Quinn's Story
Copyright© 2026 by writer 406
Chapter 28
There were visitors sitting at the kitchen table when he came home from the last day at school.
Smith and Jones he recognized immediately. The third man was new. He was in his fifties, bronze-faced from years of sustained exposure. Like Smith and Jones, he carried the quiet competence and confidence of someone who had spent time in serious places and been changed by it.
“Meet Mr. Taylor,” Smith said.
The stranger was watching him with the same rapid inventory all these men ran — comprehensive.
He nodded.
Quinn nodded back.
Sullivan was at the table companionably drinking coffee the way he had the last time Smith and Jones were there. He looked at Quinn and communicated in the private language they’d built — this is real and I know what it is and you’ll be alright.
Quinn set his bag down. So no Montana for him. He hid his disappointment.
“When?” he said.
Smith checked his watch. “Now,” he said.
They stopped at the REI on Geary Street. Smith, Jones, and Taylor selected items with the efficiency of people who knew exactly what they needed and why.
Boots first. Taylor waved away the salesgirl and sat across from Quinn on the fitting bench, evaluating fit himself, directing Quinn to stand and walk and flex and squat. Then, gripping a boot by the sole, he tested its torsional rigidity. The boots were leather and heavy and would need breaking in.
“They’ll do,” he said. “Your feet are going to hurt for the first two weeks. That’s just boots becoming yours.”
The pack frame fitting was careful, sized to Quinn’s torso with the same precision a tailor brought to his clothing. Taylor adjusted the straps with hands that understood this piece of equipment was not an accessory but a working tool.
Taylor noticed he hadn’t asked any questions.
“You’re not going to ask,” Taylor said.
“I figure you guys will tell me what I need to know,” Quinn said.
Taylor looked at him with grudging approval. He adjusted the last strap and stepped back.
They bought a sleeping bag rated to negative twenty, a poncho and a rain cover; a water filter; a compass; a map case; some quick-drying pants and shirts; a first aid kit whose contents Taylor reviewed item by item in the aisle, assigning a use and a method to each one with the completeness of someone who had needed these things in circumstances; a six-piece fishing rod and reel; and a belt knife.
They did not buy a gun but did buy a lot of bear spray.
He noted this and filed it alongside the negative-twenty sleeping bag and Taylor’s face and the compass and let the pattern develop.
The flight to Spokane was unremarkable. From Spokane, they drove north in a rented pickup, the landscape moving from city to farms, then to forest that got wilder as the miles accumulated.
Doukhobor Discovery was a small place on the Arrow Lakes. They met two more men there, Jim and Carl, guys he recognized from the Nevada ranch. Apparently, now it was okay to talk to them.
There were six of them and three canoes.
Quinn looked at the canoes on the lakeshore and thought about the ranch kids who’d been appalled at his inability to drive. Now, he was going to be the kid who knew nothing about canoeing.
He was right. He sucked at it. Paddling wasn’t nearly as simple as it looked. Paddling in a loaded canoe moving against the current’s resistance demanded continuous response. He made every available mistake in the first hour, some of them twice.
Jim paddled stern of the canoe and said almost nothing. He corrected Quinn’s stroke once, with a brief demonstration that showed the gap between what Quinn was doing and what was required, then let the water finish the lesson.
The pace was unrelenting. By the end of the first day, his shoulders were sore and his hands blistered. By the third day, the paddle had begun to make sense—not comfortable, not unconscious, but making sense.
Portages were the other thing.
He’d read the word before and gotten a romantic picture of the French voyageurs cheerfully carrying their canoes between waterways. In practice, portaging was a huge pain in the ass. You balanced the canoe upside down across your shoulders, the yoke balanced on your shoulders and walked through mud and underbrush and around fallen trees. All the while, a billion black flies and mosquitoes drank your blood like mad vampires.
“You’re fighting the weight,” Taylor said, who Quinn noticed was not the one carrying the fucking canoe.
Quinn repositioned his hands.
“The weight is not your enemy,” Taylor said. “Find the balance point. Fighting takes three times the energy that carrying does.”
Quinn thought about this for the rest of that portage and several after, the distinction between fighting and carrying extending itself to things far removed from canoes. He wrote it in the notebook he kept at the top of the pack.
They fished for food, not for recreation. This was conducted with the same seriousness as everything else. Quinn paid attention to the others and caught fish. He cleaned them over the water the way Taylor showed him and ate them cooked over a fire he learned to set and light by the end of the first week, building it with care, small and hot, with wood that was sometimes wet.
Taylor gave him flint and steel and wouldn’t let him use matches, which, of course, was much more difficult, especially with the others watching and commenting on how hungry they were.
He learned that he had a nickname from his time in Nevada: “Deadeye,” a name they called him with friendly teasing. He didn’t mind at all; they treated each other the same way. Except for Taylor. They were careful around him for some reason.
When there were no fish, he ate MREs, which he ate the same way he had eaten group home institutional food. It was fuel.
During moments of MRE meals, he thought about Maria’s kitchen, not with longing, but more as a reminder of what his life was like.
He drank what Jones called cowboy coffee. Grounds dumped in a pot of boiling water. Not particularly good but welcome in the chill of the morning.
His skin turned brown. His hands hardened. The boots hurt for two weeks, as Taylor had warned him, then stopped.
Quinn paid close attention. By now, he was pretty sure what they had in store for him.
Taylor lectured constantly, showing him how to read a compass and use a map. He talked about plants and mushrooms, showing him what was edible and what was not.
The others were on vacation. He was in for some kind of ordeal.
Taylor knew this country intimately. He knew the plants by their relationship to sun and soil, named them, but more importantly, discussed their utility or, in the case of some mushrooms, their danger.
Taylor tested him too.
“What’s that?” he would say, pointing to a plant at the trail’s edge, low and spreading.
Quinn looked at it. He’d been building a plant vocabulary for three weeks, alongside the compass work, water reading, and portage technique.
“Labrador tea,” Quinn said.
“What tells you?”
“The leaf shape. The underside is woolly.” He crouched and turned a leaf. “The smell.” He crushed it slightly. It was correct.
Taylor nodded. “What do you do with it?”
“Brew it. Medicinal.” He ran through the rest. “Headache, cold symptoms. Not too much—it carries a compound that’s toxic in quantity.”
“And if you’re not sure of the quantity?”
“Use a bit once, wait, observe.” Quinn stood. “If there’s doubt, there’s no doubt.”
Taylor looked at him. “Where did you hear that?”
“Smith. About weapons.”
Taylor was quiet. “The principle travels,” he said. They started splitting up in the fourth week.
He’d watched it coming—the navigational instruction intensifying, the others deferring to Quinn’s route assessments rather than providing them, the whole enterprise shifting from we are teaching you to you are demonstrating what you’ve learned.
After three weeks, Quinn realized that they had traveled in a big circle; they were back close to where they started. They stopped at a large cabin.
The others unpacked while Taylor laid out the map.
“Here’s your first solo. Make your way to that point and come back. Should take you a day and a half.”
Quinn read the map. He translated contour lines into terrain, identified the portages, and estimated the time.
“Okay,” he said.
The solos lengthened. One day became two, two became four. The trips became hikes; the canoe was left behind.
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