The River by Gary Paulsen Read Free Book Online

how to shoot fish, then how to use the guts from one fish to bait the others into a trap made of stones; and they soon had more fish than they needed. Brian found a clam bed and they had actually eaten one meal—clams steamed around the fire, nuts, and berries—that left them full.
    Full.
    Plus, they had more clams stored and plenty of fish left in the trap and knew the locations of several ruffed grouse. There were rabbits and squirrels all over the place, and if they had to they could make it a year or two, and it felt wrong.
    All wrong.
    He shook his head again and moved back by the fire pit. Derek was sitting on his bed by the fire, feeding an occasional stick to the fire to keep it going, writing in his notebook. He looked up as Brian walked into the shelter, and saw him shaking his head.
    “What’s the matter?”
    Brian shrugged. “I don’t know—it’s just wrong, I think.”
    “What do you mean—wrong?”
    Brian looked around at the shelter, the comfort, the food, the fire, the lake. “All this. We’re so . . . so ready. So calm. It doesn’t work, somehow. None of it works.”
    “I still don’t know for sure what you’re talking about. We’ve done it. In four days you’ve shown me how to live in the wilderness with nothing but a knife. I’ve got tons of notes to take back and teach from—I think you’re wrong.”
    “But this isn’t how it works,” Brian said. “It isn’t this smooth and easy. You don’t just fly in and get set on a perfect lake and have all the food you want and have it all come this easy. It isn’t real.”
    Derek leaned back, put his hands in back of his head, and looked at Brian.
    “There’s not a thing to make it rough . . . nothing wrong. 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.”
    “Tension.” Derek said. “It lacks tension.”
    Brian nodded. “Maybe—but that’s not all. I don’t think you can
teach
what you want to teach.”
    “But they do—they teach survival.”
    “No. I think they tell people what to do and maybe you can tell them some of what we do. But that doesn’t teach them
how
to live,
how
to do it, does it? You’d have to bring each person here and drop them in the lake and let them swim out and drag up the shore and try to live, to really
teach
them how to do it. Every single one.”
    “But that’s impossible.”
    Brian nodded. “I know. But I don’t think it will work unless you do it that way. You can tell, but you can’t really teach.”
    “Tension,” Derek said again, leaning forward and writing in his notebook again. “You need the tension created by the emergency.”
    And they settled in for the rest of the day and that night, and later Brian would remember what they had said—how it needed tension—and wish he had not thought it at all.

10
    B rian awakened suddenly, and listened, and smelled.
    For a moment he could not tell what had brought him up from sleep. They had banked the fire well and the coals would last until morning. It was still warm and red, giving off a little smoke. There were no bugs, the night cool wasn’t too cold, no animals prowled, and he could find nothing wrong and was closing his eyes to sleep again when he heard it.
    The far-off sound of thunder. Not loud; low and rumbling. He could smell rain coming, but that should pose no problem. The storms and the wind came from the north-northwest and they had the hill in back to protect them. With the overhang facing south and being on the side of the hill, the rain wouldn’t bother them. In fact, they’d had an evening of soft rain and nothing had come in the shelter—not a drop.
    And with the storm blowing any rain away from the opening, they should