Once More Down the River | Yankee Classic

Yankee Classic: November 1984

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THEY PRESSED CLOSE in the cab of the truck, canoes lashed on top, jostling over logging roads, stirring great clouds of dust beneath a high summer sun. “I was just thinking,” said the old guide. “I first came down this river with my father. I was seven years old. That was 71 years ago.” He smiled and a gold tooth flashed. His name was Mick Fahey. He stood a shade under six feet (“and shrinking,” he’d say) with pale green eyes and high cheekbones rouged by sun. He wore a plaid wool shirt, jeans, and a buckskin vest. A sheathed knife looped around his belt. He peered out the window through his spectacles, searching out landmarks though years had passed since last he’d seen this stretch of Maine woods. Beside him sat a young woman of about 30, Alexandra Conover, fresh-faced and pretty with auburn hair spilling to her shoulders; and her husband, Garrett, lean and bearded with restless eyes that scanned for moose as he drove. Like young apprentice painters with a Renaissance master, they had studied the ways of the North Woods with the old guide. They called him “our university.”

He motioned to a dark thicket, seemingly indistinguishable from the forest around it. “Now slow down a minute, Garry. In there you’ll find a spring, cold and pure. Doubt many people alive know it’s there.” The truck stopped. The old guide plunged into the woods, Garrett and Alexandra in tow, his tousled white hair sticking out from under a red bandanna like the crest of an exotic eagle. They could hear his muttered oaths as the spring eluded him. He stood a while in the woods; now and then he spat a stream of tobacco juice onto the ground. In time he climbed back into the truck. “It’s in there,” he insisted, “I know it is.” He shook his head.

“Once I could go anywhere in the woods, across the ridges, the divides, down in the valleys, and hell, ten years after that I could go there again, no problem. Now … “ He rubbed a hand over his face. “I know the waters,” he said. “Put me in a canoe. I’d know my way.”

They turned left at a fork; suddenly Moosehead Lake shimmered in the distance, and beyond rose the black knob of Kineo. The old guide smiled. He had his bearings. They were on the two-mile-long carry trail that connected Moosehead Lake to the West Branch of the Penobscot, the river that flowed through the heart of the North Woods, gateway to the Allagash and the St. John.

“I thought you might like to see this again, Mick,” Garrett said.

“Northeast Carry,” said Mick the way someone might say “Paris” or “Rome.” “Indians have traveled this since time out of mind. Right here.” He said, “this is the history of Maine from the beginning.”

They stopped the truck in a clearing facing the lake. Mick Fahey swung his right leg around, then his left, grabbed hold the door, and climbed out. He walked slowly to the water’s edge, bent down and splashed a handful of Moosehead Lake on his face. He cupped his hands and drank.

“Well, I’m glad to see this again,” he said. “There was a boy, say 16 or 19, he used to come up the West Branch. There was quick-water in it then before the dams flowed it out, and he’d pick up his 20-foot canoe and bring it across the carry.” He motioned behind him where a tall frame building stood decaying among the alders. “He used to stay right here in this old hotel, Mrs. Snow’s place. He used to guide out of here. Affluent sportsmen would come from across the country and ask for him. And he used to fish out of here when there were fish in here—togue, 15, 20 pounds. He’d race his canoe against the other guides. Not too many beat him. And he had balance. Supple as a young willow. He felt he could go anywhere he wanted. Take off into the woods with just an axe and a crooked knife, and he could build a shelter, a canoe, carve a paddle, and find meat. I’m not like that young man anymore. Sometimes,” he said, “sometimes I can’t even remember who he was …”

The river trip had been Alexandra’s idea. Every time she saw him he seemed a little weaker, a little thinner.

“We’ll take it easy,” she had urged. “Down the West Branch a few days, stop off at Chesuncook, see some moose.”

He wasn’t at all sure. He told her, “I haven’t been right since maple syrup time. I have no power. No power at all. I won’t be much use on a river.”

“Mick,” she replied, “you’ll be our sport. It’s our turn now. That’s why you trained us.”

They drove back across the carry and parked, the wheels of the truck sinking into the sand just above the West Branch. The river was high and quick, raised by torrential early summer rains. Garrett carried the canoes, 90 pounds apiece, easing them into the water. They were E.M. White’s, 20 feet long, handcrafted, elegant canoes made of wood and canvas. “The best traveling canoe a guide ever had,” Mick said admiringly.

