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 No aircraft would be flying in this weather, so there was no point in going back to the beach, where he no longer maintained a campsite.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 nature.
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.
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.
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, possible 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, occasionally 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.
He gathered together his dirty laundry and went to the stream. He had no soap, so the clothes would not get really clean, but on the positive side was the fact that washing them would not befoul the brook, for all the dirt on the garments had come from this quarter mile of wilderness.
When he had returned from that chore and spread the clothes to dry on the roof of the lean-to, he found that the water in the birch-bark vessel had, when not watched, reached the proper temperature and was simmering with conviction. So it was true that the miraculous sometimes happened in nature. Why the bark failed to burn was not his business. He got his minnows and put them to boil.
Probably he cooked the little fish too long: they were falling apart when he took them from the pan. But the fact was that they proved to be the most delicious food he had ever put into his mouth. Even most of the bones were edible. The trouble was that the supply proved woefully meager. He devoured the entire catch in hardly more time than it took to empty the steaming contents of the bark kettle onto a bed of clean leaves.
He put another potful of water on the fire and went to seine up more minnows. By the time the bark vessel boiled again and seconds had been caught, cooked, and eaten, much of another afternoon was gone.
It was a luxury now to sprawl next to the pond, with a full belly, in benevolent light and warmth, stout lean-to nearby, laundry drying on its roof, breeze stirring the rushes, sun shimmering on the water. It could be that he was less alien here than in society, were the truth known, and, thoroughly sober for the first time in years, he could reflect on what he had been with another and less limiting emotion than self-pity.
He felt so good that he had the courage to lean over and catch a glimpse of himself on the looking-glass surface of the pond. He was shocked. He knew he had not shaved or combed his hair (which in fact had needed a trim for some weeks before the trip), and though he had bathed his person, willy-nilly, by sporadic immersions, he had not often washed his face nor brushed his teeth, but he was not prepared to see the swarthy derelict who stared back at him. He could have looked at himself at any time since recovering the shaving mirror from the airplane, but he had not considered so doing. The mirror was a tool by which he sought to survive. To see his face in magnification had never been a pleasure.
At that moment—and suddenly, because the wind was blowing in the wrong direction—he heard a plane hardly sooner than he saw it fly overhead, at an altitude much lower than that of the one that had come the day after the crash.
He scrambled to his feet and waved. He shouted uselessly. He ran to fetch the mirror and signal with it. He ripped at the nearest greenery and threw it on the fire, which by now, the cooking long since completed, had been allowed to go to embers. Wisps came soon, but a good mass of smoke, enough to be visible from above, was excruciatingly slow to gather, and did not really do so until the craft, after a wide and momentarily promising circle, picked up speed and shot beyond the horizon of treetops. Had he stayed on the shore of the lake, he would have been much more visible, for it seemed likely that the larger body of water was what the plane had circled. Had the pilot seen the wreck through the transparent water? And now gone back to report as much?
Yet he had not himself been able, that morning, to locate the submerged aircraft by repeated dives to where it had last been visited. Had the searching plane really circled the lake or was he making his own self-serving interpretation of what had been another maneuver altogether? From the ground it was difficult to say with any authority what an airplane was doing thousands of feet in the sky above. The only clear truth was that he still had not devised a means of attracting those who might rescue him.
All his successes—with food and shelter—supported staying here, not leaving. He was agitated again and had to do something to relieve the tension. He began to collect poles with which to add sides to the lean-to.