Father Water, Mother Woods

by Gary Paulsen

We just know; all will fit in and the wood will swell and the leaks will stop and there is that … that thing, that smell, that fresh adventure calling from up the river so it will all work out.

  Gear is selected. No fishing this time, no hunting, only to go and lie by the river with a fire at night and look up at the stars and talk about what will be, could be, should be.

  Gear for comfort.

  An old army surplus pup tent and a piece of canvas for a tarp because it always rains. The tent for two men will sleep three boys easily, four if the tarp is used.

  Blankets. This was before sleeping bags. Blankets and an old quilt are wrapped and rolled in the tents but they will not be needed because even in rain, even in clouds and wind and rain, it is still summer and the nights are hot and damp, and a single blanket works to help keep the mosquitoes off when the fire dies down and the smoke is gone.

  But still blankets, two, three for each boy, more blankets than can fit in the boat, and the largest part of planning hasn’t yet begun.

  Food is next. Hunting and fishing take “fixin’s,” flour to cook fish or a pan to cook meat, but all food is carried on camping. Enough food for thirty days is carried. Everything that has ever been wanted and can be afforded is taken except by Bill, whose father is a grocer. He has to bring all past-dated fruit and vegetables because his father will not give him things that can be sold.

  Wayne brings all the cans of Spam he can find because he loves Spam, cooked, raw, sliced, in chunks, Spam, and Kool-Aid made from spring water and cupfuls, not spoonfuls, but cups of sugar.

  Marshmallows and hot dogs and a stream of cans of pork-and-beans and soft tasteless white bread and jars of peanut butter that doesn’t stick to the roof of your mouth and some that does and grape jelly in small jars with cartoons on the sides and more marshmallows and more beans and cans of corned beef hash and large potatoes and tinfoil to bake them in the fire until they are burned black and taste like charcoal and bags of cookies, Oreos and the kind that are filled with marshmallow, and there are never enough in the box, and still more hot dogs and one, one jar of pickles and two more loaves of bread and one last bag of marshmallows and two pounds of raw hamburger to fry in an old pan, all in a pile on the bank next to the boat.

  And that was just for one boy.

  Food for the masses, food for towns, was stacked on the bank next to the bait boat. Food until it couldn’t possibly all fit in the boat, stacked and waiting and still one boy not there, still to come one more pile and at the last, disaster.

  Every last thing is thought of and no matter how many times the camping is done there is always some last-minute disaster that seems to come to ruin everything.

  When Bruce comes to the boat, all his food in sacks on his bicycle, there is another boy with him helping to push the bicycle, a last-minute boy.

  “This is Gilson,” Bruce says. “He’s an exchange student from South America. They sent him up early so he could work on his English.” And then the curse, the words that nobody wants to hear, the doom words. “Pa says we’ve got to take him with us.”

  Five boys then. Gilson, it turns out, cannot speak more than forty or so words in English, many of them almost wonderfully foul and almost all of them used completely in the wrong context.

  “I am damn,” he says, smiling at us. “Is the boat screw?”

  Nobody wants to take him.

  “He’ll be fine,” Bruce says, trying to put the best light on it. “All he does is smile and give everybody the finger.…”

  And since Bruce is one of the all-for-one and one-for-all summer gang that camps and fishes, since that is the way it is, we must take Gilson or leave Bruce, and it is unthinkable to leave Bruce.

  With gear and paddles and five boys, when the boat is pushed away from shore and an attempt is made to paddle it upstream, it is impossible, and only two inches of freeboard exist between floating and sinking and the wood hasn’t swelled yet so it leaks.

  “Son of a bitch,” Gilson says. “Water more boat.…”

  Command decisions are made, all mistakes. As heavy as the boat rides it will not paddle upstream, hangs like a half-sunken log in the current, and Wayne says what everybody is thinking.

  “We’ll float downstream—it’ll be easier to paddle her back light.”

  It makes no logical sense. Except for some of the food being gone (eaten), all the other gear and all the boys would still be with the boat, and it wouldn’t be any lighter. But it somehow sounds sensible and the boat is moved into middle current and catches the river and slides off out of town.

