The River Does Not Care

The first rule of the Kallo River, according to Ulla Brandt, was that it did not care about you.

“It isn’t cruel,” she said, standing in the shallows with a paddle across her shoulders and the morning mist coiling round her knees. “That’s the thing people get wrong. A river isn’t your enemy. It isn’t your friend. It just goes where it goes, and it goes very fast, and you either work with it or you get carried.” She grinned. “Right. Any questions? Mateo?”

“Are there bears?”

“Yes.”

“Are they—“

“Don’t worry about the bears. Worry about your knots.”

Ines Varga, fifteen, sitting in the bow of the red canoe with her brother’s lifejacket strap pinched in her fingers, wondered for the hundredth time how she had let herself be talked into this.

It had been her mother’s idea. A week of guided wilderness for the pair of them, in the north, as far from everything as it was possible to get. You two need time, Mum had said, with the look she wore these days when she meant that their parents’ divorce had been hard on all of them. You’ve barely spoken since Christmas.

That was true. It was also, Ines thought, a gross understatement. She and Mateo had been close once, so close that people took them for twins, though she was two years older. They’d had a code. They’d built a treehouse. And then the year had come in which everything split, and Ines had gone one way, quiet and angry, and Mateo had gone the other, noisy and anxious, and somewhere along the way they had stopped being on each other’s side.

“I can paddle by myself, you know,” said Mateo from the stern, in a low voice that Ulla couldn’t hear.

“I know.”

“I’m not a baby.”

“I know, Mateo.”

“You always talk like I’m going to break.”

She turned round. He sat hunched in the back of the canoe, thirteen years old and small for it, his round glasses misting up in the damp air. His inhaler hung on a cord round his neck, as it always did. He looked, she thought with a pang, exactly like the boy in the treehouse.

“Sorry,” she said.

He blinked.

“What?”

“I said sorry. I’ll try not to.”

“Oh.” He sat up. “Okay. Thanks.”

It was the longest conversation they’d had in weeks. It ended when Ulla, from the shore, whistled, shouted “Eyes front, crew!” and pushed the red canoe out into the current.

On the fourth day, the Kallo River showed what it was.

It had been gentle until then. They’d spent three days drifting down a broad green avenue of spruce and birch, seeing eagles, eating Ulla’s terrible porridge, sleeping on gravel bars under a sky so full of stars that Mateo said it looked like someone had spilled a bag of salt. There had been a few rapids, but only little ones, which Ulla called “riffles,” and which Ines found quite thrilling.

On the fourth morning, they came to the Narrows.

“Right,” said Ulla, pulling in at a gravel beach where the river bent sharply left. “This is a Class Three. Nothing to be afraid of, but it deserves respect. I’ll go first and show you the line. Then you follow, one at a time, and you do exactly what I do.” She looked at them. “Is that clear?”

“Clear,” said Ines.

“Mateo?”

“Don’t die. Got it.”

“Good lad.”

She went. Ines and Mateo watched from the bank, standing on a rock, as Ulla’s blue canoe nosed into the neck of the Narrows, sliding sweetly down a smooth green tongue of water and into a boil of white. She was magnificent. She leaned, cut, swept, found the line like a thread through a needle. Ines held her breath, and let it go, and laughed.

Then Ulla’s canoe turned broadside.

It happened so quickly Ines had no time to cry out. One moment the blue hull was running true; the next, a hidden rock under the surface caught it, and the whole boat swung around and slammed sideways against a boulder in the middle of the stream. The river piled up against the upstream side in a thick brown wall. The canoe folded, like a leaf in a fist.

Pinned, Ines’s brain said, very calmly. That’s what it’s called when this happens.

Ulla was in the water. She had gone over the side, and her paddle was gone, and she was clinging to the boulder with both arms, her face white and wild, while the current dragged at her legs. She shouted something. The roar drowned it.

“Mateo,” said Ines. “Stay here.”

“No way.”

“Stay.”

She ran. She went down the bank in a scramble of loose stones, across a slab of wet rock, and out onto the lip of the boulder, with her heart in her teeth. She flung herself flat and grabbed Ulla’s lifejacket by the collar.

“Pull!” yelled Ulla. “Pull, pull, don’t let go!”

“I’ve got you!”

“My leg—“

“I’ve got you! Come on!”

It took everything she had. She hauled, and Ulla kicked, and somehow, with a sickening wrench, the guide came free and flopped onto the rock beside her, gasping. Her left leg was bent at an angle that made Ines’s vision go grey at the edges.

