The River Read Online Free PDF Page A

lean-to—Brian missed the overhanging rock with his shelter back inside a great deal. Clearly it would not stop the rain, though they had tried to make rough shingles of old pieces of half-rotted bark, yet it was a start.
    But for some reason—some protective thought—they had crawled back into the lean-to when the mosquitoes first came.
    As if, Brian thought, they could hide from the little monsters.
    “God,” Derek said in a whisper, a tight sound in the darkness back in the lean-to. “This is insane.”
    They were sitting with their jackets pulled over their heads, but due to Derek’s size, when he pulled the jacket up, it pulled his shirt up from his waist and exposed a bit of skin there, and when the mosquitoes found that, he pulled the shirt down and it exposed his neck, and when he hunched to cover that, they could get his waist again, and in a small time he was jerking up and down like a yo-yo.
    “You must settle,” Brian told him. “In your mind. There are some fights you can’t win, and I think this must be one of them. It will get worse and worse until after the middle of the night, when the coolness comes and the mosquitoes will stop. Or at least a lot of them will.”
    And just the words had helped, had calmed Derek and himself as well.
    Dozing, listening to the whine of them around his head in the dark as they tried to find a way through the jacket, he thought,
it was the way
. It was the way of things here. The mosquitoes and the night and the coolness that he knew was coming were just the way of it—part of being here—and he thought he should tell Derek, but decided to keep his mouth shut.
    Derek would find it for himself. Or he would not, just as Brian had found things out for himself.
    Brian left the lean-to and went back outside. There might be part of a breeze later as the rain came and it would help.
    There was a sliver of moon, which made enough light to see the lake well, the flat water with the beam of moonlight coming across it, and even with the mosquitoes still working at him he was amazed at the beauty.
    There were night sounds—birds, flittering things he knew were bats. He also knew they were eating mosquitoes—he’d read about them in biology—and he thought,
get some, bats. Get some. Get all the mosquitoes there are.
    Something swam into the moonlight on the surface of the lake—either a muskrat or a beaver—and cut a
V
right up the path of the moon, seemed to be heading for the moon, into the moon itself.
    Water made sound and he realized it was the river gurgling as it left the lake to his right. Not fast, and not wide—perhaps forty or fifty feet across—the river still seemed to possess force, strength as it ran.
    Somehow the beauty overrode the mosquitoes. Brian was standing there, looking through the gap in his jacket—which was still pulled up over his head—when he heard Derek come up alongside him.
    “It’s incredible, isn’t it?” Derek saw it as well, the beauty, and Brian was glad that he could see it, see not just the bad parts but the good as well.
    “I had forgotten,” Brian said. “I had dreams after I got out last time. Not all nightmares, but dreams. I would dream of this, of how pretty it was, how it could stop your breath with it, and then I would wake up in my room with the traffic sounds and the streetlights outside and I would feel bad—miss it. I would miss this.”
    “Except for the mosquitoes.”
    Brian smiled. “Well, yes, except for those.”
    But even as they talked, the night temperature started to drop and it was as if a switch went off. There were still some mosquitoes, but most of them left and the two of them were left standing in the moonlight.
    “Incredible,” Derek said. “They’re just gone.”
    “Haven’t you run into them before? You know, when you’re doing the courses, and all that, for the government?”
    Derek nodded. “Of course. Sort of. I haven’t run the courses that much—just once to try to see what it