Chapter 17

Wednesday, December 5, 2001

To say that Duane's head was swimming the next day would be to put it mildly. Though he was tired from getting less sleep than usual, ached in joints that hadn't ever had a workout quite like that, and could feel the scratches from her fingernails on his back, he was not dissatisfied with the way things had turned out. The wakeup call had put him a little behind schedule in getting the dogs fed and the morning chores done, but she was right out there with him working at it. They were raft guides, after all, and used to working together, although they had only been on the same crew occasionally.

Working together made things go quickly, and there was even time to head back into the trailer and throw together a breakfast that was better than his usual cereal and instant coffee. They were just finishing up when Candice showed up, then Phil, and not too surprisingly, Josh. Even though Josh had his job with the railroad, it was the slow season, and he still spent some time each day out at the dog barn. Unlike Candice and Phil, Josh knew Michelle a little from a trip the previous spring. Duane introduced her around, then as Candice, Phil, and he got sleds rigged and dogs hooked up for the first training run of the day, Josh helped Michelle hook up a team, then took off with her on a different training trail. When the other three were getting close to the dog barn on their way back three hours later, they were joined by Josh and Michelle – except this time Michelle was on the runners, and Josh riding in the sled basket.

"Another natural," he shook his head as a verdict when they got back to the dog barn and were breaking the four teams down. "Michelle, you're too green to go on training runs by yourself, but if you're with another musher or two, and someone else is on point, you should do all right. You ought to be able to pick up the nuances quickly. Let's go have a cup of coffee before I have to head back down to the railroad."

They all trooped into the trailer, and Duane set the coffeepot going. While it was perking, Josh explained about how the training was organized. "It's all different this year from the way we used to do it," he said. "In the old days, it was just Tiff and me doing most of the training, and we pretty well knew who needed what, without talking about it much. Now, since we can't keep as close a tab on it, we had to get more organized."

He went on to explain that every day Tiffany sat down with a computer and worked out a training plan – which dogs would go on which teams, how far, what kind of trail, and so forth. If a dog was having trouble, running slow, or whatever, that had to be reported back so that Tiffany could adjust the next day's training plan. "It seems a little programmed and it is," he said. "But between the dog barn cutting back the time spent on maintenance and having things better organized, we're getting in more and better training than we ever did before."

"We about have to do it this way," Phil agreed; he was a tall, lanky guy with thinning hair and a laid-back personality. He'd explained earlier that this was pretty relaxing for him – his former job had made him a ton of money as a world-traveling tech rep, but it had been very stressful and exhausting. "I agree it isn't as much fun as the old days, but it isn't the drudgery, either."

"Yeah, it used to take six man-hours to do a feeding," Josh agreed. "We can do it in one, now. The only part about that I don't like is that we don't get the interaction with the individual dogs we used to, and I haven't made up my mind yet whether that's good or bad. That's neither here nor there; we've argued about it before and will again. It probably won't get settled until we've had more experience with the results." He glanced at his watch and continued, "I really need to be getting back to the shop. Phil, the four of you will bring the run total today to eight, with two left. Why don't you and Candice do them today, so Tiff and I can have Duane and Michelle over to dinner?"

"Might as well," Phil said. "You two figure on having dinner with Brandy and me some time."

"Hope you like pizza," Candice smirked. "Neither he nor Brandy can boil water without burning it."

"Can't be good at everything," Phil laughed. "We do our part in keeping the restaurants in this town open all winter."

"I'll let Phil and Brandy run ahead of me," Candice said. "But you can figure on coming over to have dinner with John and the boys and me some time. Maybe that'll make up for Phil ordering pizza."

Thus it was that Duane was bringing up the rear of a line of four dog teams, Michelle right in front of him, as they ran down the railroad grade to the east on top of a layer of new snow that had fallen through the night. The run down the tracks was dull; Duane had done it several times now. It all seemed to be pretty much the same thing, but it was a good way to get raw, steady miles on the dogs, and would be an easy way for Michelle to solo on a sled for the first time.

As the miles rolled mindlessly by, his thoughts understandably wandered, mostly to the night before, and to the woman on the dogsled fifty yards ahead of him. Too much of that could kill a man, he thought, but what a way to go!

It hadn't been just a quick good-night roll in the hay; it had been intense from the moment he first penetrated her dripping hot wetness. It was as different from being with Chica as it could be. Where Chica had just sort of tolerated it, Michelle really liked her sex and was good at it. He didn't really have much experience with sex, just Chica and a few brief experiences in college, but Michelle brought things out in him that he never knew. The first time had gone on a long, long time with ever-increasing tension until he exploded deep into her body while she hung on to his back with her fingernails, screaming and thrashing in an intense orgasm of her own. That hadn't been the last time, either; they caught their breath, talked a little in quiet tones, then did it again, even better if such a thing were possible. Then a third ... she'd woken him in the middle of the night for yet another ... and still managed an intense quickie after the alarm went off.

