7

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

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

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

The legal services ended once his father was dead: the firm was one of the places from which he was permanently barred. Not only had his father never punished him; he had never even been criticized by the man. They had not known each other that well.

All this self-pity came from the theft of the raft. He hated his enemy for causing him to remember his own failings, which he had begun to forget in his struggle to live off the land.

Lateral visibility was good, but after a bright dawn the sky had gradually become overcast. Unable to see the sun, he could not have said how long he had been walking. With the usual unvarying topography of beach and forest, he had little by which to mark the gaining of ground until he saw coming into view on the opposite side of the lake a sheer cliff similar to the one he had climbed the day before (and in so doing given somebody an opportunity to steal his raft). The shoreline before it was very like the other as well, and the entire section of terrain, if it had been directly across from the first, might have been taken as a reflection of it, perhaps a mirage, due to some peculiar condition of atmosphere. That is, if the eye was playing tricks. Actually, there were any number of differences: the cliff behind the far shore was not so high as the one he had scaled, and the grove of trees at its base was denser than that in which he had killed and eaten the rabbit and spent the night. Of the nearby stream he could see nothing but its mouth, which emptied into the lake.

The fact undoubtedly was that granite cliffs pretty much all looked like one another, with trees along their bases and probably streams as well.

But to see something that reminded him of the raft was unpleasant. He decided to keep going until it was out of sight before halting to look for food, and also attend to a related matter: namely, to pierce another hole in the belt which throughout this time in the wild he had repeatedly tightened lest his pants fall down, and he had begun as a slender man, with a normal waist appropriate to one-sixty on a five-eleven frame. He must be down fifteen or twenty pounds after so much physical labor on a diet much less hearty than that imposed sporadically on herself by Molly, who was capable of regimens of chemical liquid on which she lost a fourth of her flesh, only to gain back more with a return to solid food, as he never tired of pointing out. Pitifully, it had been his only weapon against her. Molly was an exemplary self-made woman, with her own interior-design business, and at the outset she had made the grievous mistake of loving him. At the end he assured her the fault had been hers: she should have known better than to have trafficked with the likes of him. What could she have expected? And she was supposed to be the smart one! If you ever sobered up, she told him, you would understand that all your cynicism is fake. Molly was the one he felt guiltiest about, because though by any standard she was the most admirable of his wives, she was also the one who had attracted him least.

In the absence of the sun he could not make fire and thus could not cook anything he killed. There was no good reason to stop unless he could eat. While walking he was able to make the new hole in his belt if he held the belt end and the waist of his pants with his left hand.

When he had closed the all-purpose tool and returned it to his pocket, resuming a normal stride, he glanced across the lake and saw, against the far shore, what was presumably his raft, or anyway a sizable fragment of it. He had pulled it up for repairs just before it was stolen. Apparently it had since partially disintegrated under the strain of further use and been abandoned by the thief, near what seemed to be the mouth of a stream that came down from the forest behind. Farther along, the shoreline rose to a headland.

The thief had apparently not stayed in the neighborhood. In any event, Crews was too prudent to expend his energy on a swim of that distance. He continued to walk doggedly on. The overcast had begun to be breached by the sun, which seemed to be in the wrong place in the sky, that is, in his face rather than at the back of his head, but without a compass directions would always be imprecise, and natural things were never regular. The lake might well not be the oval he assumed it was; its shore was probably not as straight as it had seemed when walked. It might slant gradually, to a degree that could not be determined on the ground.

When the sun next appeared, it was on his right side. This made so little sense that it was simply not worth bothering about, and the clouds quickly closed in again, for all practical purposes removing the problem.

He did permit himself to reflect that, aside from the area of the cliff, he had seen no striking landmarks on the far shore. When the sun next returned, it came at last from the proper direction, behind him, proving he was right not to have worried about its previous shenanigans. But his failure as yet to reach the lake’s end had begun to discourage him. How long could it be?

