The Choiring of the Trees - Donald Harington [188]
If only he had been able to keep that up. But as the north shore seemed to come closer and he felt all his muscles failing him, he lashed his right arm over his head with such desperate energy that a terrible pain shot through his shoulder. He screamed. He knew it was no mere cramp or muscle spasm; he had thrown something out of joint. From then on, he could not move his right arm at all, and the pain was all he could think of.
With his left hand he paddled several more strokes to keep afloat, until another log came drifting within reach and he caught it with his left hand and hung on. He did not know how long he clung to that log, conscious of nothing but the terrible pain in his shoulder and the darkening of the sky; the sun must have set. Seized with frantic thirst, he was almost tempted to drink the brown water but dared not. Then he roused himself from his pain to observe that the log was not in the midcurrents of the river but was caught in an eddy swirling toward a bend in the river; his log was headed for a great raft of snags. He kicked free from it just before it crashed into the pile of other logs, but the currents of the eddy had been too turbulent and confusing for him to fight with only one hand.
He must have lost consciousness—briefly, blessèdly—because he had stopped screaming from the pain. It was fading twilight when he found the world again and discovered his situation: he had been wedged into the pile of debris, clear of the water except for one leg and his useless right arm. He pulled himself up and got into a sitting position from which he could get his bearings: he had reached the north shore! Or not the shore itself, not dry land with earth beneath his feet, but this vast tangle of logs and limbs shunted into a bend of the shore. He crawled from one log to another, trying to hold his dead arm against his stomach, trying to hold his balance with the other hand, slipping, falling, from log to log, trying to extricate himself from the brush pile. It took a long, long time. When he had at long last reached solid earth, or sand, and thrown himself exhausted upon it, it was full night, full dark, and he slept.
Mosquitoes awakened him. Those biting him on his right side, or anywhere below his waist, he swatted and killed with his good left hand, but he could not swat at any mosquito alighting on his left arm or his left side. He spent most of the rest of the night battling the mosquitoes, too tired to get up and move away from the riverbank.
The first light of morning found him moving again: he walked away at last from the river, heading north across a sandbar, wading an eddy beyond the sandbar to climb a steep bank of clay and reach the first stand of cottonwood trees, who seemed to be singing him a welcome. He slaked his terrible thirst by using a handful of grass to mop up the morning dew from plants and rocks and squeezing the drops into his mouth: the beginning of his practice in doing things with his left hand alone. But the left hand soon began to fail him when he neared the first human habitation and a dog came to meet him, shattering the stillness with vicious barks; with his right hand he reached down to pick up a rock, and the searing pain reminded him that he couldn’t use that arm; he switched to the left hand and attempted to throw the rock at the dog but missed so badly that the dog itself seemed amused and drew even nearer. Finally he picked up a heavy stick and lashed out repeatedly until the dog withdrew. Leaning toward the left, instinctively toward the northwest, he went on, avoiding the dog and its master, and whatever remained of the settlement of Nail, Arkansas, as it once had been called.
The pain in his shoulder did not let up, but he had grown almost accustomed to it. Still, it distracted him entirely from the wound in his hip until he unfastened his pants to relieve himself and