“I’m too hungry to sleep. I keep waking up.”
“I’m awake, too,” Titus said from his position on the ground. “Can’t really sleep.”
“Let’s get a good fire going,” Paul said. “We’ll all feel better with a good fire.”
E loaded the fire with wood. It felt good to have the heat and light, and good to have company in the darkest part of the night. They made a good team, she realized. Seldon should not have come with them in the first place. That had been a mistake, but sometimes you didn’t know a mistake until it bit you on the ankle. She sent out a little thought beam to Seldon, wishing him a quick trip back to Camp Lollipop. He was a good guy when all was said and done. She wondered how he had spent the night.
“It’s cold,” Titus said. “How much did it snow?”
Paul crawled to the edge of the lean-to and looked out.
“Four or five inches,” he said.
“We should head back at first light,” E said.
“Head back to what?” Titus asked. “We have to face it. If we don’t go on, we’re finished. We’ll die.”
“You don’t know that,” Paul said. “You know I respect you, Titus, but you don’t know that.”
E watched Titus in the firelight. He didn’t argue or say anything. She held her hands out to the fire. Snow had come into the lean-to and covered the dirt floor with moisture. It had melted with the fire heat and turned everything muddy and sticky and disgusting. So much of what they had lived through had been disgusting, she reflected. She had become immune to filthiness.
“What’s the difference between stuffing and dressing?” Paul asked after a while.
It was a game they played. A game to remember food. E knew Paul started it to get Titus off the idea of swimming the rapids.
“Dressing is outside the turkey, and stuffing is on the inside,” E said, happy to change the topic of conversation.
“I like the part of the stuffing that is crusty. It has a little crusty surface, and when you bite into it …”
“Does your mother use onions and celery?” E asked.
“Both, I guess. And sometimes apples and walnuts.”
“I bet that’s good,” E said. “What does your mom put in the dressing, Titus?”
He didn’t answer.
“Sweet potatoes and regular mashed,” Paul said. “With the turkey, I mean.”
Paul poked the fire with a piece of wood. E couldn’t say for certain, but it felt like morning had come through the snow and settled slowly around them. She couldn’t say it was light, but the darkness seemed less defined. Birds had not yet started to call. She liked it when the birds called, because that meant one more night had been endured. They had endured it.
“It’s getting light,” Titus said.
“The nights are wicked long now,” Paul said.
“Pretty soon they’ll be longer. They’ll be as long as anything,” E said.
“It’s my decision to make,” Titus said. “The swimming, I mean.”
“We’re in this together,” E said, her stomach feeling nervous and empty and spoiled. “We need you at Camp Lollipop, even if we can’t keep going. It’s not your decision alone.”
No one spoke after that. Paul dug in his pack and came out with the last of the fish. E passed on it. Titus took a little and chewed it loudly. It was disgusting stuff, E thought. If she had to survive much longer by eating dried fish, she wasn’t sure she could do it. Paul was the only one who seemed capable of tolerating it. He ate a piece and then pushed out of the lean-to. E heard him go off into the bushes. He came back a minute or two later.
“Lots of tracks in the snow,” he reported. “Nothing big, but a lot of animals.”
“Probably drawn to the fire and our scent,” Titus said.
“Can we make some sort of igloo?” E wondered aloud. “Out of the snow and everything. Do you know how to make one, Titus?”
“Not really. You dig down, same as we did with the pine hut. Then you circle it around with snow blocks. But it depends on the kind of snow you have to work with. I made one once. It wasn’t very good.”
“It would be warmer, though, right?” Paul asked. “Warmer than the pine hut? More protected?”
Titus nodded. E pushed past them and went out to the bushes. She watched the snow tumble softly from the branches. Despite the snow, it did not feel that cold. It wasn’t winter; it was late fall. Most of the three days they had been traveling, they watched birds migrating south. Everything seemed to be moving. Even they had been migrating until they came to the rapids.
