Robert Crews

by Thomas Berger

  He kept no count, but he made so many dives that when he finally had to give up the quest, at least for the morning, he was so exhausted he had hardly enough strength to gain the beach, at last crawling on hands and knees up onto the dry sand and collapsing. The plane was no longer where he had last seen it. In fact, it had vanished altogether. And what was worse, he could conceive of no explanation for the disappearance beyond that which simply attributed it to more of the divine malice that had brought the craft down in the first place.

  He rolled onto his back, exposed to the heavens. The sun was too bright even for closed eyelids. He threw a forearm across his face. Where could an entire airplane have gone? Where it had gone down, the lake was no more than fifteen or twenty feet deep, and except when a strong wind made the surface of the water opaque, the top of the wreck anyway should have been visible from the air. Yet it had not been seen by the plane that came looking for it—unless it had not been there at all. Or maybe the aircraft in the sky had not been looking for the one that had crashed. He was confused and demoralized. He had been coping very well with disaster, but had no defenses against altered reality. Could the storm have brought winds so powerful that something as large as an airplane would be moved under water?

  He was rushing toward terror. Lose one vital line to the real and all connections begin to unravel, and what part of existence can then be identified?

  He threw the arm off his face, to stare into the merciless blaze of the sun and thereby either see truth or be blinded … but he found himself in shade. The massive head of the bear was between him and the sky.

  His reason was intact. That the bear was not a hallucination (should there be any doubt) was confirmed by the coarse sounds of its breathing and, even more forcefully, by the feral stench it exuded, which was all but asphyxiating. It sniffed at him with distended nostrils, its little eyes having virtually disappeared in the furry head.

  Crews’s blood had converged behind the pulse in his neck and closed his throat. His limbs were too cold, too brittle, to be moved, lest toes, or a whole foot or hand, break off. Yet he was a man, with a rational mind and a coherent voice. Having no other weapon, he tried to speak to the animal. At first he could make no sound at all. Next he emitted a stream of almost noiseless air. This inchoate whistle intrigued the beast, which now brought its face near enough to take a prodigious bite of his if it so decided.

  At last he managed an inner scream, but what emerged was the thinnest of whimpers. Something in it gave pause to the bear, which arrested the movement of its head, then withdrew slightly. Crews was encouraged. Using all his strength, he whimpered again, persisting until he was able to develop an outright whine. Repeated, the whine became a moan, descending from nose to diaphragm.

  The bear slowly backed away, giving him reason to believe its purpose had been more investigatory than hostile. But it no longer looked curious. Perhaps he had annoyed the creature, and it was preparing for a brutal charge. He continued to produce vocal noise, converting the moan into a hum that in turn became a melodious chant, a recitative with bogus words, sheer gibberish, and eventually, by a progression that was almost natural in the sense that he did not think consciously about it, he was singing at almost full volume the lyrics of a song he had not heard since childhood: the theme of a television cartoon series of which the hero was a multicolored parrot that not only spoke comic Brooklynese but solved crimes. In truth, the rendition was far from adequate. Having a tin ear, he was aware he butchered the tune, nor did he remember the words with any clarity. The bird was named Gus, and it made a fuss when something, something, got in a muss, or went bust, or went out of line and was a crime…

  The bear continued to back away, though its expression seemed to grow more unfriendly. But Crews’s morale rose with every receding step the animal took. Soon it had withdrawn so far that it could not conveniently be seen from his supine position. He sat up and stopped singing. The bear ceased to move. Crews hastily resumed his song, but stayed in the seated position. The bear gave him a lengthy stare with its little glittering eyes, then quickly swung its snout around, taking its bulky black body along, and left the beach in a kind of lope that for all its ponderousness also looked carefree.

  Crews continued to sing the nonsense song for some moments after the animal had ambled out of sight among the trees. He sang in relief and triumph, and also as insurance against the bear’s return. The experience had flushed from his mind all previous doubts as to his sanity, and some of his earlier fear of the bear, though he had even more respect for the power of the big beast now that he had been close enough to smell it, and suspecting that his musical weapon might not have been so efficacious had the bear been really hungry, he was far from being blasé. Were he to remain in this region for long, he would have to take more substantial defensive measures, though what kind of barriers could be built, with make-shift tools and vulnerable wooden materials, could not be said. In zoos, dangerous animals were separated from the public by smooth walls of concrete and perhaps a moat as well. In summer, they floated cakes of ice in the latter, and the polar bears plunged in and swam with obvious pleasure….

  This was no time for nostalgia. The matter of feeding himself was paramount. He could only assume he had lost the wrecked plane because of a mental confusion due to physical weakness, which in turn owed to the lack of nourishment in his system. He had applied reason to the problem of the bear, when the animal was face to face with him. He must do as well with the problem of acquiring food. What did bears eat to become so large and burly? He believed they were omnivorous, stealing pawfuls of honeycomb as bees swarmed furiously about them, stings impotent against the thick and long-haired hide. And were they not famous fishermen, wading in rapids and scooping up and tossing huge salmon onto the shore? But as with berries and nuts, he had seen no bees nor salmon locally.

