Death of a River Guide Read Online Free PDF

lifts her up in the air and sweeps her through the air, carrying her into the river, in which he gently lets her down. She staggers to her feet and with her good arm slaps the Cockroach on the face. The Cockroach hasn’t anticipated such a response and falls backward.
    Aljaz goes back to loading the rafts. On go the waterproof personal gearbags, brightly coloured in blues and greens and reds. On go the additional bags with tents and tarps and cooking equipment. On goes the hard vegetable bag, allowed to swill around at the bottom of the gear frame. On go the ammunition boxes full of first-aid kits and repair kits and punters’ cameras. On go the ropes and spare carabiners and carabiner pulleys and rescue throw-bags and bailing buckets, all clipped on at various points to the frame. On goes everything ten people need to survive for ten days in the wilderness.
    I can see that Aljaz likes the beginning of the trip - it gives him certainty, it brings order to the chaos of his thoughts. It gives him tangible fears, real fears. Will the food stay dry for ten days? Will the customers get through safely? Will none burn themselves? Or drown? That is always a great, Aljaz’s greatest, abiding fear. That he will lose a customer on the ditch. It is so easy, it happens so smoothly . Violent death can come with a deceptive grace; so quick, so effortless, so silent, that it is not immediately apparent what has taken place. People turn around thinking that the person is perhaps standing behind their back about to surprise them, whereas they are not playing an elaborate joke, they are dead. Simply dead. A revealing phrase in itself - death is not the complex matter life is. At least not for the dead.
    â€˜I once saw a woman who had drowned in the Zambezi,’ says the Cockroach. He is back out of the river, wet, still smiling, and is standing next to me in the raft, helping to buckle the netting down over the gear. ‘She was with another company, not ours, and she had fallen in and got tangled up with the rescue rope. By the time we turned up they had fished her out, but it was too late. She was already blue and they were giving her CPR. But they knew she was gone, you could tell the way they went through the CPR routine so calmly and efficiently, like they were preparing the corpse for embalming rather than trying to keep her alive. This punter on my raft turns around and says, as if he’s just seen a fish jump, he says, “She just drowned, is that what it is?” A stupid bald Pom he was. Of course she just drowned, her lungs just filled with water, I felt like shouting at him.’
    But Aljaz hardly hears this story. His mind is elsewhere and I am with it. He is thinking how without the trip his thoughts take on a darkness he cannot overcome. Upon the ditch he can meet his fears, name them - Nasty Notch, the Great Ravine, the Churn, Thunderush, the Cauldron, the Pig Trough - and having met them, bid goodbye to them all. Without the trip his thoughts are beyond his control, and wander toward a divide that he can never see, the presence of which chills him to the bone. At such times he feels the workings of his mind hang by a few slender threads, and if they break he will be unable to do anything, unable even to get up in the morning, unable to do the simplest of things that people take for granted. Unable to say hello without bursting into tears, unable to talk to people without feeling his bowels being gripped by the most terrible fear, unable to meet with friends without experiencing the most horrifying sense of vertigo, that he might suddenly tumble and fall into the abyss.
    â€˜Then suddenly,’ continues the Cockroach, ‘suddenly, some spasm of her muscles made her spew up all this water and they got their hopes back up for a minute. But it was too late. I knew that. Even the bald Pom knew that. She was a goner.’
    Now I can see that Couta Ho had understood all this, that long, long ago when