Getting back

by William Dietrich

  "In your dreams, Washington."

  "I'm just inventorying our resources."

  "Use your gadgets to keep yourself warm."

  They found another sandy riverbed at noon the next day, but even after following it upstream for several miles they found no water. "Doesn't this country have any wet stuff in its rivers?" Tucker asked rhetorically. "This is weird." Lunch was quiet, the flies so persistent that the travelers had mostly given up trying to swat at them, though Ico still wore his head net. They were down to a quart of water each.

  "If we don't find more water we might have to hike back," Daniel said gloomily. "We can't go on without it."

  Amaya looked thoughtfully at the sand. "I've got an idea," she said. "Let's go back to that bend we passed a mile or so ago."

  "I don't want to go backward," Ico groused. "In fact I don't want to do anything right now. I'm exhausted. Let's nap."

  "I told you that you were carrying too much," Tucker lectured.

  "I'm keeping up. I just don't want to go into reverse."

  "What's your idea?" Daniel asked Amaya.

  "There's probably water under the sand here. Deserts swallow it after a rain, but it doesn't disappear. We just have to dig in the right place."

  "So what's the right place?"

  "I'll show you. Come on, Ico, it's not far."

  "Aw, Mom."

  They trudged back. It was strange to encounter their own footprints; it was the first sign of humans they'd seen in this place. At the bend of the dry river there was a sandy bluff the water had eaten into, and a hollow in the sand beneath it. "The dynamics of the surface water digs out pools at places like this," she explained. "I'm betting there might be another pool beneath us, in the sand." She dropped her pack, got a stick, and began to dig. "Come on."

  The men joined her, each taking a turn. It was blisteringly hot. "If you're wrong, we're going to melt right here," Tucker warned.

  "Yes. This is our first real test."

  Two feet down the sand darkened, then grew moist. "Widen the hole," she directed. The sand flew more furiously and then they stopped, exhausted.

  Dirty water drained into it. "It's just mud," Daniel objected.

  Amaya scooped out the muddy water and cast it aside on the sand. "That's just from our disturbance. Now we wait. The trick in the wild is patience."

  They retreated to the shade of some gum trees and sat, weary. The sun was dipping lower and they allowed themselves sips of their last water. "I thought it would be easier to drink out here," Daniel admitted. "If Outback Adventure drops people in at random like that, I mean. The company didn't emphasize water-finding skills and the desert is pretty green. I assumed we'd find some water each day."

  "Maybe that was our first test," Ico replied. "Our assumptions."

  "The good news is, it's a test we're passing," Tucker said optimistically. "We found water anyway, right?"

  Time crawled on. Daniel lay back to study the branches of the trees, watching the flitting birds. Wanting something to do, he began to try to identify them. Ico had taken out a book on disk. Tucker dozed, and Amaya sat as if meditating. The group was nervous but no one wanted to articulate it. They could die out here, and no one was coming to their rescue.

  As the shadows lengthened a bird fluttered down and hopped to the lip and then into the trench. It gave a call and flew out. Amaya came out of her trance and crawled forward, lying on the lip of the hole as if mesmerized. Then she turned to grin. "Daniel! Bring a cup!"

  They camped in the riverbed that night, first drinking their fill from the slowly filling hole and then carefully refilling their water bottles. As Amaya had predicted, cleaner water had flowed into the hole, filtered by the sand. They drank and drank, and then collected more water to wash, a reminder of civility that helped revive their spirits. The success of the well restored their confidence. With patience, they could prevail.

  A new moon rose and Daniel decided to go hunting. Taking his spear, he climbed out of the riverbank and into the surrounding bush, moving slowly and taking his bearings frequently so he wouldn't get lost. Twice he saw furtive movement and once he threw at it, hitting nothing. Still, his ability to negotiate the wilderness in the dark encouraged him. It was another step toward being at home here.

  They broke camp before dawn to set out east again, having filled every possible container with water. The sun was fixing their schedule: a hard morning's hike, a siesta, another spurt toward likely water and camp. As they moved out some large forms bounded away in front of them.

  "Kangaroos," Daniel breathed.

