The River Read Online Free PDF Page B

someone to hear me; and now that I have someone, I don’t talk.
    “It’s kind of strange having someone here with me.”
    Derek nodded. “That’s what I mean. You have to tell me everything, externalize it all for me, so I can write it.”
    Derek moved back to the lean-to, where he’d left the radio and his weatherproof briefcase. Inside the briefcase he had notebooks, each one in a plastic bag, and he took one out now with a pencil and began to write carefully. When he’d written something he looked up at Brian, waiting. “All right. I’m ready.”
    Externalize
, Brian thought. How do you externalize?
    “Well, I’m thinking now that we should make sure we get a shelter today and then get a fire today and get some food today…”
    I sound like a catalog
, he thought,
like I’m reading a telephone book.
    But Derek nodded and started writing and Brian thought of what he really wanted to say.
    We should grab the radio and call for the plane and go home and eat a hamburger and a malt, maybe eight or ten Cokes, a steak, some roasts and pork chops…
    He shook his head.
    “There,” Derek said. “What were you thinking there?”
    Brian stared at him, then shook his head. “You don’t want to know. Just junk.”
    He walked away into the day. It was enough. Enough of talk. Enough of externalizing. Another night like last night would kill him.
    He left his clothes to dry, but wore his tennis shoes and noticed that Derek did the same thing—although he carried the notebook as well—and Brian set off along the lakeshore to the left.
    Rule one, he thought, don’t leave the lakeshore or you’ll get lost. Then he remembered Derek and said it aloud.
    “Thank you,” Derek said, rather properly. Standing in his underwear holding the notebook he looked like somebody out of an old, funny movie and Brian had trouble keeping a straight face. “That’s exactly what I meant by externalizing.”
    “We’re looking for a fire stone, a shelter, and food—all at once. Always, always you look for food. There, up along the edge of the clearing—you see those stumps?”
    Derek nodded.
    “Those will be a good bet for grubworms later.”
    “Grubworms?”
    “Sure. Bears eat them—love to eat them. I can’t eat them yet, but by about the third day if we don’t find something else or get some fish they’ll probably be looking pretty good.”
    “Grubworms?”
    Brian smiled. “I thought you did this survival thing once before.”
    “Oh, we ate lizards and snakes and stuff like that—they always have the course in the desert. Or did until now. I think it will change. And you always read about people eating ants and grasshoppers, but I never ate a grubworm.”
    “You don’t chew them,” Brian said. “I think that would be too much. Just to chew one up, guts and all. They’re too soft and, well, just too soft. But if you wrap them in leaves and swallow them whole . . .”
    “Right,” Derek nodded and wrote in the notebook. “Grubworms.”
    Brian stopped and turned to Derek. “Food is everything.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Just that. Out here, in nature, in the world, food is everything. All the other parts of what we are, what everything is, don’t matter without food. I read somewhere that all of what man is, everything man has always been or will be, all the thoughts and dreams and sex and hate and every little and big thing is dependent on six inches of topsoil and rain when you need it to make a crop grow—food.”
    “You sound like you’ve thought this out.”
    “That’s
all
I did—think of food. You watch other animals, birds, fish, even down to ants—they spend all their time working at food. Getting something to eat. That’s what nature is, really—getting food. And when you’re out here, having to live, you look for food. Food first. Food.
Food
.”
    They moved through the day that way. During midmorning they found some raspberries growing in a brushpile. It was not a thick stand—it would