Chapter 4: The River’s Edge

~ Emmie ~

She heard the river before she saw it.

It came through the trees as a low, continuous rushing — not loud, not dramatic, but insistent, the way a voice is insistent when it has been speaking for a very long time and has learned that patience is more persuasive than urgency. She had been walking northwest by the sun’s position for the better part of six hours, Kanti on her back for the last two of them, and the sound of the water hit something in her that was beyond thirst — some deeper register of need, the body’s ancient understanding that where there is water there is life and the possibility of continuation.

“River,” she said, half to herself and half to the weight on her back.

Kanti lifted his head from her shoulder. He had heard it too — she felt him come alert, felt the shift in how he held himself, and then he said something close to her ear, quick and certain, the word liquid-sounding and unmistakable in its meaning even without translation.

“Yes,” she said. “Let’s go.”

The Grande Ronde came into view through a break in the cottonwoods — wide and gray-green in the afternoon light, moving fast over a gravel bed, splitting around a low island of willow scrub midstream. The banks here were muddy, churned at the water’s edge where animals had come to drink. She studied the mud as she approached, reading it the way her father had taught her — deer, definitely, a whole group of them from the overlapping prints. Smaller marks that might be raccoon. The broad, hand-shaped print of a beaver near the waterline.

And there, running parallel to the bank for twenty yards before turning northwest — the unmistakable round-edged impression of unshod hooves. Many of them. Moving together, deliberate, not the scattered pattern of loose horses but the packed, purposeful track of a group being led.

She crouched and set Kanti down and pressed two fingers into the nearest print.

The edges were firm. Not fresh — a day, perhaps more. But the direction was clear.

“Your people went that way,” she told him, pointing northwest along the bank. “We’re going the right way.”

He crouched beside her and looked at the hoofprint with the same serious attention he gave everything. Then he looked up at her and said something that sounded, in tone if not in content, like confirmation.

She allowed herself one moment of something that was almost relief. Then she stood, unstopped the canteen, and walked to the water’s edge to fill it.

The bank here was a gentle slope of packed gravel that flattened into a shallow, rocky shelf before the river deepened. She went to one knee on the shelf and submerged the canteen, watching the bubbles rise, and she was focused on this — on the canteen, on the cold of the water over her fingers, on the calculation of how many miles remained before dark — and so she did not immediately notice that Kanti had followed her to the water.

She noticed when she heard the sound.

It was not a loud sound. It was barely a sound at all — a sharp intake of breath, a small disruption, the particular noise of a foot finding no purchase where purchase was expected. She turned.

He had gone three steps past her along the shelf and the shelf had ended and the river bottom had dropped away and he was in the water.

Not deep — the current caught him at the waist and he was still standing, still upright, his arms out for balance, his face a mask of pure startled shock. But the Grande Ronde in September ran cold as snowmelt, which it was, and the current was stronger than it looked from the bank, and he was four years old and small even for four and the river did not care about any of that.

She was in the water before she decided to move.