Chapter 6

We rode the eddy around to the right place, beached the canoe, and pulled it up out the the water.

“Why don’t you go ahead and get a GPS waypoint for this, and then find some way to mark it so we can find it easily? I’ll run up to the top of that bar and see what I can spot. I’ll blow three long whistle blasts and see if they signal back. Maybe we can find them and give them some help. I’d sure hate to be stranded out here without my boat!”

“OK. I’ll take care of that and wait here by the boat. If you want me to come up there, blow your whistle long, short, long. I don’t know if I can hear you if you just hollar.”

“OK sounds like a plan. I’ll try yelling if I need you to do something else, if you don’t understand, wave your arms up and down. If you do understand, put your hands on your head. We’ll use the same signal if you need to yell at me, OK?

“OK, gotcha!”

I grabbed my emergency bag and headed up the hill. The sand and gravel was loose above the high water line, and it was slow going. Once I reached the top, I once again scanned both shorelines. I didn’t see anything, so I pulled out my whistle, stuck it in my mouth, plugged my ears and gave three long blasts, as hard as I could. Unplugging my ears, I shut my eyes and listened very carefully. All I could hear was the sound of the water, and the breeze in the trees. I put the binoculars to my eyes once more, and scanned very slowly as far as I could see ... nothing. I was about to give up and go back to the boat, when I caught a hint of motion out of the corner of my eye. I looked back in the direction where I thought I’d seen it, but saw nothing. I turned back where I’d been and tried to look straight ahead with an unfocused gaze.

Once more I caught a hint of motion. This time I had a better line on it. I tried to spot it straight on, and saw a blur of something off to my right, above the trees. Trying not to take my eyes off it, I brought up the binoculars and looked again. This time I spotted it! A thin tendril of smoke, rising up from the trees! I pulled my GPS out of the emergency bag and took a careful bearing on the smoke.

The river must curve for a good long way right here, since there seemed to be a lot of trees and ground between me and the smoke.

I turned around, cupped my hands to my mouth and hollered at Jeff. “I think I’ve spotted them! It looks like smoke, maybe a quarter-mile down river. I’m coming down, and we’ll see if we can find them!”

Jeff put his hands on top of his head as I went downslope as quickly as possible without going ass over tincups.

He already had the canoe back in the water when I got there. We pushed off and dug in hard. The pool turned out to be longer than I’d thought, but S-shaped rather than a C. We went around to the right, back left, and then right again. I kept my eye peeled, but only caught one more glimpse of smoke. It was nearly impossible to see at river level.