The cleaning up was left to Whit, Hawthorn, and Hod. At home Whit had slacked off abominably on this chore, making game of Fawn, but with Hawthorn and Hod to ride herd on, not to mention Berry watching, he became wonderfully scrupulous all of a sudden. Fawn was considering breaking out her spindle for a little hand-work, when someone on the shore path trotted past the bow and shouted, incomprehensibly, “Hey, Berry! The upstream keelers are on the tow!”

Berry rose, grinning. “Come on, Fawn. You’ve got to see this.”

She picked up an oddly shaped leather bag from under her curtained bunk. Fawn grabbed her jacket and followed; Whit trailed after.

The late morning was overcast and chilly but not foggy. More of the leaves were down from the trees, drifted into sodden yellow piles from yesterday’s rain, leaving the bare boles the same gray as the air, receding ghostly up the hill. Berry led down the path past the wharf boat and the ferry landing. The Lakewalkers’ ferryboat, Fawn saw in passing, was moored on the other side of the river, and its capstan rope had been taken down. No one would be crossing after Remo just yet.

A little above where they’d gathered coal, Berry hopped up onto some tallish rocks that gave a fine view down over the Riffle. At the bottom of the rapids, which were slowly disappearing under the rising water, two keelboats were moving along opposite shores. On the far shore, the keel was being towed against the current by a team of eight oxen handled by what looked to be a couple of local farmers. On the near shore, the keel was being heaved along by about twenty straining men pulling a long, thick rope. Fawn at last saw why all the trees on the riverside of the shore path had been cut to stumps. Both boats had men running back and forth on their bows with long poles, fending off rocks and clumps of wrack. The two crews were shouting back and forth across the water, rude insults and challenges and a lot of chaff about We’ll be at Tripoint before you!

“Is it a race?” asked Whit, staring in delight.

“Yep,” said Berry, and bent to draw a polished hickory-wood fiddle from the case. She tested the tuning by plucking at the strings and turning the pegs, stood up on the highest rock facing downstream, and drew a long note, starting low and winding high until it seemed to leap off the fiddle altogether. She added, “I’ve fiddled my keeler boys up over every shoal and riffle on the Gray and the Grace. It makes the work go easier if you have a rhythm. When the boat boss wanted them to go faster, he’d bribe me to play quicker. The boys would bribe me to play slower. It could get pretty lucrative.”

Fawn spotted a lot of fellows out on the Pearl Bend wharf boat in the distance, shouting the contestants onward. “I don’t suppose you have a bet down on this race, do you, Berry?”

The riverwoman grinned. “Yep.” And set her bow to her strings, sending an astonishingly loud ripple of notes echoing down the river valley. The grunting keelers on the near shore looked up and cheered, and bent again to their rope in time to the boatman-music. Fawn guessed it was a familiar tune, likely with familiar words, and likely with a rude version, but the men had no breath to spare to sing along. The oxen on the other side seemed indifferent to the noise.

When the repeats on the first song began to get dull, Berry switched to a second tune, then a third. Some of the other boat bosses from Possum Landing had come out to watch the show, including Wain from the Snapping Turtle. Berry moved back from the rocks to the other side of the path as the keelboat drew near and began yet another tune, even livelier, her elbow pumping. Her audience shuffled after her. Strands of her lank blond hair, loose from the horse-tail at her nape, stuck to her face, and she alternated between either blowing them out of her mouth or chewing on them in her concentration. Her fingers stretched, arched, flew so fast they blurred. Everyone else was watching the race; Whit was watching Berry, his eyes alight and his mouth agape.

The sweating keelers, passing, hooted at her, then bent and stamped and strained. She made her fiddle echo their cries almost like a human voice. They were pulling well ahead of the oxen. Berry kept her music chasing them up the shore until they reached the wharf boat, reeled in their keelboat, threw down their rope, and sent up a victory whoop. She made her fiddle whoop back, and finally dropped it from under her chin, panting.

The flatties and locals who had collected along the bank to watch tromped back up the riverside to settle their bets and hoist a drink at the wharf boat, but neither Berry nor the other boat bosses on the lookout point joined them. Instead, they peered upriver, where one of the flatboats had loosed from its mooring and was being slowly sculled out to mid-river. “There goes the Oleana Lily,” someone muttered. They were all watching, Fawn realized, to see if this scout could clear the shoals without hanging up or tearing out its hull.

“If he makes it, will we go?” Fawn asked Berry.

“Not just yet,” said Berry, shading her eyes and squinting at the drifting flatboat, which was picking up speed. “The Lily drew a shallower draft than me even before I undertook to load on extra people, a ton o’ window glass, and a surly horse. You see that long pole sticking up out of the water below the Landing wharf boat?”

Fawn gazed where she pointed at what looked like a slim, bare tree, stripped of side branches, with a limp red flag nailed to its top some thirty feet in the air. Every half foot along its length, it had a groove circling it daubed with red paint, until a few feet up from the water where it changed to black paint. “That tells you how high the water is, right? Is it safe to take the shoals when it changes from red to black?” There seemed to be several feet left for the water to rise.

“Depends on how low in the water your hull and cargo ride. When it changes to black, any fool can get his boat over.”

“The marks go all the way to the top,” said Fawn uneasily. “The water doesn’t ever go that high, does it?”

“No,” said Berry, and Fawn relaxed, until she added, “By the time it’s about halfway, the pole usually rips out and washes away.”

Fawn finally saw why the river people relied on wharf boats, instead of a fixed dock like those she’d seen around Hickory Lake. The wharf boats would rise and fall with the shifting water, could be pulled ashore for winter, and wouldn’t be torn away by floods, drifting trees, or grinding ice. Were less likely to be, she amended that thought.

A few of the boat bosses lined up on the rocks yelled comments or advice to the steersman of the Oleana Lily, which were proudly ignored, but most watched in silence. When the steersman leaped to one side and pulled hard, not a few leaned with him, fists clenching, as if to add their strength to his. When the boat sideswiped a rock, scraping along the whole length of its oak hull, the boat bosses groaned in synchrony. They bent like trees in the wind, then all straightened together and sighed at what sign Fawn could not see; but the Lily was past the last rock and clump of wrack and still moving serenely.

The group broke up and began to trudge back up the path; a couple of men trotted ahead. Berry detoured only briefly at the crowded wharf boat, collecting a couple of bone-cracking hugs from some keelers and money from several more sheepish boatmen. She refused pressing offers of cider, beer, or the drink of her choice. “I got me a boat to launch, boys. We’ve been here too long—you’ve drunk this place dry!”

She paused on the bank to squint again at the ringed pole. “Well, not quite yet. But I think we might load on that horse.”

Back at the Fetch, they did so, laying extra timber for the gangplank. Dag soothed his dubious mount across the bending boards. Copperhead snorted in dismay, but followed; the boat dipped as he clomped down onto the deck and was penned with Daisy-goat. Whatever groundwork Dag was doing to assure the gelding’s cooperation was as invisible to Fawn as ever, but she noticed Remo raising his brows as if secretly impressed.