He knew that by tomorrow morning that he would likely have a fever. If he didn’t get help by then, he would probably die, too weak to move — infection finishing off what the fall had not. The Army doctors could fix him up — if he could get there in time.

“Ain’t time to give up yet,” he told himself, and started his slow, painful hobble toward the stream he had seen from the top of the cliff.

Cole hadn’t seen any maps and he didn’t know the name of this stream or this valley, but he knew the simple truth of water, which was that small streams flowed into bigger streams, which flowed into rivers. Along the banks of a river, there would be help.

He soon reached the running water. The sound of it gave him solace, for running water meant life. He knew this stream would flow into the Imjin River, which in turn flowed past the Army outpost.

Of course, there might be more than a few Chinese between here and there, but he tried not to worry about that yet.

The water was still muddy from all the monsoon rains, but he didn’t care. His canteen was gone, so with great effort, Cole got down on his belly and drank his fill like some wild animal at a watering hole. He sucked in gulps of the gritty water through blood lips, thinking that he had never tasted anything so good.

A little while later, he realized that he needed to urinate. He was not reassured to see his red-tinged flow spattering on the sand. The blood surely meant he had internal injuries. He’d thought that maybe he had a day to find help, but maybe he’d been wrong about that. Maybe he had a few hours.

He trudged along the bank of the stream, which ran swiftly, perhaps ten feet across. Rocks and brambles lined the far shore, but he was lucky to have the sandy side where the going was easier.

He found comfort in the sound of running water against the backdrop of utter quiet. There was something mysterious in the babbling of water, as if it spoke a message he couldn’t quite hear. Then again, maybe he was already getting delirious if he was listening for the stream to tell him something.

The stream did remind him of being a boy back home in the mountains, running his trapline. Back then, would he ever have thought that he would be limping along a stream in Korea? Not likely. He’d never even heard of the place.

Cole wondered if he ever would get home again. He wouldn’t have minded wandering that stream again. He wouldn’t have minded seeing Norma Jean Elwood, either. But he supposed that this remote valley in Korea was as good a place to die as any.

He pushed the thought from his mind. You ain’t dead yet.

Although the fight at the fort had started at dawn, the shadows already stretched long and the sun was sinking toward the mountaintops. The day seemed too short, but he was missing a big chunk of it. He must have been knocked out longer than he realized.

He pressed on as long as he could, but as it grew darker, he knew that he would have to stop for the night. He had no light of any kind, and if he stumbled and fell in the dark, he wasn’t sure that he would have the energy to get back up.

He was also getting cold. And hungry. If he was going to do something about those two things, the time to do it was while he still had some daylight. Whatever food and matches he’d had in his pockets had been ripped away in the fall, so he would have to try something else.

Cole kept going until he found a wide, sandy bend in the stream where the waterway deepened and slowed, the current moving like a smooth brown muscle. Slowly, painstakingly, he gathered what he needed for a fire. First, he needed tinder. He found something that resembled milkweed and gathered the feathery tufts. Then he found bone-dry kindling that was buried deep in a pile of flood drift.

Using the walking stick for support, he managed to lower himself to his knees. Clearing a space in the sand, he built a fire lay that resembled an Indian teepee — bigger sticks on the outside, with a heart of fine shavings and the weed tuft. His hands shook, whether from cold or weakness he couldn’t say.

There was no shortage of flint, and he held a sharp-edged piece in one hand and struck the stone with the spine of his knife.

It took a couple of tries, but he got some sparks. They skewed away and winked out, but he directed them the next time at the heart of tuft and shavings. Finally, a spark landed and lit the tuft. He blew gently, and the smoking ember turned into a tiny flame. The fire spread and grew, catching on the outer layers of the teepee. He felt welcome warmth on his face.

He knew that it was something of a risk, having a fire out here in Indian country. But if he didn’t have a fire, the risk was that during the cool of night in his condition, he might die of exposure. Besides, there was no telling what critters might be prowling the night. Wolves and even tigers had once roamed these mountains before being wiped out by Japanese hunters decades before. These predators were supposedly gone now, but there were stories about a few surviving in the more remote places. Wouldn’t that be a hell of a thing now, to get eaten by a tiger?

With the small fire going, he turned his attention to filling his empty belly. He had not eaten since the night before and getting this far down the bank of the stream had taken all his energy.

He had no rifle, not that he had seen any game, anyway. There wasn’t any time to trap.

However, there would be fish in that deep water in the stream. He just didn’t have a fishing pole, hooks, or any bait.

Cole considered his options. What he did have was a hand grenade.

As a boy, he remembered how he had once gone with his pa and some friends to the river. They had climbed into a leaky old skiff that the men had trouble rowing in the current. It hadn’t helped that the men had been about half-drunk, or maybe mostly drunk, which wasn’t unusual for his pa. These drunken fishermen had gotten hold of a few sticks of dynamite, which was popular then for the removal of stumps and large rocks from farm fields.

“We are gonna do us some hillbilly fishin’,” his pa announced. “Best cover your ears, boy.”

Cole did as he was told, then watched as his father lit a stick of dynamite and tossed it far out into the river.

The resulting explosion had sent a wave that nearly swamped the boat. Cole had found himself more excited than terrified. The men whooped. And then, in their drunken fashion, they had paddled the boat around to scoop up the stunned fish on the surface of the river.

“Time for some hillbilly fishin’,” Cole said.

He pulled the pin on the grenade and tossed it into the deep water, then threw himself down in the sand.

The grenade lifted a geyser of water several feet in the air and shattered the stillness of the valley. He hoped to hell that the Chinese hadn’t heard that.

He saw a couple of fish on the surface, just as he had hoped, but the fish began to drift away on the current. Cole realized that he had miscalculated. How would he get at these fish in his condition?

But as luck would have it, the blast had tossed one fish onto the bank nearby. Not fully stunned, the fish flopped around in an effort to get back into the water. Cole pounced on it, his ribs screaming in protest as he did so.

Soon, scaled and gutted, he had the fish on a stick over the fire. He didn’t know what kind of fish it was, maybe something like a Korean small-mouth bass, but it smelled delicious. He could barely wait for it to finish roasting, and he then picked the bones clean and threw them into the stream along with the offal so as not to attract any critters.

He stretched out on the sand next to the fire, letting it be his guardian. The stars burned overhead. They had been there before him and would still be there long after he was gone. The question was, would he be going tonight?