The River

Listen to me, he thought. If I were talking out loud, I’d be whining. Derek gets hit and I act like I’m the one getting messed up. It

The answer to his problem had come to

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.

He realized that he was not always right, was, indeed, often not right, and at the same time he found that others were not always wrong.

He decided to stop every hour for ten minutes. Derek had told him once that that was what the military did on long marches—a ten-minute break every hour

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

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

lightning struck up, not down—moved from the ground up.

What was the main problem - the worst of it?" And he thought at first of mosquitoes, started to tell her about them and shook his head. "Hunger." "Really?" She seemed surprised. "I thought it would be the danger, or being alone, or the weather." "I don't mean hunger like you're thinking of it," he had told her. "Not just when you miss a meal and and feel like eating a little bit. Or even if you go a day without eating. I mean when you don't think you're ever going to eat again - don't know if there will ever be more food. An end to food. Where you won't eat and you won't eat and you still won't eat and even when you die and are gone, even then there won't be any food. That kind of hunger.

He had not slept the night before except to doze kneeling next to Derek, and he had worked hard all day on the raft getting it ready, and when the sun went down and the darkness caught him he could not believe how much he wanted to sleep.

There was a slashing, new, impossibly loud crack as lightning seemed to hit the shelter itself and Brian saw the top of the pine next to the opening suddenly explode and felt/saw the bolt come roaring down the tree, burning and splitting and splintering the wood and bark, and he saw it hit Derek.

The mosquitoes. Tearing at him, clouds of them, the awful, ripping, thick masses of the small monsters trying to bleed him dry.

The hunger was the worst, worse than the mosquitoes, worse than any of it.

I have, Brian thought, always been wet. Always Even my soul is wet.

There were so many variables, so many ways to go wrong.

He had learned this: Nothing that lived

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.

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