That he had in fact encircled the body of water entirely did not occur to him even as suspicion until he had unknowingly passed the beach where he first landed—offshore of which the airplane, with his companions’ remains, presumably still rested somewhere on the bottom—skirted the base of the promontory beyond, and come to the mouth of the stream that flowed down from the beaver dam and the attendant marshland, which looked sufficiently similar to the place where he had built the raft for him to pause and consider the matter and then find fragments of fishline and chips of log.

So when after hours of hiking he had seen the familiar-looking cliff that morning, he was looking at the very same he had climbed the day before, and when later on he spotted the broken raft across the lake, it had been he who was on the far shore!

He was back where he had begun, having lost several days of arduous labor and several more of travel, but he had accomplished, willy-nilly, what he had set out to do, namely, explore the length and breadth of the lake. It had proved rather smaller than he expected, and though at any point there might have been, only a mile or so beyond the facade of pines, a village or ranger’s station or even a couple of campers under a tent, he had seen along his shore route no suggestion of a trail leading to such or any other evidence of man save the figure atop the cliff and, earlier on, the gunshots.

There was now no reason to retrieve the busted raft. He had nowhere to float on it. He headed upstream. There was no place like home.

He approached the pond so quietly that he saw a beaver on the bank before it saw him and leaped into the water, slapped its tail loudly, and disappeared under the surface. The exterior of his shelter showed no evidence of molestation, but inside, the duffel bag containing his extra clothing had been roughly torn open and the contents pulled out and left so, though they were undamaged. Nothing had been bitten or chewed, but the box of fishing tackle was gone, as was the leather rod case. It was not possible to believe this the work of the bear.

He had been careless in assuming the man who stole the raft had gone in another direction. While in some ways this wilderness could be seen as vast and undifferentiated, it was marked with obvious routes that any animal, including the human, would take by nature. These followed the banks of bodies or courses of water and skirted the bases of high points. Few living things, except in an emergency, would try to penetrate thick growths in preference to open ground. His enemy had arrived here by a combination of instinct and chance.

With the ransacking of the hut, added to the theft and wrecking of the raft, Crews knew the feeling of outraged helplessness peculiar to the victim of crime by stealth. That such an offense could take place in the wild, where he and this man should make common cause and not prey on each other, was inexcusable. He could think only of tracking the guy down and punishing him. He would choose the optimum time and place to jump him from ambush. He would not only reclaim his own possessions, but by right of conquest appropriate any of the man’s goods he wished, foremost among them the gun. With a firearm he would not be lost for much longer. He would have a means of making his presence known to searchers on land or in the sky. Meanwhile he could kill all the food he needed, and more humanely than with club and knife.

It took a moment for him to arrive at what should have taken precedence: there was no reason to believe that his enemy was lost. Once he had taken away the gun, he could force the man to lead him out of the woods. The problem now was to find him.

The ground near the hut was clear but not soft, and such faint footprints as had presumably been left by the other were obscured by his own, which, made by bare feet, were distinct and distracting.

It was too late in the day to cast the search in wider circles. Further tracking should be left for the clear light of morning. Crews returned the clothes to the duffel bag and put it in place as pillow on a bed of freshly gathered pine boughs. Inside the hut he felt snug for the first time since setting out on the raft, though he was aware that the sense of security he took from being there was mostly an illusion. He went to sleep asking himself why the other man was here at all, and why he had twice stolen his property while taking great pains to avoid personal contact. Why had he been roaming the forest and lake for at least two days, on more or less the same route as Crews, if he knew how to get out?

Next morning a steady rain was falling, which ordinarily would have been regrettable, for he had never been successful when trying to fish in bad weather and he could not have built a fire. He had been careless in the chinking of his roof, and some water had found him inside. Yet he surely would have stayed indoors had he not had the new mission, to find the man who had done him dirty, and for that purpose the rain was a godsend. Tracks could easily be seen on wet ground … unless the other had found shelter in which to wait for clearer skies. But pessimistic reflections, while palliative amid the ironies of cities, could be deleterious here, where failure was the rule.

The choice of directions in which to go would have seemed infinite only to the tenderfoot. As a woodsman now of some experience, Crews could assume that the other would not plow through the bristly underbrush or dense forest when clearer ways were at hand. The obvious one was along the stream that fed the pond. Its bank on the near side was invitingly passable, by contrast with the other nearby ground.

