The days blend together.  The paddle hits the water and forty kilometers becomes thirty, thirty becomes twenty, twenty becomes ten, and ten leads to tomorrow.  I wake up to the cold with a root as a pillow, the tentacle of an aged beast, a great pine filtering beams of light through its needles to dot the fly of our tent marking the break of dawn. The birds do not sing.  I lie still for a moment enjoying the rarity of complete silence.  We crawl out of the tent dragging our packed gear behind us and dismantle our temporary home.  A thin mist lingers among the pines rising from the black water, ascending into the hills.  With our packs in a pile on the flattened grass where our tent had been, I sit down with my back to a tree, too tired to consider my next responsibility.  I watch the daily array of slugs, which have congregated on any gear left outside.  Little creatures conjured by the dawn.  A tiny brown orange being has found itself on the blade of my unsheathed knife.  A particularly small slug among droplets of water from the dew, rests on the cold slab of steel.  I imagine the slug must be petrified by the action around him, the giants lumbering above his world.  He is just as likely oblivious, maybe even serene.  I slide him off the blade, wondering what he’s thinking as he falls to the ground. 

“Start loading boats!” Scott, our trip leader, calls from the rocks where he’s been making breakfast. My mind snaps away from the slug and back into real speed.  The next twenty minutes are executed with a practiced precision, a familiar routine.  I slide the boats into the water resting each bow on the beach.  While I do this, the others are hauling the packs towards the boats and loading them in one by one.  Some packs can be placed, while the other heavier food packs are dropped with a thud, rattling the frame of the canoe.  After this is done we eat a breakfast of granola with powdered milk and we’re off.  It’s 6:25, day eight of twenty-two.  We had camped at the mouth of a small river which we paddled down, draining into the giant that is Temiskaming.  Lake Temiskaming is about three kilometers wide, but runs on as if forever, giving it the feel of an enormous river.  On either bank are huge rolling hills and cliffs covered with pines.  The water is dark, black even.  The day is threatening: the water, the mist, the hills looming around us, and the storm clouds stalking behind us.  My paddle disturbs the water and I wonder what swims its depths watching the bellies of our red boats as they glide across the surface.  I feel like I am being observed by the dark spaces in the forest.  A feeling surely intensified by the immensity of our isolation.  Our only visible company is a few black crows who have found their home on a dead tree leaning off of a nearby precipice. 

We continue to paddle down the lake. Hours pass but I’m not sure how many. Time does not pass so perceptibly.  For a long time the boats and our paddles are the only things that break the stillness of the water.  But the storm clouds made no idle threats.  The sky begins to fall.  Raindrops slam into the water and the whole lake is rippled. Lightning cracks merely a kilometer from our band of boats, which now seem infinitesimal and powerless against the forces around us.  The land does not welcome us but I welcome the storm.  We paddle towards shore, our boats filling with water.  Despite the rain and thunder there was still no wind, an equally eerie and convenient phenomenon.  We come to shore amongst the giant boulders rising from the black water.  And then we wait.  We wait, cold and dripping, for the sky to see fit to allow us passage.  Thunder booms, lightning cracks, rain falls, and we wait.  I watch the stirring of the clouds, the breaking of the once glass lake.  I watch the rain drip from my shriveled hands, rushing by blisters and callouses, as water does the rocks in a river. I realize that I’m dehydrated and force myself to finish my bottle. 

Soon the storm slows, then stops.  The clouds go on unceremoniously to the east, lashing our path in momentary aggression and then returning to the august calm, insouciant of our passing. We are slugs, beings among drops of water from the rain.  Creatures conjured by the dawn.