Mark talks quietly with Dana. Followed by John, they go off to investigate something ahead. All that I can see, from where we have landed, is the river funneling into a narrow channel between vertical walls of blue ice six to ten feet high. Fifty yards ahead the river swerves around a bend, going out of view within the icy walls. We have stopped at the last possible takeout point short of a full commitment to the ice canyon.

“What seems to be the trouble here?” I say, holding out my GI canteen cup. Ginger is pouring hot coffee from the Thermos jug. My hands shake with cold; I need both hands to hold my cup steady.

“Don’t know,” she says. “Mark said he doesn’t like the looks of the river here.”

“Looks like the same old Styx to me,” Mike says from deep within his parka hood. I’m glad to see that he too is feeling the cold. Los Angeles. He and I, the only southwesterners in the party, are equally thin blooded.

Mark, Dana, John come back. Mark looks somber, an unusual expression for his habitually cheerful face. “We’ll camp here, mates.”

“Here? On the ice?”

He points to the left bank, beyond the ice. “Over there.” We unload the boats and carry our gear and baggage to dry land, then come back for the boats. By then we’ve seen what the problem is. Not far beyond the bend the river goes under the ice, emerging a hundred feet beyond. If we had gone on in the boats we would have been trapped and drowned beneath the ice, or if flushed through, probably died of hypothermia before we found dry matches and sufficient wood to get a big fire going.

“I had this feeling,” Mark says.

Most of the party get out cameras for pictures of the ice tunnel. I pitch my tent and creep inside. Aspirins and river water and sleep for me. I am awakened frequently through the long hours that follow by the roar of huge chunks of ice calving from the frozen walls, crashing into the river.

Warm weather again. By breakfast time, which by now has slipped to ten or eleven in the morning, the ice tunnel is reduced to a narrow ice bridge. Then the bridge collapses, sending a small tidal wave upstream over the gravel bar on which we’ve erected the cook tent and camp headquarters. But no damage is done and the river is again clear.

JUNE 28—I totter down the hill from my tent and join the jolly bunch around the breakfast fire. Mutely, sadly, I hold out my tin cup; someone pours coffee into it. “How’s it going, partner?” our leader says.

“Great,” I mumble, “great.”

“You don’t look good,” he says. “In fact you look sick. Time for more horse capsules, mate.”

I swallow the jellied suppositories and watch Ginger and Mike squabbling politely over Mark’s last blueberry pancake. You take it, she says. Naw, you take it, Mike says. They remind me, in my fluish delirium, of my friend Kevin Briggs, another river rat, and of his parable of the last pork chop.