Crews went upstream, proceeding cautiously so as not to alert his enemy. The rain helped him, dampening the sounds of his footfalls and, in its bursts of sudden energy, making noise to mask his. What he looked for were not yesterday’s tracks, which would be washed away, but any made since.

He reached the part of the upper stream where he had caught the trout. He had seen nothing useful en route, and now the rain had picked up in volume and force of fall. Nobody would come out of cover until the cloudburst ended. Though he was by now as wet as if he had been swimming fully clothed, the pelting of water had become so oppressive that he looked for a place of refuge of his own. After having been interrupted by one of the minor stone cliffs characteristic of the region, the forest began again upstream. He headed there, the driving rain blurring his vision sporadically.

At the base of the cliff was a bush that looked out of place. Crews noticed this though his vision was distorted. No other vegetation grew nearby. Despite the rain, the foliage of the bush was wilting. Had it been altogether dead, it might have broken away from its lifeless roots and blown here. But this one, in this situation, was a contrivance.

He approached it warily and from the side, hugging the cliff, until he got close enough to see that the purpose of the bush was to conceal a fissure in the rock face. In better weather, that the makeshift door was in place at the mouth of the cave would not necessarily have indicated that anyone was inside, but in such rain as this the occupant was certain to be at home. With a gun. In the dark, with a would-be intruder silhouetted against the light.

Espaliered against the granite, still being pounded with rain, Crews decided he had no choice but to wait for nighttime, if the man did not emerge before. He could anticipate a miserable vigil, being redundantly soaked, going without food even longer, and suffering from some doubts as to his ability to deal with an armed man when he did flush him out, or even, in the most grandiose projection of all, when crawling into the cave after dark to take him while he slept. But there was no reason to wait against the cliff so long as the rain did not abate. A less uncomfortable place of surveillance was available in the woods farther on. He could move closer when the weather improved. He must be in position to exploit his only weapon, surprise.

When night came it was uncompromisingly dark. From his place within the trees Crews could not see the bush that obscured the mouth of the cave, but its foliage was not so thick as to block all light from within, had there been any. He saw nothing, no flickers or radiance of fire, flashlight, candle. Which meant either that the occupant had no means of illumination or that nobody was inside the cave.

He now had to decide whether to wait for morning, and thus lose the advantage of darkness, or, himself without any kind of light, to go crawling, probing, confined within stone walls with an armed adversary.

But the rain continued to fall, and not much of a shelter could be constructed in the dark. What a fool he would be if he stayed out in the wet while the cave was unoccupied. Not only was it uncomfortable to crouch in falling water; it was morally degrading.

He went across the open ground and found the bush easily enough, by touch. The rainfall was even heavier against the base of the cliff. Despite the thickness of the now overgrown hair on his scalp, he felt as though he were being incessantly battered. He hurled the bush aside. He felt for the contours of the fissure in the wall of rock. The aperture felt too narrow to admit a human body. There might not even be much of a cavity beyond, but just a shallow crack, leading nowhere.

But even as he had these defeatist thoughts, he knelt and felt farther. The opening widened toward the bottom. He could slide in on his back, feet forward, if he did not raise his head more than a few inches from the horizontal. Added to the disadvantage of not being able to see anything in the darkness outside and in, he would be helplessly supine. Nor did he know how thick were the walls of the entryway, or indeed whether it was an entrance as such and not simply a shaft that would never broaden throughout its length. Caves were another of the things of which Crews had had no experience, nor was he likely, under normal circumstances, to have sought any, being a selective claustrophobe, liking tight bedclothes and snug-seated high-performance cars, but having a distaste for most other constraints. But after he had slid for no more than half his body length he could no longer touch the sides of the tunnel. He was in fact inside a cave of unknown capacity, but sufficiently spacious to allow him first to sit up, then rise to his knees, and finally to stand and extend his arms overhead without finding a ceiling.

