Donald Barthelme, “The Expedition”

He read the complete Tom Swift series (his favorite was the one about Tom Swift going to the Caves of Ice); and Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons; and there was the biography of a Norwegian resistance fighter who swam through chilly oceans and got gangrene and wandered through I think it might have been Finland or Lapland in a sweet short summer and everyone took him in and the dark Finnish women made him tea with honey in it on late afternoons and it was beautiful but also horribly sad because the book was only half over and you knew that bad things were going to happen. He kept pushing on northward and sleeping in the flowery meadows every night and passing thousand-year-old trees carved with magic runes and it never rained, and people hid him from the Nazis and fed him and let him rest and sent him on again and then it began to be fall, and brown and yellow and red and scarlet leaves came swirling down into the pools in the forest, and then one day it was winter and he had to keep going because I think he had some important message to deliver about a German sneak attack, so he went on and on and the lakes froze and the snow got so deep in the forests he had to make himself cross-country skis and then snow-shoes and go on northward through the forests and over the grim mountains and he lost his snowshoes and went snowblind; and the Germans were coming after him because they realized that there was in fact a survivor of that ship they had torpedoed: “Es ist ein Bugchen,’’ they laughed; “Wir wollten den Bugchen zerstören,” and he finally came to the ice caves or rather Caves of Ice and took refuge in them in a storm, having located them by touch, and then he lay there waiting for someone half as brave as he to find him and help him because all he had was a little flask of brandy, and the chapel bell tolled seven times for vespers. In the evenings their counselor sometimes read them ghost stories. He was a very stern muscular hairy man who had blue bathing trunks. It was his job to get all the boys in Cabin Ten (the Beaver Tribe) out of bed and dressed and doing warm-up exercises at 7:10, because by 7:12 every morning each group had to begin its run.

William T. Vollmann, You Bright and Risen Angels