The creature that had always struck her as especially horrible was the Naked Bear, because it had come too close to revealing overtly the secret of the stories. The secret was that the stories weren’t true, but they weren’t exactly imaginary, either. This was a bear, a creature whose nature was to kill people, but it wasn’t just a bear. It was hairless, made to look like a human being, and it talked: "Ongwe ias"—I am the one who eats you.
The surface of the big lake was almost invisible. She paddled on, going faster now because the slight sweat she had raised by paddling helped to keep her cool and her arms felt limber and strong after an hour of the rhythmic sameness. Her strokes had lengthened and become sure. It had been a couple of years since she had been in a canoe, but now everything had come back, because even when the mind forgot, the synapses in the brain that controlled physical movement had been altered to hold the pattern forever.
The moon came up an hour later, but she still could not see the end of the lake. The paddling had already become unconscious, and she spent the time making herself firmer and stronger. Her grandfather’s stories were cautionary tales: The lone hunter the woods devoured had made some mistake out here. A turned ankle or a case of dysentery or even a failure to see signs on a trail thirty miles from a road might as well be a bullet through the head. The thought made her afraid, but it was the right kind of fear, so she nurtured and studied it. The fear made her alert and cautious, aware of every sound. She felt the irises of her eyes opening wider, letting in more of the light from the moon that the black water reflected up at her. The people in the stories never survived by strength, only by cleverness. A human being was a small, fragile animal with skin that could be punctured and bones that broke. The only way to stay alive was to think clearly.
She stayed a couple of hundred feet from shore, where the tiny, almost imperceptible swish of the paddle would be difficult to hear and the shape of the canoe would be hard to separate from the shimmer of the surface of the lake. She studied every foot of the shoreline as she went, watching ahead for a faint glow, sniffing the air for the smell of smoke.
It was after midnight when she reached the southern tip of big Tupper Lake. The end was just a sense that the darkness had thickened in front of her. She paddled toward the shore through the standing reeds in the shallows that scraped quietly against the hull of her canoe, and passed along the shore until she found the inlet. It had been marked on the maps, but in the dark it was only a sensation that sounds were coming from farther back, not muffled, but open and alive. She had planned to camp here and wait for first light, but now that she had made it, she did not want to stop.
The river was slow and the banks thick with low trees and bushes. He had a three-day start on her. She tried to feel his presence ahead, but it seemed wrong. He wouldn’t paddle this far, down to the tip of the big lake, and then stop a mile up the river. He would go on, farther from policemen, electric lights, and roads.
If she guessed wrong and he had stopped along the little river, then it would be better to come on him in the dark, when he might be asleep, than to swing around a bend in bright sunlight and find him waiting. She paddled on up the little river into the dark forest. The river was swollen with water from the melted snows above, but she could make slow headway by paddling hard and not letting the canoe glide. She threw herself into the work, watching the trees along the banks for signs and the water ahead for obstacles.
At three in the morning, she was stopped by a big old tree that had fallen into the water across the channel. She let the current carry her a few yards backward and then headed her canoe into the opposite bank. She pulled the craft up on the mud into the weeds and found a flat place in the trees to lay out her nylon tarp. She wrapped herself in her down jacket, rested her head on her backpack, and went to sleep with her hand touching the stock of the rifle.
Dawn came three hours later, with the chirping of chickadees and the rap of a woodpecker back in the woods. It was still blue half-light in the forest, but she found that objects around her were beginning to have clear edges. She sat by the side of the water to eat her packaged breakfast of dried beef and eggs. She had brought nothing that she couldn’t eat uncooked, but she would have liked a fire now for the warmth. In the night she had kept up a sweat, but during the three hours of sleep she had stiffened and the cold and damp had settled on her.
When she had finished eating, she loaded her canoe and dragged it around the fallen tree, staring at the ground. There were no keel marks, no footprints. She launched her canoe and paddled to the opposite bank, then stepped ashore again. She walked to the place where the roots of the tree had lifted a piece of the bank and found no signs there, either. She widened her search until she found one. He had pulled his canoe up onto the bank at least a hundred feet downstream from the fallen tree trunk. He had caved in the bank a little to destroy his keel mark. Then he could only have walked into the forest. It took her a few more minutes before she found his footprint in the dirt: the ripple-soled hiking boots he had bought in Lake Placid. She moved ahead in the direction the toe was pointing, but she lost him again.
She walked back to the place where she had found the print. It was a single mark, a misstep maybe, but it was disturbing. There were no tracks going back: He had made only one trip. He had managed to pack all the gear and supplies he had bought onto his back, lift the canoe, and walk through the woods around the barrier. It made her feel small and weak and alone. He was so much bigger and stronger, and he wasn’t using his size to make mistakes but to be more careful. He had started to walk long before a tracker would look for footprints, and gone into the woods instead of staying on the bank. The only reason she had found any mark at all was because she had known there had to be one.
She walked back to her canoe and stepped in. This time she didn’t wrap the rifle in the tarp but kept it beside her as she pushed out into the stream and began to paddle. It was after 10:00 A.M. when she reached the mouth of the stream at Round Lake. As soon as she recognized what it was, she went back down the river a hundred yards, pulled her canoe up into the woods, and brought the rifle back with her. She hid in some bushes near the edge of the lake and scanned the shoreline through the rifle scope.
There was no smoke, no canoe, no sign of human life anywhere along the margin of the lake. She opened her map and studied it. There was a small circular road marked 421 that went west at the other end of Round Lake, leading to a little town called Sabattis and back. After that, there was nothing. The logic of it said he wasn’t waiting for her here. He had started out in the tourist spots, where strangers were a common sight, and he had laboriously made his way down here. He wasn’t going to stop until he had left even that road behind him.
Jane went back to her canoe and put it into the water again. She spent the afternoon going across the lake and down the stream to the bridge where the road crossed it. She searched the area around the bridge for a half hour but found no sign that he had been here, or that anyone else had, either. She made it to the edge of Little Tupper Lake in late afternoon and stopped to eat dinner and watch the water. The lake was oblong like big Tupper, formed by glaciers moving south and scraping the mountains. She used the rifle scope to look for the usual signs of life, and she began to feel a foreboding.