When she came back to the lean-to, the boys had pushed down the walls and fed them to the fire. The fire blazed up. E realized there was nothing to cook, nothing to warm. She grabbed her blanket, shook it free of dirt and snow, and wrapped it around her head and shoulders. She looked like a tiny peasant woman, she thought.
“If it gets a little lighter, we can travel,” Paul said, his hands out to the fire, his eyes scanning the area. “We might get lucky and come across something to hunt. Deer or something. This is the time of morning they come down to drink, right? I’m right about that, aren’t I?”
Titus didn’t say anything.
E shrugged her shoulders after an awkward ten count and said, “Probably.”
That was when she knew Titus intended to swim the rapids. He didn’t have to say anything. She knew he had made a decision.
Web ate his second cheeseburger in six bites. He counted the bites. They were fast-food burgers, brought from someplace — not a national brand — in a white paper bag. The bottom of the bag came loaded with a nest of fries. He had a strawberry milk shake, too, and he found it difficult to stop sucking at the straw long enough to eat. Then, while he was eating, he found he wanted to suck the straw again. The food went in like a squirrel shivering down his belly. He was astonished how good it felt.
While he wasn’t eating, he listened to them making plans about finding Team Four.
Rangers. Cops. Mountain men and women, for all Web knew. They all buzzed around the cinder-block building next to the airport, their radios crackling, their equipment set out on cafeteria tables. A hundred different conversations, map coordinates, and so forth. They waited for enough light to fly. They said that over and over again. And the snow had complicated things.
Across the table, Jill sipped at a Diet Coke and finished a small fry. Walter Eliot had already eaten and had gone off with a few of the men to look at maps. That was a joke, Web reflected. Walter wasn’t exactly the guy to put you onto the correct trail.
“I’m stuffed,” Web said, finally pushing the milk shake away. “Amazing.”
“Don’t eat so much, then,” Jill said.
She ate a fry in six bites. The same amount of bites Web had used to eat the second burger.
“I can’t believe you’re not eating more,” Web said. “Aren’t you starving?”
Jill didn’t say anything. She mostly stared out the security window from where they sat. She wore a green blanket around her entire body. The medical people had given her the blanket, and someone else had brought the food. Calls had gone out. Web had already talked to his stepfather. Everything seemed to have happened at once. He heard a television reporter was on his way to interview them.
Walter Eliot came back inside the room.
“They’re getting ready to go,” he said. “A tiny bit more light, is all.”
“Cool,” Web said.
Jill didn’t say anything.
Web sucked his milk shake again. He had pushed it away, but he couldn’t resist.
“They know the watershed,” Walter said, taking a seat. “As soon as I started talking about it, they knew it. It’s a wild river.”
“Are they going back to Camp Lollipop?” Jill asked.
Walter shook his head.
“Not right away. Later they will. They want to get to the kids on the trail first.”
“How are they going to find them?” Web asked.
“I
f the kids stayed next to the river, it won’t be such a big deal. The rangers can buzz the river back and forth, and they can use a PA system to call to them. I’m pretty confident. Now that they know where they are, it should be fairly easy.”
Jill went back to staring at the security window.
Web suddenly felt his stomach begin to rebel. He shifted on his seat, trying to predict what his stomach intended to do. He had eaten too much. He knew he was doing it as he did it, but he couldn’t help it. The food had simply tasted too good.
“I’ll be right back,” he said and headed to the restroom.
As he hurried off, he heard the spark of a helicopter engine followed by the first slow churn of the propeller blade.
Titus shoved off from shore, the top portion of his body clinging to two pine logs lashed together like a boogie board. He wore his clothes, but kept his shoes tied to the top of the miniraft. It wasn’t ideal. Nothing about the situation was ideal, and as he pushed off, he saw Paul and E staring at him, shaking their heads.
Titus wondered if he was missing the point.
He wondered if he was trying to be a hero.