  The beavers had gotten so fat and sleek on a diet of bark. He put on the clothes he had removed for swimming and went into the woods along the route he had blazed. Fortunately, it was some distance from that used by the bear. He was leery of evergreens. He could not distinguish among them as to type, and was not hemlock a legendary source of poison? The birch would seem preferable. Its pale skin had the sympathetic connotations associated with Indian canoes, and while not edible in itself, on being peeled away it disclosed subcutaneous layers of juvenile bark-to-be and living greenish tree flesh. The stuff had a fresh smell but no discernible taste. Nor was it, however relatively tender when considered as wood, easily chewed. To answer his need for nourishment, he would have to girdle even more trees than the beavers had ruined, and in his case, for questionable nourishment.

  One of the few other trees he could identify (because of the Canadian flag) was the maple. He found several bearing the characteristically shaped leaves, but their bark was even less inviting than that of the birch. If the sap of the maple could be boiled into syrup, surely it must be edible, or drinkable, as it came from the tree. No sooner did the idea come to him than he remembered the pictures one saw of buckets hanging from the trunks: the background was often snowy. Nevertheless he banged at the nearby trees with his sharp rocks. He got no sap. It was the wrong season. Molly, the wife from whom he had lately been divorced, professed to be a conservationist: he could imagine her scorn. Pointing to the beavers as fellow depredators could not legitimately be done, for at least they survived by what they ruined.

  The only second course he could find to follow the bark appetizers comprised samplings of a succession of weeds and grasses. He chose these preeminently by appearance, the smoother-surfaced and the paler-green in color the better, avoiding the spiky- or hairy-leafed or harsh-looking. What he ate was quite pallid in flavor, but presumably, being fresh, was full of the vitamins and minerals required to keep at least its own life going.

  From the course of the sun, he could identify the general points of the compass. If he walked south, he must eventually, inevitably, reach some form of civilization. It was, of course, po
ssible that what he was looking for was much closer in any or all of the other three directions, including the north. But he felt obliged to go by probabilities. He had lost most of his conviction that he would soon be found by rescuers. The one plane that had flown over was far too high to have been looking for Spurgeon’s party. He would be well advised to go on the assumption that Dick had been so far off course that no one could have the vaguest idea where the craft had gone down.

  If he was in for a long hike, he needed footgear. He returned to the birches that had provided the first course of his pitiful lunch and hacked off some more bark. This time he wanted the full thicknesses of all strata, for what he had in mind was a walking shoe or slipper that began with one sock inside another (he had enough to add a third, but found that combination too tight at the instep and decided to pocket the spares, to be exchanged at will with the inner ones in use). To the outer sock he would stitch a birch-bark sole, using fishing line as thread. To be sure, the line was thick and stiff, but those properties would make it easier to steer an end through the weave of the socks and then into the perforations he would pierce around the margins of the bark soles. Anyway, he had no needle. In tales of castaways such implements were commonly made of fishbones, he remembered wryly. Had he abundant access to fish, he would likely stay where he was for a while longer and not feel obliged immediately to hike out to no defined destination on crude homemade shoes, with no better prospects for food, and perhaps less for water, than he had here, where furthermore he had built a stout new structure to call home.

  He went ahead and started on the shoes, trying, with only conditional success, to flatten the bark to the point that it would provide a comfortable surface on which to put a man’s weight. But he continued to think about the fish that surely thronged the depths of the bodies of water surrounding him. It was ridiculous to starve in such a place. He needed to be as resourceful as he had been in making fire and constructing the lean-to.

  A new idea made him put aside the unfinished footgear. He had disassembled the fly-fishing rod and returned it to its container. Now he found that case at the end of the lean-to where his possessions were arranged much more neatly than anything he had ever owned in civilization and removed from it only enough segments of rod which when joined made a thin pole slightly shorter than himself.

  He pulled off ten or twelve feet of line from the reel and chopped it free with the stone ax. He tied the length of line to the guide ring nearest the end of the partial rod he had put together. With the fingernail clipper he cut free from its tiny hook all the colored hair, feathers, etc. that had made the artificial fly. To a nonsportsman like himself, the naked hook looked much too small to catch any trout worthy of the name, but obviously it had been fashioned by experts who knew better.

  Then he went looking for live bait. He had not noticed an earthworm since childhood, and he could not locate one now in this terrain. He did encounter a leaping insect, a sort of grass-hopper, but lost it momentarily in a patch of weeds and before trying to flush it out, saw a flat rock on the ground nearby, on instinct overturned it, and found several pale squirming wrigglers, not long pink earthworms but shorter, gray grubs or maggots or larvae (or were they one and the same?). The first that he tried to impale on the hook turned to paste in his hand. He chose another, working with all possible delicacy and succeeding. He went to the pond and dropped the bait-bearing line into the water near the growth of reeds.

