The Harder They Come

Colter never broke stride, the dried-out scrub giving way to the denser vegetation of the riverbank, to dogwood, sumac, wild grape and the shining coppery leaves of poison ivy, then to the weeds and sedges taking root in the sandbars, then to damp earth, then to mud, and in the next moment he was launching himself into the water in a knifing fluid dive. It was a shock. The water, snowmelt from the big blunt mountains above, was like liquid ice, but Colter was generating his own kind of heat, beating across the river to an island that had been pushed up out of the current in a time of flood. There was a huge raft of uprooted trees there, hundreds of them, the whole interlarded with smaller debris, and that was what he was making for. And what was he thinking, his brain fueled by the adrenaline of the chase that was like cocaine running through his veins? He was thinking that if he could get to that heap of debris before the Indians appeared on the bank, he could find a place somewhere in the water beneath it to hide himself. Of course, that was a big if, because he could hear them shrieking now, pounding closer, sure they would find him floundering in some backwater where he’d be as easy to spear as a buffalo fish.

 

He was almost there, the thatch of logs taking on color and dimension, the bark slick and black, branches splintered and trailing in the water and the water dark and swift where it fought to pull the whole mess back out into the river. Snatching a breath, he plunged under, gliding like a beaver, but this was no beaver lodge and he couldn’t find a place to surface and breathe. Desperate, his lungs burning, he had no choice but to back out and thrust his head up again even as his eyes raked the shore: if they saw him, he was doomed. No one there yet. But here they came, hooting, hooting. He took the deepest breath he could hold and went back down again, feeling along the bottom of the pile for a gap, a hole, a crevice, and still nothing. Were his lungs bursting? Yes, yes, they were, but he kept on, his hands frantically digging at the debris, ready to drown rather than give himself up, but he was Colter and he was legendary and to be legendary you had to be lucky too. And he was. At the last possible moment, when he was about to give up and fill his lungs with another medium altogether, the medium only fish could make use of, not humans, he found an air pocket and surfaced.

 

He was too worked up to feel the terrible life-sucking chill of that water yet and because he was Colter and because he’d escaped, at least for the moment, he couldn’t help smiling to himself there in that dark hole where the water-run thatch filtered the light and held him in tenuous suspension. Their voices came to him then, the war whoops giving way to a querulous snarl of disbelief as they came to the deserted bank and saw that their quarry had eluded them, and though he couldn’t fully understand what they were saying, there was a lot of blame being thrown around, a lot of contention. Some of the braves, judging from the direction of their voices, had already started down the bank, poking through the reeds, searching the shallows, straining their eyes to see the glistening ball of his head bobbing with the current so they could draw a bead on it and put an arrow through one ear and out the other. Let them go. That was fine with him. He smiled wider.

 

But then he froze. There was a noise above him, a heavy footfall, voices. Two, three, four of them had apparently swum across to the island and they were probing the raft, tearing at branches now, thrusting their spears into the gaps and all the while jabbering and arguing with each other, probably along the lines of You shithead and I told you so. That was a hard moment. Colter never made a sound, even when a spear thrust came within a foot of him. He barely even breathed. What he was thinking was that one of them would get in the water and start searching the underside of the pile, same as he had, and his mind started playing tricks with him, the water itself, the very branches, feeling like the skin of an enemy come to discover him. But no enemy discovered him and a good thing too because that brave, though he might have sent up the alarm, would have been throttled and drowned in a heartbeat.

 

All right. But Colter was shivering now and they didn’t seem to be moving on. They kept jabbering and arguing and tugging at one log or another, and that was when a new thought entered his head: What if they set fire to the raft? Wasn’t that the way to flush out a rat? He’d die of smoke inhalation before the flames even got to him because he wasn’t going to move no matter what—he’d rather go that way, rather burn if it came to it, than give them the satisfaction of flushing him out so they could spear him like a muskrat. That water was cold. Cold enough to induce hyperventilation. Cold enough to kill. And they weren’t going away. On the positive side, though, they didn’t seem inclined to come into the water and get underneath the thing—and they didn’t seem to want to bother setting fire to the whole business. Or maybe they just didn’t think of it, maybe that was it.