Raft of Stars by Andrew Graff (good books for high schoolers .txt) 📕

motioned to a deer skull lying in the shadows near the fire. It came from a large buck, and the skull was picked clean of all its flesh. The intricate gaps in its nose and eye sockets flickered in the firelight. A cross of wood draped with a pair of rotten coveralls lay beside it.

“Scarecrow,” said Bread, pushing some coals nearer to the cooking pot. “Fish, this island. It’s some kind of abandoned camp. I think it was a poachers’ camp. There’s some old stuff around, pans and such, a lot of rope. I found three cans of beans.”

“A scarecrow?” Fish closed his eyes. He was so thirsty. His throat seemed to catch on his words. Why was there a scarecrow in the forest?

“Did its job, too. Fish, you hit the deck so hard I thought you died. I couldn’t wake you up, but I heard you breathing, so I swam the river and fetched our stuff. I figure whoever abandoned this camp was poaching deer. Just wait till you see all the skulls! But guess what else, Fish.”

“Do you have water?”

Bread handed Fish a mess tin. “It’s river water,” he said.

Fish drank it greedily. It tasted like silt.

“Fish, guess what else I found?”

“Did you swim our bikes across too? I don’t see our bikes.”

Bread took the mess tin away from Fish. “Fish,” he said, and his eyes lit up. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. We don’t need bikes anymore.”

Fish wanted more water.

“Fish, we found our raft.”

Bread motioned past the fire, deep into the shadows. There looked to be a large boulder hulking in the darkness, but it was far too square to be natural rock. Fish stared at it for a moment. It was a small cabin, the roof caved in and the whole thing leaning into the dirt.

“We found the makings of our raft, anyway,” said Bread. “That old cabin is a pile of cedar.” He lifted the lid of the pot away, inhaled deeply through his nose. Fish’s stomach growled, and he forgot all about rafts and dreams and scarecrows.

“Mm-mm,” said Bread. “Beans.”

“WE KNEE MARE ROWF,” SAID BREAD. HIS WORDS WERE MUFFLED BY the manila rope he held in his mouth. Bread needed both hands to straddle and muscle the log in place. Fish hurried over to the long coil of rope Bread had found in the cabin, and used his barlow to slice through another length of it. The rope was dry and coarse, the kind that burns your hands if it slips. When he returned to the build site, Fish took the other rope from Bread’s mouth and tied the two together with a double fisherman’s knot his grandpa taught him.

The boys had a plan again. This was progress.

The project moved quickly now that they didn’t need to cut their own trees and dig their own rope. The abandoned cabin made a perfect lumberyard. It was a twelve-by-twelve-foot structure that once stood about six feet tall before the roof and doorway collapsed. The logs were big cedars about as thick as Fish’s waist, and only the very bottom row showed any sign of rot. The rest were dry and gray and solid as bones. The boys knocked away mud chinking using river rocks for hammers.

“Got it?” Fish asked.

“Go ahead,” said Bread.

Fish wrapped the rope around the end of a log Bread held in place. This had been their pattern of labor for the majority of the morning, setting the logs together with tight S-curves of rope, lashing the logs to ridgepoles in a continuous weave.

The boys stepped back to admire their work. Only feet from the water’s edge lay a nearly finished platform of a raft. At twelve feet wide by twelve feet long, the raft would prove stable enough. The sun was high in the sky again, and the weather warm. A stiff breeze kept the bugs at bay, and overall this day in the forest was shaping up to be much better than the first. Fish’s jaw still ached, but he couldn’t help smiling at the job being done. Bread had a big smear of sweat and dirt across his forehead. He smiled back.

“How many more, you figure?” asked Fish.

“I’d say the ridgepoles can fit two more logs,” said Bread.

Fish nodded.

The boys weren’t sure how the raft would handle in the water, or which way to point it once they got it floating—with the length of the logs running with or across the current. Either way, they were certain it would float. Cedar this dry was as buoyant as cork, and it wouldn’t become waterlogged either. Fish’s grandpa shingled his porch in cedar. The stuff shed water like a duck.

It was Bread’s idea to construct the raft on top of roller logs. When they first started binding the logs in place on the gravel shore, Bread stopped them. We’re not going to be able to move this once we finish it, Fish, he said. For a moment the two boys stared at it and the lapping riverbank. Fish gave a fruitless shrug. Then Bread remembered a picture book he’d read where the ancient Egyptians used logs as wheels to move huge stones for the pyramids. The boys placed two of the roundest logs near shore. It was a good thing Bread realized the problem when he did. Even with only three poles lashed together, the boys could hardly lift the raft onto the pair of rollers.

“You getting hungry?” Bread asked.

Fish nodded, brushed the fine gravel and cedar chaff from the front of his shirt. Fish’s muscles trembled with fatigue, but this progress was irresistible. “I’d finish the base of the raft first,” he said. “If you’re up for it.”

Bread nodded and wiped his forehead and smeared the dirt to his ear. Adding the final logs went quickly, and when they were finished the boys sat in the shade and leaned against tree trunks while they ate and gazed at their creation. They both pretended not to be too proud.

“It’s a