Garrett placed setting poles along the sides of the canoes, and between the thwarts he placed ash baskets, a wooden chest filled with eggs and cheese and meat and vegetables, and a wooden cask filled with flour. He made room for a case filled with cameras, another full of videotaping equipment, and joked, “We’re out to impress you with how light we travel, Mick.” Alexandra took long, shiny paddles out of canvas sheaths. She handed one to Mick.

“I give you fair warning,” he said. “I won’t be much help paddling.” Indian fashion, he knelt in the bow of Garrett’s canoe then pushed off, leaning into the all-but-forgotten North Woods stroke. “The old familiar movement,” he said.

A woman standing on a logging road bridge watched them approach. “Bull moose down below,” she called out. Paddles halted; the canoes drifted downriver towards the moose. It was feeding, its head submerged; only its back, like a rounded hill, poked out from the water. Bubbles rose and then the head. The moose shook, spraying water, eyed the canoeists, then ambled casually off into the woods.

“I like seeing moose,” Mick said, “but you know me well enough to know I don’t exaggerate. In my time we would have seen 100 deer by now, and we could have shot a young spikehorn buck and done no harm.” Throwing his arms to the woods that had been cut repeatedly by the paper companies, he said, “They’ve made a sick forest. An empty forest. And the deer have gone. Well, mister moose likes it fine.” He tired then, leaning back against the thwart, his paddle across his lap.

***

ALEXANDRA AND MICK FAHEY met one fall day in 1976 when she came to his house, a two-man, raker-toothed crosscut saw in her hands. Its teeth were broken and decayed with rust. It may have lain in the woods a half-century or more. “I want to get it back the way it would have been used,” she said. “Will you help?” She was a student at College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor, and had heard that an old Maine guide lived nearby. She had grown up in Stow, Massachusetts, the daughter of an archeologist, devouring Ernest Thompson Seton’s nature books. “When I first stepped into Mick’s house,” she said later, “I saw split ash baskets, hides, and crooked knives. In the shed he had birchbark canoes and Indian toboggans. I remember thinking, ‘This man knows everything I ever dreamed of knowing.’ It was like I’d just met Ernest Thompson Seton.”

Tooth by tooth, over many days, they brought the saw to life. A friendship was formed. “And more,” Alexandra would say, “an alliance.” Mick’s two sons had moved to the Sunbelt. (“Big strong men of the woods,” he’d say, “who chose lives behind a desk.”) His daughter had died three years before. He had just retired from the last of his varied careers, and was preparing to move with his wife Eunice to remote Chesuncook Village, where there were no phones, no electricity, and except for some overgrown tote paths, no roads. “I wanted to learn,” Alexandra explained, “and Mick had someone to teach.”

He taught her to use a crooked knife; with it she whittled an axe handle and with the axe hewed out a paddle. He showed her where brown ash grew in swamps, how to pound and split it along the fibers, how to weave the strips into baskets strong enough to last a lifetime. If she sometimes chafed under his strict guidance, he’d say, “Learn to do it right first, improvise later. It’s been done this way for centuries.” He taught her to work deerskin with a paste of grease and boiled deer brains. When the skin was soft, she sewed it into a vest and gave it to Mick. She made him beaver skin moccasins. From a road-killed woodchuck she made him a pouch for his crooked knife. In turn, he gave her a pack basket, and sold her, for a penny, the axe with which he had taught her axe work. Nobody around college saw her very much. Then it was spring, and the curriculum moved to the rivers.

“Forget everything you know about paddling,” he told her, then taught her the lost art of the North Woods stroke, a technique that used a body roll instead of arm strength. It was how the old guides and freight canoemen had paddled for days without tiring. When she began to master the stroke, he said, “Fine. But a canoeman who cannot use a setting pole is only half a canoeman.”

Taking her to calm, shallow water, he had her walk up and down the canoe for balance (“Now, Alexandra,” he’d say, “you may never have the balance of a riverman born to the river, but strive for it, strive for it”), then to the rips where, poling, he had her feel the current through her feet, and then to windswept lakes where he taught her to take waves at an angle, letting the swells roll harmlessly beneath. He told her the old guides had seen too much whitewater in their work to seek it out for fun, that they looked for the safest way through the rapids, not the most exciting. He wanted her waterwise, he said, and waterwise meant not just how to do something but “when to stay put,” he said.

