“What are we going to do?” Bobby said again.

“The question is, what is he going to do?”

Nothing came back. I went on.

“What can he lose now? He’s got exactly the same thing going for him that we had going for us when we buried his buddy back in the woods. There won’t be any witnesses. There’s no motive to trace him by. As far as anybody else knows, he’s never seen us and we’ve never seen him. If all four of us wind up in the river, that’ll just even things out. Who in the hell cares? What kind of search party could get up into these rapids? A helicopter’s not going to do any good, even if you could see into the river from one, which you can’t. You think anybody’s going to fly a helicopter down into this gorge, just on the chance that he might see something? Not a chance in the world. There might be an investigation, but you can bet nothing will come of it. This is a wild goddamned river, as you might know. What is going to happen to us, if he kills us, is that we are going to become a legend. You bet, baby: one of those unsolved things.”

“You think he’s up there? Do you really?”

“I’m thinking we better believe he’s up there.”

“But then what?”

“We’re caught in this gorge. He can’t come down here, but the only way out of this place for us is down the river. We can’t run out of here at night, and when we move in the morning he’ll be up there somewhere.”

“Jesus Christ Almighty.”

“Yes,” I said. “You might say that. As Lewis might say, ‘Come on, Jesus boy, walk on down to us over that white water. But if you don’t, we’ve got to do whatever there is to do.’“

“But listen, Ed,” he said, and the pathetic human tone against the river-sound made me cringe, “you got to be sure.”

“Sure of what?”

“Sure you’re right. What if you’re wrong? I mean, we may not really be in any danger, at all, from anybody up … up there.” He gestured, but it was lost.

“You want to take a chance?”

“Well, no. Not if I don’t have to. But what …?”

“What what?”

“What can we do?”

“We can do three things,” I said, and some other person began to tell me what they were. “We can just sit here and sweat and call for our mamas. We can appeal to the elements. Maybe we can put Lewis back up on the rock and do a rain dance around him, to cut down the visibility. But if we got rain, we couldn’t get out through it, and Lewis would probably die of exposure. Look up yonder.”

I liked hearing the sound of my voice in the mountain speech, especially in the dark; it sounded like somebody who knew where he was and knew what he was doing. I thought of Drew and the albino boy picking and singing in the filling station.

There was a pause while we looked up between the wings of cliff and saw that the stars were beginning there, and no clouds at all.

“And then what?” Bobby said.

“Or somebody can try to go up there and wait for him on top.”

“What you mean is …”

“What I mean is like they say in the movies, especially on Saturday afternoon. It’s either him or us. We’ve killed a man. So has he. Whoever gets out depends on who kills who. It’s just that simple.”

“Well,” he said, “all right. I don’t want to die.”

“If you don’t, help me figure. We’ve got to figure like he’s figuring, up there. Everything depends on that.”

“I don’t have any idea what he’s figuring.”

“We can start out with the assumption that he’s going to kill us.”

“I got that far.”

“The next thing is when. He can’t do anything until it gets light. So that means we’ve got till morning to do whatever we’re going to do.”

“I still don’t know what that is.”

“Just let me go on a minute. My feeling is this. You can’t hear a gunshot that far off, with all this goddamned noise down here. After he shot Drew, he might have shot at us some more, and we’d never have known it unless another one of us was hit. I don’t have any idea how well he can see from where he is. But I think it’s reasonable to suppose that he saw well enough to know that he hit Drew, and that the canoes turned over. He might believe that the rest of us drowned, but I don’t believe he’d want to take a chance that we did. That’s awful rough water, but the fact that you and Lewis and I got out of it proves that it can be done, and I’m thinking he probably knows it. Again, maybe the reason he didn’t nail the rest of us was that by the time we got down here where we are now, we’d been carried a good ways past him, and also it was too dark. That’s our good luck; it means we’ve got at least a couple of advantages, if we can figure how to work them.”

“Advantages? Some advantages. We’ve got a hurt man. We’ve got a waterlogged canoe with the bottom stove in. We’ve got two guys who don’t know the first thing about the woods, who don’t even know where in the hell they are. He’s got a rifle, and he’s up above us. He knows where we are and can’t help being, and we don’t have the slightest notion of where he is, or even who he is. We haven’t got a goddamned chance, if you and Lewis are right. If he’s up there and wants to kill us, he can kill us.”

“Well now, it hasn’t happened yet. And we’ve got one big card.”

“What?”

“He thinks we can’t get at him. And if we can, we can kill him.”

“How?”

“With either a knife or a bow. Or with bare hands, if we have to.”

“We?”

“No. One of us.”

“I can’t even shoot a bow,” he said. He was saved for a little while.

“That narrows it down, sure enough,” I said. “You see what I mean about solving our problems? If you just do a little figuring.”

It was a decision, and I could feel it set us apart. Even in the dark the separation was obvious.

“Ed, level with me. Do you really think you can get up there in the dark?”

“To tell the truth, I don’t. But we haven’t got any other choice.”

“I still think that maybe he’s just gone away. Suppose he has?”

“Suppose he hasn’t?” I said. “Do you want to take the chance? Look, if I fall off this fucking cliff, it’s not going to hurt you any. If I get shot, it’s not going to be you getting shot. You’ve got two chances to live. If he’s gone away, or if for some reason or other he doesn’t shoot, or if he misses enough times for the canoe to get away downriver, you’ll live. Or if I get up there and kill him, you’ll live. So don’t worry about it. Let me worry.”

“Ed …”

“Shut up and let me think some more.”

I looked up at the gorge side but I couldn’t tell much about it, except that it was awfully high. But the lower part of it, at least, wasn’t quite as steep as I had thought at first. Rather than being absolutely vertical, it was more of a very steep slant, and I believed I could get up it at least part of the way, when the moon came up enough for me to see a little better.

“Come here, Bobby. And listen to everything I tell you. I’m going to make you go back over it before I leave, because the whole thing has got to be done right, and done right the first time. Here’s what I want you to do.”

“All right. I’m listening.”

“Keep Lewis as warm and comfortable as you can. When it gets first light—and I mean just barely light: light enough for you to see where you’re going—get Lewis into the canoe and move out. The whole business is going to have to be decided right there.”

I was the one. I walked up and down a little on the sandbar, for that should have been my privilege. Then for some reason I stepped into the edge of the river. In a way, I guess, I wanted to get a renewed feel of all the elements present, and also to look as far up the cliff as I could. I stood with the cold water flowing around my calves and my head back, watching the cliff slant up into the darkness. More stars had come out around the top of the gorge, a kind of river of them. I strung the bow.

I ran my right hand over the limbs, feeling for broken pieces and splinters of fiber glass. Part of the upper limb seemed a little rougher than it should have, but it had been that way before. I took out the arrows I had left. I had started with four but had wasted two on the deer. One of the remaining ones was fairly straight; I spun it through my fingers as Lewis had taught me to do, feeling for the passing tick and jump a crooked aluminum arrow has when it spins. It may have been a little bent up in the crest, just under the feathers, but it was shootable, and at short range it ought to be accurate. The other arrow was badly bent, and I straightened it as well as I could with my hands, but there was not much I could do in the dark. Holding it at eye level and pointing it toward the best of the light places in the sky, I could not see even well enough to tell exactly where and how badly it was bent. But the broadhead was all right.