Robert Crews: A Novel

by Thomas Berger

  He was hungry again. Except for a few hours after he had gorged on enough to fill him, he was always ravenous. You just did not get enough to eat if you had to track down and kill for every mouthful. Ask the bear about that, and it was even omnivorous. If you build a civilization, start with groceries and restaurants or you won’t go far.

  He sent the raft carefully against a sand beach, went into the forest and cut a fishing pole, then dug for earthworms, but not quickly finding any, overturned rocks and collected the creatures underneath them. Back on board and underway, he affixed the pole in one of the interstices between the logs so that its line and baited hook would troll behind the moving raft. But after an hour or so, he had caught nothing on it.

  It was midafternoon. His progress was hard to measure against the featureless shore he had been following since leaving the projecting rock. Since finding the shoeprint he had seen no living thing aside from the squirming grubs used as bait. No fish broke the water, no birds flew overhead. This was often true, and to see mammals was rare enough in the best of seasons. Under ordinary circumstances he would not have been disturbed, but now he felt as though adrift in a void. He had no food and he was en route toward no destination. He had wasted time on making a raft that served only to take him away from a comfortable shelter and sources of food that were at least sometimes reliable, and when one source failed he had been in a position to find another. Had he put as much work into making an effective bow and arrows as he had wasted on the raft, he might be eating an excellent dinner now of at least trout and watercress, or if he had applied himself to the matter of footgear, it would not be out of the question that by now he could have hiked out to someplace with showers, mattresses, and room service.

  He heard two gunshots.

  It was by reflex action that he swung the raft into the shore and hopped off. He had no reliable sense of where the shots had come from. The beach was vacant, which had to mean that the shooter was somewhere in the woods, but the nearer Crews came to the trees, the more he was aware of the problem he might have in locating anyone within them if he simply penetrated the wall of close-grown pines that faced him: he would soon be disoriented and might well get shot for his pains.

  He began to yell. After multiple repetitions of Hey! he announced he was a person, on the beach, and lost. From time to time he stopped shouting so as to listen for evidence he had been heard. None came. He cried out his name, should the shots have come from a party searching for survivors of the downed aircraft. There was no response. He began to doubt his earlier conviction that the gunfire had come from close by. He had no experience in gauging distance by sound, but it seemed possible that noises of a reverberatory kind might come from any choice of places across a great expanse and produce echoes from far away.

  But this was not another of the necessarily short-lived opportunities afforded by the two planes that early on had come and gone so rapidly. Whoever had fired these shots would be on foot in wild terrain (unless there was a superhighway, or even a dirt road, behind the trees) and would stay in the area for a while, even if departing.

  Nowadays he took self-preserving notice of natural conditions. The wind was coming off the lake, which meant that the forest animals would have his scent long before he reached the pines, and also that human beings in the near distance could smell the smoke of a fire built on the beach. So he took the mirror from his pocket and made one, feeding it first with the bone-dry driftwood of which there was a random supply along the shore.

  When more smoke was needed, he added brushy green branches and fanned the flames with others. He continued sporadically to shout. His voice had gone unused for so long that this strenuous employment of it made him hoarse after a while. He restrained himself from running into the forest; he continued to work by reason and not emotion. How far would he have to go to exceed the reach of his yells and the odor of the fire? And the farther one went in a wrong direction, the greater the angle of error. In a territory so vast he might find neither what he looked for nor the route back to the lake.

  He stayed where he was. Spending the night there seemed to make sense. He gathered enough wood to keep the fire replenished till he went to sleep. He also dug for earthworms, but not finding any, caught an insect found under a rock, not a slug this time but a small adult beetle. Primitive though he had become, he yet felt a twinge of regret as he impaled the live creature on a hook. But perhaps it was that very movement of life that did the trick: he got a bite almost as soon as the insect disappeared beneath the water. The fish when hauled in was not quite so large as it had seemed when fiercely resisting its capture, but it was a handsome plump specimen, the biggest thus far.

  He gutted his catch and spitted it over white embers. He ate everything but bones and tail, which he carefully returned to the water so as not to attract scavengers: meaning, for him, the bear.

  It was a delicious meal, but he was too preoccupied to enjoy it as much as he might have. He continued to shout from time to time between mouthfuls. The presence of others, though as yet unseen, unidentified, and apparently not aware of him, changed the basic conditions of his existence. He was no longer alone in a nonhuman void, yet neither was he thus far in company. He had additional responsibilities without additional rewards.

  Before going to sleep, he moved his fire to a pit dug in the sand, so that while the light would be visible at a distance in the darkness and the odor of the smoke would continue to be broadcast, there was a diminished danger that sparks driven by a fitful wind would set the forest aflame.

  Next morning Crews awoke with a decision if not a solution. The shots must have come from hunters too far away to hear his shouts and by the time he produced the smoke not in a position to smell it, having moved in the opposite direction. Looking for them in the thick woods made even less sense now than it would have the afternoon before. The best thing was to resume the exploratory voyage, hard as it might be to leave the only place where he had encountered evidence of human life since the crash.

