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“Hey,” yelled the older boy from shore, “where are you going?”

José turned back to him and smiled. “Hudson Bay, my nigga!”

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In Canoeing with the Cree, Eric Sevareid sums up the 160 river miles between Fargo and Grand Forks, North Dakota, in one blasé paragraph: “The journey down the Red River from Fargo had been almost uneventful, a long, monotonous process of steady paddling, with no current to aid us, around unending bends, under a hot sun, beside muddy banks.”

Some things don’t change. We had agreed to a daily goal of 40 river miles, but 15 miles out of Fargo, José was hungry and refusing to paddle unless he had a hot meal.

It was impossible to cook lunch, I explained. There were no dry landings, the stove was buried somewhere in the depths of our packs, and we would have to use precious drinking water. We also had plenty of food that required no preparation: trail mix, jerky, dried fruit, chocolate, cheese, and crackers.

“It ain’t real food unless it’s cooked,” he replied. “I can’t live on birdseed.”