Taylor Five by Ann Halam Page B

footing. She dropped the pole. It was lucky she did or she’d have been left stranded, hanging on to it in midstream. The tree trunk snatched the raft away, so violently that the guide rope parted. The drowned tree and the raft went whirling around, all tangled together, Tay and Uncle being flung about like rag dolls—
    “Push it off us! Push it off us!” yelled Tay. But the tree trunk, unbalanced by its new burden, heaved itself up, tipping the raft upside down. The water closed over Tay’s head. She popped up to the surface and saw Uncle in the branches of the drowned tree, staring at her, terrified, as he was swept away.
    “I’m coming!” she yelled. “Hang on!”
    She struck out. She couldn’t fight the current, she had to let it take her, straight into the arms of the raft-snatcher tree. In a confusion of splashing, with brown foamy water in her throat and nose and eyes, she grabbed on to a branch and clung there.
    “Jump!” she yelled. “You’ve got to jump, Uncle! There’s rapids and you’ll get killed. Come on, remember I’m really Pam, I can save us, only
jump
!”
    And he was in the water with her, grabbing onto her frantically.
    “Kick for the bank!” she screamed, and choked, and went under—
    Somehow, between them, they managed it. They escaped from the current. They drifted, they swam, and at last they clambered out, into the waterlogged roots of the trees on the eastern bank; and up onto solid ground.
    Tay got on her hands and knees and threw up a lot of muddy water.
    “Have I still got the rucksack?” she croaked. She was too dizzy to tell.
    Uncle took her hand and held it to the straps. Yes, she still had the rucksack. . . . When she could manage to see straight, she took it off and checked to see what had survived. The radiophone was safe, and her torch, both still wrapped in plastic bags but wet through anyway. Tins of food, a water bottle, the map and the piece of Donny’s blanket that she had brought with her, to have something of his . . . the Shakespeare, very bedraggled. The compass was zipped into her shorts pocket, with her pocketknife and the matches. The map was useless. What was missing? She was sure there should be something else. Something important.
    “Oh, Uncle! We’ve lost Clint’s important papers! They were in here, I’m sure. Do you remember when you last saw them?”
    She couldn’t remember when she’d last seen that slick black package. She asked Uncle again, but he just offered her the Shakespeare.
    “Not the book.
Different
papers with writing. Clint’s papers—”
    Uncle held out his empty hands.
    “No, I don’t remember either. Oh well, it doesn’t matter. There’s nothing to be done.”
    Tay had looted the shops at Aru Batur. She didn’t think that was wrong. She’d filled the rucksack with supplies again. Some of the stuff she’d looted—tins of food mostly—was at the bottom of the river now, but they could survive for days and days. All she had to do was keep Uncle cheerful and keep them both going. If they’d managed to stay attached to the ferry hawser, there’d have been a road in front of them now. But they’d been swept downstream, so instead there was another of those walls of trees.
    “It’s not as bad as it looks,” she told him, forgetting that to Uncle the trees were his natural home. “There’s only a thin band of forest here. Then it’s the dry corner of Kandah. It’s open country, savannah: low hills and a few trees but mostly grass. I don’t think we should try to get back to the road now. We’re better off just heading east by our compass. We’ll come out of the trees soon, and then we’ll be able to see for miles.”
    Uncle took to the branches, Tay found the best route she could. The shy animals and birds of the forest floor didn’t show themselves, but she heard them rustling and stirring; and that made her feel at home. Hornbills called, and once a troupe of monkeys crashed by, far overhead. The going