He didn’t think so. He hoped not. As the river began to gather him closer, pulling him gradually to the center, he played with settling himself higher on the pine logs. That had been the plan, the design. He had boogie-boarded plenty in both the Atlantic and Pacific, and he felt fairly confident he could handle the whitewater. It was simply surf, after all, surf that went on and on over rocks, with wicked cold water and deep dips that could sometimes swallow a raft.
Then, after another ten or fifteen yards, he had to stop thinking.
The first V — a wake formed from a rock in the streambed — came at him, and he swept down it, keeping his chest high on the pine logs. It wasn’t bad. Not bad at all. He let his legs trail behind him, trying not to give them anything to brace against. He wanted to be a piece of kelp, a dangling, formless grass, the tail on a drifting kite.
But then the water started shattering.
It broke in every direction, swirling and biting, and he felt the logs begin to buck and dive, buck and dive, and he had to force himself higher on the boogie board to prevent it from rearing up and whacking him on the chin. He started to slip off it, and one of his shoes shot away. He tried to grab it as it drifted past him, but that was no use. The water pried him away from the logs. He made a fevered grab and caught the end, and something hit his knee incredibly hard. Then he went under, swirled once, and came up beside the boogie board. He lunged for it and felt one of his fingernails break off. Something struck his rib cage on the left side and he made a hmmmummmpppp sound that surprised him. It came out of his body without his cooperation, and suddenly he felt the cold digging into him, diving down toward his bones, and he tried again to snag the boogie board, but it had disappeared.
It had been a mistake.
He knew that clearly now.
E and Paul had been right. He should have gone back to Camp Lollipop and waited for fate to take a hand, but he had made this decision instead, thinking it the right thing to do, the only thing to do, and he had been wrong.
It was over for him, he thought. End of the line.
Then his knee hit something else below him, and the water suddenly gathered up into a white fist and punched him in the gut. It shoved him down, down, down, and the world became silent. His nose filled with water. He wasn’t sure where up might be, and that had never happened to him, not even in some big California surf, but he remembered enough to wait and let the water release him. And it did. Then he was in a long section where the water ran like a tight piece of paper over a fairly shallow shelf of rocks and he tried to stand. But the water shoved him off his feet, and he felt himself trembling, trembling, and he saw pine trees and clouds above him. Crazy, crazy clouds that were moving faster than clouds would drift.
Hey, he said. But whether he said it aloud or not, he couldn’t tell.
Then the water took him and tried to break his back on a rock, fixing him on a piece of granite, and for an instant he lay like a bug on a windshield, white, curling water splashing up and jamming itself into his mouth, and he almost let it finish him there. But he pushed off and rolled into a pocket of deeper water, and it was all cold, cold, cold.
And he wondered if the cloud had been a helicopter.
Wouldn’t that be a kick in the pants? he thought.
Then a final wave came and chucked him end over end and his breath left him, and one of the logs from the raft came and gave him a karate chop on the shoulder. He figured that was probably it. He rolled onto his back and tried to keep his mouth out of the water for a second, but the water took him and pulled him down until he scraped the bottom of the river, and he thought, quietly, sedately, Now I can rest. Now I can rest.
He was gone, just like that. E still couldn’t believe it, even though she had witnessed it. Titus had climbed into the water, fallen forward, and hugged his ridiculous makeshift raft, then drifted away. It didn’t seem possible. Something had to change. Something had to help fix what had happened. People didn’t simply float away, not like this, not forever.
She screamed for Titus to come back. She screamed until she fell down on her knees and put her face in her hands.
“What were we thinking?!” she yelled through her fingers. “We are complete idiots!”
“He made up his own mind,” Paul said beside her. “We couldn’t talk him out of it.”
“We should have tried harder! We should have insisted he come back with us. He’s gone, don’t you get it? We just watched the end of Titus.”
“You don’t know that,” Paul yelled in response. It was like a roar, E thought. “Don’t say that. You don’t know that!”
“We should have gone with him, then. I can’t believe this. I can’t stand this!”
