Gary Paulsen - The River

It wasn’t terribly high — thirty feet or so — but it was steep and very unstable, the edge loose and soft from the rain.

Brian had moved close to the edge. Down below he could see into the green water of the lake and there were fish moving and the sight made him realize how hungry he was becoming. It had been over a day now — they had eaten normally the day before when they flew to the lake — and the hunger was becoming demanding.

He turned to see Derek, who was coming up the back of the hill. “See the fish—”

Brian had come too close to the soft soil at the edge, and before he could finish the sentence, the bank let go.

He dropped like an anvil, his finger still pointing at the fish. Halfway down the face of the cut there was a small outcropping of soil and rocks mixed, held in place because it was made of clay and chalk bound together, and Brian hit this mound on his stomach. Hard.

“Ooomph!” He heard himself sound like the air going out of a tire, then he bounced up and sideways and continued on down to the bottom in a shower of mud and rocks, to where a small gravel beach led into the lake.

I don’t think I’ll move , he thought, lying flat on his face. Ever again.

Derek was by his side in moments, frowning in worry. “Are you hurt?”

I wonder why people ask that, Brian thought. Did he think I could do this and not hurt?

But he shook his head. “No. At least I don’t think so….”

He rose, or put his hands down to push himself up, and as he made the move he noticed the rocks around him on the beach. Most of them were round and smooth, rubbled by wind and water and weather and time, but mixed in with them were black, hardened shards.

Where he’d fallen there were fresh ones, not weathered, and he saw that they had come from the bank where he had bounced.

“Look,” Brian held up one of the black stones. It was chipped and layered. “I think it might be the same kind of stone I used to make fire with the hatchet.”

“Flint,” Derek said. “I think it is.”

Brian took out his knife, opened it and locked the blade, and struck the back of the hard steel against the sharp edge of the flint. Three, four times he hit and finally there were sparks.

He looked up, smiling. “No more mosquitoes.”

He took two of the larger black stones and they went to find a campsite, and here, too, there was the waiting for luck.

They walked nearly halfway around the lake, looking always as well for food. As they worked past the northern end of the lake they came on low brush filled with small nuts. These he knew were hazelnuts, and they stopped to pick and eat some. They were ripe, or very close, just shy of being dry, and the worms and squirrels had been at them, but they still found enough to cut the edge off their hunger. They used rocks to smash them and spent over an hour bashing rocks and nibbling at the small chunks of nutmeat, which tasted almost sweet.

It was then approaching evening and Brian knew they would need a shelter of some kind and a fire, before dark and the evening horde of insects found them.

Then, coming out of a stand of thick willows, they found it.

In some ancient time, an enormous tree had fallen in a giant wind. The tree had been growing on the side of a small hill, which was made on a rocky shelf. As the tree went over it pulled earth, balled in its roots, with it, and made a large hole back in, under the shelf of rocks.

Time had done the rest. The tree was long rotted and gone to worms, the soil had filtered somewhat back into the hole and taken grass seeds, and what was left was a large depression in the side of the hill with an overhanging shelf of rock. On each side of the depression there were large trees — white pines that went towering up and shaded the whole place to make it feel like a quiet garden.

It was not perfect, not as nice as Brian had had on the L -shaped lake. But it was good enough, far better than nothing, and to cap it off, there was a small spring of water to the side of the overhang, where a fissure of rock let water work out in a trickle that made its way down to the lake.

“Home,” Brian said.

Derek looked at the depression. “It looks like a hole — what do we do to make it livable?”

“Beds and a fire. You use pine boughs to make the beds.” He showed Derek how to cut the boughs and stick them point down to make a soft bed. “You do that and I’ll work on a fire.”

“I need to watch you do that,” Derek said. “So I can write about it.”

Brian nodded and set out to find what he needed.

He would never forget the first fire, what it had meant to him — as important as it must have been to early man — and he approached making a fire now almost as a religious experience.

You could not hurry it, he knew. Fire would come only when it wanted to come, and only when there was a good bed for it, a home for it.

He found some birches near the shoreline and shredded dry birch bark with his fingernails until it was like hair. He kept adding to this until he had a ball of fluff three inches in diameter.

To this he added some pulverized, dried grass, worked almost into flour, and when it was all together, he gently used his finger to make a hole in the middle.

A home for the fire, he thought. A place for it to live.

Derek had watched all of this with intense interest, writing in his notebook from time to time, underlining things, nodding.

Brian set aside the tinder and found some dry pine twigs, as small as matches. When he had a good pile of these, broken and lined up for use, he searched for slightly larger dry wood and still larger until he had a pile as high as his knees.

In all of this he was silent, thinking only of the fire, but he turned to Derek now. “You can’t have too much wood. Ever. And you should always have dried wood stashed back in some safe place, along with tinder….” He paused, thinking, remembering.

“What is it?” Derek asked.

“Fire. It’s so… so alive. Such an important thing to us. Back there in the world we don’t know that. But when I got home last time I tried to read about what it was like, you know, before we got everything we have now. In colonial times they kept people awake just to watch the fires, and in ancient times the most important person in the tribe was called the fire watcher.”

Derek wrote it down and Brian smiled. Something about Derek walking around all day looking for berries and nuts, carrying a briefcase like a business executive, seemed ridiculous. But he meant what he was doing and Brian liked him more and more all the time. When he’d fallen and Derek had kneeled next to him, he had been genuinely worried.

Fire.

There was a lowering of light now and evening would not be long, accompanied by the waiting bugs.

He and Derek made a small fire pit in front of the overhang. Then Brian put the tinder on the ground in the pit so that the flame cup was aimed upward.

Over this he held the piece of flint.

He struck it with the knife and nothing came.

Naturally, he thought. If it were easy, everybody would want to do this.

He hit again and again and finally the sparks came. Now he slammed the stone with the back of the knife blade with renewed force, again and again until a small shower of sparks fell into the cup.

Quickly he raised the tinder in his hand, blowing gently, softly on the sparks, watching as they became glowing holes in the tinder and the holes grew, became red, turned to coals and finally, blowing as he put it back on the ground, smoke curling up into his eyes, there came the tiny flicker of new flame.

Hello , he thought— hello, flame . Fire.

He fed small twigs to the flame, crossing them and recrossing them until the fire was full, healthy. Then he added larger sticks and still larger until they filled the pit and there was the crackling sound of a full fire.