All in all, it was still a total surprise to have Michelle show up at all, and then to wind up in bed with her with little warning. Or was the romantic aura of the evening before, the nice candlelight dinner a warning that he hadn't picked up on? Though this was a part of Michelle he'd never seen before, it really wasn't out of character for her. She had a reputation for liking her good times, and overdoing them, rather than just doing them. Her liking sex and being good at it was no surprise, when looked at from that viewpoint.

Over the past couple summers he'd heard stories, more from Scooter and Crystal than from Michelle, of some intense one-night stands at ski resorts or in the Bahamas when the three had gone sailing like they would in a couple months. However, she was thoroughly professional as a guide in the summer; she had never, as far as he knew, messed around with either crew or passengers while on trips. Her reputation didn't lead to that kind of wild, and she told him flat out the night before that this was the first sex she'd had since Hawaii the winter before. As far as that went, he played the game the same way, brushing off advances on occasion from customers; his last sex had been with Chica, almost two years before.

It seemed unlikely that her showing up like this really meant anything serious. It probably was pretty much like she'd said – she'd rather be spending time with a friend than alone, doing something rather than doing nothing. A couple different times she'd referred to him as a "fuck buddy" and that was probably exactly what was happening, not that he minded. It was a little surprising that she'd picked him; they were friends, yes, but not close personal friends, just crew members who had worked together and liked each other. It seemed likely that as soon as Myleigh's wedding was over with at the end of next month, she'd hop in her car and be gone; that would be the end of it.

That was probably just as well. Fun though she had proven to be in bed, and with a viewpoint and experiences that were a lot closer to his than any of the people he knew in Spearfish Lake, ever since Chica he hadn't really been looking for a relationship. That could change, probably would change in a few years, but he wanted to get in some adventure before he settled down. That is why he'd done the AT, become a raft guide, and why he was out behind this sled right now – if he stayed with it for a couple winters, there was a good chance that the offer would be made for him to take a junior varsity team on the Iditarod sometime. What a river tale that would make!

A relationship, a wife, could louse that up in a hurry, he knew well. He remembered Al telling him, "Spouses have cost me more good boatmen than booze ever could." Just last summer, an experienced rafter, an assistant trip leader, had left the company because his girlfriend just wouldn't put up with him being on trips eighteen days running, then off three days before the next trip for seven months out of the year. Jerry's leaving was indirectly responsible for him being an assistant trip leader himself toward the end of the season.

It wasn't always that way. Scooter had married another rafter, Jim; he'd replaced Duane on Team 3 toward the middle of the summer and become an assistant trip leader in the process. Preach had left a good job as a youth pastor at a large church in Tennessee to be on the river with Crystal; while yet to be named an assistant trip leader the last Duane had heard, Preach was clearly being groomed for it. The other set of trip leaders, Dave and Mary, had similarly been rafters before getting married, and made a third leadership team. While that didn't bode well for his own chances of being an assistant or a trip leader on a permanent basis any time soon, it didn't bother him a lot; he was perfectly happy to be a boatman and let it go at that.

For that matter, he knew Michelle herself had been tagged as an assistant for a season a couple years before. In terms of seniority she should have been a trip leader, but didn't want the job – and both she and Al agreed that her youthful appearance would make people not take her seriously as a trip leader anyway. She was perfectly happy to be a boatman and let someone else take the responsibility.

But that begged the question: did it mean anything as far as he and Michelle were concerned? Dave, Mary, Scooter, Jim, Crystal, and Preach had all confronted the question of having a relationship and being in the Canyon. All of them except Preach had been Canyon junkies for years before deciding to double up; Preach, an experienced rafter on other rivers, had come to the Canyon with Crystal as part of the deal so it added up to much the same thing. Duane had never thought too far down that road, but he could see Michelle as a possibility that lay down that way.

Being realistic, though, a possibility was about all that Michelle could be. She was such an intense, enigmatic person that he couldn't see how any kind of permanent relationship could be built with her. Perhaps that was just as well – like he'd thought earlier, too much of that could kill a man.

In the long run, he thought, what happened, happened, and at the moment there was no point in making plans beyond the end of the month. After that, she would probably say it's been fun, thank him for a good time, and head on out to other things, so it was probably best to not allow himself to get too hung up on the possibilities.

If he survived that long...

"Hey, dude," Justin said, altogether too loudly for this hour of the morning, "You wanna go do breakfast?"

Justin Blair had been Trey Hartwell's roommate for two and a half years, ever since Trey had come to Marienthal College right after getting out of the Army. In that time, they'd hung out together, eaten together, watched games on TV together and had been a lot of places together. For all of the time the two spent together Trey really didn't like Justin all that much, thought him immature, loud, and obnoxious, but kept his feelings to himself. If there was anything Trey had learned in the Army, it was that such discomforts didn't last, and Justin was easier to get along with than some of the people he'd known in the Army.