The River

15

Time was everything now — once the decision was made, time was vital. But Brian took a minute to scan the map once more and do some mental calculating, and it didn’t come up too terrible.

Say it was a hundred miles by river.

When they’d landed they’d come down next to where the river left the lake, and Brian had watched the current as it flowed away. It seemed to move about as fast as a person walked — maybe three miles an hour. Of course, that didn’t mean that it would continue to flow at that speed, but it would probably be about the same.

If he could get into the current and move with it and stay with it, a hundred miles would take thirty-five or forty hours.

He studied it closer on the map and noted that it grew wider as it flowed and that in some places it moved through hilly country — there were contour lines on the map close together, which meant steeper hills. Here the current might even be a little faster.

A day and a half, he thought. Then he said it aloud for Derek. “A day and a half. A long day and a half, but if we keep moving, stay in the river and don’t stop, we should make the trading post in a day and a half. Maybe two days.” And that, he thought without saying, is a lot better than seven or eight.

A lot better than dying.

There were two places where the river ran into lakes and out the other end, and many smaller ponds and what might be swamps where the river moved through a center of a small body of water. They would slow him down.

He could not judge how much, but none of them were large, and if he stayed on the edge and used a pole he should be able to keep moving well enough not to lose too much time.

Time.

He was sitting, reading, looking at the map, and there wasn’t time for it.

He needed to build a raft.

He checked Derek one more time, made certain his breathing was regular and that his heart was beating steadily and then moved off down the side of the lake, looking for wood.

The problem was not wood so much as the lack of a tool. When he’d made the raft before to go out to the plane he’d had his hatchet, and he missed it terribly now. After he’d been rescued and gone home, his mother had put the hatchet in a glass case in the living room, where she kept the china handed down by her grandmother. He’d looked at it as he’d left the house, but they had decided that having a hatchet might not be realistic.

“Lots of people carry a knife of some kind,” Derek had said. “But how many have a hatchet on their belt?”

So all he had was a knife — well, two knives, actually. He had Derek’s knife as well. He’d almost forgotten that.

But even two knives wouldn’t help him cut through logs.

There was wood all over the place. Wind storms over the years had knocked down pines and spruce trees and many of them were the right diameter to use for making a raft — six or eight inches and straight. But they were for the most part too long, or still connected to the root structure, which made them impossible to use.

But Brian moved along the lake, up from the shore and back, and finally he found a stand of large poplars where beavers had been working.

He knew almost nothing of beavers except that they lived in the water, chewed trees down, and looked cute when he saw them swimming in the water. Except for pictures he’d never seen one on dry land, but he’d seen how they took trees down and this stand of poplars was a good example. In a hundred-yard circle there wasn’t a tree standing.

There were pointed stumps everywhere, with tooth marks on them, and dropped trees fallen across each other so thickly that it looked like giants had started to play pick-up-sticks and walked away before finishing the game.

The beavers had been working at the grove for some time — probably years — and they had not only dropped the trees, many of them the right diameter, but they had cut the limbs off and dragged them down pathways to the lake and cut some of the tree trunks in sections between eight and ten or twelve feet long, apparently to make them easier to move.

It’s like I hired them, Brian thought, looking at all the fallen poplars — just to cut them down for me.

The older trees, which had been cut down the year or two before, were well dried out, and when Brian rolled and skidded them down to the lake he found that they floated well. Four of them side by side held him up easily when he used his arms to hold them together and crawled on top of them. He got wet, but they held him.

Of course, Derek was a lot heavier and the two of them together heavier still, but eight or ten of them should do it. And there were many the right size and length. He had only to select the ones he wanted.

He worked hard for a solid half hour, then ran to check on Derek. He was still the same, and Brian jogged back to the beavers’ woodyard.

He picked eight logs, each running close to eight inches thick and roughly eight feet long. He selected the driest ones he could find, going by feel. He’d learned that from firewood. The drier, the lighter.

The wood was soft, felt soft to the point of his knife, and he thought that might mean they would waterlog, but then he decided it wouldn’t matter. It would take weeks, or at least days, to soak into an eight-inch log, and he wouldn’t need the logs that long.

One way or the other, he thought, while dragging the first log down to the lake.

