BY THE TIME CREWS’S REVERIE CAME TO AN end, the entire supply of smoked trout was gone. Given the current context, his addiction was as bad as ever, with food replacing the alcohol of civilization. It was all he could do not to puke again. But he forced himself not to do so, and thus established at least some difference between what he had been and what he was.
Too much of another day had come and gone to undertake a project that would carry him very far from camp, but there should be sufficient time before darkness to trace the route of the continuation of the stream that the beavers had obstructed to create their pond.
With the stream to follow, he could not be lost when returning. But having no knowledge of how long the journey would be or what conditions he would meet en route, he put on his jacket and slipped into its pockets the magnifying mirror (though the sun would soon be beyond the proper angle to make fire, he allowed for the possibility that he would be away till next morning) and lengths of different kinds of fishing line, useful for many purposes, and made sure the multifunctional tool was secure in his pants pocket.
He put on a pair of socks and over them the new sandal-socks with soles of birch bark. This presumably short journey of exploration would serve also as a trial of the footgear, the potential of which, though he had tested it briefly, strolling alongside the pond, remained theoretical. His bare feet had become habituated to the forest floor by now, so long as the sharper sticks and pine cones were sidestepped, and the grassy shores of the pond had never been a problem. The sandals not only felt awkward; the more or less rigid soles were uncomfortable to walk on. Nor were they altogether flat despite the steaming and weighting.
But going downstream took less effort than climbing to where he had found the trout, and the terrain was gentler, grassier, with fewer stones. When he got within sight of the lake, the right bank of the stream had broadened into a meadow, where wildflowers bloomed, amid the general greens and tans, in patches of gold and red and vibrant purple. In its farthest reaches, perhaps a quarter mile from him, where the forest began again, a trio of deer continued to graze for a moment after he had come in sight, but soon, probably when his scent reached them on a fitful breeze—they were downwind—the animals had gone, without his seeing, at that distance, quite how or where.
On his left flank the ground had risen to an acute height: surely this was, on its other side, the headland he had seen from the shore on which he had first been stranded. Within another hundred yards of stream he had reached the greater water into which it flowed, which at first sight seemed so vast as to be oceanic. For a breathless instant he could see no land beyond it. Entranced, he had stared in but one direction. In another moment he decided he had been looking at the length of the lake, and not its breadth, for elsewhere the far shore was visible, in fact closer than it had been from his original camp on the beach. The lake must be long and relatively narrow. It would be within his power to swim across it at this point, less than half a mile by eye, but the unbroken forest over there offered no incentive. The urge to make a longitudinal exploration was, however, irresistible, though maybe unadvisable. He had by now been cold sober long enough to call false hopes worse than none. Furthermore, he could find food and had fabricated shelter and shoes. Prudence would have kept him where he was until rescue arrived, but it was only human to dream of more than that which merely kept body and soul in business.
To explore the lake would require a means of buoyant transport. He had the ability to build a raft, the materials for which were readily available and the design self-evident. Ready-cut logs were to be had from the beavers’ leavings in the devastated area near the pond, but not being of uniform length, they must be trimmed to size, then bound all together with reeds and rushes of sufficient tensile strength. A pole must be found or an oar made. The former would serve if he hugged the shore, staying in shallow depths, but given the idiosyncrasies of bodies of water, such a route could be overlong. A crow’s-flight voyage, straight up the lake, would get farthest most quickly, but would probably be over a deeper bottom than a manageable pole could reach. But making a paddle or oar would surely be a lengthy and fatiguing job with the undersized blade of the all-purpose tool and the crude chopping stones.
Before beginning any work, however, he would do well to explore the middle distance by foot: that is, the meadow, which would be easy going, and even pleasant, to traverse. At its farthest lakeside extremity, the grass gave way to a barren point from which it might be possible to see more of the reaches of the water than from where he stood at present.
He removed the sock-shoes and the extra socks inside them and proceeded on bare feet. The footgear had not passed its test. The longer he walked, the more the bark remembered its cylindrical origins and tried, curling on either margin, to return to that form. In some places the soles had gone brittle as well and cracked, not to mention the peeling caused by the abrasive contact with the ground. He had done better as architect-builder and fisherman than as cobbler.
