The River (4 page)

Brian left the lean-to and went back outside. There might be part of a breeze later as the rain came and it would help.

There was a sliver of moon, which made enough light to see the lake well, the flat water with the beam of moonlight coming across it, and even with the mosquitoes still working at him he was amazed at the beauty.

There were night sounds—birds, flittering things he knew were bats. He also knew they were eating mosquitoes—he’d read about them in biology—and he thought,
get some, bats. Get some. Get all the mosquitoes there are.

Something swam into the moonlight on the surface of the lake—either a muskrat or a beaver—and cut a
V
right up the path of the moon, seemed to be heading for the moon, into the moon itself.

Water made sound and he realized it was the river gurgling as it left the lake to his right. Not fast, and not wide—perhaps forty or fifty feet across—the river still seemed to possess force, strength as it ran.

Somehow the beauty overrode the mosquitoes. Brian was standing there, looking through the gap in his jacket—which was still pulled up over his head—when he heard Derek come up alongside him.

“It’s incredible, isn’t it?” Derek saw it as well, the beauty, and Brian was glad that he could see it, see not just the bad parts but the good as well.

“I had forgotten,” Brian said. “I had dreams after I got out last time. Not all nightmares, but dreams. I would dream of this, of how pretty it was, how it could stop your breath with it, and then I would wake up in my room with the traffic sounds and the streetlights outside and I would feel bad—miss it. I would miss this.”

“Except for the mosquitoes.”

Brian smiled. “Well, yes, except for those.”

But even as they talked, the night temperature started to drop and it was as if a switch went off. There were still some mosquitoes, but most of them left and the two of them were left standing in the moonlight.

“Incredible,” Derek said. “They’re just gone.”

“Haven’t you run into them before? You know, when you’re doing the courses, and all that, for the government?”

Derek nodded. “Of course. Sort of. I haven’t run the courses that much—just once to try to see what it was like and I pretty much failed it. They always have tents and repellent and gear with them. You know, to take the edge off.” He laughed softly. “I’ll change that the next time we have a meeting. It was wrong. Psychologically wrong. You were right to leave all that in the plane—absolutely right.”

Later, when everything changed and he did not think there was hope, that statement was all that kept Brian going.

T
he rain came about eleven.

Derek had time for one quick joke.

“You said it would be six and a half hours—it’s almost seven.”

Then it hit them and there was nothing but water. The clouds had come quickly, covering the stars and moon in what seemed like minutes and then just opened up and dropped everything on them.

It wasn’t just a rain. It was a roaring, ripping downpour of water that almost drove them into the ground.

They had moved back into the lean-to to try to get some rest since the mosquitoes partially lessened, but the temporary roof did nothing, absolutely nothing, to slow the water.

They were immediately soaked, then more soaked, sloppy with water.

They tried moving beneath some overhanging thick willows and birch near the edge of the lake, but the trees also did nothing to slow the downpour and finally they just sat, huddled beneath the willows, and took it.

I have, Brian thought, always been wet.

Always.

Even my soul is wet.

He felt the water running down his back. He judged it to be about the same rate as the faucet in his kitchen sink at home and that made him think of his mother.

Sitting at the table, the dining room table.

With a roof. He’d forgotten how nice a roof could be.

“This is crazy,” he said aloud to Derek next to him, but the rain took the words away and he leaned against a birch and closed his eyes and, finally, took it.

I’m here,
he thought,
to show Derek how I did it, how this can be done, for other people, and right now there is nothing to do but take it.

And somehow the night passed.

Close to dawn the rain stopped and there was a softness after the rain, almost a warmth, and that brought the mosquitoes back for one more run. By the time the sun came up, full up over the lake and brought them warmth, Brian felt like he’d been hit by a truck while playing in a puddle.

He ached all over, and when he turned to see Derek—leaned back against a tree sideways, curled into a ball with his jacket still over his head—Brian laughed.

The sound awakened Derek, who was not really asleep, and he looked out of the jacket. “What’s so funny?”

Brian shook his head. “I guess it’s not funny, but you look so miserable—”

“You ought to see yourself.” Derek grinned. “Kind of like a drowned rat.”

“That’s about how I feel.”

They stood, and Brian moved down to the shore of the lake. He stripped his clothes down to his shorts and wrung them out and hung them on some branches to dry.

This day,
he thought,
this day we must find shelter and a fire stone and get a fire going and some food.

Hunger was already there.

Not the kind that would come later, the cutting kind he remembered so well and that still made his mouth water when he walked past a grocery store or fast-food place.

But it was there.

“We have a problem,” Derek said suddenly. He had moved down to the lake shore as well and had stripped down to hang his clothes to dry.

“That’s for sure,” Brian said. “We’ve definitely got a problem.”

“No. Not what we’re doing here. I mean, we have a problem with you.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’re so . . . so quiet. I mean, I see you looking at things and thinking, but I don’t know what you’re thinking about or what you’re working out. I have to know all this to write about it, to tell people what to do.”

Brian nodded. “I understand. It’s just that the last time I did this I was alone.”

I would have killed, Brian thought suddenly, for someone to talk to, someone to share it with, someone to hear me; and now that I have someone, I don’t talk.

“It’s kind of strange having someone here with me.”

Derek nodded. “That’s what I mean. You have to tell me everything, externalize it all for me, so I can write it.”

Derek moved back to the lean-to, where he’d left the radio and his weatherproof briefcase. Inside the briefcase he had notebooks, each one in a plastic bag, and he took one out now with a pencil and began to write carefully. When he’d written something he looked up at Brian, waiting. “All right. I’m ready.”

Externalize
, Brian thought. How do you externalize?

“Well, I’m thinking now that we should make sure we get a shelter today and then get a fire today and get some food today…”

I sound like a catalog
, he thought,
like I’m reading a telephone book.

