Saving Fish from Drowning - Heal Burma

SAVING FISH FROM DROWNING
in a few hours. But Black Spot only shook his head. “No way mak­
ing this.”
“Did anyone go down yet to see if Walter’s come back? You know,
our guide Walter?”
Black Spot looked uncomfortable, for he was going to suggest
what was untrue. “I think he not coming. Bridge go down. Guide...
I think guide go down, too....”
Bennie clutched his chest. “God! No! Oh God! Oh God! Shit!...”
When he could catch his breath, he said weakly, “Did you look?”
Black Spot nodded and said in a flat voice: “We looking. Nothing
we can do.” Which in a way was true, if you have seen nothing.
Bennie returned to my other friends. “Do you know what the
boatman just told me?” he said in a shaky voice. They looked up.
“Walter’s dead.”
For the next couple of hours, they mourned Walter. Heidi mur­
mured, “He made one mistake but otherwise he was so dependable.”
Marlena used the words “sweet and gallant.” Moff said that he was
“articulate and damn smart.” Bennie observed that Walter was a
hero, because he took the plunge for them.
Dwight and Wyatt did not know what to say about grief, so they
returned to the chasm to picture exactly what had happened. This
time they looked more carefully. They estimated the trajectory a
body would take if it fell from the middle versus the end of the
bridge. They scanned the ledges and the rocky funnel below. They
applied Pythagorean geometry to their tragic calculations, and hav­
ing seen evidence of blood, they pinpointed “the spot,” a sharp slab
of rock with dark splotches of rust-colored lichen.
Wyatt concluded: “One bounce, and you wouldn’t know what
after that.”
Dwight appended: “Let’s hope so.”
The men returned with their field report. Walter was one or two
steps away from reaching the other side and—Dwight snapped his
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