Hunter's Run(39)

"East," the man said. "The east bank's closer."

"That's where the chupacabra was."

"That fucking thing's days behind us. Come on. East!"

Ramón grabbed the oar and angled the raft as best he could toward the eastern shore. The man pulled their meal free of the coals and then went forward to look at the river. The sound rose from a bare whisper, something hardly noticeable, to a roar that almost drowned out the man's words.

"Hurry the fuck up," he said. "I can see it."

Ramón could too by now. A slight haze where the cataract threw mist into the air. Rapids, perhaps. A waterfall. But their raft wouldn't survive even a small insult. He had to reach land.

"Come on!" the man yelled, then dropped to his knees and started paddling with his good hand, scooping water as if he could swim the raft to safety. Ramón's shoulders were sore; his hands gripped the oar until his joints ached. The muddy bank inched nearer. The roar increased. The haze grew higher.

They were close, but they weren't going to make it. The flow of the river was too fast, and the raft had no purchase on the water. Boulders were beginning to slide past them, the water breaking white over the stone. The roar was near deafening. The shore was four meters away. Three and a half.

Something in the water caught Ramón's attention; a shifting. An eddy that meant something the back of his mind knew. Without thinking, Ramón switched his grip, pushing the raft away from the bank, aiming for the point on the river where the flow was  …  right. The bank edged away.

"What the fuck are you doing?" the man shrieked. "What the fuck are you-"

In the same instant, a sick, grinding sound overcame the cataract's voice, the forward float shattered, and the raft lurched, throwing Ramón forward beside the fire pit. The other man nearly tipped into the water. The flow of water arced at the raft's sides, an icy wave running over the back edge and draining between the loose branches. Ramón slid forward slowly, careful not to dislodge the raft from whatever had stopped their rush. A boulder just below the surface and sharp as the prow of a kayak had nearly split the front float. The stone still penetrated the bent and broken cane. A half meter toward the bank, and they would have missed it. Ten meters on, Ramón saw the streaks in the water where it gained speed as it prepared to fall. His twin's amazed and joyous whoop barely reached his ears, but the man's pounding congratulatory slaps on his shoulders conveyed the meaning clearly enough.

He'd saved them. Precarious as their position was, at least they hadn't died. Yet. Four meters of fast water still divided them from the land, but the raft was stationary.

"Rope!" his twin shouted in his ear. "We've got to get some rope to haul this pinche motherfucker onto the shore! You wait here!"

"What are you  …  Hey! Don't-"

But the other man had already taken two long, fast strides and leaped out over the water. The raft shifted one way and then the other, the ruined cane float twisting. For a sick moment, Ramón was sure the other man had freed him from the rock, but the raft steadied. Ramón sat, waiting, with his back and belly aching with fear. Was the other man going to be able to get to shore, or would he be swept over the brink? And if he was, where the fuck did that leave Ramón? And the raft itself, pressed up against the boulder by the constant push of the river, was like a coin balancing on its edge. If the float gave way or the river rose, he was dead. And rope? Where was his twin going to find rope, anyway? They were in the middle of the wilderness. By the time he'd thought all these things, he saw the slick shape of his twin pulling himself from the water.

As Ramón watched, the man hauled himself up the bank, paused for a moment, head hung low, and then vanished among the trees. Ramón squatted at the front of the raft, adding his weight to the raft's in hopes of keeping the float stuck where it was, and also crouching down, ready to leap for the shore if it did come loose. But as time passed, the sun pressing down on his back and shoulders, warming his skin and the cloth of his robe, his urgency and fear mixed with a strange kind of peace.

It was like one of those meaningless Zen stories Palenki liked to tell when he was drunk. He was trapped at the edge of a waterfall, on a raft that might come loose from its stone at any second, waiting for a man who was also in a sense himself to return from the wilderness with some scrounged tool that would save him-a man who would probably try to kill him if he knew the whole situation. And if he did make it out of here, it was a race to get to a city where his future was totally uncertain, where the law might, after all, still be after him, while genocidal aliens floated overhead. And what was he thinking about?