An instant of apprehension returned him to his knees. He turned and crawled against a solid wall. He had lost the entranceway! He frantically beat his hands on the cold stone and might have surrendered to panic had he not quickly imposed order by remembering the several ordeals he had survived by now: the plane crash, the storm, the bear. Then he found the inside aperture of the cave’s mouth. It would be easy enough to lose again in the darkness unless he devised a means by which to keep its location fixed while his own was mobile. Working by touch in the darkness, he tied the end of one of his coils of fishline to the all-purpose tool and tossed the latter toward the outside air: presumably its weight would keep it in place while he payed out the coil.

He began to crawl again, following the right-hand wall now, so as to have another reference to his position in space, the darkness being much more disorienting than he had imagined. The surface beneath his knees was not the level floor of tourist caverns but rockily uneven, with sharp points and punishing edges. He stood up again, but this time rose only to some five feet before pressing his head against the ceiling, and as he slowly, gropingly proceeded, the height of the cave gradually diminished, bending him until his back was horizontal with the floor, which felt ever rougher underfoot.

He had reached the end of the fishline without reaching that of the cave, but after his experience in circling the lake, he allowed for the possibility that he had been following a curved rather than a straight wall. What was more important was his failure to encounter evidence that any person was or had been within, and surely by now he had produced enough noise to evoke a reaction from a man with a gun.

He traced the line back to the mouth of the cave, where he could not see the outside world but could hear the rush of the rain still falling there. At least he had found shelter. He scraped away the loose stones from an area large enough to lie on and curled up against the wall, near the entrance tunnel but not blocking it, lest a bear, out for a nighttime forage, came home. The cold, unyielding floor was an uncomfortable alternative to the luxury of his usual bed of boughs, but he soon found the most comfortable contortion of body, and after retrieving the tool and opening the knife blade, he placed it where he could find it in the dark and went to sleep.

Crews did not believe he was dreaming when he was awakened by a blow to his shoulder and heard an unpleasant voice address him abusively. He assumed rather that it was real enough but that time had been reversed, taking him back to his first marriage, for the voice was female and the unpleasantness in it was by intent, not nature.

But when he opened his eyes he was staring at a wall of rock, visible in the flare of light that must be coming by way of the constricted entranceway through which he had crawled the night before. So obviously he had been dreaming.

He rolled over to look. A human figure stood near enough to have kicked him. It held a blazing, smoking torch. In its other hand was his tool, with the extended knife blade.

“Who the hell are you?” The tone was harsh, but the voice was that of a woman. She brandished the blade. “I’m not afraid to use this.”

“God almighty,” Crews croaked, from a throat unaccustomed to speech. He was getting his hands and one knee under him. “You’re—”

She pushed him forcefully with a foot, and he fell back. “I asked who you were.”

“I was in a plane crash,” he said angrily. “It went into the lake. I’ve been trying to keep alive ever since. Why are you threatening me? Why did you steal and wreck my raft? It took me days to make that, without any tools but the one you’re holding. Why do you need my knife when you’ve got a gun?”

The flame was sputtering and getting smokier by the moment. The young woman, for such she was, held the torch as far from her body as she could. She had tousled long dark hair and regular features, so far as could be seen in the light that illuminated only part of her face and threw distorting shadows on the remainder.

“Are you telling the truth?” Her voice had lost some of its edge.

“Look at me,” Crews said. “Do I look like things are going my way?”

“All right,” she said, gesturing with the knife blade. “Get to your knees and start crawling out of the cave, and be quick about it: this torch is about ready to quit. Remember, I’m right behind you, with the knife. When you get to the outside, keep crawling away from the mouth of the cave, until I tell you to stand up.”

He did as ordered, but when he reached the outside, where daylight had come, he immediately sprang erect, bent down as she crawled out, wrested the tool from her hand, and, seizing her denim jacket at the scruff of its neck, pulled her to her feet. She was fairly tall, only a couple of inches shorter than he, and slender but very fit-looking. She tried to struggle with him, but he pushed her away.

