Robert Crews: A Novel

by Thomas Berger

  In lieu of making a decision, he decided to reconnoiter the adjacent area of the forest. He had penetrated the trees only fifty yards or so from the beach. Exploring a bit farther would not be imprudent.

  He went only another hundred yards before emerging from the woods into a clearing in which stood the bare, broken, dead stumps of many trees, some with fallen trunks beside them, others standing alone. The devastation, which under other conditions might have been seen as ugly disorder, could only mean that human beings had been there. The stumps were pointed like sharpened pencils, not broken off jaggedly as if by winds. Why they were not of uniform height, if the chopping had been to gain lumber, and why so many of the fallen trees had not been hauled away, was of no substantive concern. He was not in a position to be offended by vandalism when the vandals were fellow men. Even if they were no longer on the scene, their trail in reaching this place could surely be traced back to where they had come from.

  Civilization must be reasonably close by, even if, as was probable, the visitors had used vehicles. In such a region, distances were gauged by another measure than that of city taxi-cabs. He might be in for a long hike. But he would be thrilled to make the effort. The worst thing about being lost in this way was seldom knowing what to do beyond the emergency requirement, which was invariably of a negative nature: finding protection against drowning, freezing, starving, or an attack by a wild animal. At last he had an altogether positive task. Once he reached a main road, he would probably be picked up by a car or truck long before he had walked as far as a town.

  He decided to keep going now, abandoning the few possessions parked back by the fallen log. Hiking would make him warm enough not to need the other articles of damp clothing. His knee was without pain today, and his bare feet were not uncomfortable, especially now that the ground was wet … and growing wetter, much more so than could have been caused by the recent rain, which anyway had almost stopped. In fact he was ankle-deep in a swamp, which soon gave way to an outright pond. He stopped to get his bearings. Now his knee had begun to hurt, and he was nowhere near anything that could be a trail or path, let alone a road. He backed out of the water onto the soaked earth and leaned against one of the pencil-ended stumps. It was almost waist-high and had been neatly carved to a ragged point by someone using what must have been a rather small ax or hatchet, judging by the size of the chop marks.

  Across the pond, perhaps forty yards away, was a floating field of lily pads, and while he watched, an enormous horse-like creature emerged from the woods, waded into the water, and began to feed on the aquatic plants. It had a small rack of velvety horns, obviously not full-grown. Crews needed a moment to identify the animal as, probably, a moose.

  He remained motionless against the stump. He was not likely to see a living moose, as opposed to a cartoon version, soon again. He had no plans to return to the wilderness once having escaped from it, but he would treasure the memories he had accumulated here: the bear and now the moose … and next the two beavers he saw swimming to shore. One of them, sleekly fat but agile, was leaving the water when he suddenly understood who it was that had gnawed the trees down and stripped away the bark.

  There would be no human path or trail to find, at least not one associated with the naked tree trunks at hand. The beavers—perhaps, given the devastation, a whole tribe of them—had done this work. He made a motion of chagrin, which was followed quickly by a report so loud that for a heart-lifting instant he took it for a gunshot but then recognized that the leading beaver had leaped back into the pond, smartly slapping the water with his big flat tail. The two glistening heads disappeared beneath the surface. The moose too, for all its size and ungainliness, could move rapidly. It hurled itself from the pond and penetrated the woods with a crash of branches. Before he could sigh, Crews was alone again.

  In a moment he looked for compensation for the disappointment. He now knew of the pond’s existence. Maybe fish would be easier to catch there than in the lake. Also, where did ponds get their water? If in this case the source was a stream, perhaps it led in a direction taking which, on a makeshift raft, one could eventually find fishermen or campers.

  But the rain had started up again and soon was falling in volume, discouraging further exploration. He turned and headed back to the log that was his new home…. Such was his intended destination, but he had no landmarks by which to be guided. The cone-gnawed stumps were indistinguishable from one to the next, nor were the living trees of the forest behind them any more helpful. Sometimes he had walked in shallow water, which retained no tracks. For every fallen tree trunk that looked familiar, there was another nearby that seemed even more so until he took another perspective on it. Crews had a poor sense of direction even when driving a car on paved country roads marked regularly with route signs.

  It was all he could do to restrain himself from panicking and running so far into the woods as to make his problem even worse. Better to keep the pond in sight than to lose even it by a disorienting plunge into a forest that to him was featureless and from which it might be difficult to see the sun when it finally came out. He could reestablish directions once the weather cleared up.

  He decided to build a lean-to on the drier ground at the edge of the swampy area. It would give him a task in which to put to work that anxious energy that might otherwise be wasted or put to a destructive use. And though he admitted that the feeling might be sheer sentimentality, this neighborhood, because of the beavers and the moose (who, unlike the bear, were afraid of him), seemed friendlier than any he had yet encountered.

