13

In the late afternoon it began to rain. By now, Gerfaut was several kilometers from the railroad.

After his fall he had remained unconscious for but a few minutes. Picking himself up, he was amazed to discover that he was not dead. In truth, he was not really amazed. The events of the last few days, coming after a comfortable childhood and an early youth of successful upward mobility, had more or less convinced him that he was indestructible. But, given his improbable situation, arrived at by way of such thrilling vicissitudes, he found it appropriate, even exhilarating, to be surprised at the fact of still being alive. The image he now had of himself drew on a crime novel he had read some ten years earlier and from a small, baroque Western he had seen the previous fall at the Olympic movie theater. He had forgotten the titles of both works. In the first, a man left for dead and hideously mutilated by a crime boss proceeds to wreak a horrifying vengeance upon the said crime boss and his lackeys. In the film, Richard Harris is likewise left for dead by John Huston, but survives, living in a completely savage state, hating God and fighting with wolves for morsels of food.

Gerfaut shuddered at the thought of fighting ferocious animals for morsels of food.

Once he had come round and sat up, Gerfaut first leaned against the trunk of a larch and palpated himself with an excess of precaution. His left foot was painful. With the help of the tree trunk, he struggled to his feet. His foot gave way beneath him, and he slipped back to the ground, scraping his palms on the bark of the tree as he did so. A second attempt met with more success. He let go of the trunk he was holding on to and made it in four stiff and risky steps to another, around which he threw his arms, about three meters away. He experienced a sharp pain in his instep, but oddly it seemed to diminish when he walked. His ankle kept twisting painfully beneath his weight. Staggering from trunk to trunk, he nevertheless advanced fairly easily.

The slope helped him. Initially, he had wanted to make his way back to the railroad tracks in the hope of flagging down the next train or else following the rails to the nearest station. But he had to abandon this idea because of the steepness of the terrain. So he went downward, instead. The farther down into the valley you go, he told himself, the more likely you are to find houses. By and large, anyway.

One tree at a time, he cut across sharply falling land that supported a fine dark grass, mosses, and the odd cluster of mountain primrose, catchfly, or houseleek. The larch needles were slippery underfoot, and another barrier to quick progress were the many gullies of reddish earth strewn with loose stones. Gerfaut fell often. To go in the direction he had chosen, he was obliged to walk with his injured foot lower than the other on the slope, which made things much more difficult.

The air was crisp. The forest was full of lively, whispering breezes. Birds were few, darting with precision from tree to tree, just below the lowest branches. Once, looking up between the pistachio-green treetops, Gerfaut noticed a larger bird gliding high against a sky become gray. Soon afterward, he got beaten up all over again when he careened down into a ravine on the seat of his pants, bouncing and swearing as he went. As he finally came to rest, his ankle collided brutally with a tangle of roots, and he almost wept. Getting up yet again, and seeing where his slide had brought him, he thought he was done for.

So far down had he fallen that he was at the very bottom of a mud-filled hollow full of vegetable matter in various stages of decay. If there were wild boars at this altitude (which Gerfaut doubted), the place would surely have been a boar’s lair. At all events, if Gerfaut was to go on in any direction at all, he would now have to climb.

He made several false starts that ended in pathetic and painful tumbles. At last, he had the idea of crawling and using his fingers for purchase. In this way, he dragged himself up a short incline and reached ground that was all broken up and distinctly discouraging: nothing but sharp rises, patches of bare granite, tangled branches brought down by lightening or avalanche, and vertiginous overhangs. From an aesthetic point of view, the landscape was highly romantic. From Gerfaut’s point of view, it was absolute shit.

He continued to make headway, still on his belly, but his strength was on the ebb. Above, the sky was lowering. Then it began to rain.

It rained hard and long. Yellow water ran down the red gullies. Gerfaut hauled himself to a chaos of uprooted trees, curled up beneath them, and turned his shirt collar up. Water trickled between the fallen tree trunks and into his clothes. It was cold. Gerfaut began crying softly. Night fell.

At the break of day he had been asleep for only a short time. Anxiety, and a certain morose enjoyment of his misery, had kept him awake for many hours. Showers had followed one another at short intervals. Even when rain was not falling, water continued to run down the hillside, dripping from the branches above, percolating into Gerfaut’s niche under the fallen trees and soaking him. When he opened his eyes, he felt as if he had only just closed them. His teeth were chattering. His grimy forehead was burning. He felt his injured foot and found it swollen and more painful than the day before. Laboriously he removed his mud-encrusted city shoe. When he stripped off his cotton sock, it ripped at the heel and instep. With a perverse satisfaction, Gerfaut contemplated the inflamed and purple flesh and the large, hard, unhealthy-looking protuberances on the front and side of his foot. He was unable to get his shoe back on, even after he tore out the lace and hurled it away from him with all his strength; it landed in the mud all of two meters away. He wanted to consult his Lip watch—which he had bought directly from the Lip workers when they had occupied their factory and which had never worked very well—but he discovered that he no longer had it. Then he recalled having already discovered this shortly after falling from the freight train.

