looming downriver and it was decided that we’d stop at the base of a thirty-metre-high esker and pitch camp. From the apex of the dune I could get a protracted view of where the fire was spreading, plot its movement on the topo map, and chart which direction the smoke was blowing. Since leaving Shethanei Lake we had been following the sheer-line of smoke, managing to keep it out of our faces by less than half a kilometre. Tomorrow could be different; the fire was following the south shore of the river and if the wind came up, the possibility of it jumping to the opposite side was likely — if that happened we would either have to hold up or try to get in front of the inferno. It was the smoke we were worried more about than the actual fire.
It had been unseasonably hot the past few days, in marked contrast to the first three on leaving Tadoule. That evening we feasted on grayling and fresh-baked cornbread, under the shadow of the esker behind us and the auspicious cloud of smoke downriver. I had knots in my stomach and tried to weed them out by walking the crest of the esker alone while the others sat at the camp. Everyone was getting along, and for now Andy seemed to have straightened out, at least enough so that I didn’t have to keep such a watchful eye on him, and he would follow my lead closely while running rapids, or carry out chores on his own without me grilling him.
I walked for several kilometres. It was easy going and my legs seemed to flex on their own, one step at a time, mind racing, thinking about the past week, what lay ahead, and how crazy this whole adventure was. The esker trailed off to the north, a natural trail that was not hard to follow without actually paying much attention; that was the lure of it — you were drawn onward by the simplicity of it, away from the river noise, the promising quiet, the aloneness. Like any trail, you were compelled to follow it to the end; but here it seemed to go on forever. If it ended, it just retreated into the landscape temporarily, and you could see it surfacing a short distance away, the yellowed back of a sand serpent. Twilight added to the spell, and there was no rush to get back, to beat the waning sun and expected darkness. There were wolf dens dug into the side of esker mounds, the history of meals displayed in a variety of bone fragments covering the entrance path. There were grave sites with weathered pickets bleached grey by sun and pitted by weather, scattered about, the dead now long forgotten, and places where animal bones mingled with those of humans … life and death along the trail.
In the morning, we didn’t have to paddle very far before getting a good view of the fire burning along the river’s edge. With the current pulling at ten kilometres per hour, interspersed with long sets of rapids, we had little chance of backtracking if the fire and smoke proved to be intolerable. We had played our cards, or rather I had dealt out everyone’s hand because I held the deck, betting that the winds had forced the smoke to rise vertically — and it did — instead of hanging in a deadly shroud over the Seal.
At one point we stopped along the shore at the head of the blaze in order to get some photographs, but the intense heat seared our bare skin and showers of glowing sparks and airborne cinders fell like rain on top of the canoes, forcing us to retreat further down the river. Each dry spruce at the leading edge of the fire would literally explode into a ball of fire, sending a plume of black smoke skyward, adding to the conflagration — an entity that moved with the sole purpose of destroying whatever lay in its path. At least it was safer to stay out toward the centre of the river, away from the flames and the heat, playing the rapids cautiously as we rounded river bends not knowing what waited for us ahead.
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