When Alexandra graduated from college, Mick asked her to come to Chesuncook to help him and Eunice restore an old neglected waterfront house. “You’ll be living and working in the woods,” he told her. “Can’t help but learn from that.” It took weeks to transport Mick’s “living museum” and its 800 books on the North Woods from Washington County to Chesuncook, hauling it in station-wagon loads to a dock on the West Branch, from there upriver in his pride and joy, Voyageur, his handbuilt wood and canvas freight canoe, built from boyhood memories of seeing the deep, wide, freight canoes hauling supplies to the loggers.

In time Garrett Conover, Alexandra’s friend from college, arrived in Chesuncook, having slogged through mud for miles on an abandoned tote road. Mick sized him up as a man of ability. “How long can you stay?” he inquired. “As long as you have work,” Garrett replied. “Fine,” Mick said, “then we’ll reserve you a place in the cemetery.”

They worked together shoring up buildings, puttying windows, hanging doors. Mick confided to his wife, “That young man … if I show him something, the next time around he beats me.” In no time Garrett was paddling the North Woods stroke, poling with precision, carving with a crooked knife. He had arrived in love with another woman, but twilight in Chesuncook changed all that. When Alexandra and Garrett told Mick they planned to marry, he smiled, “I always knew this would occur.”

They married in 1980, the same summer Mick was rushed from Chesuncook stretched out in a boat. They brought him wedding cake in the hospital. For a wedding gift family and friends bought them an E.M. White 20-foot wood and canvas canoe. With savings they bought more canoes and guiding equipment, passed tests given by the state, and became professional Maine guides. Mick cautioned, “When you think you’re pretty good is when something goes wrong.” He gave them a paddle from his early days when he would explore watersheds, one after another, from Maine to the north shore of the St. Lawrence. “It was great country to play in,” he told them. “I had fun with this paddle. Oh, didn’t I have fun!”

***

PULLING INTO A SMALL ISLAND, Mick stepped out wincing. His knees had locked up. He rested his paddle against the mud-slicked, steep riverbank. “This is the first time in my life I’ve sat in the bow of a canoe and been paddled and stopped paddling because I was tired, or thought I was, or lazy or whatever …”

“We’re not going to let you forget it, either,” Garrett said. “We’re going to go around telling people.”

Mick looked at the pack baskets, 50 pounds apiece. “Now I haven’t done this to you fellas much,” he said, “but you go ahead and suffer. Okay, legs,” he muttered, “get me up here. One more time at least.”

Garrett went off to set up the tents and to chop firewood; Mick explored the small island. “In my time,” he said, “there was lots more birch here.” He leaned against a stump, sipping a glass of whiskey, content to watch Alexandra mixing biscuits.

“Thoreau camped here,” he said. “We called this Thoreau Island in my day.” He thought for a moment, sipping. “I’m baffled how Thoreau rose to such prominence regarding the Maine woods. He raced through here like it was a marathon. He never visited any of the people here, never talked with them. He was not a woodsman. He knew nothing of this forest and these people. Nothing.” He sipped again. “And,” he added, “he was not a man well liked by his guides. He caused them a great deal of trouble.”

Blackflies and mosquitoes swarmed around Mick’s head; he seemed not to notice. “I’ve seen young horses—and young men—go mad from flies,” he said. “Flies is when you slap your hand and come away black. No flies here, ’cept maybe one or two.” He was facing a bend in the river, and the sun reflected off the water.

“I enjoy this,” he said. “It scares me, though. When you get tired going down the West Branch …”

Alexandra glanced up. “Weren’t you supposed to have a check-up?”

“I don’t know if this is the time or the place,” Mick said, “but you asked so I’ll tell you. I have this summer. They told me to have fun. And I am.”

“Maybe my cooking will finish you off,” she said lightly.

“I’ve thought of that,” he said.

“Well, Mick,” she said, “you sure look great.”

“Hell, I don’t weigh anything. I just can’t put it in like I used to.”

Garrett came back, his arms full of firewood. “That’s why we’re bow light,” he said.

Mick reached over for the whiskey and poured himself another drink. “The first was medicinal,” he said. “This one’s social.” He looked at the camp, satisfied. Utensils were hung from a crosspiece lashed to poles, up and away from dirt; the fire burned low and hot with barely a trace of smoke. A neat, efficient camp.

“What’s that fella’s name?” he asked. “Marshall Dodge? He wanted to film a Maine guide camp the way it would have looked 50 years ago, so he came to Chesuncook, got me to dig out my equipment, and we hauled it over to Cunningham Brook. I had it just right, hot little fire, tight tarps, taut tents. I sat down pleased with myself. Then I looked up. That damned critter was loosening the tarps, pulling out stakes so the tents sagged. He threw green wood on the fire. Said he wanted smoke. He didn’t believe the old guides would have had it so neat. Then he wanted me to flip flapjacks!”

