Drew and I got down and helped with our hands. Bobby stood looking off into the trees. Drew dug in, losing himself in a practical job, figuring the best way to do it. The sweat stood in the holes of his blocky, pitted face, and his black hair, solid with thickness and hair lotion, shone sideways, hanging over one ear.

It was a dark place, quiet and almost airless. When we were finished with the hole there was not a dry spot any

where on my nylon. We had hollowed out a narrow trench about two feet deep.

We hauled the body over and rolled it in on its side, unbelievably far from us. Lewis reached his hand and Bobby handed him the shotgun. Lewis put the gun in and pulled back his hands to his knees, looking. Then his right hand went back into the grave, and he gave the gun a turn, arranging it in some kind of way.

“OK,” he said.

We shoveled and scrambled the dirt back in, working wildly. I kept throwing the stuff in his face, to get it covered up quick. But it was easy, in double handfuls. He disappeared slowly, into the general sloppiness and uselessness of the woods. When he was gone, Lewis smoothed out the leaf mold over him.

We stood on our knees. We leaned forward, panting, our hands on the fronts of our thighs or on the ground. I had a tremendous driving moment of wanting to dig him up again, of siding with Drew. Now, if not later, we knew where he was. But there was already too much to explain: the dirt, the delay, and the rest of it. Or should we take him and wash him in the river? The thought of doing that convinced me; it was impossible, and I stood up with the others.

“Ferns’ll be growing here in a few days,” Lewis said. It was good to hear a voice, especially his. “Nobody’d ever come on him in a million years. I doubt if we could even find this place again.”

“There’s still time, Lewis,” Drew said. “You better be sure you know what you’re doing.”

“I’m sure,” Lewis said. “The first rain will kill every sign we made. There’s not a dog can follow us here. When we get off this river, we’ll be all right. Believe me.”

We started back. I couldn’t tell anything about our back trail, but Lewis kept stopping and looking at a wrist compass, and it seemed to me that we were going more or less in the right direction; it was the direction I would have followed if I had been by myself.

We came out upstream of where the canoe was. The water was running toward the river, and we went with it, down the secret pebbles of the creek-bed, stooping under the leaves of low branches, mumbling to ourselves. I felt separated from the others, and especially from Lewis. There was no feeling any longer of helping each other; I believed that if I had stepped into a hole and disappeared the others would not have noticed, but would have gone on faster and faster. Each of us wanted to get out of the woods in the quickest way he could. I know I did, and it would have taken a great physical effort for me to turn back and take one step upstream, no matter what trouble one of the others was in.

When we got to the canoe we all got in. Drew and Lewis paddled, and I felt the long surges of Lewis’ strokes move us as I wanted us to move. Drew fended off the low branches, and we went back to the river faster than I thought possible.

The other canoe was where we had left it, softly shaking against the bank.

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” Bobby said.

“Let me figure a minute,” Lewis said. “This is no time for vanity or hurt feelings. How much work can you do, Bobby?”

“I don’t know, Lewis,” Bobby said. “I’ll try.”

“It’s not your fault,” Lewis said. “But trying is not going to be enough. We’ve got to get the best combinations we can get. I expect I’d better take Bobby with me. Ed, how much have you got left?”

“I don’t know. Some.”

“All right. You and Drew take my boat. Bobby and I will take everything we can in the other one. We’ll try to keep up with you, but it’ll be better if you lead off, so that we can see you if you get into trouble. I hate to tell you, but from what little I know, we haven’t hit the rough part of this river yet.”

“The part that was going to be fun,” Bobby said.

“The part that’s going to knock your stupid brains out if you don’t do exactly what I tell you to do,” Lewis said, without raising his voice. “Come on; let’s get whatever else we can carry out of my canoe. You want out of this, don’t you?”

We took about ten minutes shifting equipment around.

“Take everything, if you can take it, Lewis,” I said. “If Drew and I have to go through these damned rapids first, I want a boat I can at least halfway handle. And I don’t want things wrapping around me in the water.”

“I don’t blame you,” Lew said. “We’ll take all we can.”

“All I want is a weapon,” I said. “I’ll take my bow.”

“I’d think twice about that,” Lewis said. “If you think tents can be bad, you wait’ll those bare broadbeads gore you a few times when you’re in the water with them.”

“I’ll take it anyway,” I said. “And I sure wish we still had that guy’s gun. Why the hell did we leave it with him?”

“The gun is better right where it is,” Lewis said.

“We could have got rid of it later.”

“No, too risky. Every mile we carried that shotgun with us would increase the danger of our being caught with it. That could be the thing, buddy. That could be the thing.”

We were ready. Drew crawled into the front of the aluminum canoe. I was glad he was there; I could work with him. He sat with the paddle just out of the river, shaking his head. Neither of us said anything until I told him to push off.

It was about four o’clock, and the thought of spending another night in the woods paralyzed me. The problems and the physical work of the burial had taken my mind off our situation, but now the thought of it and of what might happen to us surrounded me; I felt driven into it by a hammer. But something came to an edge in me, also. The leaves glittered, all mysterious points, and the river and the light on it were nothing but pure energy. I had never lived sheerly on nerves before, and a gigantic steadiness took me over, a constant trembling of awareness in a hundred places that added up to a kind of equilibrium, that made my arms move in long steady motions and showed me where the rocks were by the differences in the swirling of the water.

We moved well for the better part of an hour. Lewis was keeping up, too, driving the almost-buried canoe forward with an effort I could not even guess at. He liked to take things on himself and, because be could, do more than anyone else. And I was glad to see that in an emergency his self-system didn’t fold up on him, but carried on the same, or even stronger.

But I was also very glad that Drew and I were light and maneuverable. There were no rapids, but the river seemed to be moving faster. There was an odd but definite sensation of going downhill in a long curving slant like a ramp. I noticed this more and more, and finally it occurred to me that the feeling was caused by what the land on both sides was doing. At first it had lifted into higher banks, the left higher than the right, and now it was going up raggedly and steadily, higher and higher, changing the sound of the river to include a kind of keep beating noise, the tone coming out more and more as the walls climbed, shedding their trees and all but a few bushes and turning to stone. Most of the time the sides were not vertical, but were very steep, and I knew we would be in real trouble if we spilled. I prayed that there would be no rapids while we were in the gorge, or that they would be easy ones.

We pulled and pulled at the river. Drew was hunched forward in a studious position like a man at a desk, and at every stroke the old GI shirt he wore took a new hold across his shoulders, one which was the old hold as well.

I looked back. We had opened up a little distance on the other canoe; it was about thirty yards behind us. I thought I heard Lewis holler to us, probably to slow down, but the voice, thinly floating through the boom of wall-sound, had no authority and very little being at all.


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