THE NEXT morning I began to work carefully on my calendar. It became the most precious of my few personal possessions. It was a thick sheet of birch bark which I carried packed inside the large pot. I wrote on it with a stick of charred wood I had taken from one of our camp fires. It was only one day since we had buried my father in a shallow grave and fled downstream like two thieves pursued by Justice. Why we did not capsize a second time and die in those cold, rushing waters that awful afternoon is beyond me to answer. Tim tried to keep the canoe under control, but he didn’t have the skill or the attention that day to do more than provide enough steerageway to keep us from whirling around like a runaway log. We slid wildly from one shore to the other, with me fending off threatening rocks and logs with a long pole. It was as if we were in guilty flight, as if we were somehow responsible for what had happened in that lonely clearing in the woods. We had to put it behind us, for neither of us had the courage to spend another night there.

But daylight soon deserted us, and we were forced to come ashore some three or four miles downstream. Tim pulled the canoe up on a sandy beach and began unloading it as I stacked stones for a camp fire. My hands were trembling, and it took me three precious matches to get the blaze going. By then it was almost dark. Tim and I huddled next to the fire, wrapped in the blankets, shivering more from fear than from cold, no browse bed made and no stories to tell in the darkness. I don’t believe either of us slept, nor did we talk. Each crept into the little shell we save for such hours of despair and loneliness and stayed the night there, alone and forlorn.

When morning came, the canoe was gone; it had drifted away during the night. There must have been rain far upstream somewhere, causing the creek to rise slightly, just enough to slip the unsecured canoe off the beach and take it downstream without a sound. We searched for it half the day and finally gave up.

Angered, I shouted at Tim: “You should have been more careful!”

He hung his head. “I know.”

But I was foolish and did not let up. “How could you have been so dumb? It’s your fault.”

“Not everything is my fault!” he flared. “Whose idea was it to come down this terrible Cold River? Dad was willing to go back. If you had let him, he might be alive now.”

I sat down, sick to my stomach.

He saw the anguish on my face and softened. He touched my shoulder. “I’m sorry, Lizzy,” he said. “I didn’t mean that.”

“You are right. My willfulness killed my father.”