The River by Gary Paulsen

couldn’t think right.
    He put the radio down and turned back to Derek. There was no change at all—no movement except for the short rise and fall of his chest with his breathing. The eyes were still partially opened, as they had been.
    Think.
    What did he know that could help?
    Lightning had hit the tree next to the overhang, come down the side—he saw where the pine bark was burned and literally blown from the tree—and then must have come out on a root or jumped away from the tree somehow.
    No, that wasn’t right. He’d read somewhere that lightning struck
up
, not down—moved from the ground up.
    Somehow it had come from the ground, through Derek and the radio and him to the tree, and then up, except that it seemed to come down and Derek shouldn’t have reached out, shouldn’t have risen…
    He shook his head. Stupid. None of that mattered.
    Electrical shock. What did you do when there was electrical shock?
    C.P.R.
    To get them breathing again, you had to give them C.P.R.—except that Derek was breathing already.
    Heart. He should check the heart.
    He put his fingers on Derek’s wrist, but couldn’t find the pulse—but when he checked his own he couldn’t find that either. He put his ear to Derek’s chest and heard the heart thumping. He tried to time it, but couldn’t transpose the number of beats per minute measured on his digital watch into a pulse rate because he couldn’t think.
    Think.
    The lightning came, took the tree, then Derek, the radio, him—and they were all knocked down and out.
    There it was—maybe Derek was just knocked out and would come to in a little while.
    Somehow he knew that wasn’t true. Something in the way Derek looked made the condition look like more than just being knocked out. Yet Brian wanted it to be, wanted it to be so much that he forced himself to believe it.
    Derek was breathing evenly—short breaths, but even—and his heart was beating regularly.
    He was just knocked out.
    Brian would make him comfortable and then wait next to him. Wait for him to come to.
    He would wait.

12
    T he rest of that day and through the night, he kneeled next to Derek.
    Waiting.
    He only moved to get a drink and eat some berries and go to the bathroom, the rest of the time he kneeled next to Derek, putting a piece of wood on the fire now and then to keep it going, waiting. Waiting.
    And he knew.
    He knew that Derek was not just unconscious, was more seriously hurt than that, and still he did not know what to do.
    Or if he could do anything.
    The radio was gone. They had made a schedule that said they would check in once a week or so—it was very loose—and that they would call if there was an emergency. Derek had just done the weekly check-in the afternoon before, so they wouldn’t think it odd that there were no calls. The bush-plane headquarters said they would keep their radio on around the clock, but not necessarily manned all the time, so even if he had a radio, Brian might not be able to get them right away. Of course, he could call any other airplane and report the emergency.
    If he had a radio.
    So he could not call for help, and they would not worry for another week or so, when Derek did not call in. There they were, where they sat.
    Derek was down, unconscious.
    In a coma.
    There.
That
word came. He had been afraid of the word
death
before and now this word,
coma
. He’d have to stop that, have to face things better than he was facing them. He knew almost nothing of medical terms or what happened to people with severe shock, and knew less than nothing about comas.
    He’d seen movies about people in comas for months and months or years and years and then they would suddenly snap out of it and wonder how long they’d been asleep.
    In the night, next to Derek, he tried to will him awake.
Snap awake now and ask how long you’ve been sleeping. Now. And we’ll laugh and talk about how close the lightning came.
    But it did not work.
    Derek did not awaken, made no change of