Great pep talk. “We’re not dead yet!” she flashed back. “And I’m not giving up. Let’s push’er into the water.”
Working together, they hauled the raft to the river and shoved off. Margo scrambled aboard and used her pole to help push them into deeper water. They picked up speed as the swollen current caught them and swept them downstream. She crossed her fingers, said a tiny prayer, and clutched her paddle.
Here goes nothing.
At least she wasn’t hiding back home in Minnesota, waiting for life to pass her by the way it had passed by nearly everyone else in that godforsaken little town. If she was going to die out here, she’d die trying! That, Margo supposed as she dug her paddle into the racing current, was something worthy of an epitaph.
She hoped that thought didn’t turn into prophecy.
The trip back down the Limpopo was an exhausting, nerve-racking blur of incidents which haunted her at night when she didn’t sleep:
”Push off!” Koot screamed. “Now! Now!”
Margo thrust her improvised paddle against a jagged rock higher than her head. The shock of wood on stone all but dislocated her shoulder. Margo went to her knees as the raft spun away from the rock. One kneecap punched through the Filmar floor. Margo dropped her paddle to rig a hasty patch across the spurting hole. Then had to grab wildly for the paddle again as another rock towered in their path. The shock of contact spread white-hot fire through her damaged shoulder. But she held onto the paddle and kept lookout for more boulders. On the other side of the gondola, Kynan hung grimly to a long pole while Koot van Beek clung to his own paddle, trying to steer a course through the flood.