Gary Paulsen - The River

He wasn’t at Brannock’s Trading Post. He was here.

Yet he couldn’t take his eyes off the spot on the map. It was there, on the same map — just there. And he refolded the map so it would show the lake where they were and the trading post at the same time. He used his fingers to make a divider and measured it straight down, but it didn’t mean anything.

Then he remembered that the grids stood for five kilometers each, and when he counted the numbers of grids between the lake and Brannock’s he came up with about sixteen squares.

“So how far is that?” he said to Derek. “Five times sixteen — maybe eighty, eighty-five kilometers.”

But that was straight — in a straight line southeast.

The river was nowhere near straight, looping back and forth and actually flowing slightly north back along itself at one point.

He started counting, measuring the river as it turned through each five-kilometer square, marking each ten kilometers in the dirt with a line through it, then the next set of ten. It was involved and took him some time, but finally he was done.

He counted them.

“One hundred and fifty kilometers,” he said. “One point six kilometers to a mile. Just under a hundred miles.”

He looked at Derek, who did not move, who made no sign.

“There are people just under a hundred miles from here.”

But what good did that do?

“Here it is — I could leave you and try to follow the river out and bring help back.”

Which, he thought, sounded insane. There were animals. They would come, and if they thought Derek was dead…. He was defenseless. They might attack him. Even eat him. Even small things — ants, bugs.

“I can’t leave you.”

Brian looked at the map again. It was there, the answer was there. Brannock’s Trading Post was the answer and the river was the answer, but he didn’t see how.

He couldn’t leave Derek.

He couldn’t leave Derek….

What if he took Derek with him?

He said it aloud. “What if we went out together?”

On the face of it, it sounded like madness. Haul a man in a coma nearly a hundred miles out of the wilderness on a river.

You could say that, Brian thought, but there was a lot of difference between saying it and doing it.

How could he?

The river. If he had a boat… or a raft.

If he made a raft and put Derek on the raft, there might be a way he could make the run and take Derek out, get him to the trading post and to help.

And even as he said it he knew it was crazy. A hundred miles on a wilderness river with a raft, hauling a grown man who would be nothing but dead weight, was impossible.

He would have dropped it, except that he looked up from the map and saw the truth then; looked up and saw Derek with his eyes half open and not seeing, awake but not truly living, the minutes of his life moving past and Brian knew that he really didn’t have any choice.

If he stayed Derek would die of thirst in two, perhaps three days. Well before the week or ten days that would pass before the pilot came looking to see what happened.

If he stayed, Derek would die.

If he made the run, took Derek down the river, at least there was a chance.

He had no choice.

Time was everything now — once the decision was made, time was vital. But Brian took a minute to scan the map once more and do some mental calculating, and it didn’t come up too terrible.

Say it was a hundred miles by river.

When they’d landed they’d come down next to where the river left the lake, and Brian had watched the current as it flowed away. It seemed to move about as fast as a person walked — maybe three miles an hour. Of course, that didn’t mean that it would continue to flow at that speed, but it would probably be about the same.

If he could get into the current and move with it and stay with it, a hundred miles would take thirty-five or forty hours.

He studied it closer on the map and noted that it grew wider as it flowed and that in some places it moved through hilly country — there were contour lines on the map close together, which meant steeper hills. Here the current might even be a little faster.

A day and a half, he thought. Then he said it aloud for Derek. “A day and a half. A long day and a half, but if we keep moving, stay in the river and don’t stop, we should make the trading post in a day and a half. Maybe two days.” And that, he thought without saying, is a lot better than seven or eight.

A lot better than dying.

There were two places where the river ran into lakes and out the other end, and many smaller ponds and what might be swamps where the river moved through a center of a small body of water. They would slow him down.

He could not judge how much, but none of them were large, and if he stayed on the edge and used a pole he should be able to keep moving well enough not to lose too much time.

Time.

He was sitting, reading, looking at the map, and there wasn’t time for it.

He needed to build a raft.

He checked Derek one more time, made certain his breathing was regular and that his heart was beating steadily and then moved off down the side of the lake, looking for wood.

The problem was not wood so much as the lack of a tool. When he’d made the raft before to go out to the plane he’d had his hatchet, and he missed it terribly now. After he’d been rescued and gone home, his mother had put the hatchet in a glass case in the living room, where she kept the china handed down by her grandmother. He’d looked at it as he’d left the house, but they had decided that having a hatchet might not be realistic.

“Lots of people carry a knife of some kind,” Derek had said. “But how many have a hatchet on their belt?”

So all he had was a knife — well, two knives, actually. He had Derek’s knife as well. He’d almost forgotten that.

But even two knives wouldn’t help him cut through logs.

There was wood all over the place. Wind storms over the years had knocked down pines and spruce trees and many of them were the right diameter to use for making a raft — six or eight inches and straight. But they were for the most part too long, or still connected to the root structure, which made them impossible to use.

But Brian moved along the lake, up from the shore and back, and finally he found a stand of large poplars where beavers had been working.

He knew almost nothing of beavers except that they lived in the water, chewed trees down, and looked cute when he saw them swimming in the water. Except for pictures he’d never seen one on dry land, but he’d seen how they took trees down and this stand of poplars was a good example. In a hundred-yard circle there wasn’t a tree standing.

There were pointed stumps everywhere, with tooth marks on them, and dropped trees fallen across each other so thickly that it looked like giants had started to play pick-up-sticks and walked away before finishing the game.

The beavers had been working at the grove for some time — probably years — and they had not only dropped the trees, many of them the right diameter, but they had cut the limbs off and dragged them down pathways to the lake and cut some of the tree trunks in sections between eight and ten or twelve feet long, apparently to make them easier to move.

It’s like I hired them, Brian thought, looking at all the fallen poplars — just to cut them down for me.

The older trees, which had been cut down the year or two before, were well dried out, and when Brian rolled and skidded them down to the lake he found that they floated well. Four of them side by side held him up easily when he used his arms to hold them together and crawled on top of them. He got wet, but they held him.