Behind them, the blue canoe broke apart with a sound like a gunshot. The pack with the satellite phone went with it, tumbling out of sight into the white.

They got her to the bank. It took twenty minutes, and a great deal of swearing from Ulla, and a stretcher improvised from Ines’s paddle and two lifejackets. By the time she lay propped against a log with a rolled sleeping bag under her knee, the guide’s face was the colour of candle wax, and she was talking in a steady, controlled, slightly too-calm voice that Ines recognised from her father’s hospital stay.

“It’s a break,” said Ulla. “Both bones, probably. I won’t be walking. Don’t look so frightened, I’ve had worse.”

“What do we do?” said Mateo. He was sitting cross-legged in the dirt with his arms round his knees, his inhaler clutched in his fist. “Where’s the phone?”

“Gone.”

“The other one? The spare?”

“There isn’t a spare.” Ulla closed her eyes. “I should have brought one. That’s my mistake. Stupid. Well.” She opened them again. “Listen, both of you. This is going to be a hard hour. I need you to listen as if your lives depended on it, because they do.”

They listened.

“We are sixty miles from the outpost at Kallo Falls. Maybe sixty-five. We’re five days’ paddle from where the road starts, but there’s a ranger station at the Falls, and a radio. If we’d stayed on schedule, somebody would come looking for us in nine days. That’s too long. I’ll be fine for a week if I’m warm and have water. But I don’t like the weather.” She nodded at the western sky, where a bank of grey cloud was massing over the trees. “And I don’t like not having a plan.”

“We go for help,” said Ines.

“One of you.”

“Both of us,” said Ines at once. “We can’t leave him—“

“Me?” said Mateo, astonished.

“I’m not leaving you here alone with a woman with a broken leg.”

“You aren’t leaving me with anyone. I’m coming.”

“You’re thirteen.”

“And you’re fifteen!”

“Be quiet,” said Ulla. It was not loud, but they both stopped. She looked from one to the other. “Ines. Mateo. Look at me. If one of you goes, and the other stays, I lose a pair of hands and the one who goes is alone on a river. If you both go, you’ve each got somebody.” She took a rasping breath. “And if you both stay, you’ve got me, and no help. I’m saying there’s only one sensible answer.”

Ines looked at her brother.

He looked back at her. His lip was shaking, just slightly, behind his glasses. She saw him press his thumb into the top of the inhaler, for comfort.

He’s scared, she thought. He’s as scared as I am. And he’s not going to say.

“Together,” said Ines. “We go together.”

“Together,” said Mateo, hoarsely.

“Then listen,” said Ulla, and for the next forty minutes she taught them everything she knew: how to read the water, how to find the line, which side of a bend to hug, how to portage the rapids they couldn’t run. She marked the map with a stub of pencil. She drew a grid of tiny arrows. She showed them where the river forked, and where it dropped, and where, on day three, it plunged into the Gorge.

“There’s a portage path on the left bank,” she said. “It’s marked. It’s long, and it’s steep, and you must not try to run that gorge. Not under any circumstances. If you see white water that you don’t understand, you stop. You get out. You walk.” She looked from one face to the other. “Do you promise?”

“We promise,” said Ines.

“Say it, Mateo.”

“I promise.”

“Good.” Ulla leaned back, spent. She gripped Ines’s wrist. “You’re better than you think. Both of you.”

It was nearly noon when they pushed the red canoe back into the stream.

The weather broke on the first evening.

They were forty miles from nowhere, on a gravel bar in a bend of the river, when the cloud rolled in and the rain came down in stair-rods. They had a tarp, which they strung up between two trees, and a camp stove, which Mateo coaxed alight with a patience that astonished her. They had porridge. They had, from Ulla’s pack, a tin of peaches that they ate with their fingers in silence, passing it back and forth.

It rained all night.

At some point after midnight, Ines woke to find that Mateo was awake, too. He was lying on his back in his sleeping bag, staring at the dripping tarp, his glasses folded on his chest. She could hear his breathing. It was a small whistling sound, a catch and release, and her stomach clenched.

“Mateo?”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re wheezing.”

“It’s the cold. It does that.” A pause. “I’ve had my inhaler.”

“How many puffs?”

“Two. It’s okay.”

She rolled over. In the dark, in the rain, with the river muttering to itself nearby, she was suddenly aware of how very small they were. Two children under a scrap of waterproof cloth, in a wilderness the size of a country.

