The River (5 page)

“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.

Brian settled back on his haunches and smiled; looked up at Derek, who was also smiling.

Brian gestured around with his hand. “No more mosquitoes—the smoke keeps them away. It doesn’t even take much, just a little blowing around. But we need more wood.”

They took the next hour to gather wood, stacking it until they had a large pile to the side of the camp, and Derek used the time to cut pine boughs for beds as well. When it was late, and they finally lay back to rest, they had done much to make the overhang a home.

Brian went to sleep on his side. The last thing he heard before he dozed was the sound of a wolf. He heard Derek rise.

“It’s a wolf,” Brian said. “Far away, just singing. Besides, wolves don’t bother you. You can go back to sleep.”

And Derek did, rolling over, his breathing even, and Brian let sleep come again.

B
rian stood away from the fish trap and shook his head.

Nothing was the same, really.

It was a beautiful day, with the mid-afternoon sun shining down on them, and he thought of what the problem could be, what was wrong.

It had somehow turned into one big happy camping trip.

We might as well have a cooler full of soft drinks and sandwiches, Brian thought.

They’d been at the lake three days, but it looked like they’d been there a year. The camp was squared away and neat. Derek had called in on the radio and told the world they were all right, telling them to pass the information on to Brian’s parents—Brian thought his mother might worry if she knew about them sending the gear back. Then they had enhanced the beds and made them deep and soft with more boughs, there was enough firewood for a month, and they had made birch-bark containers to hold extra hazelnuts and berries.

They’d found blueberries and raspberries and plums. On this side of the lake the forest was more open and the plums and nuts and berries seemed to thrive in the light and heat.

Wild plums. They were a little green, but even so, Brian couldn’t believe how sweet and rich they were—like small, domestic plums, with a little more tang to them.

Brian had made a bow, used a strip from his belt for a string, and had shown Derek how to shoot fish, then how to use the guts from one fish to bait the others into a trap made of stones; and they soon had more fish than they needed. Brian found a clam bed and they had actually eaten one meal—clams steamed around the fire, nuts, and berries—that left them full.

Full.

Plus, they had more clams stored and plenty of fish left in the trap and knew the locations of several ruffed grouse. There were rabbits and squirrels all over the place, and if they had to they could make it a year or two, and it felt wrong.

All wrong.

He shook his head again and moved back by the fire pit. Derek was sitting on his bed by the fire, feeding an occasional stick to the fire to keep it going, writing in his notebook. He looked up as Brian walked into the shelter, and saw him shaking his head.

“What’s the matter?”

Brian shrugged. “I don’t know—it’s just wrong, I think.”

“What do you mean—wrong?”

Brian looked around at the shelter, the comfort, the food, the fire, the lake. “All this. We’re so . . . so ready. So calm. It doesn’t work, somehow. None of it works.”

“I still don’t know for sure what you’re talking about. We’ve done it. In four days you’ve shown me how to live in the wilderness with nothing but a knife. I’ve got tons of notes to take back and teach from—I think you’re wrong.”

“But this isn’t how it works,” Brian said. “It isn’t this smooth and easy. You don’t just fly in and get set on a perfect lake and have all the food you want and have it all come this easy. It isn’t real.”

Derek leaned back, put his hands in back of his head, and looked at Brian.

“There’s not a thing to make it rough . . . nothing wrong. In a real situation, like when I was here before, there were things wrong—going wrong. The plane didn’t land and set me on the shore. It crashed. A man was dead. I was hurt. I didn’t know anything. Nothing at all. I was, maybe, close to death and now we’re out here going la-de-da, I’ve got a fish; la-de-da, there are some more berries.”

“Tension.” Derek said. “It lacks tension.”

Brian nodded. “Maybe—but that’s not all. I don’t think you can
teach
what you want to teach.”

“But they do—they teach survival.”

“No. I think they tell people what to do and maybe you can tell them some of what we do. But that doesn’t teach them
how
to live,
how
to do it, does it? You’d have to bring each person here and drop them in the lake and let them swim out and drag up the shore and try to live, to really
teach
them how to do it. Every single one.”

“But that’s impossible.”

Brian nodded. “I know. But I don’t think it will work unless you do it that way. You can tell, but you can’t really teach.”

“Tension,” Derek said again, leaning forward and writing in his notebook again. “You need the tension created by the emergency.”

And they settled in for the rest of the day and that night, and later Brian would remember what they had said—how it needed tension—and wish he had not thought it at all.

B
rian awakened suddenly, and listened, and smelled.

For a moment he could not tell what had brought him up from sleep. They had banked the fire well and the coals would last until morning. It was still warm and red, giving off a little smoke. There were no bugs, the night cool wasn’t too cold, no animals prowled, and he could find nothing wrong and was closing his eyes to sleep again when he heard it.

The far-off sound of thunder. Not loud; low and rumbling. He could smell rain coming, but that should pose no problem. The storms and the wind came from the north-northwest and they had the hill in back to protect them. With the overhang facing south and being on the side of the hill, the rain wouldn’t bother them. In fact, they’d had an evening of soft rain and nothing had come in the shelter—not a drop.

And with the storm blowing any rain away from the opening, they should stay dry and safe.

Brian put a couple of pieces of wood on the fire to make sure it kept going, added a handful of green leaves to make smoke and keep the mosquitoes down, checked to see that Derek was still sleeping, and lay back on his bed.

Maybe the storm wouldn’t even hit them. He remembered the tornado that had caught him before and decided he wouldn’t worry. The odds against getting hit twice by anything as wild as a tornado were huge, and there was nothing they could do anyway, except just hope that it would miss them. He remembered the sound the tornado had made—the wild roaring—and the storm it had come from, and this was different.

A summer rainstorm with soft thunder—it didn’t seem anything to worry about and certainly nothing to keep him awake. He went back to sleep, slipping into a light doze.

Things moved in and out—he dreamed that he was talking to Derek, saying in the dream that he thought they should use the radio to call the plane and cancel the rest of the “operation,” as Derek kept calling it in the dream, because it didn’t seem to prove anything.

He was awakened by an explosion.

It seemed to come from inside his skull, inside his thinking, inside the dream: a sharp crack, so loud that he snapped awake, rolled over, and was on his feet, moving to the back of the shelter without thinking, without knowing he was moving.

It was thunder.

But not like he’d heard before, not like he’d ever heard. It was around them, exploding around them, the lightning cracking around the shelter, so close it seemed to Brian that it came from inside him.

“What—”

He knew that he opened his mouth, that he made sound, but he could hear nothing except the
whack-crack
of the thunder, see nothing but images frozen in the split-instants of brilliance from the lightning.

Like a camera taking pictures by a strobe light, things would seem frozen in time, caught and frozen, and then there would be another flash and things would be different.

Derek was moving.

In one flash he was still on his bed, but raised his jacket falling away from where he’d had it as a blanket, as he rose.