rowing

  He could no longer think anyway. He had no idea how far they had come, how many hours or days they had been traveling or how far it still was to the trading post. He could only pull now, only pull with the paddle.
  He knew absolutely nothing, except the raft and the paddle and his hands, which had gone beyond bleeding now and were sores that stuck to the shaft of the crude paddle; knew nothing but the need, the numbing, crushing need to get Derek somewhere, somewhere, somewhere down the river….
  Food, hunger, home, distance, sleep, the agony of his body — none of it mattered anymore.
  Only the reach.
  The bend forward at the waist, the pull back with the arms, two on the left, two on the right.
  Two left.
  Two right.
  Two.
  Two.
  Into that long day and that long night he moved the raft, so beyond thought now that even the hallucinations didn’t come; nothing was there but the front of the raft, Derek, and the river.
  The river.
  Sometime in the morning of the next day, any day, a thousand days or eight days — he could not tell — somewhere in that morning the river widened and made a sweeping curve to the left, widened to half a mile or more, and he saw or thought he could see a building roof, a straight line in the trees that did not look natural and then he heard it, the sound of a dog barking — not a wolf or coyote, but a dog.
  There was a small dock.
  People had dogs that barked, and they had docks. He kept pulling, still not able to think or do anything but stroke, pulled to the edge of the river until the raft nudged against the dock, bounced, and then the paddle dropped.
  He was done.