Every muscle, every tendon, every fiber in my body aches.

What I can’t understand is how I am alive. How did I not succumb to hypothermia? I suppose the only explanation is the intense heat wave. Was this enough to thaw me out after spending nearly six minutes in forty-five degree water?

I roll over on my side, then push myself up into a sitting position. The sky is the purplish-yellow of a vanishing bruise.

The canoe floats silently on a glass of water. The river is wide, twice as wide as I remember. The water is guarded by sandbars, then thick grass and rolling forested hills.

I look down at the canoe.

It is fifteen feet long, two and a half feet deep, three feet wide. There are two spots to sit, though you could fit three people if you tried.

“Lassie?”

I push myself up and sit on one of two wooden dividers which act as footrests.

“Lassie?”

I crawl up and down the boat.

He’s gone.

My stomach tightens, then begins to spasm. It takes everything I have to hold down whatever food is left in my stomach.

What did I expect? For him to be sitting on my chest when I woke up? He weighed five pounds. There is no doubt in my mind he froze to death. That we hit some rapids and he was thrown from the boat.

I want to tell myself he was just a cat.

I take a long, deep breath.

My eyes begin to water.

“Dammit.”

Maybe he made it. Maybe the canoe came close to shore and he jumped out.

I want to believe that, but if Lassie’s body were in the same condition as mine, then he wouldn’t have been able to move. Then again, it had been twenty-three hours. The hot sun could have thawed him, then he made a leap for it.

In my heart, I know.

As hard as Lassie’s death hurts, the thought of Ingrid buried somewhere in the rubble of the cabin with our unborn child in her belly hurts more.

I need to get back to them.

I need to find her.

Save her.

I do some quick math. If it took four hours to float twelve miles on the Chena, then we went about three miles per hour. After the quake, the river flowed twice as fast, perhaps three times as fast, but at some point downstream it would have found its equilibrium and slowed back down. Who knows how many miles, or how many hours that took? Here and now, it moves at a crawl, two miles per hour, maybe less. I decide to use four miles per hour as an average. The canoe could have gotten stuck at some point, possibly for hours at a time, but I have to assume the worst, I have to assume I floated for twenty-three hours straight. At four miles per hour, that was almost a hundred miles.