  Hot morning sun beating down. Steering the boat now and then with an idle push of the homemade paddles. Drifting on through town, the boat really just on the verge of sinking, portaging the short walk around the dam and reloading and finding the current again.

  The boat moves deceptively fast. The current seems sluggish, more so as the morning turns to noon and the day-heat comes, but as slow as it seems, the river is moving fast, faster than a quick walk, carrying boys and food away from town.

  Some notice. Wayne has science knowledge and uses his fingers as a gauge to measure progress against dead trees on the bank and says, “You know, we’re moving right along” and “I think we’re hitting at least four point six miles an hour” and “I’ve been calculating, and if we’re moving at four point six miles an hour and we’ve been drifting for four hours, we’ve come roughly eighteen point four miles.…”

  But nobody listens.

  The day is warm, the sky is completely open and blue; and in broken English, almost crippled English, and awe-inspiring gestures Gilson has revealed that he is almost a year older than anybody in the boat, lives in Rio de Janeiro, that there are prostitutes there and that he has availed himself of them not once but—holding up his fingers—four times.

  Telling all this, using the limited language and his hands, takes considerable time, and the audience—at an age when hormones run wild—is raptly attentive and does not notice the current or the distance traveled. There are many questions of a technical nature and each answer takes Gilson considerable time.

  Mile floats past aimless mile while Gilson struggles to describe how it was to Know Things, and when disaster comes it happens so fast and with such finality that it almost isn’t accepted.

  Gilson’s hand is in the air—something to do with female anatomy—he is struggling for a word, the perfect word, when there is a slight bumping sound beneath the hull and without further warning a short limb from a sunken snag jams through the boards and rips the entire bottom out of the boat.

  A half-second hangs, Gilson’s hand in the air, all eyes on the hand, the boat bottom gone; half a second, and then everything, everything goes under.

  The boat, already waterlogged, sinks like a stone and all the gear with it. There is time for nothing but survival. It has happened so fast Gilson’s hand is still in the air when he goes under, his eyes wide. Somebody has time for half of a foul word and then five boys are in and under the muddy water.

  Three heads come up sputtering, then four, and finally Gilson, who—it turns out—cannot, could not swim but has learned quickly how to do a cross between a paddlewheel riverboat and a thrashing dog and comes up in a spray of muddy water and eloquent Latin-based curses.

  “All right,” Wayne starts, treading water, “whose job was it to check the bottom boards?”

  But again, nobody listens, and Gilson—having had his fill of river water—wheels and aims for shore, leaving a rooster tail like a speedboat.

  The problem is that there isn’t a shore. The river has been winding deeper and deeper into thick forest, really northern jungle, and the undergrowth grows to the edge of the river and out, so thick it is hard to push an arm through it, let alone a body, so thick it prevents Gilson from leaving the river, from doing anything but hang on a limb staring at the muddy water around him whispering softly: “Snakes? Is snakes here?”

  Wayne finds a hole away from the bank, two feet across, high
enough to crawl where a beaver has dragged a log down the bank, and he pulls himself up out of the water and disappears into the green wall as if he’s been swallowed.

  “Come on.” His voice is muffled, within a few feet, and it’s almost impossible to hear him. “It’s nice in here.…”

  He has lied. We all follow him, slipping up from the water in the mud of the river’s side and into the greenness, the thick green of the forest, but he has lied to us.

  It is not “nice.”

  As soon as we are out of the sun and into green—so thick it wraps us, so close and cloying that Bruce hisses, “It’s like being in a jar of lime Kool-Aid”—as soon as we clear the direct light of the sun, the mosquitoes find us.

  Hordes, clouds, a mass so thick they cover all skin, sting the eyes, every inch they can reach, millions of them come at us so terribly that Gilson—who is almost totally urban and knows nothing of forests except for stories of the Brazilian rain forests and headhunters and snakes—Gilson goes mad with the mosquitoes, screaming and trying to run away from them. He is quickly tangled in hazel brush and wild grapevines, fights free and scrambles back down the tunnel to the river, where he sits submerged up to his neck refusing to come back out.

