'Adventure fee' was Billy's name for it.

Homer thought it might make his would-be adoptive parents self-conscious if he told them any stories about life at St. Cloud's-or worse, about Thanksgiving in Waterville. He felt he had to contribute something to the campfire spirit of this present adventure, but the only good stories he knew were Great Expectations and David Copperfield. Dr. Larch had let him take the copy of Great Expectations with him; it was Homer's favorite of the two. Homer asked the Winkles if he could read them a little of his favorite story. Of course, they said, they'd love it; they'd never been read to, not that they could remember. Homer was a little nervous; as many times as he'd read Great Expectations, he'd never read aloud to an audience before.

But he was wonderful! He even mastered what he guessed was Joe Gargery's accent, and by the time he got to the part where Mr. Wopsle cries out, ' “No!” with the feeble malice of a tired man,' Homer sensed he had found the proper voice for the whole tale-he felt he might also have discovered his first talent. Unfortunately, talented though he was, his reading put the Winkles fast asleep. {50} Homer kept reading by himself, through the end of Chapter 7. Maybe it's not my reading, Homer thought; maybe it's the Winkles-all her sit-ups, all his trout-catching, all the fierce rigor of the indisputably great outdoors.

Homer attempted to arrange the Winkles' sleeping bag-a huge, single bag-comfortably around them. He blew out the lamps. He went to his own room in the vast tent and crawled into his own sleeping bag. He lay with his head by the open tent flap; he could see the stars; he could hear the nearby crashing water. It did not remind him of Three Mile Falls, because the stream here was so different from that river. It was just as fast, but it ran through a deep, narrow gorge-sparkling clean, roundbouldered, with glossy pools where Grant had caught the trout. It was not unpleasant imagining further adventures with the Winkles, but Homer had more trouble imagining a moose. Exactly how big would a moose be? Bigger than the Winkles?

Homer exhibited no mistrust, and certainly no fear, of the Winkles. He felt for them only a detached wariness -he was sure they weren't dangerous but they were of a slightly altered species. He fell asleep confusing the Winkles, in his child's mind, with moose. In the morning he woke up to the sound of what he was sure were moose -only to discover that it was the Winkles in the tent room next to his. The Winkles appeared to greet the morning vigorously. Although Homer had never heard human beings make love, or moose mate, he knew perfectly well that the Winkles were mating. If Dr. Larch had been present, he might have drawn new conclusions concerning the Winkles' inability to produce offspring. He would have concluded that the violent athleticism of their coupling simply destroyed, or scared to death, every available egg and sperm.

Homer politely feigned sleep. The Winkles then roused him playfully. Like large dogs, they burst into his room on all fours, tugging at his sleeping bag with their teeth. They were going to swim! they told him. They were such {51} large people, Homer wondered at the sheer abundance of their active flesh. He also wondered how they intended to swim in the raging stream without being bashed against the boulders and swept away. Homer didn't know how to swim-not even in calm water.

But the Winkles were old hands at outdoor feats of skill, and they were cunning with equipment. They threw a line across the rapids; it was called a survival rope, they told Homer. The rope attached to a rakelike cluster of spikes, which Grant Winkle neatly lodged among the rocks on the far shore of the roaring river; he then strung a second rope to this one, and then a third. These additional ropes were complicated, with metal eyelets and hooks and adjustable safety straps that went around the Winkles themselves and held them tightly at their waists. With the assistance of this truly adventuresome gear, the Winkles were able to bounce, semisuspended, into the thick of the rapids-where they were tossed about like bathtub toys while remaining safely in the same place, attached to each other and to the socalled survival rope. It was fun for Homer to watch them. The water seemed to swallow them completely at times-streaming sheets of it would engulf them and suck them down. Yet they would emerge in seconds, bouncing, appearing to walk across the churning, rolling foam. They played in midstream like giant, blond otters. Homer was very nearly convinced of their mastery of the elements-at least of water-and felt himself to be on the verge of asking them to let him try the game of showering in the rapids when it occurred to him that they couldn't hear him. If he'd called out to them-even if he'd screamed-the whoosh of the turbid water all around the Winkles would have drowned out any noise he could muster.

He had resolved, therefore, to remain sitting on the shore and watch his would-be adoptive parents play, when the ground began to shake under him. He knew this more from certain badly told stories, in badly written {52} children's books, than from the felt recognition of the moving ground itself; in those children's books, when something terrible is about to happen, the ground always shakes. He almost chose not to believe it, but the ground was unmistakably trembling; a dull hammering reached his ears.

Homer watched the Winkles more closely, believing them to be in control of everything. The Winkles continued to play in the rapids; they heard nothing, they didn't feel the ground shake because they weren't on the ground.

Oh my God, a moose is coming! thought Homer Wells. He stood up. He watched his feet hop-all by themselves -on the jumping ground. It is a herd of moose! he thought. To add to the hammering sound, Homer now heard sharper noises: cracks, some as startling as pistol shots. He looked at the Winkles and could tell that they'd heard these harsh slaps, too. Whatever it was that was coming, the Winkles were familiar with it; their entire attitude changed-they were no longer playful. They seemed to be struggling, and on their faces (now disappearing in the rushing white froth) their expressions were both knowledgeable and frightened. When they got a second to look (between plunges into the rapids), they looked upstream.

So did Homer-in time to see the log drive when it was about twenty-five yards away. The trees along the shoreline were occasionally snapped off as cleanly as kindling snapped over a knee-by a random log as big as a telephone pole but stouter, hurtling out of the water, striking a boulder and spinning for twenty feet through the air, leveling a patch of forest wherever it crashed and rolled on. The mass of logs, each as big as telephone poles, moved swiftly downstream with a wall of water in front of it. This water was not like the clear water of the river, but muddy with turmoil, clogged with slabs of bark, messy with whole chunks of ground that had been gouged out of the shore. The Ramses Paper Company {53} called it a modest log drive; they said there'd been no more than four hundred, maybe seven hundred logs in that particular drive downriver.

Homer Wells was still running when he reached the road, where he was safe. He turned in time to see; the logs surge by. A line from the tent had been attached to the Winkles' survival rope, and the: entire tent and everything in it (Homer's copy of Great Expectations, too) were swept downstream in the pounding flow and charge of logs. The Ramses Paper Company wouldn't recover Billy and Grant's bodies for three days; they found them nearly four miles away.

Homer Wells was fairly calm. He looked upstream, waiting for more of anything; upstream was cle;arly the direction whatever might come next would come from. After a while, he relaxed; he examined the Winkles' safari vehicle, which looked naked without the tent and the kitchen equipment. He found some fishing gear, but he didn't dare to fish; it meant standing too close to the stream. He found some guns, but he had no idea how they worked (he felt comforted that the guns were there, however). He chose the biggest, most dangerous-looking one-a twelve-gauge, doubles-barrel shotgun-and dragged it around with him.