  Even Ico, bent under his heavy pack, brightened. "Cool!"

  "When are you going to hit one of those, Daniel?" Tucker asked.

  "When they agree to stand still."

  The sky was as shiny as blue porcelain, the desert as red as Mars. They wound eastward through shrubby trees spaced like slalom poles. Amaya spotted some sap on another mulga tree, collected some bits on a stick, and ate it. "It's sweet, like candy," she said. Dubious, the men tried it.

  "Well, better than ant balls," Ico said.

  "How do you know?" she teased him. "I haven't made one of those for you yet."

  They found water again that night, this time in a series of pools on the surface, and Amaya found some wild passion fruit in the creek bed, splitting the orange rind and sucking out the seeds. Their sense of familiarity was growing. They built a fire again, and as its coals burned down Daniel slipped off to hunt once more, his confidence growing at his ability to navigate in the dark. He began to move slowly, walking a short distance and then stopping to stand perfectly still, his eyes searching the monochromatic moonscape for movement. After an hour, his effort was rewarded: a shape in the darkness moved, then hopped toward him. A kangaroo. He sucked in his breath and waited. It hopped closer. He raised his makeshift javelin, and as he did so his own movement alerted the animal and it bolted. By the time Daniel threw, it was a shadow bounding into the dark. He trotted to pick up his spear. Next time he'd have to stalk with his arm already upraised. Still, he felt satisfied he'd found big game. He spent a few minutes simply throwing: rocks, sticks, his spear. He was training unfamiliar muscles in a skill that dated back a million years.

  As he slowly worked his way down the riverbed back to camp he heard some gentle splashing and stopped again, alert. Something was in a pool of the riverbed.

  Slowly he crept ahead, his spear upraised, his head down. He pushed his head through some bushes and then stopped, sucking in his breath. It was Amaya, bathing. She was naked, standing in water to her thighs, her slim body luminous under the glow of the night sky. She was scooping up water and letting it pour onto her face, and then run down her small breasts and smooth belly. The drops glittered as they bounced off her, falling into a mirror of stars. She washed with the same unconscious grace of a wild animal, and Daniel was jarred by the natural beauty of it, entranced by her form's pearl luminescence under the night sky.

  He didn't know whether it was best to try to retreat, possibly startling and embarrassing her with his noise, or to step into view as warning, intruding on her respite. Finally he decided to do and say nothing. She dipped to her shoulders in the cold water with a gasp and then sprang upward, the water spraying as she shook herself, her arms flung out. It was erotic to watch the water stream down her but also innocent, primeval. There was an abstraction to the scene. Her features were indistinct and so there was only the sculpture of her limbs and torso, bent this way and that. Daniel was transfixed. Finally she finished and waded to the shore to slip into her underwear and walk back to camp. She paused a minute and looked across the pool as if staring directly at him, then slipped away into the dark. He waited ten more minutes and then followed. She'd retired into her tent. He slipped into his own bedroll, looking up into a night sky that seemed like a pool of dark water itself.

  The next day was long and hot, and the following evening they were on a scrub plain and couldn't find even a likely place to dig. They nurs
ed what water they had carefully, sprawled on the red earth. After a few minutes Tucker sprang up again. "Ants! I'm on a damn nest!" He moved to a new spot, searching the ground carefully. "Some campground," he grumbled.

  "All we can do is sleep as best we can and push on," Daniel said.

  The dryness was beginning to be discouraging. He felt sunburned, insect-bitten, and grimy, and had yet to get close enough to an animal to successfully kill it. He knew he hadn't been patient enough but didn't want to hold up the group to take the time necessary to learn how to hunt. At some point, though, they would need the food- even Ico. Daniel mused about making a bow and arrow, but it sounded difficult and he knew the aborigines hadn't bothered even when shown them by visiting tribes; their spears and throwing sticks and rocks had been adequate to bring down game. All he was lacking was skill.

  "We'd better walk tomorrow until we find water," Ico said. "Walk and pray for rain."

