She put on her shoes and began walking the river line. The wind clicked the river bramble and skimmed over the water. She stood dazed for a moment, watching the flashing water rippling. She heard the snap of old branches, the slight slough of field grass, someone walking. She hunched behind a gray log. She put her head down and pulled her hair to one side. Louise knew they wouldn’t be coming for her for some time. Arliss and Mrs. Finger were too occupied with their own tough luck to think of her now. She took a long breath and let it out slowly.

Her grandmother had told her there were places along the river where water waited to be heard. River stories. They ice-fished the Flathead after her grandmother had made certain the ice was solid. She remembered the water gurgling in the steaming ice hole. And just before dusk a sound would wobble across the skim of ice, always a hard clattering like the river giving way, then a wire-pitched zinging close to her ears, a woman wailing. Her grandmother would smile then and tell them it was time to go. Louise would pitch the slick string of fish over her shoulder. Walking home Grandma would tell them it was the sound of Mali, the woman who fell into the river when Grandma was a girl herself. “Greedy,” Grandma would say, “trying to pick berries over the river’s edge.”

She always thought her grandmother had told her those stories to scare her from water. Last spring when the water was high and silt-brown, she had slipped beneath the swirling water to escape Charlie Kicking Woman and water had shut over her like a door to a dark room closing. Water tightened around her throat and pulled her downward and then up. She felt the arms of water, the sting of river sticks and stray branches. She fought the current but after a while she let the current carry her. She was lifted to the surface downstream. She had heard Charlie calling her but he had seemed far away. Sometimes before sleep she would remember the burning cold of the river. Thoughts of an old woman with sticklike fingers leaning over her. Now she sat still, listening. She had never expected the things her grandmother had told her would prove true.

She had the uneasy feeling that someone was watching her. She looked around carefully. She could feel her breath heavy in her throat so she closed her mouth. She waited. She waited a long time and when she was sure she had just scared herself she stood up.