  The lengths of tree felled by the beavers but not hauled away after the bark was stripped and apparently (since it was gone) eaten were stout material for building. When he sought to lift some of them he suspected they had been simply too heavy for the animals, as they were for him as well, but he found enough of those he could move to build a sturdy frame by employing as uprights two rooted stumps seven or eight feet apart and gnawed to roughly a common yard in height, and managing to heft a log to stretch between them. But not before making a crude depression at either end to accommodate the jagged tips of the stumps, which resembled sharpened pencil points only from a distance: close up, they were not all that keen. His tools again were rocks: an intact one he used as hammer; another, split, provided chisel-like edges. But with these implements he could not gouge holes sufficiently deep to offer sound connections that would serve for long unassisted. He needed some kind of binding.

  He waded in the pond to the nearest stand of reeds, flushing out several small fish that had been feeding or lurking at the base of the plants, as seen through the water—so he had been right: there was potential food here!—and brought back an armload of long green fronds. They proved tough enough to lash the cross member at each end to its supporting stump, though it took him a while to develop a means by which the reeds could get a purchase on the smooth-peeled vertical shafts. More pounding with his crude tools, the hammer-rock sometimes slipping and bruising the hand with which he held the make-believe chisel, produced circumferential grooves to hold the twisted lashings.

  Once the frame was up, the arranging of the lengths of wood—in some cases trimmed branches, in others real logs—that made up the slanted roof/wall required no effort of design, but the job was physically taxing, for not only were some of the logs at the limit of what he could tote, but he was obliged to work rapidly before the coming of another night. He arranged the lengths side by side, ends on the earth, irregular tops skyward, at roughly an angle of forty-five degrees. When he was done he had a structure that might be called half a wooden tent.

  At the moment he had gone as far as he practically could. He had built a roof that was as sound as possible without its elements (except the upright frame) being tied one to the other, which was to say that if there was another such violent storm as the one of the night before, most of it would probably be blown apart and away. But the sky had cleared and was darkening now by reason only of the hour. The rain had
ceased to fall some time since. Nevertheless, he carried back from the nearest evergreens sufficient shaggily foliaged boughs to lay over the bare poles, with their many interstices, of his roof, arriving at a result that surely was not waterproof but at least would repel some drizzle if it came. The structure was open to the south, so as to catch the sun when it next appeared, but a storm like the recent one would have soaked the interior of any lean-to no matter which direction it faced.

  Not until he was ready to retire inside the structure did he remember that his extra clothing remained back at the fallen log, wherever that might be. The air, though dry enough now, had cooled considerably with the coming of evening. Further-more, though he had built his shelter on solid ground beyond the deliquescence of the marsh, the earth was soaked from the heavy rains and there would be no material anywhere from which he could make a dry bed. He tried to dig a shallow trench of the kind that had been of some service on the beach, but the ground here was not sand and though wet had stayed too hard to penetrate easily with a sharpened stick. He was too exhausted to chop much with the stone ax.

  The fact was that he faced his worst night yet. But while just enough light remained so that he would not lose his way, he remembered seeing a patch of mud near the route he had taken to fetch the reeds from the marshland. He made his way there now and, having stripped naked, scooped up handfuls of the stuff and coated every part of his body he could reach except for the head and the privates. To protect his back, which got coldest when he slept, he smeared a thick coating inside the T-shirt he would wear against his skin. The mud happily turned out to be rather a kind of clay, a stiffer ointment to apply but no doubt preferable as insulation and with less of a connotation of dirt, though he was getting beyond such concerns. At the moment of application the wet stuff felt cold, but only a few moments later he had at least the illusion of being encapsulated in a deliciously warm investment, a sort of armor, and he began to feel as if protected against the bear as well as the cold. Before returning to the lean-to, he even capped most of his head in clay, including the backs of his ears, leaving only his face uncovered.

  Under the roof of poles, he had a mattress of more shaggy pine branches, which when shaken vigorously were not as wet as the ground. When he lay down upon its springiness he felt warm enough by reason of the clay coating underneath his damp clothes to recognize that, given the conditions, he had actually attained, wondrously, a state of comfort. He went to sleep immediately.

  When he woke, as usual now, at first light, the clay had dried here and there on his body and for a moment it might have seemed as though he were imprisoned in pottery. But when he vigorously flexed his limbs, chunks of the armor loosened and, as he rose, fell down the legs of his pants. The chest plating too detached itself easily and collected in fragments at his belt, bulging there until, leaving the lean-to, he freed the tail of the T-shirt and let most of the rest of his clay underwear fall to the ground. It had done the job in an emergency, as had he.

  The air was still cool at that hour but seemed to grow warmer by the moment, for the sky was beautifully clear except for the intense striated colors of the rising sun, which was just at the point of his horizon that was farthest from where he would have placed the east. Therefore his lean-to faced north, not south. How right he had been the day before to stay here by the pond and not attempt to return lakeward. Caution was the way to survive. The moose, big as it was, was not ashamed to run from a harmless midget like himself. When in doubt, choose the prudent alternative. That was nature’s way.

  His hair was still full of dried clay, and a good deal remained stuck inside the T-shirt, making him itch. He stripped, ran to the pond, plunged in, and almost fainted from the heart-stopping, suffocating cold of the water, which felt as if at a much lower temperature than that of the lake. This enterprise had scarcely been prudent. For a few instants he could not move his gelid arms, and his immobile legs were inanimate weights that pulled him down…. He was standing on the bottom, in water that was waist-deep. Prudently, he had belly-flopped. But very soon his personal temperature had altered, and suddenly finding the air colder than the water, he crouched to cover his trunk while he rinsed the clay from his head.