“Titus wanted to try it. He might make it. He really might.”
E leaned over and thought she might be sick. She felt as though she needed to vomit, to get rid of every last particle of food or drink or anything that potentially brought comfort. How could they not have seen it more clearly? she wondered. That was puzzling, truly puzzling. You do not slip into a wild Arctic river with nothing ahead of you — no companions, no boat — and expect to live. It was insane even to consider such a plan, but they had let it go forward, weighing the pros and cons as if any part of it made sense. It was irrational behavior, nutty, stupid thinking, and her participation in it made her head hurt.
“If anyone can make it,” Paul said more softly, “it’s Titus.”
“He can’t make it, Paul,” E said quietly. “Don’t you see that? No one could. We were crazy to let him try it.”
“We were desperate, that’s all. Don’t go changing the conversation now. Don’t go reinventing things. We were desperate. We still are. Titus evaluated things and decided it was worth a try. He didn’t do it lightly.”
“But we shouldn’t have let him try it at all,” she said, slowly rising to her feet. “I can see that now. I don’t know why I couldn’t see it then.”
Paul didn’t say anything else. He walked over and squatted next to what was left of the fire. A little snow had begun to fall again, E noticed. The flakes came down independently, hardly bothering to collect into anything meaningful. The flakes seemed lost.
She went to join Paul by the smoldering fire. She squatted next to him, and her knees made an absurd pop. It made her think something had changed inside her, something had gone old and dead from the lack of nutrition.
“We should start back,” Paul said. “If we walk hard, we can make it back in two days. Maybe less.”
“And just leave Titus?”
“We can’t join him, and we can’t expect him back.”
She threw twigs on the fire. Then she watched them slowly turn to flame. Paul threw some on, too. The smoke grew stronger.
“What should we say when we get back?” Paul asked. “How do we tell them about Titus?”
�
�We’ll say he’s traveling onward.”
“You don’t think we should tell them the truth?”
“It is the truth,” she said. “It’s the truth as far as we know it.”
“We don’t know he’s dead.”
“You’re right, we don’t.”
“It might give everyone a little hope to think that Titus is heading to civilization.”
“We can at least give them that,” E said.
Then she stood, kicked some dirt over the fire, and started walking back to Camp Lollipop.
Titus crawled into the shallow water and rolled onto his back. He’d made it. He’d made it, he realized, but now he was going to die. He was exhausted and filled with water, and he wasn’t positive, but he was fairly certain he had lost the matches. Not that they would be dry. Not that he could ever get a fire going, even if he had the strength to move.
But he had made it. He had made it down the rapids, and that was pretty good.
Pretty stupid, too, he realized.
It had been his one big mistake. After being fairly smart about things up until that point, he had chucked it all on one stupid decision. It was all okay, because the cold had started to do what not even the river had managed. He felt himself sinking away, melting like a quart of ice cream left out on the counter on a summer’s day, like a ball of ice on a wool mitten when you hung it on a radiator.
The big shakes came next. When you lost your body heat, the big shakes rattled your ribs.
He tried to stand, but he couldn’t. Something had broken down in his knee, and he knew he had some sort of cut on his head, up near the cowlick on the back of his scalp. He reached up and touched the injured spot, and his hand came away with blood. Blood diluted with river water. His teeth chattered like one of those toys you could buy in a cheap gag shop, the snappy jaws that jumped around and gnashed like a mouth gone nuts.
It would be over soon enough.
For the heck of it, he reached down into his shirt pocket and felt for the matches. He had trouble making his fingers work. They felt like chopsticks. But at least he hadn’t lost the matches. That was something. And they were wrapped in plastic, so there was a chance, just a chance, that they might still work. Even if they did work, though, he didn’t think he could get tinder and kindling and get a fire started. He needed a fire, for sure, but he was an amphibian, just crawling up out of the water, and a fire belonged to humans. He had centuries to go before he could harness fire.
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