The day had started off hot and sunny. The fourteen of us had broken camp at eight A.M., and already we had been perspiring as we loaded the canoes with tents, bags, and all the assorted stuff that seven couples carry with them on a week long canoeing expedition. We were on Kootenay Lake in the Selkirk Mountains of British Columbia. My wife and I had been sharing a canoe yesterday, but today Sue Anderson was to be my companion.
This was the first time Sue and her husband, Adam, had been on a camping and canoe trip, and the strain on them showed after the first day. Both were unaccustomed to the physical demands of six hours of guiding a heavily burdened canoe on the often choppy waters of Kootenay Lake. Frequently one of the other six couples had to circle back to help them. It had been decided at camp this morning that they would split up today, and each would share a canoe with a more experienced paddler.
Once Adam had heard of our plan to split him and Sue, he had immediately started to protest. It figured! He was a bit of a jerk, anyway. A successful real estate broker in the big city, he was used to bossing people around and getting his own way. He had snapped at Jim, our proclaimed trip leader, "Bullshit! We can hold our own with the rest of you. She stays with me!"
Jim had looked at him for a moment without answering. Then he quietly said, "The two of you together present a danger to the rest of us, and you're holding us up. I'm responsible for this group, and I say that you split up for a day, until you get the hang of this. O.K.?" They had stood eye to eye for a few moments, then Adam had spit out, "Fine, just fucking fine. You're the boss, hotshot." Then he had stomped away to join my wife Carol who was preparing our canoe. I had motioned for Sue to join me in hers, and we were off.
At first, we had kept in more or less a single file, with about fifty yards separating each canoe. It was a great day. The lake was calm, stretching ahead and behind as far as the eye could see. Tree covered mountains rose to about ten thousand feet on either side of us. Their peaks were still covered with snow, even in July. Here and there, glaciers could be seen in the valleys of some of the higher mountains. We kept close to shore, and the perfume of pine and cedar trees reached us as we rhythmically stroked through the clear glacier-fed water.
Sue hadn't said anything for about the first fifteen minutes. Then, once we were out of earshot of the others, she had unbuckled her life jacket and thrown it to the deck. "Too damn hot," she had said as she had looked defiantly behind at me. I didn't say anything. None of my business, and besides, it gave me an opportunity to admire her as she sat in front of me.
She was about twenty-five, with short black hair cut into a pixie. Any time a slight breeze came up, strands of hair would sweep across her face, partially obscuring her turned up nose and wide, pouty mouth. From where I sat behind her, I could just glimpse the slight swelling of her right breast as she shook her head back, her hand sweeping the hair from her face. From what I had seen of her yesterday, I knew that she was small and firm. At camp the night before, she had shown that she was more fit than her husband, chopping wood and helping set up the tents while he had complained of sore muscles and heavy loads.
Today, knowing that it was going to be hot, she had dressed in a thin T-shirt and jogging shorts, both which touched her body in just the right spots. As she leaned forward to dip the paddle into the water, her small round ass would rise slightly off the seat. I could see the globes of her rear tense with each stroke as she brought the paddle through the water, then raise it for another stroke. It was getting hotter in that canoe by the moment.
"You think he's an asshole, don't you?" Her question had surprised me after the long silence. The others were at least a hundred yards ahead. We had fallen behind, partly due to her inexperience in paddling, but mostly because I had been lazily watching her and not paying too much attention. "Well, don't you?", she repeated. Sue had turned to partially face me in the narrow boat. The front of her shirt was damp with perspiration. A light band of sweat shone on her face, and when she smiled at me, a drop gathered at the corner of her mouth.