down. And shivering, shivering already, and there was no way to make a fire anywhere near here without Howard Walpole nosing round to warm his hands and feet, and jaw about the weather and wondering if he couldn't help out with a piece of meat for the spit and inserting the sly observation that Sess was pretty far afield of his cabin, wasn't he? So he shivered and edged closer, keeping to the dense growth along the riverbank, tightroping a game trail through the willows that no human being had traversed in the history of mankind, or at least since breakup. He saw moose track, black bear, wolverine, wolf. Moose droppings, bear scat. The rain was steady, the leaves dripped.
When he got within a hundred yards of the cabin, he dropped to hands and knees, because there was no sense in putting Howard's dogs on alert. The crawling calmed him-being down like this took him back to the deer stalks he'd made as a boy through grown-over burns in the Sierra foothills, and it gave his elbows a chance to get as wet as his knees. Crawling, he thought about that, about the dairy farm outside Porterville where he'd been raised, where he'd worked beside his father day by day, slowly acquiring the muscle he could have put to use on the football field, but the coach was a jerk of the first degree and he quit that before he'd hardly got started, and he'd quit college too, because he couldn't see boxing himself in behind a desk. His every free moment was spent roaming, hunting, fishing. He was good at it, good at concealment, good at _this.__
Fifty yards out, he eased into a clot of highbush cranberry and raised the binoculars to his eyes, and he didn't feel low or cheap at all. He didn't feel like a hopeless, sick-at-heart, unmanly, voyeuristic _creep.__ Not him. No, he felt more like a-well, a commando, that was it. A commando on a secret vital mission essential to the well-being of the entire country, not to mention a very specific plot of painstakingly husbanded bush at the mouth of the Thirtymile.