“I’m not very good at this,” she said abruptly. “Looking after you. I know I’m not.”

“What?”

“I always get it wrong. You say I talk to you like you’re going to break. You’re right. I do. I think it’s because—“ She stopped. She hadn’t meant to say any of it. But the dark made things easy. “When Dad moved out, you cried for three days. You wouldn’t eat. And I was so angry, Mateo. I was so angry that I couldn’t even—I couldn’t stand it, that you were so sad. I didn’t know what to do with it. So I decided I’d be the strong one. And I’d keep you safe. And I would never let anything else go wrong.”

He said nothing for a long time.

“Is that why you stopped talking to me?”

“I didn’t stop—“ She faltered. “Yes. I think so.”

“I thought you hated me,” said Mateo, in a very small voice. “I thought you were embarrassed. Because I’m the baby, and I cry, and I’ve got asthma, and I’m not cool.”

“I thought you hated me.”

“Why?”

“Because I wasn’t—“ She shook her head, laughing and crying at once in the black. “I don’t know. I don’t know why. We’re idiots.”

There was a long, shaky pause. Then a hand reached out of the other sleeping bag and found hers in the dark. It was damp and cold and perfectly familiar.

“I’m not going to break, Ines,” said Mateo.

“I know.”

“I’m going to be scared. But I won’t break.”

“Okay.”

“And I think you can stop trying to do it all by yourself. It’s not a job.” He squeezed her fingers. “It’s a river. We’re in it together.”

She lay for a long time in the dark, listening to the rain on the tarp and the breath in his chest, slow and whistling and steady. Then, for the first time in more than a year, she slept without dreaming.

They reached the Gorge on the afternoon of the third day.

They’d had a good morning. The rain had cleared; a thin bright sun lay along the water. They’d run two small rapids, and Mateo had done the stern work, calling out the line from behind her in a quick clear voice: left, left, hard right, now! They’d got good at it. They’d found a rhythm. At noon, rounding a headland, they’d seen a bear, a big brown shape three hundred yards off on a gravel bar, fishing, and had stopped paddling and floated in total silence while it looked up, lazily, sniffed the air and returned to its dinner.

“That was amazing,” Mateo whispered.

“I know.”

“I didn’t even get scared.”

“You did. Your ears went red.”

“Shut up.”

They were laughing when they heard it.

It started as a low rumble, far downstream, like thunder in the next valley. It grew as they paddled. The trees began to close in. The banks rose, grey and sheer, until they were enclosed by walls of dark rock, wet and gleaming, a hundred feet high. The current picked up. It grew thick and fast and muscular.

The sound became a roar.

“The Gorge,” said Ines, tightly. She’d taken the map out and held it against her knee. “The portage should be on the left. About a quarter-mile before the drop. A path, Ulla said. A marker on a post.”

“I can’t see a post.”

“It should be—“

“Ines.” Mateo’s voice cracked. “Ines, I can’t see a post. I can’t see a bank.”

She looked up. Her stomach fell through the floor.

They’d been looking at the map too long. In those few seconds, while the current drew them in, the river had narrowed to a channel not forty feet across, with sheer walls on either side and no beach at all, no gravel, no path, nothing but black rock plunging into the water. Ahead, a hundred yards off, the river simply ended. It vanished over a smooth, glassy lip, in a curtain of spray.

“We missed it,” Ines said, very quietly.

“Paddle!”

“We can’t paddle upstream, it’s too fast—“

“There’s got to be somewhere! Look!”

She looked.

She forced herself to stop panicking, to take a breath, to look at the cliffs the way Ulla had taught them. And there, just before the drop, on the right bank, she saw a ledge. A narrow shelf of rock, no more than six feet wide, jutting from the wall about a foot above the water. Behind it, the cliff was split by a crack, a crooked cleft that might, just might, go somewhere.

It was the wrong side. It wasn’t a path. It wasn’t marked. It might lead nowhere.

“Right bank!” she shouted. “The ledge! We have to hit it!”

“What if it’s a dead end?”

“What if the drop is?”

They dug in. Ines paddled until her arms burned and her lungs seared, calling the strokes, and left, and left, hard right, while the river roared and the canoe heeled and the spray hit her face like gravel. Behind her, Mateo shouted the line, steady and sure and furious, a voice she’d never heard him use. The ledge swam up. Fifty yards. Thirty. Ten.

“Brace!” yelled Mateo.

