Gary Paulsen - The River

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 picture 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.

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.