The River br-2

by Gary Paulsen

  Derek got in the front and sat next to the pilot and turned to Brian.

  “Are you uncomfortable flying?”

  Brian shook his head. He looked out the window at his mother standing by the station wagon. They were at a different small airport, but it was the same station wagon with the phony brown wood sides. She waved when she saw him turn to look, and he waved and mouthed “good-bye” so she could see it.

  The pilot started the engine and Brian jumped a little with the noise, but he settled back down at once.

  He still could not quite believe that he was doing it, felt as if he were half in a dream. It had been two weeks since Derek first came to him, and in that time they had made detailed plans. After Brian had further convinced his mother and worked on his father over the phone, Derek had come back with maps and plans and they had included Brian’s mother in the whole process.

  Derek had decided he should be the one to go — even though he had little or no survival knowledge — because he was a psychologist and that was the aspect they wished to learn about.

  They picked a lake in the middle of the wilderness, perhaps a hundred miles east of the lake Brian had crashed into the first time. Brian’s mother thought of using the same lake, but Derek vetoed it because they wanted it all to be new to Brian. The lake was not named on the map, though it fed a river that went south and east until it disappeared off the map.

  “We selected the lake carefully,” Derek said, circling it with a felt-tip pen while they sat in Brian’s dining room. “It has the same kind of terrain as the lake you crashed into, and roughly the same altitude and kind of forest.”

  “How far is it from help?” Brian’s mother asked.

  Derek smiled. “We’ll have a radio, and if any trouble develops we can have a plane there in three or four hours. Please don’t worry.”

  “But I do worry, that’s just it.”

  She did worry, Brian thought, watching her as the plane taxied out to the runway. She did worry. Again he watched her get smaller and smaller and again he flinched with the noise of the engine throttling up and again he was amazed at how easy the plane slid into the air and flew.

  And he was suddenly afraid.

  He couldn’t help it. His breath quickened and he looked up front at the pilot and thought, here it is again: one pilot and one engine and if either of them quit they were going down. If the pilot died, if he died and Derek couldn’t fly, there would be nobody up front to control the plane. Brian would have to lunge over him and grab the wheel, try to get his feet to the rudder pedals….

  He shook his head. Easy now, easy and easy and easy. Breathe deeply, fight it. Memories of the crash came sweeping back into his mind. Mental pictures of the plane crashing down through the trees and into the water — the blue-green water, with the dead pilot next to him — suddenly filled his thoughts.

  He pulled a long breath, held it, and fought the pictures away. After he’d returned home there had been dreams. Even after he had flown again, going to visit his father, there had been dreams. Not nightmares so much as reliving dreams of the crash and his time in the woods.

  The Time.

  But now it was different, all different. He looked at the pilot and saw that he was much younger than Jake had been — so young that he had a cassette recorder held with duct tape to the dashboard of the plane and was listening to rock music with a small set of headsets, his chin bobbing with the music. He flew loosely, slouched in the seat, his fingers lightly on the wheel, and something about him, the way he sat and moved with the music, relaxed Brian.

  He eased back in the seat and looked out the window. Down and to the night he saw the amphibious float with the wheels on the side. They would land right on the lake, but the pilot could also take off from solid ground.

  The floats didn’t seem to slow the plane very much, as big as they were, and they skimmed over the trees until the pilot gained enough altitude to make them seem to slow down.

  Derek was silent, looking out the side window, and Brian realized it was the first time the man had been silent for as long as he’d known and been with him. He had asked endless questions of Brian.

  He’d read all the stories about Brian’s “adventure” (as he put it), had all the news stories on tape, and seemed to have memorized everything that happened to Brian.

  “When you ate the chokecherries,” he would say, “how long did it take you to get sick?”

  Or, “Did you notice any changes in the way you went to the bathroom?”

  “Oh, come on,” Brian had said.

  “No, really. All these things are important. They could save lives.” And his face would get serious. “This is really, really important.”

  Brian realized then that Derek truly cared. Until that moment, sitting in the dining room at his house with maps all over the table — until that moment Brian wasn’t sure he was still going. He had said he would, thought he would, but he wasn’t totally certain until he’d looked at Derek’s face and realized that Derek really wanted to help people by learning what Brian knew.

  So, here he was, in a bush plane heading north. And it somehow seemed perfectly logical, perfectly all right. As if going back were the most normal thing in the world.

  He looked out the window, down past the float on the right. They had been flying half an hour and they were already getting over forest. There were still some farms here and there, but less and less of them, even as he watched. When he looked ahead of the plane, through the whirling propeller, he saw the endless trees stretching away to the horizon.

  With the fear gone, or controlled, something about the forest drew him; and that was a surprise as well.

  His thinking had changed during the time he was at the lake. It had to, or he would have died. He had to revert, to become part of the woods, an animal. But when he came back, and had been back a time, he started to “recitify,” as he thought of it. He became used to the city again. The first time he went to a mall he became ill, dizzy with all the movement and noise, and to make himself normal again he went back to the mall again and again until finally it didn’t bother him.

