D9

D9

Cloistre fook. Rain and freezing cold plague us. We paddle up to a 2 k portage, and the

fact that I can’t see what it circumvents drives me crazy. It takes about three hours too long because of me. I pace up and down the slippery boulders looking for an alternative, and I decide to line. 15 minutes in I decide to turn around. We have to drag our boats upstream through a boulder field and then portage the worst 2 kms I’d witnessed till that point. . .ever. Up a steep incline, slippery, windy, disappearing over ancient boulder deposits. While resting between trips a small abandoned duckling paddles up to us. After 10 minutes of giving chase to capture the little fuzzball, he is named Moses. We figure he might live longer than one more day with us. We portage with him dangling like a fuzzy football with webbed feet in my arms. We scale a huge portage over a canyon later than evening, and finally I see what the character of this river is.