The clouds no longer formed a uniform and somber vault. They had lost altitude and broken up on the mountainside. Gerfaut even saw some passing below him and reckoned that he must be at two or three thousand meters. He crawled out of his den on all fours. For five or six minutes he advanced furiously, ignoring the pain. He grunted like an animal—not without a measure of satisfaction.

This brief effort exhausted him utterly. Thereafter he took long, panting halts, moving forward only five or six meters between each. The weather had turned fair. The larches had thinned out. The sun started beating down madly. Steamy mist rose among the trees. Flying insects filled the air. Soon it was very, very hot. Gerfaut was burning up with fever. The whole business no longer gave him the feeling that he was in a novel.

As the day wore on and absolutely nothing in the situation changed, Gerfaut became frankly serious. He laid plans for long-term survival alone. He inventoried his possessions, which now comprised a dirty handkerchief, the keys to his Paris apartment, a scrap of squared paper bearing the telephone number of LTC Laboratories in Saint-Cloud, and six soaked Gitane filters in a crumpled pack. No lighter, no means of making a fire, no weapon, nothing to eat. Yet somehow Gerfaut got his second wind. He contrived to tear off a half-broken low branch of a tree and use it as a crutch. He began once more to walk on his two feet and even achieved a speed of four kilometers an hour. He entertained, then rejected, the idea of finding bees, following them back to their hive, somehow chasing away the swarms, and gorging on the honey. He decided that he would be stung countless times and put out of action once and for all—or die right then, for that matter. Besides, there were no bees anywhere to be seen.

He felt duty bound to sample every likely looking plant he noticed along the way in case it was edible. Everything he tried was hopelessly stringy or far too bitter.

Once, sitting on the ground, he hurled a fragment of granite at the head of a speckled brown bird that was clinging to a tree trunk and pecking at it. He missed his target by a wide margin without even frightening the creature. He didn’t try a second shot.

The sun had dropped in the sky, and it must have been five or six by the time Gerfaut, still on his feet but advancing now at no more than two kilometers an hour, emerged into a meadow. He had earlier crossed a couple of clearings, spots where there were no more damned larches for thirty, maybe as much as fifty meters, but they had still blocked his view. This was different: even before reaching the forest’s edge, Gerfaut saw thin grass extending a good hundred meters to a bluff. Beyond was a panoramic view of a great trough of a valley, bounded by wooded humped-back hills and ending some eight or ten kilometers away, in a low notch. On one flank of the valley was an area where the forest had been cleared. Higher up, just beyond the tree line, a pale shape indicated a shelter for hikers or possibly a cowshed.

Gerfaut immediately lost all sense of being lost in thousands of kilometers of wilderness. He hastened toward the outcrop, which hid the bottom of the valley from view. As he proceeded, he was thrilled to make out paths, other cleared areas, other cowsheds on the peaks.

As Gerfaut reached the end of the meadow, a joyful groan rose in his throat. Below his feet lay a little dark-blue lake and a fairly substantial town—more than two dozen houses with slate roofs, enclosures, dividing walls, roads, and straight, shimmering streaks that must have been some kind of giant hydraulic system for distributing water from the mountainside. Gerfaut was very thirsty. He stretched out slowly and heavily on his stomach to lick the grass and contemplate his good fortune.

A full minute passed before it occurred to Gerfaut that he was not yet home and dry. He calculated the distance between his position and the bottom of the valley. As the crow flies, one or two kilometers. On foot, perhaps five or even ten times that.

Horribly aggravated, Gerfaut rested for a moment or two. Then he became afraid of falling asleep and dying where he lay. He clambered to his feet with the aid of his makeshift crutch and set off again. In order to make the descent to civilization, he had to go back into the woods. At once he lost sight of the village. After a quarter of an hour of hesitant progress, he was hit by waves of anxiety that tightened his throat and his empty stomach at the thought that he might never find the houses or that it might require a week’s march to reach them.

Night fell—for the second time since Gerfaut had been thrown from the train. He felt his way forward in the darkness. He collided with tree after tree. He wept. After falling twice, he gave up. He was very tired. Sleep came instantly. The next morning, he was found by a Portuguese logger.