  And the woods slipped away. The dreams came less and less and he began not to think about them. He didn’t forget them — he knew he would never forget them — but he didn’t think about them as much; and when he did, there wasn’t any fondness.

  He remembered the rough parts.

  The mosquitoes. Tearing at him, clouds of them, the awful, ripping, thick masses of the small monsters trying to bleed him dry.

  “What was it like?” His mother had asked him one day when they were sitting in the kitchen. “What was the main problem — the worst part of it?”

  And he thought at first of mosquitoes, started to tell her about them and shook his head.

  “Hunger.”

  “Really?” She had seemed surprised. “I thought it would be the danger, or being alone, or the weather.”

  “I don’t mean hunger like you’re thinking of it,” he had told her. “Not just when you miss a meal and feel like eating a little bit. Or even if you go a day without eating. I mean where you don’t think you’re ever going to eat again — don’t know if there will ever be more food. An end to food. Where you won’t eat and you won’t eat and then you still won’t eat and finally you still won’t eat and even when you die and are gone, even then there won’t be any food. That kind of hunger.”

  The outburst had made his mother sit back and blink, but he meant it. The hunger was the worst, worse than the mosquitoes, worse than any of it.

  Hunger.

  He looked out the window again. Only forest below now, forest and lakes and the plane droning. The air was rough, rougher than he remembered from before, but he didn’t mind the jolting.

  They had left the runway in northern New York in the early morning, but climbing had brought them into the bright sun and it warmed the inside of the plane until it was hot.

  Brian was wearing a T-shirt and a baseball cap with a pic
ture of a fish on the front. He pulled the brim down and turned away from the sun. As he turned he saw the equipment in back of the seats.

  There was enough for a small army, and it bothered him and he couldn’t pin it down — how or why it bothered him.

  It just felt wrong.

  Derek had gone over the list with his mother. Food for weeks, tent, a rubber boat, first-aid kit and mosquito repellent, fishing gear, a gun — a gun. Just what we need.

  “Just for emergencies,” Derek had explained. “In case we need them — we have everything we need.”

  And there it was, he thought. They had everything they needed and it ruined it all, made the whole trip worthless. It wouldn’t be the same.

  He tapped Derek on the shoulder and the big man turned in his seat.

  “Too much,” Brian yelled over the noise of the engine.

  “What?”

  “Too much stuff.” Brian pointed over his shoulder at the mound of gear.

  But Derek misunderstood and nodded and smiled. “Great, isn’t it? We have everything but the kitchen sink.”

  Brian shrugged. “Yeah. Great.”

  But it ate at him. What they were going to do proved nothing. They were playing a game and it struck him that Derek did that — his whole life was that. He knew it was unfair to think of the man that way — he didn’t, after all, know him very well. But he acted that way. Like it was all a game and Derek was approaching this whole business that way. Just a game. Football. Soccer.

  If it didn’t work night, they could call time out and eat a good meal and go swimming and sail off into the sunset in the rubber boat shooting things with the gun and talking to people on the radio.

  Survival.

  Right.

  The plane seemed to hang in the sky over the woods, the trees green like a carpet out and out, and Brian sat there and watched them without seeing them and thought that it was wrong.

  There was too much.

  It was all wrong.

  5

  He slept.

  He couldn’t believe it, but he slept. The sound of the plane’s engine and the warm sun and the sameness of the green forest all combined to hit him like a hammer, and his face went against the window and he slept.

  The sound of the plane engine changing sound — decreasing in pitch — awakened him, and he was embarrassed to see that he had drooled in his sleep.

  He wiped his chin.

  They were going down.

  Brian felt himself stiffen when the plane nosed down. He couldn’t help it. But the descent was gradual and controlled and even. When they were still well above the forest, the pilot slowed the plane still further and dropped the flaps. The plane almost seemed to stop in the air, floated on down toward the lake below and to the front, and Brian remembered the last time he’d “landed” on a lake in a bush plane.

  If he’d known about flaps or how to use them, he wouldn’t have been going half the speed when he hit the water. With a gentle landing he might have had time to help the pilot, get the survival pack out. He watched the pilot carefully, noted everything he did, and realized how lucky he’d been. The pilot flared the plane out so that when it came down to the lake it seemed to be barely moving. He worked the wheel and rudder pedals to make it float down slowly and easily. Brian had more on less arrowed the plane into the water — through the trees and down — and it was a miracle that he hadn’t been killed.

  The answer to his problem had come to him while he slept.

  It was simple.

  The pilot was all business now, his hands working the controls, easing the throttle, settling the plane the last bit down to the lake.

  But Derek turned and smiled at Brian. “Pretty, isn’t it?”

  And the lake was pretty. It was almost perfectly round, pushing out toward an egg shape slightly, but only slightly.

  At the bottom edge of the lake and off to the right a short distance a river flowed south and east, and it was amazing to Brian how accurate the map had been.

  They had gone over it on the dining room table, showing his mother where they would be, but looking down on it now, it seemed to be almost a model made of the map. The blue of the lake matched the blue of the water on the map and the river cutting southeast through the green forest looked just as it had on the map — delicate, winding.

