Chapter Four
JIM IS IN THE BOW OF the drift boat by six-fifteen, rod in hand, his attention already on the water.
He doesn’t talk for the first twenty minutes.
He never does for the first few minutes.
He watches the current and lets the river come back to him, and I row us into the main channel while reading the water as I’ve done since I was old enough to hold an oar.
We float past the mouth of Valley Creek and into the stretch where the big cutthroats hold in the early season. Jim’s first cast lands clean, two feet from the far bank, right on the seam where the fast water meets the slow.
“Your dad used to put the boat right here,” Jim says. “Every year. Same spot, same time, same side of the river.”
“He liked the morning shadow on this bank,” I say. “The fish hold here before the sun hits.”
“Smart man.” Jim strips line and casts again. “How long has it been now?”
“Four years.”
“I miss him on this water.” Jim watches his indicator drift through the tail of the run. “I miss him generally. He was one of the good ones.”
I row us through the next riffle without answering, because there isn’t a response to that sentence that doesn’t land as either too much or too little. My father was one of the good ones. Jim knew him long enough to say it, and he doesn’t need me to confirm what he already knows.
Jim catches a sixteen-inch cutthroat below a boulder garden, and while I net it and hold it in the current for him to admire, he tells me a story I’ve heard before and don’t mind hearing again.
My father, twenty years ago, guiding Jim through a thunderstorm on this stretch.
Lightning on the ridgeline, rain going sideways, and Dad refusing to pull over because the fish were on.
“He just kept rowing,” Jim says. “Calmest man I’ve ever met in a storm. ”
I was fourteen that day, soaked through, sitting on the cooler in the back of the boat while Dad rowed, Jim cast, and lightning cracked over the Sawtooths like the sky was splitting open. Dad looked back at me once and winked. That was it. That was the entire safety briefing.
I release the fish and watch it hold for a second before darting back to its lie. “Dad loved the ugly weather days. He said that’s when the river tells you who it really is.”
“Sounds about right.” Jim watches the water where the fish disappeared, then reels in a few inches of slack. “Gigi doesn’t really get it. The fishing or the early mornings. She’s happier at the lodge.”
It’s not a complaint. It’s an observation, offered with gentle bewilderment, and he’s not asking me to fix it or explain it. He’s saying it out loud, maybe because he doesn’t have anyone else to say it to up here.
I know exactly what Gigi does at the lodge while Jim is on the water. I know it in detail, documented and screenshotted and stored in a file on my own email server.
“She seems to enjoy the porch in the evenings,” I say, and it’s the most careful sentence I’ve ever constructed.
Jim nods. “She does. She and Cody get along well. It’s nice that she has someone to talk to when I’m on the water.”
I adjust the oar angle and row us into the next pool. The river keeps moving. I keep rowing. Jim casts into a soft eddy behind a midstream boulder. The morning is beautiful and terrible, and I carry every piece of what I know without letting any of it touch my face.
Jim and I are off the water by noon. He’s caught four fish and told me three stories about my father, and when I help him off the boat at the dock he grips my arm and says, “Same time tomorrow?”
“I’ll have the boat ready, but you’ll be on your own tomorrow. I have a new guest.” Jim is about the only guest I trust enough to let him take out a boat alone.
He walks toward Cabin Four with his rod over his shoulder, and I coil the anchor line and stow the oars while trying not to think about the distance between what I know and what he doesn’t.
I clean the boat, eat lunch in the kitchen, and check the reservation board.
A new guest is arriving this afternoon. Noah Winslow, booked for a single cabin, Five, and a series of guided floats over the next six weeks.
The reservation notes list him as a conservation biologist from Boise State, here for a summer-long habitat study on native cutthroat and bull trout populations.
He’s paying his own way rather than billing the university for lodging, which tells me he chose this place specifically.
Noah arrives at three in a dusty Tacoma with a truck bed full of field equipment.
His gear includes sampling kits, a GPS unit, coolers marked with Boise State stickers, and a stack of laminated topo maps held together with a binder clip.
He’s mid-thirties, with a neat beard the same shade as his brown hair, sunburned across the nose from fieldwork earlier in the season.
I show him to Cabin Five, and he carries his own bag without asking for help.
OUR FIRST FLOAT IS the next morning. I meet Noah at the dock at six after securing a boat for Jim, and he’s already there, crouched at the waterline with a thermometer and a small notebook, taking the river’s temperature.
“Fifty-four degrees,” he says when I walk up. “That’s good for this stretch in late June?”
“Right where you want it for cutthroat activity. It’ll drop a couple degrees when the snowmelt peaks next week.”
He writes it down in a notebook, not his phone, in handwriting I can’t read from three feet away.
We push off at six-thirty. For the first hour Noah barely speaks.
He’s watching the water, the banks, the insect activity on the surface, and the substrate visible through the clear stretches.
When he asks questions, they’re precise.
He asks about water temperature at different depths, the timing of the salmonfly hatch versus the local stonefly emergence, historical spawning patterns for bull trout in this reach, and whether I’ve noticed changes in the cutthroat population over the ten years I’ve owned the lodge.
I have. I tell him about the decline in bull trout sightings over the last three seasons, the shift in spawning substrate quality after a big runoff year, and the way the cutthroat population seems to have compressed into a narrower band of the river.
He listens. He takes notes. He asks a follow-up about water temperature stratification in the deeper pools, and when I answer he nods and writes that down too.
He doesn’t correct me or rephrase my observations into his own terminology. He doesn’t explain the river to me.
Somewhere around the third hour, I’m more engaged in this conversation than I’ve been in any conversation in months.
Not because Noah is charming. He isn’t, particularly.
He forgot to eat the sandwich I packed for him, and when I point it out he looks genuinely surprised, as if he hadn’t noticed it was past noon.
What he does is take me seriously. He treats what I know as data worth collecting and asks questions that assume I have answers worth hearing. After six years of Cody performing partnership while treating the lodge as my project that he promoted, Noah’s plain respect is disorienting.
Near the end of the float, he pulls out a topo map and points to a side channel about eight miles downstream. “This one,” he says. “The elevation change and the substrate data suggest it could be a significant spawning site. Is it accessible by drift boat?”
I look at the map. “Not right now. Water’s too high. In about three weeks, it’ll drop enough to get a boat in. It’s a full-day float to reach it and come back.”
“Can I book that?”
“You can book it today.”
He does. Standing on the dock with his thermometer still in his hand, he pulls out his phone and sends me a calendar request for three weeks out, a full-day float to survey the side channel. He’s already thinking about the next data point.
I tie off the boat and start cleaning up, and for the first time in two days, my head is on the river instead of Cody’s email archive.
That evening, after the lodge is quiet, I sit in the office and do two things.
I open a new notebook and start a written log.
I record dates, times, and observations.
I write down the meadow sighting, Cody’s truck at the Hanson Creek pullout, and Gigi’s pattern of vanishing from the common areas between lunch and dinner.
Everything I’ve seen since Tuesday, written in ink, in my handwriting, because a contemporaneous written record carries weight that screenshots don’t.
Then I open the Devlin thread from Cody’s email and start reading.
Fourteen emails over six months. Craig Devlin is interested in the lodge property.
Cody has been presenting himself as the owner-operator.
I get four messages deep before I close the laptop.
I focused on the affair before. Tonight is the business.
The anger is different, and I need to separate the two before I can think clearly about either one.
I lock the laptop in the desk drawer and go back to the client board. Noah Winslow’s name goes into the morning slots, one booking per week for six weeks. His intake form is still on the desk, the handwriting just as illegible as his field notes.
I told him yes before I thought about it. That hasn’t happened in a while.