Robert Crews

by Thomas Berger

  Not only did he fail to get even a preliminary bite, he neither saw nor heard any evidence of piscine life; no fish slapped the water today. It occurred to him that for their own reasons the creatures might simply not be feeding in any place or on anything at the moment, or had their own subaqueous sources of nourishment. He had taxed his knee by all the stumbling up and down the beach. He sat down on the sand. At least the day was a warm one, with a hearty and generous sun overhead, though some clouds seemed to be forming in the farthest reaches of the western sky. He really could not understand why no airplanes had appeared. The other men all had families who were surely bringing frantic pressure on the appropriate agencies. Had Spurgeon been so far off course that he could not easily be traced? And again he wondered about the radio: would Dick not have been in touch with whatever had been the nearest airfield, some version of which however modest should be within electronic reach anywhere on the continent? Even if the radio had eventually failed, it was working when they took off. Would not the subsequent silence have alerted those whose business it was to listen?

  But perhaps he was being too sentimental about how other people were supposed to perform, he who never had a profession. It was in any event useless to sit there asking questions that could not be answered until he was rescued. Not only useless but morally degrading. He had work to do, for the first time in his life. Half of another day was gone, and he still had no food, no fire, no shelter, and no weapon with which to defend himself against the bear.

  … At first the sound was too faint to be identified. It could have been an insect or even the humming of his own blood in his ears. In two days here he had got himself under such management that he could allow for the delusions of hope; he refused to admit he heard an airplane until he finally saw it.

  But it was high, far too high! If the plane was to him a winged speck, what must he be to it? He ran, knee throbbing with pain, back to the mirror, tore it from its forked mount, and flashed it at the sky. Now that he put it into play, the glass seemed much smaller than before. He had no way of knowing whether he was catching the sun, let alone projecting a signal in the proper direction. If this pilot was looking for him, the man was doing a bad job. For an instant, Crews yearned for a gun, not for signaling but for firing at the aircraft, bringing it down in flames with a lucky shot.

  He continued to gesticulate with the mirror until he could no longer hear a sound and the speck had first lost its wings and then its reality in the blue vastness. His anger was succeeded by a profound depression of spirit that left him momentarily too weak to make any further effort to preserve himself. He dropped the mirror on the sand and sank down beside it, convinced, on no better evidence than this single failure, that he would never be found while alive. He had been able to control his hope, but self-pity overwhelmed him. If he had not been able to cope with civilization, what could be expected of him now?

  He felt a warmth on his forearm, through the shirt that, with his trousers, he had pulled on when emerging from the water after the latest dives—he could scarcely afford to sunburn his spring-pale skin. In another moment his arm was painfully hot. Had he been stung or bitten by a venomous creature? He rolled up the sleeve and examined the skin, finding nothing untoward. Was it a withdrawal effect of the two days’ abstention from alcohol? Would he suffer imaginary pains at various places on his body? Drinking had surely got him into, or anyway exacerbated his part in, many scrapes, but he had not previously been afflicted with hallucinatory phenomena that could be associated with either the presence or the absence of drink. He knew the DTs only by way of vintage movies. Perhaps they came from the contaminated liquor of yore. But he had suffered a scare at one point when an apartment, hitherto innocent of mice and roaches, was abruptly invaded by both: or seemed to be, for examples of both were visible for such brief instants that, to senses corrupted by alcohol, they might well have been illusions. When, having fled to the nearest bar, he saw a mouse run under his stool, it took all his courage, and four drinks, to confess as much to the bartender, from whom, thank God, he heard reassurance. “Been all over the neighborhood since they tore down that building next door.”

  He returned his arm to its former position. Soon afterward he felt the warmth again. He noticed that the shaver-case top that held the mirror had fallen to embed itself in the sand at an angle from which the mirror reflected the sun as a focused beam on his forearm. He picked the thing up and noticed for the first time, never having used it for shaving, that the glass was not the standard straightforward reflector but rather a magnifying mirror. If it could be accidentally focused to warm his skin to a point of discomfort, maybe it could be intentionally used to make fire.

  He went into the trees to fetch firewood, disregarding the pain in his knee, which seemed to belong to someone else, perhaps himself in a dream.

  He brought back an armload of dead branches. Some were of brown-needled pine, but he had also foraged beyond the evergreens to find other, huskier trees, among them one of the few he could identify, namely the birch, from which he was able without implements to pull some filaments of bark so thin as to be almost transparent, from places where peeling had begun to occur for natural causes.

