He had stepped into an otter run, a hole through the net of roots down into the river muck below, and his leg was buried to the knee. He tried to lift his leg but couldn’t get it past the teeth of roots clamped over his toe. He sat all the way up and pulled at it but still it wouldn’t move.

He looked around for a stick to pry his leg out of the hole, and through the brush he saw a light moving downriver and heard the thunk of a paddle on an aluminum gunwale. He stood using his good leg and lifted his bad one, sliding it painfully from the wet boot without its sock as he fell on his hands and knees.

He could hear voices now from the canoe and a light frayed through the brush. Simon started to crawl, tunneling through the undergrowth, dragging his leg behind. Ten feet ahead he saw a spruce with its branches grown down into a skirt, the hem buried in the weeds. He pushed the branches aside with his head and crawled into the living cave it formed. The voices drew nearer to shore and Simon held himself tighter, knees to chest, one hand on his right ankle. Soon the voices drifted away and the paddles sploshed back in the water. Downstream the beleaguered teal piped and rose again into flight, their wing tips pocking the surface of the river until they gained a low shelf of wind and climbed higher. Simon lay in the den of leaves and fell asleep whimpering the way grown men do when they cry in their sleep.

When Simon woke up he found that he couldn’t move his leg. He was stiff with cold and his neck ached from resting it on the angle of his bent arm. His hands were a lattice of cuts and scrapes, red-edged and coated with grit and sap. He sat up and peeled back his pant leg to look at his ankle. It was blown up into huge blue lumps along the outside and swollen so big that his foot looked as if it had been tamped on to the end of his leg, twisted and left to harden there. Simon felt along the length of his ankle on both sides and the stiffness gave way to a warm pain that spread out from his fingers as if he had an anti-healing touch. It was still dark, not quite day. It was raining, a cold steady drizzle that squatted over the naked brush and downed timber, a steady hum with no foliage to check its fall, no leaves to break it into smaller sounds. It was steady and without remorse.