With unprotected feet, the field was not as comfortable as the carpet of vegetation had suggested when seen from afar. What had looked to be soft grass proved rather tough weeds, some of which were edged or spiked and few of which were yielding, and the flowers were fewer and farther between than when arranged by eye from a remote perspective. Those he did get near he gave wide berth to, for they were thronged with stout-backed black-and-yellow bees, humming like motors. He had no taste for walking shoeless on overgrown terrain where you might not see a snake before stepping on it. He was halfway through his hike, too far to make it practicable to go back and cut a walking stick, something between a cane and a cudgel, when he realized that was what he needed.
But the sun, though low in the sky, was brighter here in the open than when conditioned by the cliff and trees, and encouraged in him a sense of expanse and possibility. The lake was gleamingly calm, with the authoritative serenity available only to bodies of water, for nothing else is so experienced in turbulence. Only endless trees occupied its visible far shore, but who could say what might be offered when he reached the point and could see farther?
Yet it would be foolish to expect too much—in fact, anything but more forest and water, extending, without a human implication, to infinity…. In which case he could always go back home, thatch his roof watertight, catch and cook more trout, and design better footgear, continuing to survive, not without some satisfactions, until rescued.
Weeds eventually did give way to a thick-leaved version of grass as Crews approached the point, and then the vegetation was replaced not by sand but by solid rock. The stony promontory was higher above the lake than it had looked in the delusion of distance, and jutted above the true shoreline at this point, a beach ten or twelve feet below, too far to jump with impunity. But he needed to get down there, for from the rock he could see no farther than the cove or bay that began just beyond and curved within banks as high as where he stood, so that there was no hope of seeing uplake without descending to the strand and hiking around to still another point.
He found a sloping place of descent, but before using it scanned the available horizon once more and learned nothing new except that evening was coming more quickly than he had estimated. He had to get home before dark. All of this would be there the following day, and he had all the time in the world.
But in fact next day he was delayed by the old need for food. He wondered how long it had been before primitive man became a gardener and a shepherd. Fishing was an uncertain enterprise. Using the same tackle, lures, and technique as in his successful ventures, he suddenly had been unable to get a bite, and not only at the point in the stream where he had previously done so well, but also at every other place he tried. But now that, for two days, he had got used to eating once again, it was much harder to go hungry than it had been when starving seemed natural for a man in his situation. He hacked a living branch off a tree, trimmed it bare, and sharpened the slenderer end into a point, but when he hefted the finished spear, he had little faith in it, and after he hurled it at various arbitrary targets, all stationary, none animate, he had even less.
He stuck the sharp end of the spear into the ground and bent the shaft into the shape of a bow. The resilient length, cut from a living tree, did not break and, when released, powerfully sprang back to its natural form. He dulled the point, circumscribed each end with a notch, and stretched in place a bowstring made of fishing line. He made arrows of various sizes from the smaller branches of various trees. It was gratifying to put the first of these against the bowstring, pull back, and let go. But when, after at least fifty tries, the projectile failed to get anywhere near the target, a curling square of birch bark that had lately been a sandal sole, he was disheartened. He could hit the mark only when almost on top of it, and not always even then. He came to believe that his energy might be better employed in developing a technique for close stalking than working endlessly on the refinement of his aim.
As if to tantalize him while he was engaged in this frustrating effort, a pair of ducks—mallards, the only kind he could identify—appeared on the pond. The idea of roast duck was too unbearable to entertain in his current state of impotence: any attempt at a shot with one of his wretched missiles would only drive them away, perhaps permanently. In a moment any movement on his part would have done so, for the birds had paddled near enough to where he sat on the bank, whittling a keener point on an arrow, to come within the ten-foot range he had set as the limit of reasonable effort—only to put even that in doubt with prolonged practice.