  To contain the tinder against a random breeze, he scooped out a little depression in the sand. It took a few moments of adjustment in the distance between the mirror and the inflammable matter before the focus could be refined to reduce the point of light to its minimum diameter. But even when he had done this, it seemed far too blunt, too pale, to coax out flame from inert matter at the temperature of cool air…. He told himself as much even as he watched the miracle in which the paleness of the tinder slowly turned dark, from tan to brown, then went quickly to a blackening at the heart of which was soon a pinhead of red glow. He blew on it too soon, eliciting a wisp of gray smoke, but returning the mirror to play and, breathing more gently on the new embers, produced a small yellow flame, the most glorious achievement of his life. He piled on the dry pine needles and shreds or threads of birch bark, and finally the pieces of fallen branches, graduated as to thickness.

  In a few moments the fire burned so lustily that he feared his supply of fuel would soon be exhausted. He went to get more from the woods, but now had to range farther. Already the excitement of making flame had been diminished by the fact of its having been made, and once again he remembered his sore knee. But he reflected that now he could heat water with which, with strips of T-shirt, a warm compress could be fashioned—that is, if he could find something in which to heat water. The cups from the thermos were made of plastic, but they were sufficiently heat-resistant to accept the hottest liquids. Primitive peoples, of whom he was now a fellow, were ingenious within the conditions of their ignorance. Before arriving at a sophistication that would enable them to slice off a cross section of a log and call it a wheel, they had used the whole thing on which to roll heavy objects. Before crafting vessels that could endure direct fire, they had heated and dropped rocks into holes in the ground filled with water.

  He located some small stones, pebbles, and with care situated them in the fire at a place where they could be retrieved with tonged sticks. With the addition of a third application of wood, the flames were now rising to a formidable height, smoking, sparking, and he was gratified to be almost singed as he dropped pebbles into the embers. If you had fire, you had one of the essential elements of survival anywhere. Except in drenching rain, fire could in itself be the better part of shelter: with a hot enough blaze, you could do without a roof or walls. Also fire could serve as a deterrent against animal enemies. He was no longer defenseless against the bear.

  He filled both plastic cups with water from the lake. When the stones seemed to have been heated sufficiently, he rolled them out of the coals with a long stick he had broken from a pine branch that was still green and thus resistant to flame. With another stick of the same sort, which served as the other member of the tongs, he managed after a few unsuccessful attempts to get the hot stones
into the cups. This project too worked as intended. He poured the warm water onto the T-shirt and applied the compress to his knee. He felt better than at any time since the crash, but he knew he must resist hubris. He was still lost and still hungry.

  The compress did so much for his knee and his general well-being that he decided to renew it when it had grown tepid. This time, however, with an intent to get hotter water more quickly, he found and dropped into the fire a larger stone, and kept it in the coals so long that had it been iron it would have turned white. He had prepared his tongs for the new and heavier burden, pounding the ends of the sticks between two rocks so as to fashion them into paddles. He was also ready to move quickly in bringing the hot stone to the water in the cup lest it burn through the now thin paddle ends, even though the wood was so green as to exude sap when he struck it.

  The effort concluded in a damaging failure. The incendiary stone immediately burned itself free of the sticks, but not so soon as to fall harmlessly to the sand. Instead it fell within the cup, but off-center, and where it struck the inner wall of plastic, it burned through. Meanwhile its effect on the liquid was violent. Had Crews not instantly emptied the steaming contents onto the ground, the water would probably have boiled away within seconds, leaving the stone still hot enough to melt the bottom of the then dry cup.

  After a momentary dismay, however, he determined to remain positive. The vessel was only half ruined. It was capable of holding about five-eighths of its original capacity and also could still serve as a scoop for digging. And he had learned a valuable lesson. Even in his situation, fire could not be seen as unconditionally friendly. There was no element in his current existence that could not become inimical, in fact lethal, without warning. It was in vogue nowadays to say the same about daily existence in any city, and Crews himself had said as much, sometimes to justify his drinking. Was it better to be mugged when sober? (That, in spite of all, he never had been the victim of such a crime was beside the point.) But this was quite another universe, one in which any advantage could be nullified without warning and without moral significance.

  By now more than half of another day had passed, and the clouds that had been visible in the far western sky were moving closer. He could not think of a way to protect a fire from rain—any roof over it would burn—but suspected that a blaze that was hot enough might survive a mild downpour. At least it was a theory worth putting to the test. He must replenish the supply of wood and if possible find some means by which to keep it dry. He remembered the birches, but he possessed no knife or other cutting implement. Next time he was lost in the wilderness he would at least bring a straight-edged razor and not a useless piece of electric-powered junk.

  He wasted time in searching for a rock with a sharp edge until it occurred to him that he could sooner make one. In the woods he located a couple of hand-sized chunks of stone and struck them together until one cracked and separated into two pieces each of which was serviceably keen around most of its circumference. They were tools of not the most efficient form, but they could, when used with purposeful repetition, eventually pound an incision in a birch trunk sufficient to permit the peeling away of a strip of bark.

