Wintering Read Online Free

nodded, satisfied, and said, “Now play me that song again, eh?”
    So Gus did. He played until the stars jumped out.
    —
    For two days they paddled against the Burnt Wood’s weakening current, portaging the saults, making lunches over fires on the river’s edge, pitching their canvas each night in clearings. Already each was growing used to the silence of the other’s company. And to the strange beckonings from the wilderness.
    Here the river was narrowing even as the trees on shore grew more distant. On either side they could touch the tall and browning cattails with the blades of their paddles, the boggy water beyond seeping toward the jack pines ashore. Every thirty strokes or so they came upon matted shoreline where moose had come to forage.
    As they paddled Harry sang full-voiced:
“Le fils du roi s’en va chassant, / En roulant ma boule. / Avec son grand fusil d’argent, rouli,-roulant, ma boule roulant…”
    “What’s with the love songs?” Gus said.
    “They’re chansons. Voyageur songs.”
    “Why holler about it?”
    “You want to surprise some bull along this tight stretch of river? With nowhere to turn? They’re hornier than you are right now. We come on one unannounced and you’ll have an antler up your ass faster than you could squeal about it.” Harry smiled and started singing again. They paddled on.
    An hour later, the river and muskeg funneled into a narrow watercourse no more than two feet deep and six feet wide. Their paddles struck the rocky riverbed, sending sharp reverberations into their hands. After a few minutes, Harry stepped from his canoe and unpacked a length of rope. Gus did as Harry did. They knotted their lines to the bows, shouldered and tied off the line, and started dragging their boats single-file up what was left of the river. When the trees closed above them, they had to bend and then crawl through the canopy of boughs and branches.
    “I hope this means we’re near Burnt Wood Lake,” Harry said. “We ought to be.”
    The river was frigid and already Gus’s hands were numb. “Were you expecting this?”
    “I wasn’t expecting anything. I will not.” Harry looked over his shoulder, down the starboard side of his canoe, and fixed Gus with his stare. He remembered that stare, Gus did. All these years later, he recognized it as a warning. For Harry knew, sure as Gus did himself, that asking if he’d been anticipating a tangle of trees and shallow water was his son’s first complaint. And them only three days into a trip that would last months.
    Gus had not questioned their planning much, but he had wondered—on the night before they departed—why they didn’t just drive up to the public access on Burnt Wood Lake and put in there. It would have taken less than an hour from their front door, saved them a lot of unnecessary effort, and spared them this cloying mess of trees.
    The reason, Harry had told him, was that since the “voyageurs of yore” didn’t have the benefit of being towed up to the public access, neither should he and Gus. This notion sounded noble to Gus, and of course it was in the spirit of their adventure. But clambering on hands and knees to tow his canoe like some blind and stubborn horse, he was unable to check himself. Gus said, “This water is freezing.”
    “I suppose we’ll run into our share of cold water between now and then,” Harry said, still staring down the length of his canoe.
    “I thought this was a river,” Gus said, rolling now.
    Harry got up on one knee, cupped his hand into the water, and brought it up to his mouth. “Gus, bud, there’s gonna be stretches that’re tougher than others. We’re gonna get wet and we’re gonna get cold. I’ll save you the trouble of discovery on those accounts. Let’s not piss in our soup, eh?”
    Gus didn’t say anything, only pulled his canoe past his father and tunneled farther up the river.
    —
    “You have to wonder why we were there,” Gus said that November morning he got