The evening before, as darkness settled into the canyon and our campfire burned down to that deep red glow signalling it was time for the evening stories. I stood up and told the boys an old tale I had carried with me for years. It was said to have come from Native American traditions, but no one seemed quite certain where its journey began.
An old Native American grandfather tells his grandson that there are two wolves living inside every human being and that the wolves are forever fighting. One carries anger, jealousy, resentment, arrogance and cruelty, while the other carries courage, kindness, compassion, generosity and love. The grandson thinks about this for a while before asking the question any boy would surely ask: “Which wolf wins?” The grandfather’s answer could hardly be simpler. “The one you feed the most.”
For a little while after I finished, the boys were quiet and the only sounds came from the river moving through the darkness below us. A couple nodded, another poked absently at the coals with a stick, while Fred, who could usually be relied upon to puncture anything in danger of becoming too serious, tossed another piece of wood onto the fire and said, “That’s pretty cool.” Then someone made a joke, the moment dissolved into laughter and conversation, and the two wolves seemed to disappear with the sparks into the night.
Or so I thought.
The following afternoon we pulled the rafts onto a broad gravel bar and began unloading. The sun was still high above the canyon walls and there was the usual cheerful confusion of paddles, dry bags, food boxes and boys wandering about trying to look useful. Tom was carrying one of the food boxes when his foot caught between two rocks. He lurched forward, the lid flew loose and half our supplies tumbled across the stones.
There was one of those brief silences that often comes just before laughter, and Fred, never slow to recognise an opportunity, was first into the breach. “Jesus, Tom. You couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery.” A couple of boys laughed while Tom, without answering, crouched down and began gathering up the food.
It could easily have ended there, except Fred had discovered something he enjoyed almost as much as whitewater; an audience. Picking up a packet of tortillas, he held it above his head and called out loud enough so everyone could hear, “Hey, Tommy. Want me to show you how to carry one of these without killing everybody’s dinner?” This time more of the boys joined in.
I was farther down the beach helping one of the guides with a raft, but I could see what was unfolding. I had witnessed versions of it many times before, in schools, detention centres and groups of boys everywhere; that strange little transaction by which one boy discovers he can make himself taller by making another boy smaller. I started towards them, wondering whether I should interrupt before Fred took it any further.
But before I reached them, Fred looked down at Tom. It was not the quick glance of someone searching for material for his next joke; this time, for some reason, he actually looked at him. Tom was still on his knees among the scattered food, quietly gathering it together, and he wasn’t laughing. Meanwhile something changed in Fred’s face.
He glanced back at the boys who were waiting for the next instalment, then again at Tom. I could never know exactly what travelled through his mind in those few seconds, but watching from across the gravel bar I had the strangest thought that two wolves had wandered out of the previous night’s firelight and were now standing beside him in the afternoon sun.
Fred lowered the tortillas. “Ah, bugger it,” he muttered, then crouched beside Tom and began helping him gather the food.
“What’s wrong with you, Fred?” one of the boys called. Fred ignored him and picked up a bag of apples. Another boy laughed and called, “Gone soft, mate?”
Fred looked across at him, then put the apples back into the box. “Nah,” he said. “Just feeding the other bloody wolf.”
For a moment there was an unexpected silence on the gravel bar, and then Tom laughed. It wasn’t a great roar of laughter, nor did it need to be; it was simply enough to release whatever had been gathering between them. Fred handed him the tortillas and said, “Here. Try not to kill these.”
“Piss off,” Tom replied, and this time they both laughed.
Later that evening I found Fred sitting alone near the river. Behind us the others were gathering wood and preparing the campfire, their voices drifting along the beach, but down where Fred sat there was only the quieter conversation of water moving over stone. I lowered myself onto a rock beside him and for a while neither of us spoke. Over the years I had learned there were times on a river when silence did a better job than questions, particularly with boys who had spent much of their lives surrounded by adults wanting explanations.
Eventually I said, “You remembered the wolves.”
Fred gave a small shrug. “Yeah.” He picked up a stone and rolled it between his fingers while we watched the current curl around a half-submerged rock and disappear downstream. After a while he said, “I nearly went for him.”
“I noticed.”
“The funny thing is, I knew what I was doing,” he said. “I knew they’d laugh, and I wanted them to.”
There was no swagger in his voice now, no attempt to impress me or excuse himself. He was simply telling the truth, which seemed far more important than anything I might have said to him. When I asked what had stopped him, he tossed the stone into the river and replied, “Those bloody wolves of yours.”
I smiled. “They’re not mine.”
“Well, one of them nearly got fed.”
The stone had disappeared beneath the surface, but its circles travelled outward for a while before the current gathered them back into itself. Fred watched them go and then, almost as though he were speaking to the river rather than to me, said, “Didn’t feed the bastard, though.”
I said nothing. There seemed little point in crowding the moment with words. What I saw in Fred’s face was not the pride of a boy expecting praise, but something quieter and, I suspected, much more important; the discovery that he did not have to obey every impulse that rose inside him.
The river had taught me over the years that important changes rarely announce themselves with trumpets. More often they begin almost invisibly; a paddle placed into the current a moment earlier, a slight shift of weight before entering a rapid, the barely perceptible correction that prevents a raft from being swept somewhere its crew never intended to go. Looking at Fred beside me, I wondered whether human change might happen in much the same way.
For a boy it might be a fist that remains by his side, a cruel joke abandoned halfway to the tongue, or a hand offered to someone he might once have pushed further down. These are small things when viewed from the outside, yet rivers had taught me never to underestimate the power of a small change made at precisely the right moment.
Fred had not conquered either wolf that afternoon. They would undoubtedly meet again, perhaps the following day, perhaps many times throughout his life. But now he knew they were there, and more importantly, he had discovered that he had some say in which one grew stronger.
We sat there a little longer as evening gathered around the canyon and the first calls came from the boys around the fire. Then Fred stood, brushed the gravel from his shorts and headed back towards camp.
I followed a little way behind him, while beside us the river kept moving towards country none of us could yet see.