  “We need a fire,” Wayne says. “To make some smoke to drive them away.”

  “All the matches were in the boat.…”

  “Not all. I have some in my waterproof pocket container, along with salt and pepper.”

  “You would.…”

  But nobody complains when he scrapes some kindling together and uses one of the matches to start a small smudge fire that, miraculously, does work; the whiffs of smoke drive the mosquitoes away, and after convincing Gilson to leave the river and come under the protection of the smoke, there is time to consider the predicament.

  “How far,” somebody asks, “do you think we came down the river?”

  “Twenty-four point seven miles.” Wayne coughs.

  Everybody stares at Wayne.

  “How do you know that?”

  “Well if we were doing four point six miles an hour and we traveled …”

  “All right, all right.”

  “Of course the river winds a lot. In a straight shot we’re probably fourteen or fifteen miles from town. If we walk at an average of three miles an hour it’s going to be five, six hours. But the woods are so thick I don’t think we’ll make two, maybe a mile and a half an hour. Say twelve, sixteen hours of walking.”

  Everybody has been silent except Gilson, who is looking for snakes again and does not seem to understand that there are no poisonous snakes in the north woods.

  “What if we cut straight out?” Bruce points away from the river. “What’s out there?”

  “Ten, twelve miles of woods and then the highway. God knows how many swamps. We’re better off walking straight back to town.…”

  “I’m hungry.” Lloyd has been silent all this time. Like Gilson he did not know how to swim and learned on the way down with the boat and has been quiet since he came to shore. Until now. “I could eat rotten fish.…”

  “All the food went down with the boat.”

  “I know. I’m still hungry.”

  “Keep it to yourself.”

  “I’m still hungry.” As if he thought it would go away by talking about it.

  Argument followed discussion followed argument, standing in the smoke from leaves thrown on the fire, and nothing is agreed on by all people. Two think it would be wise to strike for the highway and two think it would be smartest to follow the river, with Gilson dissenting in ignorance. It is decided to vote and to give Gilson a chance to vote as well, though he has almost no idea of what is happening, and explaining it to him—as explaining that there are no poisonous snakes or jaguars in northern Minnesota—borders on the absurd. Any sound, the crack of a twig on the fire, Lloyd farting—any little sound and Gilson jumps a foot in the air and heads back for the river.

  Finally a vote is cast, and with much yelling and gesticulating Gilson casts his vote for following the river.

  “Hell,” Lloyd says, “he thinks he’s voting for a ride to town.”

  “It don’t matter.” Wayne shakes his head. “Elections are elections. The vote is done. We follow the river.”

  It was much easier to say than to do. There are game trails, but they wind like snakes and go in no consistent direction for more than ten or fifteen yards, and trying to move off the trails is like hitting a wall. Vines and thorns catch at clothing and skin, hold, impale, and soon everybody is cut and bleeding.

  “How far do you think we’ve come?” Lloyd asks after half an hour.

  “Maybe fifty yards. I can still see the smoke from our smudge hanging in the trees back there.”

  “How fast does that make us?”

  “We’ll get home,” Wayne says, looking up at the sky—for what reason nobody can define except that it gives him an air of knowledge—and calculating, “day after tomorrow, late in the day. If we keep moving at this speed and don’t stop to rest, or sleep or eat.”

  “Eat, hell. There ain’t nothing to eat.”

  “Snakes?”

  “No, Gilson. No snakes. None. Not any snakes.”

  It is at this precise instant Gilson steps on a snake. It is a garter snake, completely harmless except to frogs, about two feet long and just trying to cross the trail. Gilson steps on the tail and the snake responds by biting at his ankle. Garter snakes have no teeth and the response is purely automatic and cannot hurt, but Gilson looks down just as the snake is striking and there is nothing in the world that can stop him.

