Page 3 of Mountain Man's River Rush
She’d followed every instruction I’d given her yesterday to the letter. That shouldn’t have mattered as much as it did.
“Morning,” she said.
“You’re early.”
“Fifteen minutes is on time.”
I nodded toward the flat stretch below the dock. “Skills check first. I need to see you handle the paddle, read the water, and respond to commands before I take you anywhere near the gorge.”
“I know. You mentioned that yesterday.”
“I’m mentioning it again.”
I handed her a paddle and a PFD. She cinched the life jacket without being told how—each strap snug, buckle checked by feel. I watched her hands. Fast, competent, familiar with the gear.
She caught me watching. “You going to grade me on how I put on a life jacket?”
“Already did. You passed.”
We got in the raft, and I ran her through the strokes. Every one was textbook—rotation from the torso, recovery clean. I shoved her shoulder to test her high brace—not gently—and she caught it without flinching. Came back upright and looked at me like she was waiting for me to try harder.
My heart started pounding for reasons that had nothing to do with activity. I was going to pretend that hadn’t happened.
“Fine,” I said. “You can paddle.”
“I told you that yesterday.”
“Yesterday was talking. Today is the water.” I pushed us off and worked the oars toward the gorge entrance. “On the Tempest Run, I call every move. You hear me say right, you give me everything you’ve got on the right. I say get down, you drop into the raft and hold on. No improvising. No freelancing.”
“And if I see something you don’t?”
Nobody had ever asked me that. Every customer I’d ever guided through this gorge had been content to be cargo. Even the good ones.
Lincoln was not going to be cargo.
“You call it,” I said. “Short and specific. ‘Rock left’ or ‘hole right.’ Don’t describe it. Just call it.”
“Got it.”
“And Lincoln, if I tell you to get down, don’t question it. Don’t look for it first. Just get down.”
She held my eyes across the raft. Morning sun behind her, loose hairs catching the light. Not defiance, not bravado. Readiness. The look of a person who’d been waiting for something to match the size of what was inside her.
“I trust you,” she said.
The words landed in me like a hook setting in deep water—clean, sharp, all the way through.
The gorge announced itself before we saw it. The banks rose into sheer walls of granite and rhododendron, and the sound built ahead of us—the rumble of moving water over rock, growing louder with every stroke. I felt her shift in the raft. She was leaning forward, paddle up, her whole body oriented toward the sound. She wanted this the way I wanted it—the raw, physical demand of water moving fast through stone.
Jawbone came first. Three ledge drops in quick succession, spray kicking ten feet into the air. I read the line and called it.
“Left side, hard. Now right—right—dig.”
She dug. We cleared the first ledge clean, punched through the second with the bow riding high, and on the third drop, the water came over the side and soaked us both. I heard her laugh.
Not a scream. Not a whoop. A laugh—low, real, startled out of her by the sheer force of the river meeting her body. The sound lodged itself somewhere behind my sternum.
The Churn was next—a chaotic stretch where the current broke into competing channels over submerged boulders. The water didn’t follow rules here. The only way through was to read it faster than it could change.
