11 The River

Sheng stood at the river. He stared at the bridge. It was nothing more than some logs and branches tied together. Underneath it, the water rushed and foamed.

Choi Hung bobbed on Sheng’s shoulder.

“Not a bridge!” he squawked. “Not a bridge!”

Sheng filled his canteen with water while Bo-Bo drank. Then he took a deep breath. He stepped gingerly onto the makeshift bridge. Bo-Bo stayed right by his side. Sheng went down on all fours. I don’t know how they balance at all on only two legs, Bo-Bo thought.

Sheng crawled forward. Every time he seemed to be making progress, the water splashed over him and almost knocked him off the logs. Choi Hung spread his wings and held tighter to Sheng. Little by little, they all inched their way across.

“Almost there!” Choi Hung called. “Almost there!”

Sheng reached for the slippery bunch of branches ahead of him. As soon as he put his weight on them, they came loose and rushed downriver. The rope tying them together had rotted away! Sheng gasped. Now there was a wide gap in the bridge.

I’ll help him! Bo-Bo thought. If she jumped over the gap to the next set of branches, Sheng could grab on to her and pull himself across. She leaped.

She landed with a thump and a CRACK. The wood beneath her broke. She fell into the river.

“Bo-Bo!” Sheng shouted.

The water swirled over her head. She swallowed a stomachful of river. She came up and gulped air. She paddled hard to keep her head above water.

Sheng was beside her. He had jumped in after her! The water was too deep for her to stand up in—could Sheng? One look at his face and she knew he couldn’t. He was paddling desperately. This wasn’t like the stream on the claim. It was strong and fast.

Bo-Bo tried to swim back to the bridge. But the current was too strong. Beside her, Sheng spat up water. He tried to get back to the bridge too. His eyes were wide.

Choi Hung soared above them.

“I’ll be back!” he squawked. He flew downstream. He flapped his wings harder than Bo-Bo had ever seen him flap. His last shriek as he headed downstream was, “Don’t fight! Let the river carry you!”

Carry me? thought Bo-Bo. But she would try anything.

She stopped struggling. As soon as she stopped battling the current, it was much easier for her to stay afloat.

But she was floating away from Sheng. He was still fighting to get to the bridge. He slipped under the water, then came back up, and then went under again. She swam as hard as she could to get closer to him.

“Bo-Bo!” he coughed.

His hand grabbed her fur. It gave him just enough breathing space to see what she was doing. She saw him relax and give in to the river. If they could find someplace to get out, they could make it. It needed to be soon. Bo-Bo could see how exhausted Sheng was. She was too.

There! A speck far away in the sky! It got closer and closer!

“Choi Hung!” gulped Bo-Bo. “Where have you been?!”

“Quiet, dog,” screeched Choi Hung, circling. “I found a place for you two to get out of this rolling river!”

Bo-Bo kept quiet, although all she wanted to do was bark out, “WHERE?”

Choi Hung said, “Around two more curves, there’s an old tree stump. It looks like an angry bobcat. There’s some flat land jutting out into the river. Get out there. Don’t get swept past it. After that the bank is too steep. You’ll keep floating forever.”

“Which side?” Bo-Bo gasped.

“That one,” Choi Hung said, dipping his wing.

Sheng floated on his belly, swimming like a frog. A frog that kept coughing up water. Bo-Bo tried to paddle back to him but only got another mouthful of water.

“Keep swimming, dog!” Choi Hung trilled.

The water carried them down, down, down the river.

“There it is! There it is!” Choi Hung squawked in human words. Bo-Bo saw it too. A big tree trunk with knots that looked like eyes, twigs that looked like a bobcat’s ears, and a hole near the bottom that looked like an angry mouth.

She hurled herself against the stump, catching her paws between two roots. She hauled herself out of the water. Sheng tried to clamber up after her. But the current started to carry him away. His hat floated downriver. Bo-Bo grabbed his shirt in her mouth. Choi Hung grabbed his long braid. They pulled him up onto shore.

Sheng lay on the ground, coughing and spluttering. Finally he sat up. “Thanks!” he said.

He looked around. “I think that river did us a favor.” He coughed. “We needed to go a long way down the bank. I think this is just where we need to be!”

Bo-Bo would have wagged her wet tail, but she couldn’t bring herself to. Because she knew exactly where they were.

There was no mistaking it. The scent of scrub grass and manzanita. The gently rolling hills she could see through the trees. And the stump. From this side, it didn’t look like a bobcat.

The twigs looked like rabbit ears, and there was a big knot at the bottom like a fluffy tail. It was Jackrabbit Stump.

She was in her old territory.

“Now let’s find that canyon,” Sheng said. “We walk out of these woods across a plain and up the hill.”

Scrub Hill, thought Bo-Bo.

Sheng reached into his pocket. His face fell.

“The map!” he cried.

He ran back to the edge of the river. Bo-Bo grabbed the leg of his pants in case he tried to jump in. He gazed desperately at the foaming water.

But the map was gone.