She was good at making sense of things that seemed erratic. She had learned the most about how water behaved. Beautiful toes wasted for years crammed into shoes in the City. They watched another log vault head over tail, after which Caroline took her first tentative step out into the water.Ĭaroline was their river-crossing scout. Rapids they’d never even noticed in previous crossings, when the water was low and any whitewater was just a skimming thin hat the river rocks wore.
On a lazier river, or even a lazier part of this river, a log might have gathered farther upstream in an eddy or been nudged onto a bank. The log must have traveled from the foothills, the unusual torrent of water ushering it through. In the water, a loose log, stripped naked of its bark and limbs, bobbed and rolled past even though the nearby landscape was treeless. They handed down their bedding rolls, the pouches of smoked meat, jerky, pemmican, the harvested pine nuts, precious acorns, wild rice, einkorn, a handful of wild onions, the disassembled smoking tent, their personal satchels, the hunting bows and arrows, the bag of hollowed wooden meal bowls and the chips of wood and stone they used as utensils, the precious box of precious knives, the Book Bag, the Cast Iron, the Manual, and the bags of their garbage they carried with them to be weighed and disposed of by the Rangers at Post. The grasses, mosses, the striving trees, so thin they could be snapped between two fingers, their new spring leaves quivers of creamy green. They lowered themselves and then the children down a small ledge to the almost nonexistent bank where greens grew, a color found almost exclusively next to rivers. Perhaps the same storm that had kept them on the other side of the mountains since last summer had also remade this river. But it was gone now and they could no longer be sure where that fording spot was. But it looked as though a storm had altered the bank and submerged the patch of island where they used to regroup before attempting the far bank.
They had a usual crossing spot that they considered safe, or as safe as a river crossing could be.
From their encounters with it elsewhere, they had even considered it a lazy river, the way it turned tightly back and forth through rocks and dirt from the foothills down across the sagebrush plain. They had crossed the river many times since they first arrived in the Wilderness State. So different that they had consulted the map again, trying to match the symbols with what was now there and what their memory insisted ought to be there. River 9 moved fast and swelled against its banks, and to the Community it looked like a wholly different river from the one they were familiar with.
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