  The wind was up this morning, raising foam-crested wavelets on the surface of the lake. By now he was used to passing up breakfast. He was preparing to shove into the lake the corner of the raft that was held by the sand when he was struck by the fact that the breeze was blowing in the direction he wanted to go.

  He went into the woods, where with the miniature saw blade he worked until he had felled a slender six-foot sapling that could serve as mast. The problem came in fastening the mast to the raft. He dug out a niche between the two central logs, but even when the upright was planted in it, butt going down almost to the water, there was no support horizontally. He had to fashion and force-fit lengths of wood as braces.

  The labor took time, but all of it was regained when at last his jacket, pinned with fishhooks to a frame of stout twigs, was attached flexibly to the mast and the craft was launched. The makeshift sail took much handling. The wind-filled jacket was hard to control, and more than once ripped away from its fishhook fastenings, growing more tattered. Only at the top was it secure: an extra-long stick extended through both arms, scarecrow-style. Then too, the mast was wont to threaten to come down, especially when the sail caught a hearty gust. Crews had frequently to tend to the crude braces, holding the downwind one in place with his foot. And along with everything else, he had to keep the craft on course with the pole, pushing off when in danger of going aground, yet being careful not to let the wind take him out to deeper water.

  The raft was slow to get into motion, and the square yard of the old seersucker jacket had only a limited capacity to convert the power of the air to another use. Nevertheless, the heavy, crude platform began to run, or anyway lumber, with the wind, and little muscle was required, except at such times when, having gusted with unusual force, the wind briefly abated, catching, so to say, its breath before resuming normal aspiration. Then Crews would plunge the pole to the lake bottom and push. But he kept the other hand at the mast, alert to the return of the breeze.

&nbs
p; Such attention as he had left he applied to scanning the shoreline for evidence of human activity. Since he heard the sound of the shots, the basic conditions of his immediate reality had changed: looking for people was no longer a hopeless exercise in wish-fulfillment. He was still by himself but no longer alone at manning the universe, which is how it had once seemed, but that was what had kept him going: a sense of his uniqueness in surviving on his own in the wild. He might now have to make other moral arrangements.

  The terrain on shore had begun to change as the raft continued sluggishly but surely to sail toward what must eventually be the end of the lake. The pines gave way to an inlet made by the debouchment of another stream like that down which he had come from the beaver dam, though this one was much faster-running and probably not so obstructed in its upper reaches. Its farther bank was treeless and floored with big chunks of stone that had likely fallen, over the course of eons, from a cliff perhaps a quarter mile distant from the lake. From where Crews was kneeling on the raft, the height seemed to have a face of sheer granite.

  He might have seen something of note at its top, a flicker, a glimpse of something that would have caused him to peer longer, but at that moment the sail caught a sudden burst of wind that would have knocked the mast over had he not braced himself against it with all his strength, which in turn meant he had briefly to relinquish a controlling grip on the pole. The raft went heavily against the shore, here more rocky than sandy, with projections of those bulky stones that dotted the ground behind, and on the impact, several of the cruder fastenings between the logs burst apart.

  The craft was not quite wrecked, but he considered it too disabled to continue without repairs. Wading, he pushed it to a less demanding part of the shore, and worked most of it up onto a gravel beach. He had to get replacements for the lashings that had given way. Too much fishline would have been needed, and his supply was dwindling. There was a strip of greenery along the bottom of the cliff. Perhaps he could find some material there, vines or grasses, that would serve. He set out for it, keeping his eyes on the summit when the terrain underfoot presented no hazards, looking down when big rocks had to be avoided. His bare soles were now toughened to a condition in which walking on hard surfaces heated by the sun was no longer painful. He probably no longer needed shoes in which to hike out of the wilderness: his feet were durable enough. The leg he had hurt in escaping from the plane had been perfectly okay since a few days after the crash. The only excuse left was that without an accurate means of determining precise directions he could not be absolutely certain which way to go.

  Avoiding boulders, he had kept his eyes down. When he next glanced up at the cliff, a figure was standing on its level summit. He waved and shouted. The figure vanished without having responded. He was still too far away to know more than that it was of human conformation. He could not be sure that it had seen him. Its movement in retreat had been quick but, assessed at such a distance, not necessarily significant. Nor had he any scale by which to judge its size.

  He picked up the pace through the rocks and finally arrived at the grove of deciduous trees at the base of the cliff. They lined both sides of the stream that flowed there, the same that bent later to come out and empty into the lake. Within the trees, his line of sight at an acute angle, he had a limited view of the summit above, but he was closer now. He cupped his hands at his mouth and shouted up. Few sounds are so dispiriting as a cry unanswered when one is lost in the wild, and as he found now, all the worse when you know another human being is extant nearby.

  He waded across the stream, which fortunately was no deeper than his waist, and he could hold up and keep dry the laden pockets of his jacket, which he had reclaimed from the mast before leaving the raft. He went through the trees and looked for a route up the granite rampart, so sheer at this point it could not have been attacked except by an experienced and well-equipped rock climber. He traveled farther along the base, shouting up from time to time. At one point he flushed a rabbit from some undergrowth. The animal slowly hopped a hundred feet distant, then stayed in position till he got within fifty. Crews paused at this point, and the creature loped off into the bushes that fringed the trees. Hungry as he was, he had to fight off the urge to pursue it.

