—

THE THREE OF THEM stood in the river without speaking after that, each with his own thoughts. Joe let his body cool until he had goose bumps on his flesh. He looked straight up at the narrow opening of the canyon as if at another world. It was hell up there.

Although it was mid-morning, the sky was dark and mottled. Tongues of flame slashed out from both sides of the canyon. Despite how far away they were from the top, ash fell softly around them to be carried downstream.

Finally, Farkus said, “How long do we stay here before we climb out?”

“We’re not climbing out,” Joe said. “That fire will be burning all around us for a long time.”

“Then what do we do?” he said, a high note of panic in his voice. “Do we build a tepee and stay down here?”

“We could borrow those poles up there,” Butch said as a joke, but Farkus didn’t smile. Joe noted that Butch’s mood had improved markedly since they’d found the water.

Joe said, “The only thing we can do is go down the river.”

“Have you ever been down it?” Farkus asked.

Joe shook his head. The Twelve Sleep Wilderness Area had been so designated because the canyon and the river were nearly impenetrable. There were no roads in and very few trails. It was wild and steep and ancient and not navigable except by adventurers in kayaks in the early runoff season.

“I’ve always wanted to see it, though,” Joe said.

“There’s something wrong with you,” Farkus replied.

Joe grinned. Marybeth had often said the same thing.

—

WITH FARKUS AND BUTCH clinging to a dry pileup of debris, Joe scouted downriver.

There wasn’t enough water in the river to swim freely, and the canyon walls were so sheer they couldn’t walk more than a few feet on the dry bank. Going downstream was their only option, but there didn’t seem to be an easy or practical way to do it. Because of the pitch of the riverbed, Joe assumed the river conditions changed around every bend. There would be long, deep pools leading to furious rapids to stretches where it looked like a boulder field that just happened to have a river going through it.

He stood knee-deep in an eddy with his hands on his hips, shaking his head.

When he returned to the others and told them what he could see downriver, he stopped in mid-sentence.

“What?” Farkus said. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” Joe said, studying the debris pileup. For years, trees that had been dislodged upriver had been washed down during flood years and runoff months. The pile they were on was dense with interlocked driftwood that had been washed smooth and was pale white in color. It looked like some kind of boneyard. But simply because the pile was wood, Joe knew, didn’t mean it would float. Most of the lengths, he guessed, were fatally waterlogged.

Butch seemed to read his mind and swiveled where he sat. He pointed at a broken tree trunk near the top of the pile that was eighteen inches in circumference and eight or nine feet long. It was high enough on the pile, Joe thought, that it might be a recent addition and wouldn’t be heavy with water. It looked stout enough to hold them all, and there were enough nubs on it where branches had once been that could serve as handgrips.

“That just might be our boat,” Joe said.

—

IT TOOK NEARLY a half-hour to free the log from the pile because it was so entangled in the debris, but they finally were able to free it and roll it down the river. The log bobbed in the water and didn’t submerge, and Butch held it in place while Joe and Farkus reached around it and found places to hang on.

The surface of the log was smooth and slick, the bark blasted off by scouring water, but it was dry and buoyant. On the count of three, they lifted their feet off the riverbed and pushed it out into the deepest part of the river.

It floated.

“This might just work if we can keep it pointed downriver,” Joe said. “If we let the back end swing around, we might get hung up on rocks or more debris. That would be bad.”

They found their grips and balance on the log—Joe was on the left side of the log with his right arm draped over the top, Butch was on the right a few feet behind, and Farkus switched between the left and right side around the stump of the log depending on which way it drifted.

“Are you guys about ready?” Joe asked.

Before either could answer, there was a large explosion on the surface of the water between the log and the bank, and the splash slapped across their faces.

Joe’s first thought was that rocks were being dislodged from the canyon walls and dropping down into the river. But when he squeezed the water out of his eyes, he looked up to see the silhouette of a large mule deer, the antlers in velvet, dropping through the sky right toward them. It was trailing a stream of smoke like a shot-up fighter plane about to crash.

“Duck—it’s coming right at us . . .” he shouted, before letting go of the log and submerging.

A herd of deer had been trapped, he guessed. They’d retreated as far as they could to the rim of the canyon, but there was no way to outflank the fire. They’d bunched on the rim as the flames burnt their hides until they actually tried in vain to jump the canyon.

The buck deer hit the log with a concussive impact that boomed through the water. Joe looked up to see thrashing arms, legs, and hooves in a cloud of white bubbles and swirls of blood. The end of the log itself was driven down in front of his vision by the weight of the buck—before rolling out from beneath it and righting itself.

When he came to the surface, he looked into the frightened eyes of Butch Roberson, who was standing a couple of feet away. Their boat-log was floating slowly downriver, just out of reach.

And there was no sign of Dave Farkus.

“You get the log,” Joe said to Butch. “I’ll look for Farkus.”

Joe took a deep breath and again dropped beneath the surface.

He could see two still bodies a few feet downstream, tumbling in lazy slow motion along the river rocks. One was the buck—its back broken, ribbons of blood streaming out from its snout, its hide horribly burned—and the other was Farkus.

Joe closed the distance quickly and managed to grasp Farkus by his shirt collar. There was no resistance—no indication of life or struggle—as he pulled him up. The river was shallow enough that he could stand and breathe, and he kept Farkus above the surface by reaching under the man’s arms and pulling Farkus’s back tight to his chest. Joe backed his way to the narrow bank and lowered Farkus to the river rocks.

The man was breathing, but his breath was soft and shallow. Farkus’s left shoulder was asymmetrical, and when Joe bent over and loosened his shirt he could see the shoulder—and possibly the clavicle and sternum—had been crushed by the impact.

Farkus moaned, opened his eyes briefly, then passed out again.

“Only you would nearly get killed by a falling deer,” Joe said to Farkus, hoping the power of the fall hadn’t broken too many bones inside the man.

—

BUTCH SPLASHED HIS WAY over with the log in tow. They lifted Farkus and placed him facedown on the log as if straddling it, with his hands and legs dangling down into the water and his head resting on its ear on the trunk itself. They decided not to bind him to the log in any way so he wouldn’t slip off, but try to keep him balanced between them. If they tied him on, Joe thought, and the log flipped or got away from them in a rapid . . .

—

JOE AND BUTCH walked the log into the deepest part of the river, until the current leaned into them from behind. They pushed off and raised their feet out in front a foot or so below the surface and let the log float them.

As if he were guiding a fisherman on a drift boat, Joe kept his eyes downriver at all times. The river was technical and challenging; the trick was to anticipate the deepest runs and try to stay in the faster-moving water most of the time. But when the current looked like it would speed up and suck them into exposed boulders or dead trees or the cliff face itself, they’d have to maneuver the log so it would skirt the hazards but still keep floating.