There was steak and potatoes and biscuits, strawberries with cream and sugar for dessert. Mick ate sparingly of the meat and potatoes, took seconds of dessert. He took out his crooked knife, grabbed a dead pine branch, wrapped his hand around the curved handle and bent thumb rest that gave the knife its name, and whittled away. The knife, which was over a hundred years old, had been his for 60 years, given to him by a Chesuncook woodsman. The blade then was worn, and Mick had fashioned a new one from his grandfather’s straight razor. “You can’t believe how many paddles and axe handles I’ve made with this thing,” he said.

He admired the handle. “I think this is white ash,” he said. “I’ve been undecided all the years I’ve had it. I think it’s white ash, but I can’t guarantee it at all.” He held his hand firmly against the wood, elbow against his belly, carving towards himself. “Now you don’t want to slip,” he said. “Open you right up.” He chuckled. “What would the Boy Scouts say, carving towards you? Course,” he added, “they say never stand up in a canoe.” The shavings piled up at his feet, curled like parchment. In a few minutes the wood was smooth as glass, shining in the firelight.

***

HE WAS BORN IN CARMEL, west of Bangor, and baptized Francis, but only his mother called him that. He was Mickey to the men who worked with his father, boss of the river drive at Old Town where Mick learned to roll a log, to handle a pitch pole, a peavey, an axe, a canoe.

The Indians of Old Town, the Penobscots, were drivers for his father. During the spring drives they adopted the boss’s son. “They were very kind to children,” Mick said. “They’d take me deep into the forest, show me how to trap muskrat, mink, beaver, otter.” He learned to weave sweet grass baskets, to pound ash, to lash bark canoes with spruce roots. By age 12 he was a man of the woods, having traded his pelts for a shotgun. What his father and the Indians had not taught him, he learned to near perfection in Chesuncook.

“Chesuncook then was the heart of it all,” Mick explained. “The logging, the guiding, the trapping, it all radiated out from there. My father would take me there and we’d stay with Tommy Smart, one of-the best woodsmen who ever went this river. His wife was dead, his children grown and gone. He asked to keep me there summers and my father agreed.

“Tommy Smart was a big, rough man with a gentle heart. Gruff, quick to anger with other men, known as a fighting man on the river. But that time had mostly passed from his life. If I did some damn fool thing, if I pushed the canoe the wrong way so it grounded, it wasn’t unusual for his pole to be nicking me in the ribs. But he didn’t mean anything by it. You get a pole poked in your ribs a few times, you think hard about where you’re going.

“When he went guiding, I stayed with his brother-in-law, Lonnie Barnes. His two children had died and were up there in the cemetery. The things Lonnie could make with a crooked knife were phenomenal. I’d lay in bed at night thinking, ‘How am I ever going to learn it all? How am I going to catch up…?’”

At 17 Mick joined Tommy Smart guiding sports to Fort Kent, two weeks away, earning six dollars a day, three times what a woods laborer earned in 1923.

He guided engineers for the Geodetic Survey, seven men and horses who put into the woods in May, not emerging until Thanksgiving night in Quebec. “I was hired to get them through,” Mick said with satisfaction. “I did.” Winters he trapped or scouted for timber for paper companies, going north on snowshoes to Canada. He married, had children; when the Depression hit, his family lost its holdings in Carmel. “Stomach trouble drove me from the woods,” he said, “primarily keeping it filled.”

He moved to the coast, in time becoming superintendent of the famed Hinckley Yacht Yard on Mount Desert Island. In 1945 he joined the Red Cross overseas. Among his duties was teaching survival training to the Army. He came home to Maine one spring, having been gone over a decade. He took his canoe and guiding gear from storage and headed out to a private place on the river, deep in the wilderness.

“I camped the first night. The next day I had a long carry. I kept seeing signs of people. I thought, ‘That’s funny. I didn’t see anybody paddling up here.’ I paddled up to the main lake in the chain. In the distance I could see something glinting in the sun. I went around a bend and there was a boat with an outboard motor coming at me. I wondered how that got up there. I went alongside and asked what the glinting was off in the distance. The guy in the boat looked at me kind of funny. ‘Why it’s automobile windshields,’ he said. There were roads in there. I had no need to come upstream, to carry across or anything. Just had to drive a little ways. I said, ‘Mick, old fella, times have changed.’”

