Cover

Title Page

COLD
RIVER

William Judson

A SIGNET BOOK

This story is dedicated to
my own sweet Lizzy

Praise for
Cold River

“Full of drama and tension.”

—The Columbus Dispatch

“A natural.”

—The New York Times

“It’s refreshing to find a no-nonsense girl as the heroine…recommended.”

—Library Journal

“A novel of the indestructible will to live.”

—Hammond Times (Indiana)

“It’s just a beautiful story.”

—Cleveland Press

“The book and the youngsters win out on their own merit and there’s the ageless appeal of resourcefulness, resilience, endurance while death is nipping at frostbitten heels.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“It would make a wowser of a movie, a kind of sequel to Deliverance.”

—Pittsburgh Press

ONE

The River

NOW THAT I am older than my father, I think I understand why he always treated me the way he did. He wanted a son, but I was born instead and the doctors told him that Mama should not have any more children, so he was stuck with a daughter. Since I was all he had to work with, he did the best he could. I don’t mean to say that he sat down and figured out that was what he should do—my father was never one for sitting around thinking when he could be moving around doing. Everybody knows that. Mike Allison was head and shoulders the best guide and outdoorsman in the Adirondacks, and what’s more, he would flatten the head of anyone who disputed it.

I looked down at the Adirondack Mountains this morning. A plane was taking me from Albany to Buffalo. The snow covered almost everything below, but the big pines made black patches against the lightness of the land, and here and there I could see open water where a big lake had started to break up without waiting for the spring thaw.

All country looks the same from a great altitude. I had one of the best views in the airplane. The stewardesses always seem to think it is my first time in an airplane and outdo themselves making me comfortable. I am not as old as they think; my face is, I confess, ten years older than the rest of me, and that makes me look around seventy to those young, fresh, fragrant girls who run up and down the aisles serving coffee and milk and stronger potions to those who want them.