Borderline by Nevada Barr

Anna couldn’t see the reason for it. Chrissie’s failure to row would not make or break a turn. Running rapids was a sport as much of the mind as of the body. Between them Paul and Cyril had enough strength to control the raft.
    “Row left,” Carmen shouted. Anna had already dug her paddle deep, pushing a wide arc, trying to force the bow to point downstream. Steve had never learned to steer a canoe or raft and paddled straight ahead. Lori sat unmoving, her paddle thrust in the river nearly to her knuckles. Lori was serving as an unofficial rudder, the raft pivoting on her blade.
    “Lori,” Anna said sharply. “Row.”
    The young woman woke as if from a dream, looked back at Anna, her oar slipping from her hand and racing downstream ahead of them. The paddle crashed into the first rock and eddied away to the left. With the freakish suddenness that can turn an adventure into a disaster, the raft was against the rock, with Paul’s, Cyril’s and Chrissie’s oars trapped between rubber and stone.
    “We’re okay,” Carmen was shouting over the lowing of the cow and Chrissie’s shrieks. “Lean into the rock, don’t let the upstream side take on water, into the rock.”
    The raft steadied. The river held them fast but they were upright. “We’re okay,” Carmen said. Then the equation shifted. A dark shape bore down the river on a collision course with the raft pinned against the rock.
    “It’s going to hit us,” Chrissie screamed.
    “It’s a garbage bag,” Carmen screamed back. “We’re okay.”
    Chrissie could not hear her and she scrambled to get out of the raft. The upstream gunwale dipped and the river poured in. Lori was gone in a second, taken from sight into the rapids. Cyril held on long enough to grab Anna’s life jacket and yell: “Easter!” before the current snatched her away.
    “Go, go,” Paul was yelling at her. “Forget the damn cow.” Easter was panicked, tossing her head back and forth weakly and bleating. The towel had torn free of one horn and was unwinding from the other in a sodden flag that slapped her and scared her more with each toss.
    She couldn’t leave it to die a slow death from water-boarding, or, if it was lucky, the raft would flip and it would drown faster.
    “I got the head,” Carmen said, and began pulling the slipknots they’d used to anchor an unresisting Easter in place. Anna’s body was out of the raft and the current wanted her bad. She hooked one arm over the fat gunwale and pulled at the line holding Easter’s back legs with the other.
    “Cow!” Carmen shouted as the rope came free and several hundred pounds of beef struck Anna, pushing her beneath the brown water. She’d seen Easter coming in time to take a good breath. Rolling herself up like a hedgehog, she hugged her knees with one arm and her head with the other. A hoof or hip or shoulder bone clipped her, sending her spinning. Then she was just with the river. Her life jacket popped her to the surface and she came out of her protective ball and pointed her feet downstream so she could fend off solid objects.
    Things had happened so quickly that by the time she had the luxury of thought it was too late. The current was too great to swim back to see if Paul and Steve and Carmen had cleared the wreckage safely and too swift to make her way to the bank until it let her.
    As she rounded the boulder the raft was crucified against, a lump almost the same brown as the river rose from the depths. Anna stopped floating and swam after the cow. The beast was trussed and so weak she didn’t worry about intentional harm, though she did worry about accidentally getting gored. Four good strokes and she was next to Easter. She grabbed the cow’s horns, letting the rest of the animal lead their way downstream, Anna’s legs trailing behind, the cow’s nostrils barely above water.
    The rockslide was less than a hundred yards in length and within a minute had spewed Anna and the cow out onto relatively flat