***

MORNING BROKE CLEAR and blue with just a ripple of wind. A row of dead spruces leaned from the riverbank, their tops touching the water as if drinking. Behind them appeared openings in the timber and through the openings they could see, as they paddled downriver, signs of a clear-cut where nothing stood at all, only scabs of stumps and broken limbs.

“My father was a lucky man,” Mick said. “He knew tall spruce and he knew the fir before it got red heart, and the birch before its shade was stripped away and it died. Do you think the paper company executives in their offices know these woods? Do you think they could go a hundred yards and not get lost?”

They went down Moosehorn Stream; a dark, twisting tributary shouldered tightly by trees and bushes, so narrow sometimes: they had to duck beneath branches protruding from the bank. “I used to call moose here,” Mick said. There was no need to call the moose this day; by 10 a.m. they had sighted five, while around a bend the sixth waited, a big cow moose grazing with a cloud of flies overhead. Mick reached out, close enough to brush the moose with his paddle if he wished; she paid him little mind, as if he were merely a merganser gliding by. “Did you ever see one closer?” Mick said. They paddled slowly, coming back up the stream to join the West Branch, hugging the shore. The moose count rose—seven, eight, nine.

At noon they pulled in to the riverbank and ate lunch in the shade, stroked by the wind and the sun slanting through the trees. “This was Smith’s Halfway House,” Mick said, “halfway between Chesuncook and the carry. Teamsters stopped here. There were guides’ cabins and a big barn right where those trees are.” He waved his arms. “All this was cleared.” He headed off up a knoll, leaning on his paddle, all but vanishing in the high grass. Here and there his bandanna burst through like a darting cardinal; before he was lost from view. Not until he had climbed the highest point could he finally glimpse the river. “The woods take back their own,” he said quietly. He squinted at Garrett. “Well, young man, if you have the strength, there’s a good current and a strong tailwind. I think I’ll just go for a ride.”

The afternoon flowed by slowly and steadily with rain clouds pressing in. Mick sat back; hugging his knees, glancing about like a tourist in Venice. He scooped his paddle from the river, angled the blade and drank. Alexandra tried to follow, but the water spilled down her shirt. Mick laughed, “You’ll learn,” and took another deep drink from the blade. They paddled down Pine Stream, the current still, the water black, the shore dense with foliage. “We called this by its Indian name when I was a boy,” Mick said. “Mazatoctook. Dark water.” He spoke of hunters and trappers he had known in these woods, and though he was now a conservationist, he remembered another time.

“I was trapping bobcats, but they were scarce. It was Christmas and I needed money, so I took some deer and sold them in Chesuncook. The warden brought me in. I said, ‘Bill, there’s nothing I’ve done in the woods but that you’ve done worse.’ He was soon gone, booted out for taking bribes from poachers. We never spoke again. Sometimes I’ve thought of looking him up. Burying the hatchet.”

It rained that night, wind-driven and cold, and into the morning. Beneath a tarp and wrapped in wool and rain gear, they had coffee and pancakes smothered in syrup that Mick spooned up like soup. By the time they broke camp, the rain had stopped and a glimmer of blue sky appeared. Their two nights out had given Mick his woodsman’s face, crusty and grizzled. Just up the river and a few miles down Chesuncook Lake lay Chesuncook Village, unorganized Township 5, Range 13, a scattering of houses chiseled out of the woods—the home he had not seen for nine months. The tip of the peninsula was visible a mile away. Mick adjusted his bandanna, smoothed his vest, and paddled, talking as the village neared.

“The rivers all came into the village. They’re all flowed out now, but I remember them all—Umbazooksus, the Cusabesex, Red Brook. When I first saw it there must have been 100 people here. But when the guiding was lost, the young men left. It became a ghost town.”

The sun was shining and a wind riled the lake. When they docked, nobody was about. “Let’s see if I can find someone to give us a hand,” Mick said. He strode off without his paddle, up a path, a quarter mile from the cluster of cabins that made up the village. Alexandra and Garrett emptied the canoes and walked across a clearing where, just back from the water, a great patch of scarred earth, covered with bushes, was all that remained of Mick Fahey’s house, a house built long ago by Lonnie Barnes.