He tried to resist the foolish hope that one or the other would helpfully waddle out of the water to thrust its neck into his clenched fingers. He had yet to kill any living creature but the fish, and they did not quite count in the squeamish sophistry concerning what could decently be slaughtered for food. Not even Ardis, whose favorite meal was roast duck and who was capable of passion with regard to its preparation, liked to think that a living creature had been violently deprived of life (the only way death comes to the healthy). But whenever their disagreements extended to the table, Crews had been happy to remind her of that truth. (Know how geese are stuffed to produce morbid livers? What happened to the pig en route to becoming porc au pruneaux, the duck prefatory to its being eviscerated, plucked, roasted, and squeezed in the silver press?)
The mallards began to wrestle, duck-fashion. The drake, with much flapping of wings, leaped onto the hen’s dun back, forcing her under the surface of the pond. Hey, was that fair? The male was no larger in size, but his iridescent blue-green head and aggressive manner made him seem the bully, especially insofar as the female accepted the brutalization, her head going submissively under the water as her back accepted his weight. It took him a while to recognize that the ducks were not fighting but copulating. He was a fool to sit there and starve when they were within range of his bow and in a vulnerable state.
Man lives only by killing something regularly, be it a plant. He would probably miss both ducks, given his equipment and technique. If he hit the more conspicuous, the hen would only be a widow but he would have a much-needed meal, the first since the day before, and he was a unique human being, whereas a mallard was just a bird, easily replicated: in fact, that was what they were doing as he watched, reproducing their own kind, something he had managed to avoid throughout three successive marriages.
But by the time he had surreptitiously begun to fit an arrow to the string, keeping the bow flat against the ground till he was ready to raise it, the ducks had finished their coupling, the drake being no Crews, who in his heyday, even with all that drinking, could withhold his climax until his partner had more than one: his sole talent as husband, which when gone left him resourceless. As the mallards had not cuddled before, they did not do so after the encounter, but paddled about separately, the hen modest as ever, the male with what might be seen, anthropomorphically, as a new smugness, handsome sleek head at an arrogant angle, yellow beak cocked—but in a moment this attitude proved rather preparation for a new encounter than gloating on a past triumph.
Another male mallard had come out of the air to set down on the water, halfway across the pond. It was he for whom the first drake now headed, unknowingly saving himself from being a target for an arrow, which might not have struck its mark but was finally ready to be launched from the raised bow.
Just as Crews had not immediately recognized that the grappling between the male and the female was sexual, he was now slow to see that the two drakes were about the meet in combat. He was also distracted by the moral dilemma of which bird to shoot at first. The hen was an obvious target, being much nearer him and at the moment static in the water. But though ravenous he still had scruples with respect to the sex that produces offspring. In this case she could be presumed pregnant. In another moment, her mate, swimming rapidly toward the newcomer, was out of the effective range of Crews’s poor weapon even if accurately launched. Regretfully, he sighted on the hen and pulled the bowstring back….
The first drake leaped onto the back of the other, much as when servicing the hen, but this victim was not so serviceable. It struggled, fluttered, and writhed, but its head was restrained by the attacker’s beak, clamped into its blue-green throat, and then forced under the surface and kept there by the upper bird, kicking furiously with spatulate orange feet, to increase the downward pressure.
Crews was arrested by the spectacle, he who had himself been in so many fights but none of them over a female—at least never on his part, though it was possible that some of his opponents had been avenging an insult to wife or girlfriend. With him what had always been at stake was “honor,” not the genuine article, which of course could hardly be defended dishonorably. Wild animals were innocent of such abstractions. One drake attacked another for a motive at once deeper in the blood while more superficial in mind, if indeed ducks had minds. They ate whenever they could find food and mated only when their hormones told them to, and drove off rivals, probably in some instinctive obedience to a law of natural selection. He did not believe the loser in this conflict would die. Was it not a fact that only human beings and rats killed their own kind? No, that was applicable only to war, between armies.
The fact here was that the underduck was killed by the upper after a very short battle, in which all the savagery was exclusive to him who had lately mated, and who, having discharged another of the functions assigned him by the inscrutable God that made and maintained him, swam robustly back to the vicinity of the hen, emitting quacks that were voluble but not loud, but whether or not in triumph Crews could not judge. The longer he tried to cope with nature the more he necessarily learned, but the less he understood in human terms, which might even be an encumbrance.