  By the time he had finished his ablutions the sun was all the way up and though still not at quite the angle to provide maximum warmth, it was a glorious sight for the cheering of spirits—which, however, fell with his worry as to whether he could locate the fallen log near which could be found the top of the electric-razor case with its magnifying mirror.

  He toweled himself on his T-shirt, which he wrung out after having washed it free of clay in the pond. He left it to dry on the roof of the lean-to and, dressed in the trousers and polo shirt, barefoot, set off through the trees. He had apparently not strayed that far the day before: he soon arrived at the shore of the lake, though seemingly not near the place where he had camped the first two days. In any event, he could not find the trench nor what remained of the HELP sign, and finally had to believe they had been obliterated by reason of the storm. He had established no landmarks on the opposite shore, an unbroken wall of green. He would not have understood, at any earlier time, how easy it was to become disoriented in a state of nature from which all other men were absent.

  By now he had gone without food for several days, which days had furthermore been characterized by strenuous physical labor. Therefore when he returned to the pond he decided to focus his immediate energy on the acquisition of food. The fish seen swimming in the water around the reeds were an obvious choice. After several attempts with various dead branches and one that he had chopped off a living tree—some of the dry ones were too brittle, whereas the fresh limb was too tough, too wiry, to sharpen with his tools—Crews fashioned a pointed spear that looked and felt as though it would do the job.

  He waded into the water. He was barefoot but he kept his pants on, not even rolling them up. He entrusted his naked feet to the pond, the bottom of which he could feel as an ooze, not unpleasant, but he was leery of exposing his naked legs to carnivorous eels, snapping turtles, or God knew what.

  But the problem with the pond turned out to be not the presence of hostile creatures but rather the absence of any animate thing. Today he failed to see a single fish in or near the reeds. When at last he emerged, spear trailing, he almost stepped on a small green frog sitting in no more than a quarter inch of water. By the time he brought up the weapon, the miniature creature had long since leaped to invisibility among aquatic weeds. It had anyway been too little to provide much food. He remembered from schoolboy biology that the plump midsection was all guts and such meat as there was could be found only in the legs, which on this tiny fellow had been lean indeed.

  The sun had already climbed high in today’s clear skies. More important than food—such food as he would be able to provide even when his efforts were efficacious—was the matter of an effective means of signaling to aircraft, and he had come up with a good idea. The submerged airplane surely still held some gasoline. If he dived down and opened the cap of the fuel tank, the gas, being lighter than water, would soon rise to the surface of the lake, where it could be ignited at the first sound of an engine overhead. He also remembered that the others’ baggage, no doubt packed with warm clothes, had been stowed in the wing compartments.

  But first he had to locate the fallen log at which the magnifying mirror, along with the rest of his possessions, was cached. He made exploratory trips into the woods in various directions, but after several of these in which he recognized nothing in the terrain, he was once again threatened with demoralization. It was ridiculous and degrading to get lost within a few hundred yards of trees, and all the more so when you were already lost in the larger sense. In chagrin he sat down on another huge fallen tree, which was somewhat similar to the one he sought, in fact very similar though different in a subtle way, tapering at the wrong end, which meant it had fallen to point south, not north like his…. But the fact was that when he had last seen “his�
�� log, rain was falling, the sun was not in evidence, and he had had no idea of where either north or south was.

  At last he stood up, walked around to look at the other side of the log, and saw the den he had dug out of the dead branches and leaves to take refuge in two nights before, and therein lay the goods he had cached. He cried out in triumph, the first sound he had produced vocally since the crash. He knelt and touched his precious possessions, each in turn. Never before had he been a materialist. In the early years of his drinking, when he still had things that other people coveted, he was quite capable of presenting costly gifts to near-strangers, such as the Patek Philippe he slid from his wrist and presented to a bartender who had been exceptionally patient with him at a time when he had been ejected elsewhere.

  He carried everything to his new headquarters beside the pond and stowed it in the lean-to, the sight of which filled him with pride and that emotion one is supposed to have when contemplating one’s home but which for him had been rare indeed, time out of mind. It was with reluctance that he left it to go to the lakeshore.

  As the days had gone by, he found it ever less endurable to think of the dead men in the airplane. He was stronger now than he had been when he tried, without success, the morning after the crash, to free Comstock’s body from the seat belt. He could, and no doubt should, before looking for the gas tank or the luggage in the wing compartments, try again to retrieve his late companions from the lake. A general respect for life, as well as his particular connections, demanded as much, yet whenever he considered making a dive for that purpose, he was claimed by a debilitation both physical and moral. And knowing that it took its source in the conflict between a human sense of guilt and a savage instinct for self-preservation made it no easier to overcome. They had been men, and their remains deserved better. But he was alive and lost and hungry. And now, brooding on the matter, he felt the return of the pain in his knee. He quickly stripped to his underwear and plunged into the water. He swam to the area of the lake over the wreck, some forty yards from shore, and taking the maximal breath, dived.