The bow hit the rock with a crack that jarred her teeth. She flung herself out of the canoe, scrabbling for a handhold, and found one: a slick knob of stone. Her boots skidded. The current dragged at her thighs. She heard Mateo gasp and the stern swung out and the whole canoe, with the packs and the map and the stove and everything they owned, began to slide backward into the stream.

“Mateo!”

He dropped his paddle. He threw himself over the stern, onto the rock, on his stomach, and caught the rope in both hands.

“I’ve got it!” he screamed. “I’ve got it, I’ve got it—“

“Hold on!”

“I’M HOLDING!”

She grabbed the bow and pulled. Together, with their feet braced against the stone and every muscle straining, they hauled the red canoe up out of the water and onto the ledge, and collapsed in a heap beside it, panting, soaked, shaking, while fifty feet away the river threw itself over the lip of the world and fell, bellowing, into the dark.

For a long moment, neither of them spoke.

“You said you wouldn’t break,” said Ines, gasping.

“I told you,” said Mateo.

The crack in the cliff did lead somewhere.

It wound up through the rock like a staircase for giants, a chimney of wet stone and ferns, and at the top it opened onto a bluff of pine, high above the Gorge. From there, they found the portage trail at last, on the other side, as Ulla had said: a faint worn path with a marker on a post, exactly where she’d promised, half a mile on. They had simply missed it, downriver, by a heartbeat.

They carried the canoe. It took the whole of the afternoon and half the evening, and they did it in relays, a hundred yards at a time, with a long rest between each. By dusk, they had put in below the Gorge, on a long calm reach of river, and Ines was so tired that she cried a little, quietly, into her lifejacket, and Mateo sat beside her and said nothing, and handed her a piece of dried mango.

“We’re going to make it,” he said.

“Are we?”

“Yes. I’ve decided.”

On the fourth morning of their journey, the river turned a corner, and there was smoke.

It rose from a hillside half a mile ahead. A thin grey thread, from a chimney. Beside it, on the bank, stood a cluster of low log buildings with green tin roofs and a flagpole. A figure in a ranger’s jacket was standing on the dock, with one hand over her eyes, staring upriver. Behind her, a small boat bobbed.

“Mateo,” breathed Ines.

“I see it.”

“It’s—it’s Kallo Falls. We—“

“I see it.”

They paddled harder than they ever had in their lives. The ranger saw them coming. She dropped her hand, and then she ran. By the time the red canoe slid up against the dock, there was a small crowd, and someone had thrown a blanket round Ines’s shoulders, and someone else was holding Mateo’s head, and a woman was saying over and over, “Where’s Ulla? Where’s your guide? Where is she?”

Ines told them. Her voice came out in a thread. She told them the Narrows, the broken leg, the camp, the log, the map. She told them where.

It was a helicopter that went. It left within the half-hour, with a medic and a stretcher and the ranger herself; they waited by the radio shack, wrapped in blankets, drinking hot sweet tea. Mateo fell asleep sitting up. Ines didn’t. She watched the sky.

At three in the afternoon, she heard the thud, thud, thud of the rotors, far away over the trees, and then she saw it: a small yellow shape against the grey. It banked, and dipped, and came in low over the river, and out of the open door, someone was waving.

It was Ulla.

She was on a stretcher, strapped in tight, her leg in a splint, her face blotched with tears. But she was grinning like a lunatic, and when the helicopter touched down on the dock, she held out both arms, and Ines ran across the boards and into them, and Mateo, woken by the noise, came stumbling after in his blanket, and the three of them held on to each other in the downdraught while the rotors beat the river into silver.

“I told you,” said Ulla fiercely, into Ines’s hair. “I told you you were better than you thought.”

“You said the river doesn’t care.”

“It doesn’t.”

“But we do,” said Mateo. He wiped his glasses on his blanket, put them on, and peered round at the two of them with great seriousness. “That’s the whole point, isn’t it? That’s the difference.”

Ulla laughed until she cried.

They flew out that evening, together, into the setting sun, with the Kallo laid out beneath them like a long bright ribbon. Ines sat with her forehead against the window. She could see the gorge, a dark split in the green. She could see the bend where the canoe had pinned. She could see, for a moment, the gravel bar where they’d slept under the tarp, and told each other the truth, in the rain.

Mateo sat beside her. After a while, without saying anything, he put his head on her shoulder.

Ines did not move. She did not try to fix a single thing. She sat quite still and watched the river go by, and held her brother’s hand, and thought, for the first time in a long time, that she was not carrying it alone.