  They hiked on the next day through the midday sun, conversation trailing off into numbed silence under the pounding heat. Red dust puffed up from their footfalls. The morning's birds disappeared and the desert was as still and radiantly hot as an emptied parking lot. Nothing moved except the flies, no breeze blew, and there was no sound except the creak of their gear, the trudge of feet, and the relentless buzz of the insects. They joked halfheartedly about missing beer, or air conditioning, or a winter blizzard, but after a while the jokes seemed lame. The liberation from noise and humanity was beginning to seem oppressive. It seemed like they'd been walking forever and had encountered only a vast nothing; that they were no closer to finding whatever it was they were looking for than they had been in the city. It was becoming harder and harder to pretend their outing was a good time.

  It was sunset when they finally came to another riverbed, this one broad and shallow in a valley so imperceptibly sloped that they hadn't realized they were in one. There were no standing pools, no likely bends, and a test dig yielded nothing but dry sand. They slumped around the hole wearily.

  "We're exhausted," Amaya said. "We'll have to ration what we have and search more carefully in the morning. We'll find a place for a well like last time."

  "What if we don't?" Tucker asked.

  She brushed her hair back from a dirty cheek, tired. "We will. If it was going to be easy, there would be no point in coming here."

  Daniel nodded at her. He'd found himself looking and thinking about her differently since seeing her at the pool, and even though he hadn't said anything about it, he thought she noticed. She turned her head away shyly.

  "This is fucked, you know that?"

  Ico's complaint was ignored. What could they do?

  He persisted. "I mean, dying of thirst was not a part of the brochure that I remember."

  "Ico, stuff it, okay?" Daniel said with irritation, turning to unstrap his bedroll. He was tiring of the little man's attitude. "We're all hot and tired and thirsty."

  "Maybe we're doing something wrong. Maybe we're going in the wrong direction."

  "You want to walk away from Exodus Port?"

  "I just want a drink, man. Doesn't it ever rain?"

  "It does up there." Tucker pointed. To the north, lightning flickered in the dusk. They heard the distant growl of thunder. "Maybe we'll get a storm down here."

  Ico stood and looked to the north hopefully. "Hey! Rain! Come this way!" He waved his arms. "Yoo-hoo!" He turned to the others. "We just need to think as well as walk, that's all I'm saying."

  "So think, don't complain."

  Ico watched the luminous horizon, rumbling like an artillery barrage. "If rain comes, we should put out some containers to catch it. And a ground sheet."

  "Now you're an optimist again."

  He grinned. "In this godforsaken place? I'm not stupid, Tucker. Just desperate." He bent to his pack. "Just in case we get lucky, though, I'm going to put out every dish I have."

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Daniel's exhausted dreams were so turbulent that at first Tucker's warning cry seemed to come from the miasma of his nightmare.

  In his sleep he was lost on a vast white plain. It was as flat as a piece of paper and crisscrossed with his own tracks. His footprints led off confusingly in all directions and he was uncertain if the whiteness at his feet was sand or snow. There was an ominous rumbling in the distance. Daniel was overwhelmed by a feeling of sad uncertainty, of having made a fatal wrong turn, and the resulting dread was threatening to paralyze him. Before he could decide what to do, however, Tucker's cries became more insistent. Finally they blew the vividness of his dream into the shards of dark reality and he opened his eyes. It was night in Australia, black and confused.

  "Get up!" Tucker was roaring. "Get up, get up! It's flooding!"

  The big man was dragging something uphill. It was Amaya's tent, Daniel realized, and the woman was yelling inside it. Then the horizon flashed and in the lightning's lurid blast he saw trees shaking wildly and the glint of something wet pouring toward him like a chocolate slurry. It was as if the land had risen and was being shaken toward him in undulating waves.

  Flash flood!

  Daniel's bedroll had the grace of being zipperless, and he was out of it and scrambling for higher ground in an instant, instinctively dragging his bedding with him. A breaking wave of muddy water was pouring down the dry river bottom to devour their camp. As he surmounted the bank and grasped the trunk of a tree, lightning flashed again and he saw the water strike something angular and carry it off. There was a muffled shout. Ico's tent! In numbed fascination, Daniel watched one of the containers that had been put out to catch some raindrops being swept away in the current.