“Stop it, goddammit! This is my property.” He folded the blade back into the handle and dropped the tool into his side pocket. “Now suppose you tell me what you are doing here.” He could not resist adding bitterly, “Aside from stealing stuff from people who are fighting for their life.”

Her blue eyes continued to show residual fury for a moment or two. In full daylight her features were in fact very fine, but her face was smudged with dirt. She wore filthy jeans. Her denim jacket was torn on its left side. She snarled, “Touch me again, and I’ll kill you.”

He had forgotten the gun, but if she had been carrying it, she would surely have drawn it by now. And if she had had a firearm, why would she have brandished the knife?

“I’m not impressed by your bluster,” he said. “I won’t have any reason to touch you if you aren’t carrying any weapons. Empty your pockets. Turn them out.”

She hesitated for a moment and then complied. Her front pockets were empty.

“Turn around.”

“The hell I will.” She was fierce again.

“I just want to see your back pockets. Come on.” She had no weapons or anything else. She could do him no serious harm. “I was telling the truth about the crash. I don’t want to fight with you. Just tell me how to get out of these woods. I’ve been traveling in circles.”

She blinked briefly, but raised her eyes in some lingering defiance. “Why’d you come into the cave?”

“To get out of the rain,” Crews said. “Why are you so pugnacious?” She met his stare, and he broke before she did, because all he wanted now was her help. “All right, forget about the raft and the stuff from my hut—”

“You keep mentioning that. I don’t know what you’re talking about.” She looked away. “If you’re lost, so am I. I don’t have any idea where I am. I’ve been running for my life.” When she turned back to him, there were tears in her eyes.

“Running for your life? Then you’re not the one who has the gun? Who’s chasing you?”

She shook her tousled head but stayed silent.

Given the situation, he was annoyed. “I told you about me. If I could submit references, I wouldn’t be here, would I? I know I must look awful. I haven’t been able to shave, and it’s hard to get clean without soap. You just have to think why someone in my shoes would lie.” He lifted one of his bare feet.

“No, I don’t,” she cried bitterly, still weeping.

Her trouble seemed genuine. “Okay,” he said, “don’t tell me. But can’t we work together on getting out of here?”

She grimaced, impatiently, and wiped her eyes with the back of a dirty hand. “I certainly don’t have a gun. The man who’s after me does have one. He might do harm to you too if we link up.”

“If he’s coming this way,” said Crews, “we’d better find some cover. But not in the cave again. Too easy to be trapped there.”

“He tried to kill me.” She seemed to be telling this primarily to herself and with a certain disbelief.

“He’s not superhuman, is he?” Crews asked. “I’ve held my own out here for weeks. And look, you got away from him, didn’t you?”

She stayed grim. “He killed my husband. We were camping, and he just came out of the woods with this gun and shot Michael.”

“I heard those shots.”

“Then he tied me up.” Her voice had lost all identifiable emotion. “I hate camping. I was just trying to be a good guy. That was important to Michael.”

“Who was this man?” Crews asked. “A complete stranger?” Suddenly she was too weak to stand erect. He pointed to a nearby boulder. “Why don’t you sit there?” She finally did so. The ground, though stony, was still too damp from yesterday’s downpour. Crews remained standing. “This criminal, do you have any idea who he might be?”

“He’s some kind of woodsman,” she said, almost contemplatively, looking at the rocks between her feet. “I think he probably lives around here. A hunter or trapper or something. He’s got a beard.”

“Like mine?”

She kept her eyes down. “Big and bushy. He’s filthy dirty.”

“You’re sure your husband is dead?”

“I don’t see how he could have survived. It was at close range.”

“I’m no authority,” Crews said, “but I’ve heard about people who have survived worse.”

“That was two days ago.”

“Even so, I think we should find the campsite. He might still be hanging on, you can’t tell. I’ve got a general idea of where it might be, because I can remember where I was when I heard the shots, more or less. Who was it I saw on the cliff? Was that you or him? I yelled and waved my arms. I was sure whoever it was saw me.”

