HIS EYES opened, hammered open, and there were things he felt instantly. He was unbelievably, violently thirsty. His mouth was dry and tasted bad and sticky. His lips were cracked, and he thought if he didn’t drink water soon, he would die. Lots of water. All the water he could find. He stood, using the tree to pull himself up because there was still some pain and much stiffness, and looked down at the lake. It was water. He did not know if he could drink it. Nobody had ever told him if you could or could not drink lakes. There was also the thought of the pilot. Down in the blue lake with the plane, strapped in, the body... “Awful,” he thought.

But he was very thirsty, and the lake looked blue and wet. Brian took small steps down the bank to the lake. Along the edge there were thick grasses and the water looked a little brown and there were small things swimming in the water, small bugs. He kept until the water was clear, and there were no bugs. A “sip,” he thought, still worrying about the lake water—“I'll just take a sip.”

When he brought a cupped hand to his mouth and felt the cold lake water move past his cracked lips and over his tongue he could not stop. He had never, not even on long bike trips in the hot summer, been this thirsty. It was as if the water were more than water, as if the water had become all of life, and he could not stop. He put his mouth to the lake and drank and drank, pulling it deep and swallowing great gulps of it. He drank until his stomach was swollen. He went back to the bank, and he was immediately sick and threw up most of the water. But his thirst was gone and the water seemed to help the pain in his head as well.

"So." He almost jumped with the word, spoken aloud. It seemed so out of place, the sound. He tried it again. "So. So. So here I am." And there it is, he thought. For the first time since the crash his mind started to work, he started thinking. “Here I am and that is nowhere.” He tried to think what happened one thing at a time. He had been flying north to visit his father for a couple of months, in the summer, and the pilot had had a heart attack and had died, and the plane had crashed somewhere in the Canadian north woods but he did not know how far they had flown or in what direction or where he was...

“Slow down,” he thought. “Slow down more. My name is Brian Robeson and I am thirteen years old and I am alone in the north woods of Canada.”

“All right,” he thought, that's simple enough. I was flying to visit my father and the plane crashed and sank in a lake. There, keep it that way. Short thoughts. I do not know where I am. They do not know where I am.”—they meaning anybody who might be wanting to look for me. The searchers. They would look for him, look for the plane. Brian thought more. “Mom and Dad must be so scared, but the searchers always found the plane within a day or two. Pilots all filed flight plans—a detailed plan for where and when they were going to fly. They would come, they would look for him. They might come today. This was the second day after the crash. No.” Brian frowned. “Was it the first day or the second day? They had gone down in the afternoon and he had spent the whole night out cold. So this was the first real day. But they could still come today.” They would have started the search immediately when Brian's plane did not arrive.

“Yeah, they would probably come today.“ He stopped the thinking. It didn't matter. Either on to his dad or back to his mother. Either way he would probably be home by late night or early morning, home where he could sit down and eat a large, cheesy, juicy burger with tomatoes and double fries with ketchup and a thick chocolate shake. And there came hunger. Brian rubbed his stomach. The hunger had been there but something else—fear, pain—had kept it away. Now, with the thought of the burger, the emptiness roared at him. He could not believe the hunger, had never felt it this way. The lake water had filled his stomach but left it hungry, and now it needed food, screamed for food. And there was, he thought, absolutely nothing to eat. Nothing.

He reached into his pockets and took out everything he had and laid it on the grass in front of him. A quarter, three dimes, a nickel, and two pennies. A fingernail clipper. A wallet with a twenty dollar bill—"In case you get stuck at the airport in some small town and have to buy food," his mother had said—and some odd pieces of paper. And on his belt, somehow still there, the hatchet his mother had given him. He had forgotten it and now reached around and took it out and put it in the grass. There was a touch of rust already forming on the cutting edge of the blade and he rubbed it off with his thumb. That was it. He frowned. No, wait—he shouldn't be sad. He had some good things.

He had on a pair of good tennis shoes, now almost dry. And socks. And jeans and underwear and a thin leather belt and a T-shirt with a windbreaker so torn it hung on him in tatters. And a watch. He had a digital watch still on his wrist but it was broken from the crash—the little screen blank—and he took it off and almost threw it away but stopped the hand motion and lay the watch on the grass with the rest of it. There. That was it. No, wait. One other thing. Those were all the things he had, but he also had himself. An old teacher taught him that. He told the students to stay positive. Brian tried to think like that

People have gone for many days without food as long as they've got water. Even if they don't come until late tomorrow I'll be all right. Lose a little weight, maybe, but the first hamburger and a malt and fries will bring it right back. A mental picture of a hamburger, the way they showed it in the television commercials, thundered into his thoughts. Rich colors, the meat juicy and hot... He pushed the picture away. So even if they didn't find him until tomorrow, he thought, he would be all right. He had plenty of water, although he wasn't sure if it was good and clean or not.

He sat again by the tree, his back against it. There was a thing bothering him. The moment when the pilot had his heart attack his right foot had jerked down on the rudder pedal and the plane had slewed sideways. What did that mean? “It means,” a voice in his thoughts said, “that they might not be coming for you tonight or even tomorrow.” Brian had flown for hour after hour on the new course. Well away from the flight plan the pilot had filed. Many hours, at maybe 160 miles an hour. Even if it was only a little off course, with that speed and time Brian might now be sitting three, four hundred miles to the side of the flight plan. They might not find him for two or three days. He felt his heartbeat increase as the fear started. They might not find him for a long time.

And the next thought was there as well, that they might never find him, but that was panic and he tried to stay positive. They would find him. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon. Soon. Soon. They would find him soon.

He fingered the hatchet at his belt. It was the only weapon he had, but it was something. He had to have some kind of shelter. No, make that more: He had to have some kind of shelter and he had to have something to eat. Brian thought, “Right now I'm all I've got. I have to do something.”