  The wall of water had appeared out of nowhere and now it roared by with a furious gush of rolling stones, pitching logs, and jabbing branches, devouring everything in its path with the noise and clumsy power of a medieval army. The sound was overwhelming and the night had turned pitch black, Daniel's blindness relieved only by strobes of lightning. The flashes were dry- there was not a drop of rain- and yet even as he registered the weirdness of this the storm opened and a cloudburst sluiced down, adding to the din. Daniel felt he'd been clubbed, so heavy was the water. It pushed him to his knees.

  "Ico! Daniel!" It was Tucker, shouting from the dark trees farther from the river. Daniel groped in that direction. There was a flash of lightning and he saw the tall man leaning against a tree with rainwater streaming down his face. A stunned, wet Amaya was crawling from her tangled, muddied tent, her eyes wide, and she clutched a moment at Tucker's leg as if to seek reassurance. Daniel stumbled up to them.

  "You all right?" They said it simultaneously.

  "Ico," Daniel gasped. "I saw the river take him. We have to go hunt downstream."

  Amaya stood unsteadily, the rain lashing at them, and then gripped them both with a look of grim determination. "We might need a rope!" she shouted. "I'll get the clothesline we rigged! You two start down and I'll follow!"

  "Are you going to be all right?" Daniel shouted back.

  "Yes, yes, go on!"

  Tucker pulled at him and the two men moved off clumsily in the dark, following the edge of the flood but keeping a wary distance as sections of sandy bank collapsed. The water bucked and pitched, eating at the shore with greedy menace, and both men feared their companion was already gone.

  There was a flash and a following crack of thunder so close upon it that they staggered as if an artillery shell had gone off nearby. Sparks flew in the night and there was a crash of something falling in the trees. Daniel wanted desperately to crouch and hide and wait until the storm was over, but forced himself to keep going. He tripped, sprawled, and got up again as Tucker hauled on his arm. "I heard a yell!" the big man shouted.

  They felt their way to the river's edge, rain beating on them like hail. Lightning stabbed again and they saw a tree had toppled into the current, something synthetic caught in its branches and fluttering in the current like a flag. Ico's tent! There was another yell and they saw a dark s
hape in the branches that could be someone's head. "Ico!" Tucker roared. "We see you! Work yourself this way!"

  Their companion was obviously trying, but any loosening of his grip threatened to release him into the current. "I'm going after him," Tucker growled. He leaped in, dropping to his waist on the upstream end of his log, and immediately his feet were jerked out from under him and he went under the tree, saving himself only by grabbing the bark and hauling himself back upward on the downstream side. With difficulty, he heaved himself back onto shore, spitting dirty water. "Damn!"

  Daniel studied the tree trunk shuddering in the flood, its roots not yet fully pried out of the ground. "I'm lighter!" he shouted above the rain. "I'll climb out to him and you follow. When I get to him, hold my ankles and don't let go!"

  The tree was slick and shook more violently the farther he inched out along it, the flood sucking at the wood. In perspective he felt like a bug swirling toward a drain, his face just inches from the water. "Ico!" he screamed into the storm. "Work this way!" An arm flailed as their companion struggled to do so, grasping a new branch and letting go of the old and then being jerked furiously by the current, his body like a rag snapped by the wind. Ico's strength had to be ebbing.

  Daniel felt Tucker's huge hands grasp his ankles like a reassuring vise and the clamp was enough to give him the courage to stretch farther toward the third man, as if on a rack. Lightning lit the river and they glimpsed each other's terrified face. Ico reached, touched blindly, grabbed, slipped, and then snared Daniel's wrist with his other hand as he was being pulled away by the current. The fumbling was enough to pull Daniel from the tree as well and they pivoted, Daniel's legs in Tucker's grasp. Then with a frustrated grunt the third man was levered off the tree too and the trio was in the flood waters, swirling downstream in a confused tangle.

  They went under, Ico clawing in terror at the other two. Everything seemed stronger than Daniel: Tucker, the frantic Ico, the kick and butt of the river. They struck something hard and it was enough to ricochet them to the surface, sucking in breaths that were half water and half air. They were in a mad pirouette, totally disoriented.