“Hotter?” says Diana. “Yes.”
“How far are we?”
“I don’t know,” she says. “Fran’s been quiet for a while.”
Diana cups her hands around her mouth.
“Fran!” she says. “Where are we, girl?!”
Fran turns around, soot-colored sweat running down her forehead. She’s about to speak when, instead, she looks over your heads and up toward the sky behind you. Her eyes widen, and she inches noticeably backward in her seat. Diana turns around next, and when you hear her gasp, you have to look too.
And there it is, just visible over a stand of spruce: a fire higher than the trees.
It’s bright orange with tendrils reaching like spectral fingers toward the dark clouds above it. An enormous plume of ink-black smoke pours off the top of the fire, making the dusky sky even darker.
“Oh my god,” says Troy, nearly falling out of his canoe. “That has to be a hundred feet high.”
Will doesn’t make a sound. But he starts paddling faster. Within seconds, he’s passing your boat in the narrow channel and pulling even with Troy and Fran.
“Hey, what are you doing?!” asks Diana.
“Faster,” he says. “We need to move faster.”
Before the others can even adjust to what he’s doing, Will tosses his pack into their canoe, right behind Troy.
“Will,” says Troy, “you almost tipped the boat. What are you…”
“Hold on!” says Will.
He stands up in his boat then and leaps out of his canoe, holding his paddle above his head. It’s not pretty, and he landswaist-deep in the water. Then, while Troy and Fran scream unintelligibly, Will manages to pull himself into the boat without tipping them over. His old canoe floats listlessly away into the grass, knocking against a rock. Troy and Fran are in shock.
“What the hell, Will?” says Fran. “How about some warning next time!”
“Three paddles will move us quicker,” he says. “And we need to go quicker. So shut up and paddle.”
He immediately starts digging through the water with his oar, and when his shipmates join in, they are indeed moving faster.
“Go!” he yells. “Go! Go!”
“What about us?!” you say, as the three of them start to cut a slightly faster path through the creek.
“You two need to keep up!” he yells.
You tell yourself not to look back again, but you can’t help it. Before you start moving your aching shoulders, you turn around and watch as the spindly pines light up like birthday candles, the fire moving ever closer to the banks of the river. You close your eyes just for a second, then you breathe through your shirt and try to get in sync with Diana, putting your whole torso into the movement, the adrenaline powering you through.
Troy, Fran, and Will push ahead, but not by much. Your two canoes are within a couple of feet of each other as you move around a tight corner to the east. And in the distance to the north, you finally see something that looks like moving water. There hasn’t been much of that since those first rapids. But you swear you can see a current taking shape.
“The Loop!” yells Fran. “That might be the Loop!”
The roar from the fire is noticeably louder, and she has to scream to be heard. After she speaks, she can’t stop coughing. You give yourself a second to look, but you can’t see the Loop as clearly as she can. You can only see patches of the white water throwing off mist and spray.
“OH GOD,” says Troy, “NO. NO. NO.”
But he does not stop paddling.
No one does. You can’t tell if it’s your imagination, but the heat seems to be rising at your back. This time, you don’t look behind you. If the fire creeps up on you, you’re toast, and it doesn’t matter if you see it or not. The wind blows from what you think is the south, and suddenly, there’s little oxygen to be found. You all fall into a coughing fit as you move closer to the rapids.
“Get down low!” says Fran.
