Gary Paulsen - The River

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.”

“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.

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.