In any event, he received a windfall. The dead mallard’s body was floating in the middle of the pond. Crews had gotten his dinner without firing the arrow, which would probably have missed. He dropped the bow and raised himself from his long-held crouch. At this threat the living ducks lunged into the air and desperately winged away. Having so often endured wet clothing since coming to the wilderness, he went to the lean-to and stripped to his drawers, hanging the garments nicely on one of the projecting roof members. When he returned to the pond, a large black crow, in mortician’s swallowtail, was riding the body of the floating dead duck, dissecting its belly with a beak that served first as scalpel, then as hinged utensil with which to pull out and gobble up spaghetti strings of wet red guts.
“The hell you do!” Crews shouted in fury, his voice in this use sounding even to himself like a deafening feral roar, and plunged into the water. At this moment he would have charged an eagle. The noise alone routed the crow, which did not wait for the arrival of the naked ape but lifted itself effortlessly to a branch of the nearest tree on the far side of the pond, from which it complained raucously at the theft of its meal—impotently, for Crews, bigger and stronger and smarter, and therefore more deserving, claimed the now gory prize and swam back with it.
He started a fire, burned off such feathers as he could and skinned the duck where he could not, spitted the blackened and somewhat mangled bird on a green stick, and roasted it over flames that leaped and flared when fed by the abundant dripping fat. The result was partially charred and elsewhere raw, like most of his open-fire cookery thus far, but generally glorious, and he ate everything but the bones and cartilage, which he flung to the crow, who had stayed around all this while, cawing sometimes and often changing perches, finally coming to a tree on Crews’s side of the water, from which it peered down at him, anxiously shifting its claws.
Michelle on occasion brought home frozen dinners from the menu served in first class. There were some passengers who ate nothing even on overseas flights, as Crews himself could testify, being of their company, and nobody seemed to care what disposition was made of the surplus meals. The wines, however, were policed, being of quite a higher order than the food, despite the grand claims made for the latter, supposedly the creation of the celebrity chef whose face was exploited in the ads. The duck, for example, seemed to have been basted with an ammonia-flavored marmalade. It was garnished with potato puffs too often taken from heat to cold and back again, slimy infant green beans, and inedible “roses” coiled from tomato peelings.
But never that concerned with food, they had fun anyway. Michelle was Crews’s favorite among his wives, and not just for her remarkable body, which never showed a hint of her remarkable abuse of it. One of his great pleasures was simply to lie in bed and watch her wander around the apartment in the nude, often aimlessly, seldom with any immediate awareness of her state. This was true even at those rare times when she had lately smoked or sniffed something. She was also the most generous human being he had ever known. At first he had, in admitted bias, associated this attribute with stupidity, but Michelle did not lack in intelligence: it was rather a matter of attention. Hers was often elsewhere than where the moment would seem to demand. But where? Sometimes brooding on the question made him furious, but as much with himself as with her, and one thing that could not be done with Michelle was to quarrel. She began by granting the validity of all differences of opinion and was by nature incapable of an Ardis-style of opposition. If you want to believe that, go ahead. It was simply never the sort of thing she took seriously. What then was worthwhile? Holidays, public and private, some made up on the spot, such as the first day of sun in an otherwise wet week. She needed no champagne to make the occasion effervescent. Gifts, for which she had a genius. The expensive ones, of precious metals or rare skins, were inconspicuous; but the cheap ones, the jokes, were loud and gaudy: blow-up dolls, goofy paper animal masks, carnival hats from far-flung places. And sometimes she brought back a one-of-a-kind present that enchanted Crews, e.g., the belt from Istanbul which when you pulled the buckle from the leather sheath revealed the flexible blade of a steel so thin and elastic that it became a sword when not encircling a waistline. Judging from what, later on when he was in need, he got for it from an antiques dealer as notoriously mean when buying as greedy when selling, she must have spent several months’ salary on this alone, and with what went for drugs, Michelle could rightly never spare a dime.