  He came to the end of the sheer wall and found a slope on which greenery alternated with rocky outcroppings. Even so, the angle of ascent was only a little less than perpendicular, and when pausing he clung to whatever grew or jutted at hand lest he slide back down that height he had so laboriously gained. The last few yards, the terrain proved such that it was more easily negotiated on hands and knees. When he reached the edge of the summit, it was as if he were stealing furtively upon it, had anyone been there to see him. But the plateau was empty. It was also much smaller than when estimated from below, falling quickly in back to a forest of large, tall trees widely spaced but so thickly leaved as to keep the floor in shade on a sunny day. Unless someone was concealed behind a thick trunk, the woods too were uninhabited to at least the middle distance.

  He shouted some more. He searched unsuccessfully for tracks or broken foliage. He went to the edge of the cliff and looked down to where he had beached the raft, which was not only visible but fairly conspicuous, even at the distance, because it was markedly inconsistent with all else there—and surely had been even more so when afloat. The person could not have failed to see him, and therefore the subsequent flight had been intentional. Whoever it was wanted not only not to find him but positively to avoid any contact at all. The realization that the first human being he had encountered since the crash considered him someone to avoid was at first morally debilitating, and then Crews became angry. But having no clear object for his anger—what he had seen was essentially a silhouette—he put it aside and descended to the trees.

  He found a dead but solid branch from which to fashion a club. He lay in wait along the area of undergrowth where he had last seen the rabbit. He stayed there, motionless, perhaps for hours. For this purpose, like an animal he had a diminished sense of the duration of time. The moment was eternal. There was no alternative reality.

  When the rabbit finally appeared, it was allowed, for another eternity, to go about its business unmolested, hopping here and there, sniffing, nibbling, until it came within range at which one deadly blow could be accurately delivered: he assumed that if the first did not do the job, he would not get a second.

  Having never before taken warm-blooded life, Crews was unaware of how resistant it could be to expiring. He had to hit the defenseless creature many more times than he could have anticipated, and yet the long legs would not stop kicking, nor the furry nose cease to quiver, until he did what he should have done sooner. He got out the tool, as the rabbit thrashed under the club that held it down, and cut its throat with the knife blade.

  Just as the animal had fought harder for life than he expected, its blood was more abundant. Not yet entirely raptorial, he was revolted by the episode … until the rabbit had been skinned, spitted, turned over a fire, and devoured while still so hot the flesh singed his mouth. It was the most delicious meal he had ever eaten. He would kill in good conscience anything he could eat: there could be no regret in that.

  It was late afternoon as he sucked clean the last bone and dropped it into the swift-moving stream. He had disposed of the skin in the same fashion, not knowing how to preserve it for subsequent use. The lake wind on which he had traveled all day had turned to blow against the land. The temperature was falling as the sun sank. He would need protection from the breezes of the night. He quickly constructed a small lean-to.

  Next morning he headed for the beach. He was not prepared to discover that the raft was gone. The wind had been brisk, but hardly strong enough to move such a substantial object. Nevertheless, he pretended that it might have happened, and he searched the shore for a considerable distance should the raft have first been blown out on the water and later back to land, though he knew all the while that it had been taken by the other human
being in the area, who thereby proved to be not simply no friend but a declared enemy.

  7

  CREWS COULD HAVE NO IDEA AS TO WHICH direction the thief had taken with the raft. Toiling up the cliff again would be purposeless. He could scan more of the water from up there, but if he did see his enemy, the man would be too far away by now to pursue with any hope of success. The only choice he had was to continue to explore the lake, by foot along the shore, or hike back to his old camp at the pond. What distances must be traveled to do the former could not be estimated, but to go back by land to where he had come from by water would be a defeat of a kind that he could not accept.

  He began to walk and before long was beyond the area of stones and once again on the sand beach. He took the route firmest underfoot, at the edge of the forest, and at a regular pace probably covered as much distance per hour as he had even with the crude sail, given its constant need for manhandling, and certainly more than when merely poling the raft. As he hiked he thought about what he would do if he did encounter the man who had stolen the raft that he had built by hand with so much labor, and though at the outset he amused himself with fantasies of violence, after a while he imagined only asking the other what possible justification there could be for doing such a rotten thing.

  The question was a familiar one to Crews, who had been asked its like many times by intimates in his previous life. But never by his father. Never by his mother, either, but that was different: she usually did not know. His father certainly did, for it was a lawyer from his father’s firm who always sprang him from whichever immediate predicament that had legal consequences: the car crashes, the fights when property was destroyed, the disturbances of the peace. In the city, where everybody in an official capacity had a price, these crises became minor inconveniences, and his name was even kept out of the papers. But it could be different in the country. One magistrate refused to set bail when after doing 140 in the Testa Rossa he was roadblocked by a hick cop, and Crews spent the night in jail despite the lawyer’s best efforts for a client who had a high blood-alcohol reading and had furthermore rejected arrest until being knocked out.