“It wasn’t me. I didn’t see anybody after I got away. He went off somewhere for a while. He left me tied up, but it was easier getting out of the ropes than I thought. I didn’t know where I was running. I only know we’re a couple of days from anywhere. That was what Michael wanted. To leave it all behind.” She put her hands on her face.

Crews was reminded of his failure to retrieve the bodies from the submerged airplane. Perhaps he could earn some extenuation. “If there’s any chance your husband might still be living, we ought to try and find him. I’d spare you the ordeal and go myself, but I don’t want to leave you alone.”

“I’m scared. There’s nothing you can do against a gun.”

“There are two of us,” Crews said. “And we know he’s out there. We’re not going to be jumped without warning, like you and your husband were. One of us will stay on guard at all times. The gun is not necessarily a deciding factor. There are other weapons available to us.” Much of this was bravado, but the need to gain her respect gave him more faith in himself than he otherwise would have known. “But we’ve got to get organized. Do you have any idea where this gunman might be? If it wasn’t you who stole the stuff from my camp, then he did it. But I don’t know when. I thought he might have come this way, but if he did, the rain washed away any footprints. The first move we should make is climb up there and see what we can.” He nodded at the heights above the cave. “Do you want to go first?”

She seemed not quite to have lost her distrust of him. He took the knife-bearing tool from his pocket. “Hold it, if you want. It’s the only thing I own that could be called a weapon.”

She waved it off. “Don’t mind me.” She was shivering.

He took off the seersucker jacket. “Here. I’m sorry it’s so dirty.”

“I’m not cold that way.” She began quietly to weep again.

Crews put his jacket on. “We should get going.”

She stared at him. “It was completely by surprise. There was nothing I could do.”

“I saved myself in the crash,” Crews said, “and even brought along some gear. I did nothing for the others. I tried, but then I passed out. Maybe I could have saved some or all of my friends, but I didn’t. The difference with you is that you could not have done anything about what happened. But you’re alive, and I’m not going to let any more harm come to you. You can count on it! Now let’s find a way to get up there.”

It was she who located the best route to the top of the cliff above them, a ravine to start to climb which took more initial effort than the one he first chose, but his presented an un-climbable impasse a third of the way up, and he had to come down and follow her lead. She waited for him on the level summit.

This was the highest point from which he had yet surveyed the territory in which he had been lost for—however long it was. One end of the lake could be seen, but the other was hidden by the forest, as were the pond, the area of fallen trees, and his hut, along with the stream except for its immediate length just below them. The killer could be anywhere.

“Did you and your husband have a lot of camping equipment?” She gazed blankly at him. “This guy stole the only stuff from my hut that was worth anything. He’s tracking down the only witness to his crime and yet he takes the trouble to steal my fishing stuff. Maybe sooner or later he’ll go back to your campsite to get whatever possessions you left there.”

She nodded in what might have seemed indifference had her anguish not been known. She could surrender her vigilance, now that he had come forward. It was an expression of trust, perhaps as much as he could expect from her.

“Here’s my idea,” he went on. “If all we do is keep trying to evade him, we won’t have a moment’s peace of mind, and we might lose in the end if we think of ourselves as his prey. We don’t know where we are, and we are unarmed and amateurs at this. Whereas he’s presumably a native of the area and has a gun.” She was listening, but her face was so expressionless he could not believe she heard him. He would, however, have said as much to himself. “The conclusion I therefore have arrived at might sound crazy. I say we stalk him.” He gave her a moment to protest, while counting on her to stay remote while he worked out what he really meant. She made no response. “There are two of us, you see. In effect, he’ll always have his back to one or the other. That is, we should see that’s the case. We can make weapons of our own, spears, clubs, and so on, or just rocks. But our most effective weapon will be surprise. The last thing he’ll expect is to become the pursued.”

She stared down across the forest and said nothing. He had looked at her for an hour now without seeing that what he had believed a sooty smudge from her left cheekbone to the chin was rather one great area of discoloration, a bruise that occupied more than a quarter of her face.

“Maybe you should stay here,” Crews said. “If he did try to come up, there’s no way but the one we took. You could see him coming from a long way off, and roll those boulders down on him. There’s no place in that ravine to maneuver. You’ll be okay here. I’ll go down and catch some fish and bring them up, and some water too. We’ll eat, and then I’ll go after that bastard.”

