The Other by David Guterson Page B

little something, or shut my eyes for a few minutes. Sometimes I lie in the fetal position and try, unsuccessfully, to sleep in the forest. It was in this posture, in June, that I heard a trilling winter wren and, later, a raven. The raven’s call was like water dripping loudly—like large drops of water striking a pool. It seemed to have nothing to do with nature; instead, it sounded like a plumbing problem. I wouldn’t have thought it was made by a bird at all except that on other occasions I’d watched ravens make this noise, though even with such clear verification it’s a note that still seems improbable and dreamlike. As does the past, sometimes.
    John William and I, finished with high school, came at the South Fork Hoh from its headwaters, entering the woods at Boulder Creek Campground, and traversing the Bailey Range over four cloudless days, finally departing from published routes beneath Mount Olympus, where at close to eight thousand feet you can smell salt water on the wind. From there we found our way to the South Fork Hoh—which we didn’t know was the South Fork Hoh, because we didn’t have a map or compass, by intention—or, rather, to where it gathers in a moraine of icy water and wind-blasted scree, and then, walking in the river itself while the current wrapped around our legs, and using a climbing rope in watery belays, we came down from the high country in a canyon. Between rock walls, the falling water was so loud we couldn’t speak to each other. Trees grew from clefts in the cliffs or lay askew in the current. It seemed to me our purpose was to drown. Climbing down vertical walls in a river was something you had to be young to try, a form of lunacy, and yet my friend’s face was animated by happiness. Water dripped from his well-made chin. He’d come all this way committing landmarks to memory, so that we might, if necessary, reverse our course, and there was something in this epic mental effort, I saw, that appealed to him as an adjunct to danger.
    Finally, things calmed. At midday, we sat by a pool under high slopes, taking the brief sunlight there and tossing stones competitively. We built a rock cairn, too, on a flat boulder in midstream. We were buzzed by a kingfisher, which we saw as a good omen, that the canyon might soon open into more passable country, which it did in the afternoon. Through the long twilight we walked along a tributary into deeper forest. The cedars here looked especially hoary because of their bare withes, which hung like deadwood. Later, we needed a drying fire and tried John William’s flint, steel, and char cloth, and though we did eventually produce sparks and smoke, in the end we used up the last of his char cloth without conjuring flames. It’s difficult, making fire this way. It’s an effort that makes you appreciate the achievement in a match. But it was warm in the June woods, and we slept on moss that night, with our boots and socks drying in our sleeping bags. The next morning, our tributary became dispersed and transient, and we left it in favor of keeping ramparts on our right. I remember sitting in dense woods, playing chess with John William on the type of miniature board air travelers used before the advent of laptops, my friend lying back on one elbow and crossing his ankles like a country squire at leisure, but shirtless and in baggy wool pants. Hair in his eyes, he made his moves with an anticlimactic nudge, then scratched his mosquito bites, teeth set in an impatient overbite, while I contemplated. As I recall, we played to a stalemate. It’s hard to understand why we wanted to spend so many days in the back country with little food, no fire, no map, and no compass, but maybe it was partly for that interlude of chess, for the disparity between chess and where we found ourselves. John William and I played a match of attrition while reveling in our isolation and eating the last of our raisins. Finally, we were only pushing lonely kings and