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  67. 3:46 a.m.

I run to the table and spread out the map. I’d seen a road map a couple times before and this isn’t much different. But it isn’t roads. It’s rivers.

Opik and Lassie huddle around me.

There is a black dot with a circle around it, which I assume is the location of the cabin.

I stare at the map for a long minute.

“Oh my God.”

I pound the table with my fist, sending Lassie springing into Opik’s arms.

“We followed the wrong river!” I yell.

I thought we’d been on the Chena River the whole time.

We hadn’t.

I stare down at the map.

The Chena River is a small tributary that runs southwest down through Fairbanks then empties into the much larger Tanana River. The Tanana flows northwest for ninety miles before emptying into the Yukon River, which flows west all the way from Canada, through Alaska, then empties into the Bering Sea.

When I’d come to on the canoe, I’d been floating on the Yukon River. Lassie and I had hiked ten miles upstream, where we’d encountered Opik. Then the three of us had continued upstream, staying on the northern riverbank and either due to the darkness or at a point when the sandbar was gone, we were forced inland; we missed the “Y” in the river where the Yukon and the Tanana converged. Our fatal mistake was continuing northeast along the Yukon instead of southeast along the Tanana toward the Chena, Fairbanks, and salvation.

I think back to the yellow flag I saw stuck in the logs. It wasn’t from the Olympics. It couldn’t have been. It couldn’t have flowed upstream.

I find the scale in the bottom right corner of the map and measure it with my finger.

“A hundred and twenty miles,” I say, lying down on the table. “A hundred and twenty miles.”

:11

June 29th

Sunrise 3:20 a.m.

Yukon riverbank

I wake up on the kitchen table. Lassie and Opik are gone. The map is next to me.

I reach for the map and measure the distance a second time, hoping somehow I read the scaling wrong, that one inch equals two miles and not twenty. The scaling is right. By river, we are six inches from Fairbanks. A hundred and twenty miles.

As the crow flies, a direct shot from where we are positioned on the Yukon, southeast to Fairbanks, is four and a half inches, ninety miles. We would have to traverse through thick brush and up and over a series of small rolling mountains, between which the rivers were carved. Not to mention we could easily get lost on the way, adding days or even weeks to our journey.

We would have to follow the rivers.

Which meant:

1) Crossing from the north riverbank to the south riverbank of the Yukon.

2) Backtracking fifteen miles downstream to where the Tanana emptied into the Yukon.