The Willows

The CampfireThe openingFree

Two friends took a canoe down the Danube River one summer, a long way, from Austria into Hungary. They camped wherever they liked. They were experienced. The river was high that year, swollen with melting snow from the mountains, and fast.

After Vienna, the river spreads out into a wild, flat country of swamps and channels and islands. Nobody lives there. There are no roads. Just water, and sky, and willows.

Thousands of acres of willows. Low, bushy, silver-green, growing so thick on the sandbanks that you can't see between them. They shiver and rustle in the wind all day long, all of them together, with a sound like whispering.

On the third day, in the late afternoon, the friends pulled their canoe up onto a small island in the middle of the flood, covered in willows, and pitched their tent.

That was their first mistake.

The narrator says he felt it at once. Not fear. Something stranger. A feeling that they had stepped into a world where they weren't wanted. That they were small. That the willows had noticed them.

His friend was a Swede, a calm, practical man. He felt it too. He didn't say so. But he went quiet.

They watched the sun go down. The river roared past on both sides, carrying trees, branches, whole bushes torn out of the banks. The wind rose. And the willows, all around them, bent and tossed and moved like waves.

Something floated past in the river. Something dark, turning over and over in the current.

It looked, for a moment, like a man. An otter, the Swede said. Probably an otter. But it had looked up at them as it went by.