The Carry Home by Gary Ferguson Read Free Book Online

taken swims in rapids. But I’d never been so totally helpless. Out of control. Screaming curses as the river slammed me into boulders, tearing and pummeling my backside. Even with a life jacket on, I was twice pinned to the bottom of recirculation pools, inhaling water, close to drowning. But then I made it out again, back into the roar. Near the end of the rapid, I catapulted over a four-foot waterfall, my right leg driving hard into a rock crevice, snapping like a twig. Coughed out at last into the quiet of a flush pond, I swam over to the canoe and clung to the side, stood on my good leg, and waited for Jane. Waited some more.

HUNGER SEASON
    O ur long dance with rivers had reached a high point five years earlier, in the so-called Barren Lands of the Canadian far north—twice the size of Texas, sprawling across half a million square miles, one of the biggest tracts of wilderness in the world. We’d first journeyed there in 2000, embarking by canoe with four friends along the Hood River, just inside the Arctic Circle. The floatplane touched down after three hours of northbound flight from Yellowknife; with the weather souring, we hustled to unload gear, then confirmed with the pilot a pickup sixteen days later, upstream from where the Hood makes a final exhale into the Arctic Sound. He was anxious to be off,drawing in the anchor lines from the floats, climbing into the cockpit. After taxiing back out into the lake, he took off with a roar, drawing a wide arc toward the south and finally fading from sight, then from sound, leaving us to the wind-shorn tundra. We didn’t so much feel alone as vulnerable. That vulnerability, in turn, brought alertness. And just by being alert, we were able to catch a kid-sized feeling of having stumbled into Eden.
    Jane and I stood together in that far country and watched gyrfalcons streak out of bony canyons; hiked tundra heaved by frost into mounds and hummocks; sat open-mouthed as caribou danced across the humped ground like trotter ponies on a groomed track. By day we drifted past musk oxen grunting over patches of sedge along the riverbanks, wolverines scuttling up the hills like angry little bears. Once, a pair of wolves appeared across the river, a white male and black female, playing with their pups so enthusiastically they sent thick clouds of dust drifting through the air. Then the adults spotted us and went into action, squirreling the young into a den. As we pushed off, the male trotted alongside on the top of a small ridge, howling, anxious for us to be away.
    And then there was the light. Sun hovering above the treeless horizon even at midnight, as if stuck in flight, soaking the fireweed and tufts of cotton grass in dark honey. And of course there were mosquitoes, great clouds of them swarming every evening outside our screened-in dinner tent, hungry for a bite of these strange warm-bloods that chattered on past midnight, raising cups of whiskey and smoking foul-smelling cigars. Lateron, in our sleeping tents, absent a hearty wind, the little blood-suckers careened into the nylon walls with the insistent patter of a good rain.
    Late one afternoon after camp was set, out walking the tundra we spotted on a distant ridge a long line of piled rocks—so-called “stone men,” erected centuries ago by indigenous people. Mistaking the rocks for humans, migrating caribou would avoid them, walking instead toward hunters lying in wait.
    Without a word Jane and I sat down side by side, just staring at the stones. Trying to fathom what such lives were like. Imagining families, entire villages, moving by foot across hundreds of miles of tundra, shadowing the caribou herds—hopscotching the rough ground with kids and babies in tow, steering around an endless reach of bogs and quags.
    â€œThere would’ve been few second chances,” Jane finally said. “I wonder how that affects people—I mean, when they know how thin the thread is that keeps them