Read The River for Free Online Page A

blade, and struck the back of the hard steel against the sharp edge of the flint. Three, four times he hit and finally there were sparks.
    He looked up, smiling. “No more mosquitoes.”
    He took two of the larger black stones and they went to find a campsite, and here, too, there was the waiting for luck.
    They walked nearly halfway around the lake, looking always as well for food. As they worked past the northern end of the lake they came on low brush filled with small nuts. These he knew were hazelnuts, and they stopped to pick and eat some. They were ripe, or very close, just shy of being dry, and the worms and squirrels had been at them, but they still found enough to cut the edge off their hunger. They used rocks to smash them and spent over an hour bashing rocks and nibbling at the small chunks of nutmeat, which tasted almost sweet.
    It was then approaching evening and Brian knew they would need a shelter of some kind and a fire, before dark and the evening horde of insects found them.
    Then, coming out of a stand of thick willows, they found it.
    In some ancient time, an enormous tree had fallen in a giant wind. The tree had been growing on the side of a small hill, which was made on a rocky shelf. As the tree went over it pulled earth, balled in its roots, with it, and made a large hole back in, under the shelf of rocks.
    Time had done the rest. The tree was long rotted and gone to worms, the soil had filtered somewhat back into the hole and taken grass seeds, and what was left was a large depression in the side of the hill with an overhanging shelf of rock. On each side of the depression there were large trees—white pines that went towering up and shaded the whole place to make it feel like a quiet garden.
    It was not perfect, not as nice as Brian had had on the
L
-shaped lake. But it was good enough, far better than nothing, and to cap it off, there was a small spring of water to the side of the overhang, where a fissure of rock let water work out in a trickle that made its way down to the lake.
    “Home,” Brian said.
    Derek looked at the depression. “It looks like a hole—what do we do to make it livable?”
    “Beds and a fire. You use pine boughs to make the beds.” He showed Derek how to cut the boughs and stick them point down to make a soft bed. “You do that and I’ll work on a fire.”
    “I need to watch you do that,” Derek said. “So I can write about it.”
    Brian nodded and set out to find what he needed.
    He would never forget the first fire, what it had meant to him—as important as it must have been to early man—and he approached making a fire now almost as a religious experience.
    You could not hurry it, he knew. Fire would come only when it wanted to come, and only when there was a good bed for it, a home for it.
    He found some birches near the shoreline and shredded dry birch bark with his fingernails until it was like hair. He kept adding to this until he had a ball of fluff three inches in diameter.
    To this he added some pulverized, dried grass, worked almost into flour, and when it was all together, he gently used his finger to make a hole in the middle.
    A home for the fire, he thought. A place for it to live.
    Derek had watched all of this with intense interest, writing in his notebook from time to time, underlining things, nodding.
    Brian set aside the tinder and found some dry pine twigs, as small as matches. When he had a good pile of these, broken and lined up for use, he searched for slightly larger dry wood and still larger until he had a pile as high as his knees.
    In all of this he was silent, thinking only of the fire, but he turned to Derek now. “You can’t have too much wood. Ever. And you should always have dried wood stashed back in some safe place, along with tinder…” He paused, thinking, remembering.
    “What is it?” Derek asked.
    “Fire. It’s so . . . so alive. Such an important thing to us. Back there in the world we don’t know that. But when