By the seventh day the river had begun doing what rivers have always done best. It was wearing away the hard edges the boys had carried from the detention centre. Their swagger hadn’t disappeared, but it no longer filled every conversation. They laughed more easily, noticed more, and every now and then seemed content simply to paddle in silence.
After lunch we pulled the rafts onto a broad gravel bar and climbed a winding track to a lookout high above the canyon.
Before leaving the beach I gathered everyone together.
“Stay on the track,” I said. “This is mountain lion country, and rattlesnakes like to sun themselves on warm rocks.”
Fred looked across with a grin.
“So, if a lion comes, do we just run faster than Pip?”
The boys laughed.
“No,” I replied, “you only need to run faster than Fred.”
The climb was easy, and the boys gradually spread out along the track. Some hurried ahead while others stopped to examine a weathered pine cone, an unusual rock or a feather lying beside the trail.
When we reached the lookout, I counted heads, then counted them again.
We were one boy short.
At first nobody seemed concerned. Someone thought he’d stopped for a drink, while another guessed he was still making his way up the track. Within minutes, however, the guides were searching through the forest as the detention officers stayed with the group.
The jokes about mountain lions quickly disappeared. A broad paw print in the dust suddenly demanded attention, as did a patch of warm rocks where a rattlesnake could easily have been basking in the afternoon sun. The forest itself had not changed, but the boys had. They stood closer together, listening to every snapping twig and every rustle in the scrub.
Nearly forty minutes later three whistle blasts echoed through the canyon.
He was sitting beneath a huge ponderosa pine.
“I thought something was following me,” he said quietly.
No mountain lion had been stalking him. No rattlesnake had crossed his path. Just unfamiliar sounds in the bush and a frightened imagination that had turned every crack of a twig into danger.
We walked back without jokes, and I noticed the toughest boy in the group drift alongside him and quietly place a hand on his shoulder. There was no audience, no performance, just one young bloke letting another know he wasn’t alone.
That evening around the campfire I asked, “What frightened you most today?”
The mountain lions and rattlesnakes we’d joked about that afternoon never entered the conversation. Instead, one boy admitted he’d never realised how quickly someone could disappear, while another confessed he’d discovered how much he cared whether one of the group made it safely back.
Tom had been staring into the fire for several minutes before he quietly said, “I reckon most of us got lost long before we came on this river.”
No one spoke after his authentic words and we watched in thought as the fire slowly settled into glowing coals.