  The first nibbling vibrations that reached his fingers, not long afterward, so thrilled him that he could not restrain his impatience, and with precipitate action of the pole he lost whatever had stolen the bait. He threaded on a new grub and tried again. This time it took a while. The fish may have been alarmed by the violence with which he had tried to set the hook in the previous encounter. The spasmodic style was unsuited to survival in the wilderness. What was needed was fluidity: to be strong, sure, consistent, and careful in the sense of both caution and taking care of particulars.

  Though the bank of the pond, not much higher than the surface of the water, was still damp from the rain, he sat down on it and composed himself, holding the rod with but two fingers, its butt on the earth between his crossed legs. The day was quite nice, with its balmy air and warm sun.

  He felt a bite! This time he did not jerk the line abruptly but rather let the fish proceed for a moment as if unnoticed. Then he pulled hard and felt the barb take hold. He was disappointed when for an instant the fish did not resist at all, but immediately thereafter the creature did what it could to fight against capture: not much. Swinging it from the water with one yank, Crews could see why. The little silver thing was scarcely larger than a sardine. Yet it was food.

  After he had caught two more minnows, exhausting his supply of grubs, Crews came up with something better. He chopped a live branch from one of the pines and, having trimmed it of foliage, formed a hoop with the thinner, more flexible end, lashing the tip to the shaft with fishing line, leaving enough of the thicker butt end for a handle. Inside the hoop he hung an upside-down T-shirt, neck and arm holes tied off. The line was stiff enough to stitch the hem to the rim of the hoop without a needle. The result, though crude, looked like a workable net.

  In practice the T-shirt was not as porous as he thought it should be, performing more as scoop than seine, retaining too much water for too long, but when he was finally able to put it into action—having found it necessary to wade into the pond thigh-deep and then wait for the school of minnows to recover from their initial alarm and return—he collected a number of the little fish with one swipe, and though many escaped before the water had oleaginously drained very far below the net’s rim, he held on to three.

  He stuck at the job till the accumulated catch exceeded a dozen. He intended to use the heated-stone technique to cook them, but since this time the water must be made, and kept, hot enough to boil the fish, the plastic thermos cup would not do. The primitive hole in the ground would seem to be called for.

  All three of his wives had had obsessions concerning food. Ardis had been the one fanatically concerned about the freshness of anything that had its origin in water. Molly, an animal lover, would not touch lobster, which was never cooked except when alive. Michelle’s peculiarity was an aversion to eating much of anything lest it affect her figure.

  A dim memory having nothing to do with his marriages came within reach. In his day he had watched a lot of informational TV, sometimes even when fully conscious: British ornithologists crawling about on the barren rocks of Tierra del Fuego; stout-bellied fishermen in baseball caps, casting lures from shallow-draft boats on Southern lakes; hooded climbers toiling up Everest and K-2. On one such program, a woodsman made the claim that water could be boiled in a container made of birch bark and was about to demonstrate when Crews fell asleep. By no means would he have remembered this had he not been in his current need, so strange were the workings of the mind. Not that he believed the assertion, which defied the physical laws as known to him.

  But he anyway went into the trees and again girdled a birch, obtaining a foot-square roll of bark, which, after warming it over the newly made fire, he spread and pounded flat. Next he folded it to make an open box. The crimping and doubling over at the corners would not stay as fashioned until effective fasteners were found: the hooks of artificial flies.

  He had earlier found the long, thick conglomeration of sticks and mud that formed the dam by which the beavers had made the pond: at a quick glance it might have been taken for a random mess of dead vegetation that had been washed downstream, but closer inspection established its effectiveness for the intended job. On the downstream side of the dam, the brook reconstituted itself by means of the constant overflow in this season of rain, and probably a certain leakage. Though he would eat the little fish from the pond, because at the moment they were all he could catch, Crews was not keen on drinking its water, which was not all that clear to begin with and was made murkier whenever he waded across the oozy bottom, occasi
onally snagging his toes on slimy submerged branches that when brought up for examination showed beaver tooth-marks.

  He drank from the presumably skimmed and filtered stream beyond the dam. He now went there to fill the birch-bark box with water. Back at the fire, he mounted the container on a grate made of stones, over a modest edge of the fire, where the flames were lowest.

  The meal could have been prepared more quickly had he put the minnows into the water at the outset, bringing them to boil with the liquid, but since he could not really believe the unreasonable method would work, he did not dare risk ruining his supply of food: he left the fish where they were and, against tradition, watched the pot. This vigil served only to stop time and ensure that nothing whatever happened, which might be called miraculous in the case of the noninflammatory bark, but after a series of finger testings, the water stubbornly remained cooler than the air.

  He was hungry enough by now to swallow the little fish raw, but forced himself into distractions. He examined his hand. The wound had continued to heal, making so much progress, despite all the dirty labor, that it was all but gone.… Because his attention had been elsewhere, he had worn the same pair of pants for many days, and they were a disgrace. He exchanged them now for the jeans from the duffel bag (which already were loose at the waist), and while he was at it, he changed his drawers. He wore socks as little as possible, to save wear and tear on his supply of four pairs. He checked the birch-bark pot once again. It might have been only his imagination, but the water no longer felt positively cool to the fingertip.