The Coldwater Claim

The boat is a smudge and then it is nothing, and the sound of it goes on a while after that, which is worse. You have: forty pounds of flour, a rifle and sixty rounds, an axe with a loose head, a tent that will not do past October, and a cabin that somebody else built well and left in a hurry. Upstream, above the tree line on the far bank, a thin grey line of smoke is going straight up in the still air.