Читать книгу Canoeing with Jose онлайн

34 страница из 81

Growing up, Hawk was my idol. As a boy I shared a bedroom with my younger brother, Adam, but I preferred to sleep in Hawk’s room, on the floor beside her bed.

When I was 11 and Hawk was 13, she registered for a two-week session at a YMCA canoeing camp on West Bearskin Lake, along the Minnesota-Ontario border. I tagged along.

In subsequent years we camped with groups of kids our own age, but that first summer we went into the woods together. Sitting on a piney point on West Bearskin Lake, Hawk taught me how to smoke cigarettes and weed. She shared secrets that boys my age weren’t supposed to know, and showed me menstrual blood as it traveled down her leg following a midnight swim. Out on trail in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, she was always much tougher than me. She paddled harder and complained less about grueling portages, hunger, mosquitoes, and wet sleeping bags. I had always looked up to her, and the canoe she gave me had special meaning.

Greeny and I used handsaws to extricate the mangled boat from the leafy fist that had impaled it through the stern. When we yanked the offending branches from the hull, the gashes, two jagged wounds the size of apples, appeared to be terminal. Nearly certain that Hawk’s canoe would never float again, we gently loaded it onto my car.