Found by Joseph Bruchac

Author:Joseph Bruchac
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Book Publishing Company
Published: 2020-05-14T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

The Riverbank Cave

Nick slid down the pebbled bank that offered the quickest access to the river’s edge. Because of that cold he’d felt coming on, he was breathing a little heavier than usual. But otherwise he felt fine. He was thirsty, but he didn’t stop to drink. He was headed for what he’d seen as he scanned his surroundings—a potential hiding place a hundred feet upstream. It had been barely visible from the angle where he stood. Where the river had made a quick bend, the water seemed to have cut under a huge spruce tree that leaned over the stream. He couldn’t tell how large the shadowed place he was seeing under the tree might be, but it might be deep enough.

Avoiding the sandy places, he ran lightly over the exposed bedrock bed of the river. The stream seemed to have been twice as wide as it was now, its level probably dropping soon after the spring thaw. When he reached the huge old spruce and bent to look, he saw that luck was still with him. He dropped to his knees and crawled in. He’d found yet another natural shelter. It was not a stone lean-to, like the place he’d left behind on the mountaintop, but a ten-foot-deep cave shaped from the wash of current against sand. Because the water level had dropped with summer, it wasn’t the least bit moist inside. The floor was packed dry earth. Five feet overhead, it was roofed with living roots, and light filtered in through a space between two of the widest ones.

Nick crawled to the back of the small cave and took a deep breath. He leaned against the mat of thin, feathery roots that covered the back wall. They gave just enough with his weight to feel like a hammock.

His heart was pounding, but he wasn’t exhausted. He hadn’t burned himself out the way someone might who was running on adrenaline. He could have kept running, putting more distance between him and the men in the copter. But that might just be what they expected. Doing the unexpected was one way to keep from being caught. Fleeing in blind panic and getting caught out in the open was the worst thing someone could do when being pursued from above.

His mind was racing, though. Where were his pursuers now? What should he do next? Would he ever see his parents again?

Too many thoughts were crowding his head. He needed to calm himself down.

He closed his eyes and started doing the breathing exercise he’d begun to learn when he was ten. Black Tiger Breathing. He hadn’t been shown it by any teacher. He’d found it in a book about Northern Chinese styles of kung fu.

All you had to do was sit quietly and inhale. And keep inhaling in one single extended breath for at least thirty seconds. Then you had to settle that breath down low into your center of chi, your diaphragm area, and hold it there for twenty seconds.

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