Read Online The Other by David Guterson - Free Book Online

pawns around the board, and the space between two moves became, for both of us, a nap. I felt languid after so much time in the high country and after banging against the boulders in the river, and to loll there in the warm breeze of the forest, my limbs at rest, was a luxury. I slept deeply, rare for me in daylight. When I woke, John William was reading Outdoor Survival —the manual he’d brought for our North Cascades debacle, too—with his head propped on his pack. He wanted to look for yew wood now, as appropriate material for a fire drill. Fire, he said, was “the key to everything.” I didn’t ask what he meant—what “everything” included—and after a while we pushed ahead into more gradual terrain, where the trees were widely spaced and so uniform around that the girth of each rose like the shadow of the next. On exposed stones, we crossed a stream; beyond that the land flattened. Through the branches overhead, a rock wall rose higher than we could see, disappearing into the canopy. This was a country of easy walking: no thrashing through swales of devil’s club and slide alder. We stopped to make camp in the early evening, and I sat on a log, wrapped in my sleeping bag, while John William tried again to conjure fire. He had a yew-wood drill and a cedar fire board now. He would drill for a while, then alter something—push tinder around, carve a fresh notch—or scrutinize the diagram in Outdoor Survival. I helped a little by prodding at the tinder; once, I put my cheek to the ground in order to blow softly on an ember, which went out. At that moment, I thought I was responsible for our failure. Maybe if someone else had done the blowing. But still we persisted, taking turns with the drill, which tired our shoulders. Yet our most energetic attempts produced no more smoke than a blown-out candle. The friction of the yew turned the cedar to black powder, warm but never combustible.
    In the morning, about a half-mile away, at the base of a limestone cliff, we found a seep, which at first was nothing more than a sulfurous vapor we noticed while looking for denser yew wood. Seeing algae crusting a few nearby rocks, we clawed with our ice axes until a small, warm pool gathered. It was like finding a vent on the sea floor, so rare and unexpected is a hot spring in the Olympics. (Counting ours, there are only three.) John William and I went on picking at the limestone; for much of that day we excavated, until our pool was approximately on the order of a bathtub. Then we stripped, stepped in, and crouched there for a while, but the water hadn’t settled yet, so this was a little like soaking in hot mud. We had to pour creek water over our limbs to rinse the stain out.
    That evening, we stayed near our handiwork for its warmth, and as time wore on—we had nothing left to eat—it began to look less roiled. We sat wearing our sleeping bags like capes, with the pool producing its mineral effluvium, and our bare feet propped on rocks near its waters so as to warm our soles. I remember reading the first-aid pamphlet inside my kit as an antidote for boredom while John William carved a fresh fire drill from a length of yew. He wanted an abrupt transition, he said, between two diameters, as suggested in Outdoor Survival, so that a disk of pine with a hole at its center could be slipped partway down the shaft as a rest for his drilling hands. After a while, this ancient device was ready. We threw off our sleeping bags and knelt by the fire board. The twilight in June is long, and we used about all of it, working in near darkness. At the edge of the pool, with the kind of humorless diligence John William was prone to—me, too—we finally made the flash point for cedar tinder. The powder churning at the point of the drill turned briefly orange and then rolled into our pile of deliberately arranged shavings, where John William blew it into flames.
    Six years before, in ’68, there’d been a band called The Crazy World of