Satori - Don Winslow [92]
They were in bad shape.
The canopy of the first raft was stoved in, and several oars were broken. The second raft looked little better, its bow jagged like a broken tooth. But both had made it through the Dragon’s Throat and, miraculously, the crates sat in the middle like cows lying down in the face of bad weather.
One of the crew standing on the edge saw him and started to point and yell as Nicholai, exhausted, swam for the shore, where he just lay on the rough stones, unable to move.
“Thought you were a goner,” Tasser said, standing over him.
“So did I.”
“Glad you made it.”
“Thank you.”
“Yeah, you have the rest of my dough.”
On that sentimental note, he pulled Nicholai to his feet.
They spent the next three days resting, repairing the damaged rafts and oars, and perusing the rough map of the next stretch of the river.
“This so-called map is useless,” Nicholai said.
So Tasser and Nicholai walked downstream, climbed a steep cliff on the right bank, and confirmed their worst fear: an enormous fall, higher than the one that nearly killed them, loomed just downstream.
“We can’t run that,” Nicholai said.
“Nope.”
They would have to go around it. With only nine men, a portage would be long and arduous, but they had no choice. So they went back and began the long task of disassembling the rafts and hewing poles with which to heft the crates. This took two more days — making an unplanned delay of five days — so dwindling supplies became a concern. With no villages in the wilderness of the Lekang River gorges in which to buy food, they would have to cut rations, a serious problem with the increase in labor that the portage would extract.
But no one complained about these hardships, when weighed against the terror of another run down worse rapids. The men worked steadily, and in two days they were ready to set out.
For three days they worked in relay teams, hefting, pulling, dragging, and pushing the rafts’ logs up the slope beside the massive waterfall, then lowering them down using ropes wrapped around trees as counterweights. Then, while two of the crewmen reassembled the rafts, the other six men carried the heavy crates with their lethal cargo over the same route.
To the extent that one can enjoy grueling physical labor, Nicholai did so. The battle against the physics of hauling heavy material up and down a mountain and the struggle against the limitations of his own body and spirit seemed simple and clean as opposed to the more underhanded conflicts of his mission.
No deception was involved in this, just the direct application of muscle and sweat, determination and brains. Nicholai found it to be a cleansing process — even the sharp edge of hunger that came on the second day seemed only to sharpen his senses and purge the malaise that he only now realized had set in after leaving Solange.
And the Tibetan crewmen were a marvel of cheerfulness and stamina. Having begun their working lives as sherpas, lugging heavy baggage on the slopes of the Himalayas, they were not daunted by this task and seemed to find the complexities of maneuvering the loads to be a pleasant intellectual as well as physical challenge. They loved to solve the problems of weight and counterweight using complicated arrangements of ropes and knots that fascinated Nicholai.
He resolved that, if he survived this mission, he would spend more time in the mountains and master the techniques of technical climbing.
At night the Tibetans would build a fire, brew strong pots of tea from the dwindling supply, and make soup that got thinner each night. Still it was a good time, resting sore muscles and listening to the tales of ghosts and spirits, sage holy men and brave warriors that the crewmen would tell while Tasser translated into colloquial American English.
Then Nicholai would sleep the sleep of the dead, waking only just before dawn, when the day’s good and hard work would begin again. He was almost disappointed when, after three days, the portage was accomplished,