Crews, who always stuck to alcohol with the to him compelling argument that it was properly a food, of which he might be temporarily a glutton but from which he could at any time return to moderation, was drunkenly late in recognizing that she had a problem, but even when he did so he believed her addiction, by exceeding, excused his own.
The crow had carried quite a large hunk of duck carcass to a high branch, where, one foot clamped on its meal, it plucked and devoured such minuscule morsels of meat as were left. It continued from time to time to caw, though perhaps in satisfaction now. Most nonhuman animals had but a narrow range of voice in which to make their barbaric yawps. Crews could call himself only semiarticulate when it came to women: another way in which he was no chip off the old block. His father had been overweight and bald, yet could with a few words seemingly enchant any female in whose presence his son had ever observed him, despite losing no time in betraying any to whom he became close and letting them know: that was essential to his satisfaction.
Crews had begun to notice that his reminiscences, which necessarily tended toward the lamentable, invariably came to mind only at those times when his current existence became more rewarding—if gnawing the half-burned, half-raw corpse of a wild duck could be so called, but of course it could, according to the law of prevailing conditions, a clause in the general rule of survival, which made standard the practice of eating that which did not eat you. So long as you kept living, you were damned right to feel satisfaction. Crews cawed back at the crow, who was sufficiently startled to stop pecking bones and to gawk.
He got back to work, the moral value of which he could at last appreciate, for nothing else so keeps one from fleeing the moment at hand, the only one that can ever be used. The sandals had not been successful, but the theory thereof had by no means been repudiated. Better materials must be found. And now that the possibility that the farther reaches of the lake might be explored with profit had suggested the construction of a raft, he had a lot to do.
But heavy rain all the next day not only postponed work on the raft but also reminded him, huddling therein, that the lean-to left much to be desired as shelter from wind-driven water, which came in from any of the three open sides it willfully chose, and even through the spaces between the logs of the roof-wall. A reliable raft would take a while to build, and meanwhile there was always the matter of food. He would need his house for some time; it should be improved.
The next day was dry. He gathered enough of the smaller fallen trees, the beavers’ leftovers, to form the other half of the roof, making the former lean-to into a tent-shaped hut, or a pup tent constructed of wood, for it was only three and a half feet high at the ridgepole and had to be entered on hands and knees. He closed in one of its ends, and for the other lashed together a panel that, when hung on hinges made from the thick, rubber-insulated wire from his otherwise useless electric razor, formed a door. The many interstices of the door would admit some rain and much wind, but had a function as peepholes from which to take the lie of the land before emerging.
He plastered all the chinks in the other three surfaces of his home with clay from the invaluable deposit near the pond, doing this while the logs were still damp from the rains, so that when the clay dried it would not shrink too much as the wood thirstily absorbed its moisture. Memories that had practical value to him were now returning from childhood, when, as an only child at the country house, he was wont to frequent the workingmen who came to do repairs, such as the stone-mason who assured him it was advisable to wet well all materials that came in contact with fresh concrete.
What with the hut and a fishing expedition so successful that he prolonged it, bringing back enough trout to sustain him for a while, several days passed before Crews could deal with the matter of the raft. When he did get to it, the problem was soon evident. A platform sufficiently substantial to remain buoyant under his weight would be too wide to be floated down the narrow stream. But if the assembled product would likely be too large for the stream, you could send the logs down, one or more at a time, and when enough had been transferred, build the raft on the very shore of the lake, or even in the shallow water, where the heaviness of the members would not be a hindrance.
He set to work, rolling to the brook such ready-cut logs as remained and then sending them afloat downstream. He accompanied every consignment, a job that took hours, for the lake was at least half a mile from the pond, and despite his shepherding, the logs tended at places to get turned crosswise and hang up on projecting rocks or roots along the narrow waterway, and then for the earliest trips he had to plow a path for himself through virgin terrain, trampling down some vegetation but being forced to evade that too dense or bristling with thorns.