But Derek nodded and started writing and Brian thought of what he really wanted to say.

We should grab the radio and call for the plane and go home and eat a hamburger and a malt, maybe eight or ten Cokes, a steak, some roasts and pork chops…

He shook his head.

“There,” Derek said. “What were you thinking there?”

Brian stared at him, then shook his head. “You don’t want to know. Just junk.”

He walked away into the day. It was enough. Enough of talk. Enough of externalizing. Another night like last night would kill him.

He left his clothes to dry, but wore his tennis shoes and noticed that Derek did the same thing—although he carried the notebook as well—and Brian set off along the lakeshore to the left.

Rule one, he thought, don’t leave the lakeshore or you’ll get lost. Then he remembered Derek and said it aloud.

“Thank you,” Derek said, rather properly. Standing in his underwear holding the notebook he looked like somebody out of an old, funny movie and Brian had trouble keeping a straight face. “That’s exactly what I meant by externalizing.”

“We’re looking for a fire stone, a shelter, and food—all at once. Always, always you look for food. There, up along the edge of the clearing—you see those stumps?”

Derek nodded.

“Those will be a good bet for grubworms later.”

“Grubworms?”

“Sure. Bears eat them—love to eat them. I can’t eat them yet, but by about the third day if we don’t find something else or get some fish they’ll probably be looking pretty good.”

“Grubworms?”

Brian smiled. “I thought you did this survival thing once before.”

“Oh, we ate lizards and snakes and stuff like that—they always have the course in the desert. Or did until now. I think it will change. And you always read about people eating ants and grasshoppers, but I never ate a grubworm.”

“You don’t chew them,” Brian said. “I think that would be too much. Just to chew one up, guts and all. They’re too soft and, well, just too soft. But if you wrap them in leaves and swallow them whole . . .”

“Right,” Derek nodded and wrote in the notebook. “Grubworms.”

Brian stopped and turned to Derek. “Food is everything.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just that. Out here, in nature, in the world, food is everything. All the other parts of what we are, what everything is, don’t matter without food. I read somewhere that all of what man is, everything man has always been or will be, all the thoughts and dreams and sex and hate and every little and big thing is dependent on six inches of topsoil and rain when you need it to make a crop grow—food.”

“You sound like you’ve thought this out.”

“That’s
all
I did—think of food. You watch other animals, birds, fish, even down to ants—they spend all their time working at food. Getting something to eat. That’s what nature is, really—getting food. And when you’re out here, having to live, you look for food. Food first. Food.
Food
.”

They moved through the day that way. During midmorning they found some raspberries growing in a brushpile. It was not a thick stand—it would maybe have been enough for one person, but with two it was skimpy—still, there were some and they worked through the brush in their underwear, eating every berry they could find.

They also found some chokecherries—what Brian had called gut cherries—but Brian shook his head. “Later, if we have to, and then in small amounts.”

Brian kept moving along the lake, waiting, walking, and waiting, and he realized at length what he was waiting for—what was in the back of his mind.

Luck.

You move and you watch and you work hard and you just keep doing that until luck comes. If it’s bad luck you ride it out and if it comes the other way and you have good luck you’re ready for it.

They had good luck in the middle of the afternoon. And as so often seems to happen, the good luck came about because of bad luck.

B
rian had moved out ahead, down and to the right of Derek, and was working closer to the edge of the lake. Derek worked up and away from the lake, looking for more berries as they moved.

“Stay in sight of me,” Brian had told him. “Don’t get away from the lake so far that you can’t see, and if you run into a bear don’t look into his eyes.”

“Bear?”

“They hunt for food, too, and eat berries. We’ll probably see one. Just back away and don’t look at them—I read that it’s a threat when you do that.”

“Bear?”

Brian was glad to see that his warning had been taken and Derek was always within sight.

Here the land rose as they approached the northern end of the lake. It came up in a low roll that made a sizable hill next to the lake. Because of this rise and the freezing and thawing of the lake, the movement of the ice each winter, the land had been cut away, washed still further away by heavy rains—Brian could see the work of last night’s rain—and all this chewing at the side of the hill had left something close to a small cliff.

It wasn’t terribly high—thirty feet or so—but it was steep and very unstable, the edge loose and soft from the rain.

Brian had moved close to the edge. Down below he could see into the green water of the lake and there were fish moving and the sight made him realize how hungry he was becoming. It had been over a day now—they had eaten normally the day before when they flew to the lake—and the hunger was becoming demanding.

He turned to see Derek, who was coming up the back of the hill. “See the fish—”

Brian had come too close to the soft soil at the edge, and before he could finish the sentence, the bank let go.

He dropped like an anvil, his finger still pointing at the fish. Halfway down the face of the cut there was a small outcropping of soil and rocks mixed, held in place because it was made of clay and chalk bound together, and Brian hit this mound on his stomach. Hard.

“Ooomph!”
He heard himself sound like the air going out of a tire, then he bounced up and sideways and continued on down to the bottom in a shower of mud and rocks, to where a small gravel beach led into the lake.

I don’t think I’ll move
, he thought, lying flat on his face.
Ever again.

Derek was by his side in moments, frowning in worry. “Are you hurt?”

I wonder why people ask that,
Brian thought.
Did he think I could do this and
not
hurt?

But he shook his head. “No. At least I don’t think so…”

He rose, or put his hands down to push himself up, and as he made the move he noticed the rocks around him on the beach. Most of them were round and smooth, rubbled by wind and water and weather and time, but mixed in with them were black, hardened shards.

Where he’d fallen there were fresh ones, not weathered, and he saw that they had come from the bank where he had bounced.

“Look,” Brian held up one of the black stones. It was chipped and layered. “I think it might be the same kind of stone I used to make fire with the hatchet.”