How good the sun felt.

Hours passed. When Ramón's legs began to ache from squatting, he took the risk of sitting. The raft still shifted to the side sometimes, but never enough to alarm him. His mind wandered. He remembered lazy, empty afternoons under the blazing Mexican sun, nothing to do but pray that rain would fill the cistern before it ran dry. It didn't have the immediacy of a newly returned memory. It was just something that had happened to him once, when he'd been a boy on another planet. A school of fish sped past him, scales flashing green and gold under the skin of rushing water. Ramón didn't know if they were all speeding to their own deaths at the falls ahead or if there was some trick they knew that would preserve them. There had to be some way that the inhabitants of the deep, fast flow of the river coped with accidents of geography like this. Perhaps it was only that when enough bodies were thrown out into the void, some few would survive; like seeds strewn over rocks, a handful might find a soil-filled niche. It didn't matter if a thousand died so long as a hundred lived. That must have been what Maneck and its people had felt, throwing themselves at the sky.

Fish putting their faith in the river.

When at last his twin reappeared at the river's edge, he had to shout and wave his arms to wake Ramón from his half drowse. He carried a coil of vine wound over one shoulder, thick as his thigh. Ramón didn't know if this was some plant the man had known of, the knowledge of which simply hadn't returned to his own mind yet, or if it was a lucky discovery-and he didn't care deeply. After a long series of gestures, Ramón understood the man's intentions: he would cast the vine out to Ramón, tied around a small branch. Ramón was then to haul enough of the vine onto the raft to throw the original branch back. When they'd made the double-strand fast to the raft and a tree near the shore, Ramón was to dislodge the raft and let the force of the river work against the constraint of the vines to swing the injured craft to shore. An ideal plan, so long as the vines were strong enough. It occurred to Ramón that the man's standards for the risk might be more forgiving than his own, but there was no better plan.

It took three tries to get the vine across to Ramón and five more to return it to his twin on the riverbank. The man was grinning as he made their improvised rope fast to a tree. Ramón was less sure. But even if the plan only got him nearer the shore, he'd be able to swim the shorter distance. When the man gave the high sign, Ramón began rocking the raft from one side to the other, catching the flowing water from one direction, then another, searching for the combination that would dislodge the float. For long minutes, it seemed the raft was stuck faster than he'd imagined, and then, with a lurch, it came free. Ramón lost his footing as the vine pulled taut, the raft shuddering and tipping. The pile of firewood broke free, branches and twigs spilling into the river and bobbing away into the mist. On his knees, Ramón waited as the raft swung slowly in an arc, the lashed wood groaning and creaking under the unfamiliar strain. The man whooped as the raft touched the muddy ground. Ramón leaped off the side, and together they hauled it up and out of the water.

"Good fucking work, pendejo!" the man said, clapping Ramón's shoulder with his uninjured hand and grinning like an idiot. The roar of the cataract was so loud the man had to shout to be heard. Ramón, half against his will, found himself grinning back.

"I thought there weren't any falls on this river," Ramón shouted.

"There aren't supposed to be," the man agreed. "But this far north, who checks the mapping programs? They missed one."

"Hope they didn't miss any others," Ramón said. "Did you get to scout it out? How bad does it look?"

The man had. The roar and the mist were the products of two drop-offs, one a little more than three meters, the second not quite half again as much. The raft would have been torn to kindling. But after the cataract, the river seemed to be smooth and relatively placid again. The trick would be to carry the raft to the lower river and launch it again from there.

They took the vine and cinched the raft to a tree nearer where it had come to rest, hoping to keep it safe in case of an unexpected rise in the river. Then, together, Ramón and his twin set out into the bush. There were game paths where animals had pushed through to the fresh water, but none of the animals had been hauling a two-man raft. Ramón began to regret they'd made the thing as large as they had. Night fell before they'd discovered a good path, and they set up a makeshift camp.