Before reaching the lake, the stream degenerated into a swampy delta, in which the water was shallow and clogged with a profusion of aquatic grasses. This was where Crews collected his logs. When they had all been moved down the brook, he lashed them together, using fishline and twisted reeds and braids of long marsh grasses, a labor which took several days and was now and again interrupted by the need to find food. He was too busy to undertake the lengthy journey to the good trout-catching place. The lake was right at hand and must be teeming with fish. He had had no luck when he first wet a line there, but that was many days before and at a different spot, predating his becoming a homebuilder and naval architect. He now set about the matter in a new way. He cut the feathers, hair, etc., off one of the artificial flies with the largest hooks. He went to drier land and dug here and there with sticks until he had accumulated a mess of earthworms. He cut and trimmed smooth a thin young sapling. With this pole, a length of fishline, and a hook on which a worm was impaled, he made a rig that began to repay his effort as soon as he waded into waist-deep water and dangled the bait eight feet beyond. Almost immediately he felt, through line and pole, the gentle nibbling of something live beneath the surface. He yanked out a fish a bit smaller than the average trout and not as smartly colored, being white with a faint yellowish cast, but presumably as edible. He caught another as soon as the hook was rebaited. Apparently he had encountered a pack or school reminiscent of the minnows, though he doubted whether another makeshift seine would work with fish this large. Yet surely some better method could be found than the inefficient one-at-a-time. He collected more worms and made three more poles. While he was at it, he improved the rigs, tying on a pebble to weight each hook and finding a piece of dead porous wood that furnished buoyant bobbers. Thus he could plant the poles erect in the shallows and work on the raft while fish caught themselves, signaling as much through the dance of the porous chunks floating on the surface above them.
He caught fish on all poles, some of them new breeds to him, rounder in form, some all silvery, others with blue-tinged scales. All were delicious when spitted over a fire of hot coals. He had begun, as an anticonstipation measure, to try a more varied diet, eating small test samples of such marsh plants as looked harmless. The grasses that seemed safest were usually uninteresting on the palate, but in one place, at the land edge of the marsh, he found a low bed of what would seem from its spiciness to be a form of watercress, though it was of a slightly different shape from the familiar and therefore sufficiently suspect, to a man in his situation, to be tasted in very small amounts until proved nontoxic.
He abandoned the idea of making a paddle—any kind he could imagine would require more craftsmanship than he yet had at his disposal—and furnished himself with a long, sturdy pole, which would serve on the shore-hugging route he had decided to take. For all his care, the raft could be no better than the quality of the lashings that held it together, and they would not really be tested until the voyage began: it would make sense to avoid deep water.
As to what to take with him on the expedition, he had to weigh alternatives. Some possessions, such as the fire-making mirror and the all-purpose tool, should go wherever he went, along with coils of fishing line and a selection of flies and hooks from which he had stripped the decorations, but nothing that could not fit in the pockets of his seersucker jacket, a garment now much the worse for wear and too dirty ever to get clean without soap, so he had not tried to wash it. The extra clothing would not be needed and might if carried only wash overboard. If he found nothing but more forest at the other end of the lake, he could return to a comfortable home and a little collection of useful equipment. If on the other hand he encountered any form of civilization, his miserable hovel and lode of wretched goods would instantly become trash that had served its purpose.
He began the voyage and almost immediately was beset by a problem that had not arisen in the several short trial runs of the completed raft, probably because the purpose of those was only to ascertain whether the structure would carry his weight and whether the crude lashings would maintain their integrity. No attention had been given to the matter of steering a roughly rectangular collection of logs joined together by primitive fastenings that might loosen at any moment. If he put his back into pushing on the pole—and a great deal of effort was needed to move the sluggish thing at all—he was likely to run the raft aground near the shore, and so dangerously send a shock throughout its parts, with another to come on the relaunching. But too gentle a push was useless. Nor did he dare go out into deeper water.
He had peeled the bark off the pole, to make it less abrasive to handle, but his palms quickly developed areas of sore discoloration, visible despite the dirt. These were en route to becoming blisters. Another unanticipated problem. Had he known, he could have made pads.