The fire broke out one day in May 1982. Mick and Eunice were in Washington County, getting ready to finalize the move to Chesuncook. The house was fully restored, rooms filled with the artifacts of his North Woods passion. He had a blacksmith shop, a woodworking shop, and in a shed beside the house he had stored six canoes, including his Voyageur. The fire started next door where fishermen were staying and spread quickly to Mick’s house where propane tanks exploded.

Garrett and Alexandra had rushed to see Mick. “The only thing old I have left is myself,” he told them. Alexandra made him a paddle, modeling it after the paddle of his youth, but soon after that Mick had fallen sick. Only once or twice had the paddle seen water. Then Mick sold the land where the house once stood, and with it his cabins by a spring back in the woods a spring that was once Tommy Smart’s’. The buyer was a friend. Mick and Eunice could keep the cabins as long as they lived. “I wish you fellows could have bought this,” Mick told Garrett and Alexandra. “I always hoped you would.”

They stayed the night there in Chesuncook, then a second and a third, bounded by water and woods, touring tote roads in Mick’s 1927 Model A truck, sputtering along at 10 mph with mud flying like angry wasps. They tracked a bear, fished a little, rested a lot, Mick puttering around the cabin, noting a multitude of things that needed doing. At night Alexandra baked chocolate cakes and rhubarb pies and sang old woodsmen’s songs accompanied by an autoharp as Mick dozed on his couch, his feet keeping time to the music.

The last morning, bright with sunshine, they walked to Chesuncook cemetery, up a path deep into the woods to a clearing closed in by trees. The grass was tall and wet with dew; the stones, perhaps 70, were pocked with lichens.

“Here’s Alfie Miller,” Mick said as he walked along the rows, “drowned at Pine Stream Falls trying to pole up through in the spring of the year … Thurlotte, here, put the first team on Mud Pond Carry. He went blind and his wife left him, but his son stayed to lead him and his horses over the carry . . . Chick Smart, a marvel around a campfire. Never forget his planked squaretail …”

He stopped by a stone that was cracked down the middle. “Johnny Smart,” he said, “Tommy’s brother. Sober he was a good man. But when he hit town and drink …” He shook his head. “He was fighting king of the Upper Penobscot. He was at Kineo House one day, and he’d been drinking. He looked at Paul Peters, who’d come in from hunting, his rifle on the bar, and said, ‘Paul, I’m going to lick you.’ Paul said, ‘I’m not going to fight you Johnny, there’s no reason to.’ Paul knew Johnny broke some people up pretty bad. He didn’t intend that to happen. He said, ‘Johnny, if you come for me, I’ll shoot.’

“‘Start shooting,’ said Johnny, ‘because I’m coming.’ So he did, shot him twice in the chest.” Mick fell quiet.

He knelt by another grave. Grass covered the stone and he pulled it away, hurling clumps beside him until at last, standing, he could read the dates, 1880-1937, and the name, Thomas Smart. For a moment he reminisced. “I was small and light in the bow of Tommy’s canoe.”

They headed back then to load up the canoes, and when they were ready, Mick paddled hard, not looking back. His blade feathered the water with power, but gently, so scarcely a ripple appeared. The canoe moved swiftly, as if borne by spirits.

“There’s some unholy rough water across the narrows at the bottom of the lake,” Mick called as they approached the end of the journey. They took the waves quartering, rocked gently by swells, not a drop entering the canoes. In late afternoon they docked. By prearrangement their cars were waiting.

“You know,” Mick said, “I’ve been thinking I should fix up those bark canoes of mine. (They were in Washington County at the time of the fire.) It’s time you two learned bark work and spruce root work.” He walked to his car, turned and came back to them.

“The old days can’t come back,” he said, “and you’re not ever going to make a lot of money from this. But I’ve seen lots of guides and lots of camps. If the men of my day had seen you come down the river, had seen your camps, well … you’ve become damned good river men.”

He turned and drove off then. Garrett and Alexandra lingered, storing gear in their truck. He had never before praised them that way. “It blew me away,” Alexandra said later. Finally they, too, headed home. Down the road Mick was waiting, staring into the woods.

“I know that spring is in here,” he said. “It’s just grown up, that’s all. It used to be kept clear.” He disappeared into the woods, Alexandra and Garrett close behind. He found it; he knew he would. The spring bubbled up through a mat of leaves, covered with moss, and their feet sank into the water. He bent down and drank, letting it splash down his face. He ran his hand through his hair. “That’s good water,” he said. “I knew it was here.”

The young guides bent down, drinking deeply. All the while they were noting the trees, the lay of the land; next time they would be able to find it, too.