  He makes a sound like a muffled steam whistle and leaves. Simply leaves. One instant Gilson is there, in the middle of the group, and the next he is gone, vanished, having gone straight ahead in a shower of falling brush and ripping vines.

  “Well,” Wayne says, watching him go, “he’s heading in the right direction and leaving a good trail. Let’s follow him.”

  Gilson makes almost a hundred and fifty yards before wearing down, and his trail makes for easy walking until we come up on where he has stopped.

  “Morte,” he says, and we would not know what he means except that Wayne had seen the word in a comic book about Cisco Kid.

  “It’s death,” he says. “He thinks he’s dying.”

  “He sure made it easy getting here, breaking trail for us.” Lloyd looks back at the distance covered. “Did anybody think to pick up the snake? We could use it again. Kind of keep him going with it.”

  But nobody has thought of the snake, and after a moment Gilson is dragged to his feet—Wayne says he is confessing his sins by this time and wants to listen in case there’s anything good about the prostitutes—and we start again, weaving through the brush.

  It is nightmarish going. Slow enough so the mosquitoes can follow easily, and the undergrowth and trees keep away any chance of breeze to force them down.

  We are savaged by them. At first it helps to brush them away, but there are too many and at last we can only slog along, swollen with bites, thirsty and hungry, until near dark.

  “Now,” Lloyd says, “I’m really hungry.”

  “We can’t travel in the dark,” Wayne says. “Not without seeing the stars.”

  Everybody gathers wood for a fire. Everybody except Gilson, who has cleared a spot with his foot and is standing in the middle looking for snakes, and soon a fire is going and the mosquitoes are once again at bay. Working through the day has dried our clothing, and the fire raises spirits and Lloyd has amassed enough wood to burn for several nights, let alone one, and talk starts up about Gilson and the prostitutes and it is some time before anybody notices that Wayne is gone.

  “Where did he go?” Lloyd asks.

  “Did anybody hear a scream or anything?”

  “Snakes?”

  “Wayne!”

  There is nothing, no sound. Somebody throws more wood on the fire, heaps it until the flames go up fifteen feet, and we search in the light from the fi
re but there is no sign.

  “What could have happened?” Lloyd moves closer to the fire. “He was right here and then he just disappeared.… God, you don’t suppose a bear took him, do you?”

  “I don’t think a bear would want him.”

  “We’d have heard something. A yell, something.…”

  “We should look for him.”

  “In the dark?”

  Wayne was gone. More yelling was done, even Gilson forgetting the “jungle” long enough to add his voice but there was no answer and it was decided—after much argument—to wait until daylight to look for him.

  “Maybe he went back to the river, fell in and drowned …”

  All knew stories of boys who drowned in the river. Never girls, always boys going down in the murky water and not coming up because the temperature was so low it kept the bodies from generating gas to make them float. Put just that way. “The bodies don’t generate gas to make them float.…”

  But looking in the dark at the river would aid nothing, and others might drop in and drown and so, finally, more wood and still more wood is put on the fire and everybody lies strangely quiet, looking at the flames, until Lloyd starts:

  “You know, I liked Wayne. Always have.…”

  “Yeah, he’s all right. A little too full of numbers and stuff but not bad.…”

  And more until an hour has passed, everybody thinking Wayne has dropped in the river and getting sadder and sadder until there is a sound, a crackling in the brush, and Wayne comes into the firelight.

  Everybody is startled and jumps, including Gilson, who heads for the river again in the dark and has to be tackled and dragged back.

  “What are you carrying?”

  Wayne is holding a large object in his hands and when he gets into the light Lloyd identifies it.

  “A shovel?”

  He has an old scoop shovel, the handle long rotted away, and it is filled with eggs.

  “Eggs?” Lloyd says. “Where’d you get eggs?”

  “There’s a farm. Not half a mile away.” He is still breathing hard from trotting. “I heard a chicken squawk earlier and thought I should go investigate it. The people were gone but I found the chicken coop and the eggs and this old shovel to cook in. Oh, there’s a driveway. We can walk out tomorrow, get to the highway and hitch home.…”