The River br-2

by Gary Paulsen

  “All right.”

  Derek nodded and stepped past him, balanced along the float and reached into the plane. He said something to the pilot, who nodded and looked at Brian through the windshield with a strange look, a studying look. Then he smiled and waved through the plastic and Brian nodded and waved in return.

  Derek came back ashore with the radio — a small unit with a weatherproof seal and fresh nicad batteries. He also carried a small plastic briefcase.

  “For my papers,” he said. “I have to take notes, write things down.”

  Brian nodded, smiling inside. Derek sounded almost like Brian sounded when he was speaking to his mother or father and wanted to do something. Pleading. For my papers…

  It was a strange feeling for Brian, the role reversal with an adult. He was in change of an adult and he supposed in this situation it was the best way. But he was uncomfortable with it, the business of being in control over an adult — or anybody, for that matter.

  The plane had to be turned. It was nosed into the reeds and the pilot opened the window and asked them to aim the plane around so it could taxi out and take off.

  Derek and Brian worked it back and around, wading in the water, pushing at the floats — the water felt warm to Brian, shore warm — and when they had it aimed well out, the pilot started the engine.

  He taxied away without looking back and as soon as he was clear of the reeds he gunned the engine, increasing speed until the plane was roaring across the lake.

  It bounced once, then again, and was airborne, climbed well over the trees at the end of the lake, circled and came back oven them, the pilot wagging the wings as they watched, and then it was gone.

  Gone.

  “Well,” Derek said. “Here we are. Alone.”

  Brian nodded. He felt a strange loss at watching the plane leave. An emptiness.

  “What’s next?” Derek asked. “How do we get the ball in play?”

  Brian looked at him. A game, it’s all a game. “A fire. We need a fire and shelter. Soon.”

  Derek looked at him, a question in his eyes.

  Brian looked at the sky. “It’s warm afternoon now, but with evening the mosquitoes will come and we need smoke to keep them away until coolness in the morning. And we need shelter because it’s going to rain in about six and a half hours.”

  “Six and a half hours?”

  “Sure. Can’t you smell it?”

  Derek took a breath through his nose, shook his head. “Nope. Not a thing.”

  “You will,” Brian said. “You will. Now, let’s… get the ball rolling.” And he set off looking for a fire stone.

  6

  That first night Brian decided he was insane to have come back, insane to have agreed to do it, and insane for sending the plane away with all that wonderful equipment.

  Especially the tent.

  Brian had allowed them to have almost no survival gear. He decided that not all people put in this position would have a hatchet, so even that old friend was left at home.

  He and Derek each had a knife, the kind that folds like a pocketknife, but is bigger and is worn on the belt in a leather case.

  Other than that they had what was in their pockets.

  Some change, a few dollars in paper money. Derek had a large nail clipper and some credit cards, Brian had pictures of his mother and Deborah in his wallet.

  “That’s it?” Derek had said early in the evening, while the sun was still on them but low in the west, past the tops of the trees at the edge of the clearing.

  “That’s it.” Brian had nodded.

  “It’s not much, is it?”

  Brian had said nothing. The truth was, it wasn’t much — especially for two people. They would need twice as much of everything. Twice as much food, a larger shelter — it changed things.

  All Brian had needed to worry about before, during the Time, was himself. And that had been bad enough.

  The thought of the second person, especially one as green as Derek, had not somehow hit him until just then, in late afternoon.

  And then it didn’t matter.

  The plane was gone.

  Things began to disintegrate fast after that.

  It was one thing, Brian knew, to have a plan, to want to do things. It was something else to actually get them done.

  Brian could not find a fire stone, so there was no fire.

  Without fire there could be no smoke, and without smoke they had no protection against the mosquitoes.

  They came with first dark and they were as bad as Brian had remembered. Thick clouds of them, whining, filling their eyes and ears and nostrils.

  They had made a crude lean-to — Brian missed the overhanging rock with his shelter back inside a great deal. Clearly it would not stop the rain, though they had tried to make rough shingles of old pieces of half-rotted bark, yet it was a start.

  But for some reason — some protective thought — they had crawled back into the lean-to when the mosquitoes first came.

  As if, Brian thought, they could hide from the little monsters.

  “God,” Derek said in a whisper, a tight sound in the darkness back in the lean-to. “This is insane.”

  They were sitting with their jackets pulled over their heads, but due to Derek’s size, when he pulled the jacket up, it pulled his shirt up from his waist and exposed a bit of skin there, and when the mosquitoes found that, he pulled the shirt down and it exposed his neck, and when he hunched to cover that, they could get his waist again, and in a small time he was jerking up and down like a yo-yo.

  “You must settle,” Brian told him. “In your mind. There are some fights you can’t win, and I think this must be one of them. It will get worse and worse until after the middle of the night, when the coolness comes and the mosquitoes will stop. Or at least a lot of them will.”

  And just the words had helped, had calmed Derek and himself as well.

  Dozing, listening to the whine of them around his head in the dark as they tried to find a way through the jacket, he thought, it was the way. It was the way of things here. The mosquitoes and the night and the coolness that he knew was coming were just the way of it — part of being here — and he thought he should tell Derek, but decided to keep his mouth shut.

  Derek would find it for himself. Or he would not, just as Brian had found things out for himself.

  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.”

&
nbsp; “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.

  7

  The 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 i
s 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.

  8

  Brian 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.”