Gary Paulsen: The River

To my daughter, Lynn, with love

Brian opened the door and stood back. There were three men, all in dark suits, standing on the front porch. They were large but not fat, well built, with bodies in decent shape. One of them was slightly thinner than the other two.

“Brian Robeson?”

Brian nodded. “Yes.”

The thin man smiled and stepped forward and held out his hand. “I’m Derek Holtzer. These other two are Bill Mannerly and Erik Ballard. Can we come in?”

Brian held the door open to let them come in. “Mother isn’t home right now….”

“It’s you we want to see.” Derek stopped just in the entryway and the other two did the same. “Of course, we’ll wish to speak to your mother and father as well, but we came to see you. Didn’t you get a call about us?”

Brian shook his head. “I don’t think so. I mean, I know I didn’t, but I don’t think Mother did either. She would have said something.”

“How about your father?”

“He… doesn’t live here. My parents are divorced.”

“Oh. Sorry.” Derek truly looked embarrassed. “I didn’t know.”

“It happens.” Brian shrugged, but it was still new enough, just over a year and a half, to feel painful. He mentally pushed it away and had a sudden thought of his own foolishness. Three men he did not know were in the house. They did not look threatening, but you never knew.

“What can I do for you?”

“Well, if you don’t know anything about any of this, maybe we should wait for your mother to come home. We can come back.”

Brian nodded. “Whatever you want… but you could tell me what it’s about, if you wanted to.”

“Maybe I’d better check on you first. Are you the Brian Robeson who survived alone in the Canadian woods for two months?”

“Fifty-four days,” Brian said. “Not quite two months. Yes — that’s me.”

“Good.”

“Are you from the press?” For months after his return home, Brian had been followed by the press. Even after the television special — a camera crew went back with him to the lake and he showed them how he’d lived — they stayed after him. Newspapers, television, book publishers — they called him at home, followed him to school. It was hard to get away from them. One man even offered him money to put his face on a T-shirt, and a jeans company wanted to come out with a line of Brian Robeson Survival Jeans.

His mother had handled them all, with the help — through the mail — of his father, and he had some money in an account for college. Actually, enough to complete college. But it had finally slowed down and he didn’t miss it.

At first it had been exciting, but soon the thrill had worn off. He was famous, and that wasn’t too bad, but when they started following him with cameras and wanting to make movies of him and his life it got a little crazy.

He met a girl in school, Deborah McKenzie. They hit it off and went on a few dates, and pretty soon the press was bugging her as well and that was too much. He started going out the back door, wearing sunglasses, meeting Deborah in out-of-the-way places, and sliding down the hallways in school. He was only too glad when people stopped noticing him.

And here they were again. “I mean, are you with television or anything?”

Derek shook his head. “Nope — not even close. We’re with a government survival school.”

“Instructors?”

Derek shook his head. “Not exactly. Bill and Erik are instructors, but I’m a psychologist. We work with people who may need to survive in bad situations — you know, like downed pilots, astronauts, soldiers. How to live off the land and get out safely.”

“What do you want with me?”

Derek smiled. “You can probably guess….”

Brian shook his head.

“Well, to make it short, we want you to do it again.”

Brian stared at him. “It’s a joke, right?”

Derek shook his head. “Not at all — but I think we should wait for your mother to come home and talk to her and your father. We’ll come back later.”

He turned to leave and the other two men, still silent, followed him to the door.

“Just a minute.” Brian stopped them. “Maybe I didn’t understand what you said — let me get it straight. You want me to go back and do it over again? Live in the woods with nothing but a hatchet?”

Derek nodded. “That’s it.”

“But that’s crazy. It was… rough. I mean, I almost died and it was just luck that I made it out.”

Derek shook his head. “No. Not luck. You had something more going for you besides luck.”

Brian had a mental picture of the porcupine coming into his shelter in the dark, throwing the hatchet and hitting the rock embedded in the wall and getting sparks. If the porcupine hadn’t come in and he hadn’t thrown the hatchet, and if the hatchet hadn’t hit the rock just right, there wouldn’t have been sparks and he wouldn’t have had a fire and he might not be standing here talking to this man now. “Most of it was luck….”

“Let me explain what I mean.”

Brian waited.

“We teach what you did, or we try to. But the truth is, we have never done it and we don’t know anybody who has ever done it. Not for real.” He shrugged, his shoulders moving under the jacket. “Oh, we do silly little tests, you know, where we go out and pretend to survive. But nobody in our field has ever had to do it — where everything is on the line.” He looked directly at Brian. “Like you.”

The one named Bill Mannerly stepped forward. “We want you to teach us. Not from a book, not from pamphlets or training films, but really teach us what it’s like. So we can teach others more accurately.”

Brian smiled. He couldn’t help it. “You mean take a class out and show them what I did?”

Derek held up his hands and shook his head. “No. Not like that. Nothing phony. We haven’t worked it all out yet, but we thought one of us would go with you and stay out there with you, live the way you live, watch you — learn. Learn . Take notebooks and make notes, write everything down. We really want to know how you did it — all the parts of it.”

Brian believed him. His voice was soft and sincere and his eyes were honest, but still Brian shook his head. “It wasn’t like you think. It wasn’t a camping trip. I lost weight, but more than that, I didn’t come back the same.” And, he thought, I’m still not the same; I’ll never be the same. He could not walk through a park without watching the trees for game, could not not hear things. Sometimes he wanted not to see, not to hear everything around him — noise, colors, movement. But he couldn’t blank them out. He saw, heard, smelled everything.

“That’s what we want to know. Those things.” Derek smiled. “Look, don’t say no yet. Let us come back and talk to your mother, explain it all, and then you can make a decision. All right?”

Brian nodded slowly. “All right. Just to talk, right?”

“Just to talk.”

The three men left, and Brian looked at the digital clock on the table in the entryway. It would be an hour before his mother got home. He had some studying to do — it was the end of May and there were finals — but he decided to cook dinner.

He loved to cook.

It was one of the things that had changed about him from the time when he was in the woods. He thought of it as the Time.