Favoring his more tender left hand, his next push was disproportionate. Reluctant to start from a dead stop, the raft once in motion was as slow to halt, especially when an opportunity to ground itself was offered. Its starboard bow went against the sandy bottom near shore. Having no success with the pole, he stepped off into the mid-calf water, waded to the recalcitrant corner log, and agitated it. The lashing thereby came undone. It had to be rewrapped and retied, with sore hands. This was more comfortably done when sitting. He towed the raft to a place below a high rock, where some large flat stones, perhaps fragments fallen from the granite outcropping, projected from the water. Seated on the outermost, he could keep the raft afloat as he worked.
When he had finished the job, Crews propped the newly refastened corner of the raft on the stone that had been his seat, waded to land, and climbed up a kind of natural stairs at the side of the rock and continued on to the edge of the field behind, which was the one where the wildflowers grew. He was looking for something with which to pad the pole, but a quick survey of the area, with its wiry grasses, failed to furnish what he required. He got a better idea, and started back down the three or four natural steps to the beach, not part of the rock but eroded naturally in the slope alongside and sometimes sustained by tufts of grass. One was really a little ledge, sufficiently wide and deep for the planting of both feet, though on the ascent he had used only one, without examination. Coming down now, he found it natural to look more carefully.
In the loose dust, added to which were the grains of sand he had brought up from the beach on damp soles, was the fresh print of his bare left foot. Farther over, almost at the edge of the shelf, was the print of someone else’s right shoe, slightly blurred or smudged, but not so much as to obscure the elaborate pattern of a man-made sole, a complex of waves and wafflings and graph marks. This print was significantly smaller than his own.
His first emotion, which only a moment later seemed nonsensical, was fright. He fearfully examined the landscape, including even that on the far side of the lake. He went back to the top of the bluff and scanned the meadow, and then descended to search the beach. He found neither another foot-print nor any other evidence humankind had ever visited the area. He went again and again to the pattern left on the surface of the little ledge. It could not be mistaken for an accidental arrangement of dust made by some natural force or the track of any nonhuman creature however fancy its paws or claws.
But why had he been afraid? Perhaps because he had been taken unaware, and he had now been in the wilderness long enough to believe by instinct, not reason, that any surprise was more likely to be bad news than good. He must become a person again, at least insofar as he dealt with the fact that somebody, not something, had left the impression of a shoe. Someone who wore a much smaller size than his had been when he wore shoes. Perhaps a smaller man, or anyway one with smaller feet, or a woman, or a child.
The truth was, he could read almost nothing from the spoor, including any sense at all of when it might have been made. He had visited the rock a week or so earlier. Had the print been there then? Was the smudging due to wind and rain, or had other feet, human or animal, trod on the footprint without leaving a trace of another? It was a fact from which he could make nothing, but it was impossible to disregard. Where did X go on reaching the ground above? Most of the terrain was heavily overgrown. A path through the grasses and wildflowers, such as his own from the earlier visit, would have been invisible only a few hours after it was made. Beyond the meadow on all three sides was thick forest.
He had to get on with his business, which was to explore the lake. Pushing the raft ahead of him, he waded away from shore until the water was deep enough to sustain it with weight on board and then climbed on. For some reason, the poling went better than it had gone earlier. He gradually learned how better to direct the awkward craft, and to get more forward progress by using less force: it was a matter of subtlety in the placement of the pole and the adjustment of balances. His hands seemed not as sore as earlier on, now that he did not fight that with which he worked, and he still had not moved to implement the idea that had come to him at the field: to fashion some sort of sail.
He was poling along a shoreline that at the moment was so consistently linear that it could have been drawn against a great ruler, with as regular a strip of beach, backed by uniform pines so dense as seemingly to be inanimate. The one touch of humanity offered by the footprint revived in him an irony that had presumably been drowned with the submerged airplane: was it that of a child on a family outing? Scrambled up there for fun, then hopped back down, jumped in the speed-boat, and they all roaringly returned to their comfortable vacation home, equipped with microwave oven, fax machine, and TV set on which the news broadcasts had long since reported the loss of a private airplane carrying tycoon Richard Spurgeon, two business associates, and a worthless drunk nobody missed.
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.
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.