  In this crude fashion—much of his effort consisted in slamming the rocks against a tree reluctant to part with its integument until battered into submission—he eventually girdled several birches and collected what looked like enough half-cylinders of bark to roof a woodpile when flattened and placed in a shingled arrangement.

  Next he put the rocks to service as axes. When held at an angle, the sharp edges could chop thicker lengths of dead wood than he had been previously able to attack, though the crude implements would be ineffective against the stouter branches needed to build a shelter sturdy enough to stand against the bear or possible other menaces. But of course he expected to be rescued long before permanent fortification was required.

  By the time he had accumulated a waist-high pile of firewood that was of respectable quality and shingled its topmost layer with the birch bark, the afternoon had seemingly become evening, so dark was the sky when seen from the woods where he had decided his fuel supply would be less exposed to the elements than on the beach. The same could be said for himself, except for the possible greater danger of the bear when among the trees, which was presumably where the animal lived.

  With the rising of the wind, he began to doubt the validity of his prior theory that flames could resist foul weather if burning fiercely enough. His morale had been strengthened by the successes with the magnifying mirror and the make-shift axheads, but it fell now as he returned to the beach and saw the whitecaps on the lake and felt the unobstructed force of the gusts that swept in from the water.

  All at once the rain appeared without an introductory drop, great angry sheets of it, instantly transforming the fire into cold charcoal, soaking him and his miserable possessions, which he frantically gathered up for the dash into the woods, but, swept by the great broom of wind, he did not know what he had and what he left behind. That protection could be found in the trees was an illusion: the branches served only to channel more water onto him while others, tormented by the wind, whipped his face. How did bears and other wild beasts cope with rough weather? Probably in cozy caves. But the nearby terrain was flat, and he did not dare explore farther afield at this moment, lest he lose the lake and supply of fresh water as well as a situation more easily seen from the air.

  He found rocks to secure the birch-bark tiles with which he had covered the woodpile, but before he could get them in place all the bark had been blown away and the stacked wood was drenched. In searching for a place of refuge in the gathering darkness he lost the rest of his goods, but the clothes had been soaked and the picnic hamper was empty and torn and the fishing-rod case was useless.

  At last he stumbled and sprawled, but in so doing he found himself in a place of shelter inadvertently created by natural forces: an old tree trunk, fallen at an angle, against which other dead materials had collected, branches and leaves, on the leeward side of which accumulation a desperate man could burrow. He cowered therein throughout a long night in which the wind grew ever more furious in voice and act, bellowing, detonating, felling timber, increasing the volume of rain until the earth had become storm-tossed ocean.

  He dug as deeply as he could under the log, heaping himself with forest litter. It was far from being dry but warmer than his bed of the previous night, and he had no fear of the bear in such weather. After a while he was even able to sleep.

  4

  CREWS AWOKE AT FIRST LIGHT, BUT HE HAD been often briefly conscious throughout the hours of darkness. The storm had exhausted its rage and the winds had blown away, leaving the air still full of water, some dripping from the trees, more falling as a steady soaking rain which felt benevolent with the memory of the tumult of the night before. The naturally created lean-to had provided some small protection or anyway the illusion thereof: there was a distinction, but not one that mattered under prevailing circumstances.

  Without the sun there was no means by which to tell time, and no way of drying the wet clothing that was being further soaked by the falling rain. He could not make fire for any purpose whatever till the sky cleared. No aircraft would be flying in this weather, so there was no point in going back to the beach, where he no longer maintained a campsite. He had no home at the moment but the dead leaves and brush that had collected on the side of the fallen log away from the wind. But his knee seemed somewhat better as he tried to retrace his route in seeking refuge from the storm and find the possessions he had dropped. Eventually he collected everything but the damaged picnic hamper, which had probably been hurled away in one of the cyclonic blasts that had also felled several of the trees within his range of vision. He had heard some of the commotion during the night but had apparently slept through even more, knowledge of which he found reassuring: he had by combined instinct and accident taken the most effective hiding place that the forest offered against the assault of n
ature.

  There had been only two choices the day before, and they had not been changed by the storm: wait for rescue on the shore of the lake, where he could be best seen from the air, or choose a direction and hike out of the wilderness. If he stayed near the lake he should fashion better means by which to make his presence conspicuous. He had to think of some way to keep a fire going in inclement weather. He needed better shelter if he was to spend another night in the outdoors. If he chose to walk, he required some kind of footgear, and his route should be determined according to some scheme. In terrain such as that which presumably lay before him whichever the direction, it would be easy to travel in circles. In any case, he needed food. He had not eaten for two days, and while he was not yet in the condition called, in civilization, hungry (as when one who has missed dinner lurches into an all-night diner), his new rationality told him he would soon require nourishment. He could not survive forever on only the persistent metallic taste in his mouth.