Bahadur had been truthful with his last words. The terrifying glacier-fed torrent crashing through the chains of rapids seemed to lessen steadily as they fought their way upriver. Soon Jack was piloting the River Runner through swift but smooth water. They passed Devghat as far out in the river as possible and headed up the Trisuli. No other boats could be seen on the river. The current grew stronger, and rapids began appearing a few miles into the Trisuli. Jack was keeping the boat in the deepest water he could find. While he was looking for a landing place on the east bank, the propellers struck an underwater rock ledge and ground to a stop. The boat began to drift downriver. Jack cut the engines and jumped into the waist-deep water followed by Anita and Kathy. Together they steadied the boat and wrestled it to the nearby western shore and pulled the bow up on the shelving rock bank.
After taking everything useful out of the boat, Jack used an axe he found in a compartment under the stern seat and knocked two holes in the bottom. Together they pushed the boat out into the river and watched the current take it toward deeper water. The boat sank before it had drifted more than a hundred yards.
Jack said, “A wonderful start. Here we are on the wrong bank. I don’t think I want to swim across this river.”
Kathy said, “You won’t have to. Pick up your pack. We are going to find a ferry.”
Jack looked at her and wondered if she were losing it, but he grinned and helped her into her pack, mentioning the only person they had seen on the entire river trip was perched on a rock jutting into the river, dressed only in a loincloth and fishing with a spear. Now she wants to find a ferry.
Kathy cocked her head and said, “Okay, Marine, who’s the South Asian scholar here? Just follow me.”
After walking along the river for a half hour, they entered a grove of trees. Like magic an old man and a young boy were resting in the shade. Below them, pulled up on the river bank was the dugout canoe they used for a ferry boat. Kathy walked over to Anita, and said, “Try your Urdu on the ferry boat captain.”
With Anita’s few Urdu phrases and hand gestures she indicated they wanted to cross the river. The old man never said a word. He just held up ten fingers four times and pointed to each of them. Jack asked, “What does he mean?”
Anita said, “He wants 40 rupees for each of us.”
Kathy looked concerned and said, “No way! I’ll offer him 20 rupees each.”
Jack was astounded to see Kathy shake her head and tell Anita to offer twenty rupees each. The old man shook his head, lit a bidi and offered them a bidi to smoke with him. All three lit up the short hand-rolled tobacco leaf. The old man countered with thirty rupees each. Kathy nodded, and the old man sprang to his feet and ushered them into the dugout canoe.
Jack told them to take off their packs and put them in the bottom of the dugout. It was too dangerous to fall in the river wearing a loaded pack. Jack wondered how this tippy craft was going to cross the Trisuli River to an obvious trailhead on the eastern bank.
The old man and the boy poled the craft upriver in the shallows along the western bank and, when they reached the right point, shot the dugout into the current and held to a diagonal course. They beached the dugout right at the trailhead. Anita paid him, and they started the climb out of the jungle up the Mahabarat Range of middle Nepal.
Before they had walked ten steps, Jack said, “Kathy, why in God’s name did you bargain with the old man? The price he wanted was less than a couple of dollars.”
“Ah, an ugly American raises his head. You see, if I’d accepted his first price, he’d think we were telling him ‘we are so rich we can easily pay for your service.’ Therefore, as we say in the city, we’d dissed him. Instead, by my bargaining I showed him we valued his service, and the money I agreed to pay him meant something to us. He feels good he bargained for a good price and his customers valued his time and skill.”
“Okay. The scholar wins again. Now, let’s pick up the pace. We have a few hours of light before we have to pick a camp site. I’ll walk point for this first part.”
Jack commented that, according to the map, the trail along the Trisuli required them to climb to the top of many of the ridgelines of the Mahabarat Mountain range running east-west through the center of Nepal, separating the Nepalese jungle lowland from the high Himalayas.
Jack said, “I never promised you a walk in the park. Let’s move out.”
The trail while steep was not hard going. Jack pushed hard for the next three hours. As dusk was fading, he picked a camp site just over the first ridge facing the Himalayas. A handful of miles to the north they could see the Trisuli wending its way southwest. The image of the mountains changed as the sun set, from a friendly, slightly reddish glow to a steely gray, foreboding countenance that made a swallow of scotch from Jack’s trail flask and the smell of cooking food reassuring. Over the sterno camp stove Jack cooked up eight of the fresh eggs in a cheese omelet and used a freeze-dry mix to make chicken broth thickened with crumbled noodles.
After a nourishing meal of eggs, chicken soup and hot tea, Jack said, “Okay, people. I’ve some recon rules I want to tell you about. Anita, I’m sure this is old stuff to you. Jump in any time. This is going to be a hard trip. We must get to Kathmandu as fast as we can. We can’t make any mistakes. Unless it is an emergency, we do not move at night. We can’t afford even a slightly sprained ankle.
“Two meals a day. Lunch is a candy bar and maybe a cup of tea depending on the weather. We have enough food. Water is the problem. We will need about a quart per hour per person. We don’t know where the water sources are. To be five to nine thousand feet above the river along this ridgeline is not helpful. We will have to depend upon small streams or spring fed small ponds. Our purification tablets will be used at all times. Again, we cannot afford dysentery. Don’t hoard your water. Listen to your body, and drink when you are thirsty or have been sweating for a couple of hours. As long as you have water in the canteen, drink it as needed.”
Anita added, “Your recon rules are right on. I will do a foot check three times a day and more if needed. Catching a small blister early is easy to treat with a piece of tape right over the blister. If your foot feels the least bit sore, stop and we will fix it.
“We can run the flat parts of the trail. No running uphill or downhill. You will find going down these scree-covered trails is very hard on the knees. Only the true Gurkhas can run downhill. Last rule is tomorrow morning, we leave everything we don’t absolutely need. Every pound we drop helps. Regardless of our need to hurry, we need to eat and sleep; otherwise, the body will let us down. Okay.”
Jack said, “Good. What I know I learned in Marine Recon, but I’ve never done a forced march in mountain terrain like this. We will be going from eight or nine thousand feet to fifteen hundred and back up again several times on this trip. West to east travel in this country is a bitch.”
Kathy added, “And in case you didn’t notice, this camp site has a slight slope downward.”
Jack laughed and said, “Yeah, I noticed. That is the reason I picked it. Few really good campsites exist along mountain trails, and they will be well known and used. No trekker or native porter in his right mind would move off the trail this far for a sloping camp site. See you in the morning. We’re out of here at first light. I’ll have hot water ready for tea. I never thought I would miss the standard U.S. Army field rations or MREs.
“And in case you haven’t thought about it, it will get cold at night and we can’t have a fire. My humble suggestion is we put our sleeping bags together. It is also good to get out of some of our clothes and keep our boots and socks handy, in case we have to move fast. We’ll stand two-hour watches. I’ll take the first one. No need to get out of the bag. Just sit up and be aware. Goodnight, people.”
Cuddled against Jack, Kathy whispered, “I don’t know about you, but I like this kind of camping.”
Facts and Fictions 