The beavers had left clear sliding trails where they had dragged branches down to the lake, and Brian used one of them, the main trail, to pull the logs down. The last four feet to the water were fairly steep and the mud was slick from the recent rain and the logs pretty much made their own way to the lake, pushing him ahead down into the water.

He had a plan — or as much of a plan as he could have for what he was going to try to do. He couldn’t move Derek very far by mere strength — he had to weigh close to a hundred and eighty pounds, compared to Brian’s one-forty. Brian couldn’t carry him and could only drag him a short distance.

So he had to bring the raft to just below the shelter — bring the raft to Derek — and that meant building it here and working it up the side of the lake to Derek.

It took him less than an hour to get all the logs down to the water, and when he lay them side by side and lined the ends together he was pleased to see that they made a usable-looking raft. The ends weren’t quite even, but close, and they were pointed, the way the beavers had chewed them off. It gave them a streamlined look.

Like something out of Huckleberry Finn, he thought.

Except that nothing held them together yet. Brian stood next to them in knee-deep water and studied the problem.

He had no rope, no string, and yet he had to have a way to hold the logs in a flat platform to keep them solid enough to carry Derek and him.

He had his clothing. His jacket — the same type windbreaker he’d had when he first had to survive after the plane crash — and he had Derek’s jacket as well, though Brian wanted to keep that for cover for Derek.

But even cutting the jackets in strips might not make enough roping to tie all the logs together. He cast around, half looking for vines or grasses he could weave into a rope.

But again the beavers helped him. They had also cut smaller sticks — limbs and the tops of the trees — some of them five or six feet long and two or three inches in diameter.

They provided his answer. He made cross-pieces with them, put one on top and one on the bottom and sandwiched the raft body logs in place. Then he cut strips from his jacket and tied the two cross-pieces together at the ends so that they were pulled together and held the logs firmly in place. By using his knife to notch the cross-pieces to take the material, he made sure the cloth tie-downs didn’t slip off.

He put four of these cross members down the length of the raft, tying them in place as tight as he could get them, and when he was done the raft was stout enough for him to stand on, jump on, walk back and forth on.

It was about eight feet long, five and a half feet wide, and floated well out of the water, and had not taken him more than two hours to build.

He had gone back twice to check on Derek while working and now that it was finished he cut a long pole for pushing the raft and used his knife to carve a crude paddle, then moved back to the camp before bringing the raft.

He was not hungry — still felt too nervous for hunger — but knew he should eat before they started or he would be too weak. So he ate nuts and some berries they had stored in a birch-bark cone, ate everything he could find in the shelter — they wouldn’t need it on the run — and examined Derek closely one more time while he ate.

This whole thing, he knew, was crazy and had only a small chance of working. He knew that, understood that. If there was one thing he understood about working in an emergency — surviving — it was that there was a large measure of luck involved.

And if there was the slightest, tiniest change in Derek, any indication at all that he was coming out of it, Brian would call the trip off and hope for the best.

So he studied Derek, worked at it as hard as he could. He looked into the unconscious man’s eyes and saw nothing, just the glazed look that was there before. He carefully measured his breathing and his heartbeat and found them to be the same — exactly — as they had been since he’d started to keep track of them.

He yelled into Derek’s ear, looking for some reaction in the eyes, and there was no sign of any kind that he could hear, or that he could react to hearing.

Finally, he tried pain. He used the tip of his knife to poke Derek’s hand, again watching the man’s eyes and there was, simply, nothing — even when he poked hard enough to draw a small drop of blood.

No sign of any kind of life or knowledge except the breathing and the heartbeat.

Then he waited a few minutes and did it all again, working steadily, carefully, and it was the same. He had to be certain, absolutely certain that there was no choice.

And he was.

He stood and looked across the lake and felt strangely old. It was his decision to make and yet another man could die because of what he decided. He had never been in this position, and it frightened him. Even when he was in danger, even when he had to fight just to live, his decisions only affected him — never another person.

And now Derek lay there and Brian looked down to where he’d pulled the raft to the shore by the shelter and opened his mouth and said:

“We go.” It came out as a whisper.

Right or wrong, they had to do it — Brian had to do it. Please, God, he thought — and did not finish it. Just that — please, God. He turned to face Derek and coughed and said it again, loud and clear.

“We go.”