I could feel my lips swelling with the sun. I was coming slowly up against an absolute limit, but I did not know where it was, or where we would be on the river when I got to it, or what I would do when I did. Was there anything I could say to myself, or even to Bobby, that would help?
“Bobby,” I said suddenly, “hang on. If we can stay with it for ten miles we’ll be out. I know we will. We’ve come an awful goddamned long way, and it can’t be much longer.”
He tried to nod, and partly did.
“Don’t rock us, baby. And if you see anything I can’t see, tell me. If we hit any rapids, call the rocks for me. If you can’t do that, get down with Lewis and pray, but try to help us stay level.”
There was a low new tone in the river: an old one, something I recognized.
“God,” I said. “Do something for us.”
We went toward it, but when we came around the next turn there was nothing but another turn about a half mile ahead. The sound came from there, or through there.
“I think I hear some rapids, Bobby. I know I do. If we can walk the canoe through, let’s do it. We can do it. But if we can’t, we’ll have to run them.”
We went down, picking up speed, and the step-up in sound, like a dial being tuned, brought up the old terror, but also excitement: the sensation Lewis was always describing; I felt it, tired as I was.
We went into the next turn, and I knew, with the sound I was hearing, that if the rapids were on the turn or even within sight when we straightened out, they would not be as bad as some we had been through. But we came off the turn moving still faster, without falls or rapids, with no white water and none in sight, and I knew they would be bad. It was more likely that I was listening to a falls, and I got ready to die again. The sound jumped higher all at once; there was a foaming seethe in it, a hoarse desperation. We turned again. The land to the left broke away, and I looked down a set of rapids steeper—a lot steeper—than any we had been through, and longer, all stepped down toward a funnel that disappeared between two huge boulders that turned the air between them white.
The water glassed out for fifty yards ahead of us and went through an almost formal-looking series of steep little cascades, changing to a lighter color to go faster, and then into an even faster half-white half-green color, then through a short hook to the left where it shot between the big rocks. I couldn’t see any farther than that; it was as though the river were being fed into fog. We might have made it to the bank, but I didn’t have the strength for it. The current had us; we were going there.
“We can’t walk,” I yelled. “Get your ass down as low as you can.”
He didn’t look back, but moved rearward and down and held to the gunwales, letting his knees break over the front seat. Our center of gravity was as low as we could get it, though I also hunched forward myself; I could not control the canoe if I had been any lower than I was, and we were going hard down the water all drawn together like threads running into a loom. The main roar came back in our faces, and then from the sides, and we were in it, hitting the little jolting ripples before the first drop-off. We went over; the nose tipped, the canoe grated under my tailbone, and we went down another, shorter step, a rough shove up through the spine that knocked me up off the seat and drove the canoe partway over on its side. Our speed righted us, and I made an all-out plunge—one stroke with all I had left—on the right to keep us straight with the current. We swung and ran over two more stepdowns, hard shocks at the base of the brain, and in the midst of this I heard a faint, then a quick loud shout or singing or call from somewhere and thought it might be Lewis screaming. Then we were down on level rushing water. We had lost a little speed to the rocks but we picked it up again immediately, then picked up more than that, and were going for the spray and the dark white of the passage. I dug in hard, then tried to backwater on the other side, saw it was useless, dug in on the right again as hard as I could to turn the bow, and we swung, swung and jumped shooting into the hole.
For a second I couldn’t see anything at all, and rode like I was standing still with aerated water filling my mouth and little fluttering bumps coming up through the canoe shell. With nothing to see go past, motion died. It was like being in a strange room in a cold building or a shaking cave filled with cold steam. I was wet clear through before I could think: the sun was killed on my shoulders in an instant. I lanced out again to the right with the paddle, mainly because that was the last place I had taken a stroke, and if it was right then it might be right now. I was sure that we had to turn, keep turning left if we could; the right felt like death, and if I couldn’t keep it away from us we would spin broadside and the whole river and all the mountains it came from would fall on us, would pour into the canoe ton after ton, never-ending. I dug again, but couldn’t tell what I had made us do. Something snatched at the paddle and I pulled it out and dug again, and again. The river showed in front in a blinking leap, and we came shooting forward as though launched to take off into the air. We were going faster than I had ever been in anything without an engine. The force of water around the paddle blade was stupendous; I felt as though I had dipped into some supernatural source of primal energy.
It was like riding on a river of air. The rocks flickered around and under us, then sand, then rocks, changing colors into each other as we streamed through. I half rose out of my seat; nothing else could be said to me but this, in this way. It was unkillableness: the triumph of an illusion when events bear it out. I looked to see what was coming to me next. “Hold on, baby,” I hollered. “We’re going home.”
Ahead was a tilted flange of rock with water sculpted over it in a long, curling forelocked curve that broke at us and then away from us past the rock, and then a low wall of rocks that looked like they shallowed out on both sides. I dug for the rock to go straight over, to have the thing whole.
We went up, like the beginning of an incline; the nose lifted; a powerful surge caught up with us from the rear. We lost weight completely. We rolled out over the top of the rock in one unstoppable motion. I closed my eyes and screamed with Lewis, mixing my voice with his bestial scream, blasting my lungs out where we hung six feet over the river for an instant and then began to fall. I waited for the upward revengeful smash of the river, but the nose rode down with an odd softness and into the back-scrolled smashed water at the foot of the rock, quivered straight back through the spine of the canoe into mine and into my brain, where I saw a vision of burning jackstraws or needles, and we were back down onto the bedded river in two almost simultaneous stepdowns. I listened for my cry hanging in the wet air above the blue-and-white flag colors of the rock—I still listen for it—and we were down and slowing forward, back on green water, solid and heavy on it, and it solid and heavy under us.
The bed-rocks fell away; another curve, one without rapids, began to open in front of us a hundred yards farther on. I looked at Bobby. He was still hanging back from his seat, but struggling to sit on it again. He turned half around back to me, and opened the eye on that side. He started to say something but didn’t, and I started to and didn’t.
Now, in calm water, I began to collect everything we needed to make the future with.
“Right back there is where it all happened,” I said.
He looked at me without any understanding at all.
“Somebody is going to ask us things. When that happens tell him that right back there was where Drew fell out—we all fell out. That was where Lewis broke his leg and we lost the other canoe.”