  Derek said something to the pilot — Brian couldn’t hear over the sound of the engine — and the pilot nodded and banked the plane to the right, more toward the river, and put it softly onto the lake.

  There was absolutely no wind, and the water was as smooth as a mirror. Brian watched out of his window as the float came down, saw its reflection in the water, closer, closer until it touched itself and skimmed across the flatness, settling more and more until the plane slowed nearly to a stop.

  The pilot headed the plane toward a clearing to the right of where the river left the lake, nudging the throttle now and then to keep it moving on the floats until it at last slid through some green reeds and bumped the shoreline.

  He cut the engine.

  “We’re here,” Derek said, his voice loud in the sudden silence. “Let’s get unloaded.”

  He turned and Brian could see that he was excited.

  Like a kid, he thought. He’s as excited as a kid. I’m the kid here, and I’m not excited. That’s because he doesn’t know. I know and he doesn’t.

  Derek climbed out onto the float — moving a little stiffly and Brian noted that he wasn’t very athletic, seemed not to be too coordinated — and stepped ashore.

  The pilot stayed in his seat and Brian moved the passenger seat forward and clambered out of the plane, stepped on the float and then to the dry grass.

  Neat, he thought, neat and clean. The thought came into his mind that it was a beautiful day. The sun was out, there were small popcorn clouds moving across the sky, it was a soft summer afternoon.

  Then, instantly — in just that part of a second — he changed. Completely. He became, suddenly, what he’d been before at the lake. Part of it, all of it; inside all of it so that every… single… little… thing became important.

  He didn’t just hear birds singing, not just a background sound of birds, but each bird. He listened to each bird. Located it, knew where it was by the sound, listened for the sound of alarm. He didn’t just see clouds, but light clouds, scout clouds that came before the heavier clouds that could mean rain and maybe wind. The clouds were coming out of the northwest, and that meant that weather would come with them. Not could, but would. There would be rain. Tonight, late, there would be rain.

  His eyes swept the clearing, then up the edge of the clearing, and in those two sweeps he knew — he knew the clearing and the woods. There was a stump there that probably held grubs; hardwood there for a bow, and willows there for arrows; a game trail, probably deer, moving off to the left meant other things, porcupines, raccoons, bear, wolves, moose, skunk would be moving on the trail and into the clearing. He flared his nostrils, smelled the air, pulled the air along the sides of his tongue in a hissing sound and tasted it, but there was nothing. Just summer smells. The tang of pines, soft air, some mustiness from rotting vegetation. No animals. At least, nothing fresh.

  Derek had seen the change, was staring at him. “What happened?”

  Brian shook his head. “Nothing.”

  “Yes — something did. You changed. Completely. You’re not the same person.”

  Brian shrugged. “I was just… looking at things. Seeing them.”

  “Tell me,” Derek said. He took a notebook out of his pocket. “Tell me everything you saw.”

  “Right now?”

  “Yes.”

  “Shouldn’t we let the pilot go first?”

  Derek turned as if seeing the plane for the first time. “Oh, yes. I almost forgot. He has to get back. Let’s unload, and then he can go and you can tell me—”

  “No.”

  “What?”

  Brian had made the decision just as he dozed off in th
e plane and it had settled into his mind while he slept. He knew it was the right thing to do. “We’re not going to unload.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Brian looked at the lake, the clearing, the clouds. Seven, eight hours to rain. “I mean, if we unload all that gear — everything but the kitchen sink, like you said — this whole business will be ruined, wasted.”

  “I don’t see what you mean — what happens if we have trouble?”

  Brian nodded. “That’s it exactly. We have trouble. That’s what this is all about. You want to learn, but if you have all that backup, it’s just more games. It’s not real. You wouldn’t have that if the situation were real, would you?”

  “But we don’t have to use it. We don’t have to use any of it.”

  Brian smiled — a small, almost sad smile. “I promise you, absolutely promise you, that if that stuff is here you will use it and I will use it. By the third day, when the hunger really starts to work and the mosquitoes keep coming and coming and there isn’t any food or a tent and we know it’s just there, just in the bag — I guarantee you we will use it. We won’t be able not to use it.”

  So much talk, Brian thought. Just jabber, jabber all the time. Like bluejays. We stand here and talk, and in seven, eight hours it will rain and we don’t have shelter or dry wood or a fire going. Talk. “Leave it all in the plane. Leave it or I’m flying out of here right now. I know what’s coming and I don’t want to waste it.”

  “But we told your mother…”

  Brian hesitated, then sighed. “I know. But the rule still holds. If we unload, I’m going home. Period. I’ll take responsibility.”

  Derek studied him. “You mean it.”

  “Absolutely.”

  “How about a compromise?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We keep the radio in case there’s trouble — serious trouble. Then at least we can call for help.”

  Brian rubbed his neck, thinking. It wouldn’t be the same. Even the radio would taint it. Still, he had told his mother not to worry and if he insisted on not using the radio, absolutely not using it…