River Odyssey Read Online Free Page B

out of sight long enough people would forget we were still around. Then we could explore more freely.
    Radar showed a vessel ahead of us in the strait. I poked my head out of the portal and saw a ship. I didn’t even need binoculars. She was huge! I could see traces of her wake still. Wow! I wondered if she were going to Montreal. Could such a ship sail up the river? Cartier’s first ship was only fifty feet long. That was two and a half times longer than the sub. And it carried thirty men! Next to the ship ahead of us Cartier’s ship would have looked like a minnow beside a whale.
    She would know by radar that we were behind her, following her, though she would never have been able to see us. I wanted to close the distance. I wanted to take a closer look at her, but she was sailing at a very decent speed, almost twenty knots. That was impressive. We could only catch her if we stayed on the surface with the engine cranked all the way up, and that would take a few hours. Submerged we didn’t stand a chance. What would they think if we snuck up behind her? Would they report a submarine to the coastguard? If they did, we could dive and disappear. That’s what submarines were good at—disappearing. I decided to stay on the surface and close our distance to a few miles. I really wanted to take a closer look at her. I didn’t know why but I had a funny feeling about this ship.

Chapter 5

    WE FOLLOWED THE freighter into the mouth of the St. Lawrence. She was stacked with containers, one on top of another like blocks in a pyramid, and for some reason reminded me of the Incredible Hulk. If the wind picked up, I was sure she was going to topple over. I thought maybe she was going to continue south towards New Brunswick, or Prince Edward Island, but as soon as she passed Cape Whittle she made a sharp turn to starboard. It looked strangely like a last minute decision. I had a sudden thought, too, that maybe I could just
say
we had sailed to Montreal, and not really go. We could sail around the Maritimes, maybe visit Sable Island again and see the ponies this time. Of course I would never do that—lie to Sheba and Ziegfried. But thinking about it made me realize just how much I didn’t want to go to Montreal. As the sun dropped behind the hills of Quebec, I turned to starboard and followed the hulking freighter into the mouth of the river.
    The St. Lawrence is not the longest river in the world. The Nile is. And the Amazon is the biggest river in the world by volume. It is bigger than all the next eight largest rivers combined. It is so powerful that, two hundred miles from its mouth, out at sea, you can still taste fresh water. I read that in Sheba’s book,
Rivers of the World.
But the St. Lawrence does have something that’s the biggest in the world: its mouth.
    The mouth of the river is so big it never felt as though we were leaving the sea at all. And when I reached down and scooped a mouthful of water to taste, it was just as salty as the sea. It didn’t seem that the river was pouring into the sea so much as the sea was pouring into the river. And it was, all the way to Montreal.
    I carried Hollie up so we could stand in the portal and feel the wind in our faces. He raised his nose and sniffed. He could smell land. The whiskers of his eyebrows were growing over his eyes, making him blink.
    “Hollie. I have to cut your eyebrows.”
    He looked up at me as if he were trying to make up his mind.
    “I do. You’re starting to look like an old man.”
    Actually, he looked more like a seal. He was such a sea dog.
    Anticosti Island lay straight ahead. I figured we could reach it by midnight, though I had been up twenty-four hours already. Usually we’d be sleeping now, and it was not our habit to ride on the surface in broad daylight. But we were in the mouth of a river, not the open Atlantic. Surely we wouldn’t run into coastguard ships here?
    I watched the radar closely. Radar is like magic. It is an electronic,