She shook her head violently, though she continued to avoid meeting his eyes. “No.”

He tried not to be exasperated. “If you just want to try to get out of here, remember that we’re almost certain to run into him anyway. There’s probably just one main trail, and if he can’t find you before, he’s likely to wait there.”

The woman said slowly, in almost a moan, “He shot me.” She lifted the torn side of her jacket. She wore nothing under it. There was an ugly purplish wound in the soft tissue between her ribs and the waist, not a hole as such but a kind of slash. It looked as if the bullet had gone across, tearing skin and flesh, but not into her body.

Crews winced. “I’ve got some antiseptic down at my camp. I don’t think he stole that. Let me go get it. I should be back in an hour or less.”

“No, no,” she said. “You mustn’t.” She clutched at her jacket. “You’ll get killed.”

“No, I won’t!” he cried. “He’s not going to kill either one of us.” Then, so as to make a case even he could find credible, he went on. “You see, I’ve got a charmed life. There has to be a reason why I of all people was spared from dying in that crash. I was the least worthwhile person on board. I’m being given the opportunity to prove I’m worth a damn.” She dropped her hands. He could not tell whether what he said had had any effect on her. “I don’t like the way that wound looks. It might be infected. It should be cleaned and treated. I wish you had mentioned it before now. You must be in pain.”

“I don’t feel anything,” she said. “But I don’t want to stay here alone.”

“All right,” said Crews, and turned to lead the way down. It was then, making one last sweep of the land below, that he saw the thin wisp of gray smoke coming up from the dark forest on the other side of the lake. “Look. Over there.” He turned back to her. “That’s a couple of miles away. We’re one up on him at the moment. We know where he is, but he doesn’t know where we are. Let’s go.” He did not wait for her reaction.

They made good time in reaching his camp. He found the little spray can and gave it to her. But when he saw the difficulty she would have in reaching the far end of the elongated wound, he reclaimed it.

“Just keep your shirt lifted. This will feel cold at first, but the local anesthetic in it will take over in a second.” The gash, though ugly, did not seem to be infected. Washing off the encrusted blood with water from the pond would have been too painful at this point, in his opinion. She recoiled slightly when the spray first touched her, as he expected. He welcomed the reaction as evidence that she had not fallen into a state of semiconsciousness.

He took the tool from his pocket and squatted in the dirt. He began to scratch out a crude map with the screwdriver blade. “Here’s the lake, and here’s where we are.” This was an oval and an X. “Here’s the stream, the pond, my hut. Here’s where I was on the raft, on the lake, when I heard the shots.” He touched the blade to the earth. “Think your camp might have been about here?” She was still standing. Crews was impatient. “I need your help with this.” But when he saw her woeful expression, he rose. “We can do that later. Let me put some stuff together, and we’ll get going.”

“There was a clearing,” she said. “It was less than fifty yards to the beach. He didn’t want to be closer to the water, he said, because the tent would be too exposed if a storm came. He knew about things like that.”

Crews squatted again and x’d the dirt map. “Does this look about right?…” He glanced up at her. “I know this is painful, but can you remember any details at all? Where the sun rose or set? Any landmarks? One of those cliffs, for example?”

“I didn’t know about anything,” she said. “Mostly, I didn’t know about him.”

Crews put the tool into his pocket along with the can of disinfectant. From the hut he got the thermos, which, after filling it at the pond, he tethered to his belt with a loop of fishline that would allow it to dispense water without being unhitched. In the duffel bag he found one of his knitted shirts. During his raft-building days he had taken time to do some laundry in the lake, and the shirt was as clean as soapless cold water could make it. He took it out to her.

“Here. Put this on under the jacket. It’ll help at night.” He considerately turned his back. “I’ve only got one other pair of pants, and I didn’t get around to washing them after the raft was finished, and they’re full of mud.” When he turned back she had the shirt on. It was even looser on her than he had anticipated. She had trouble getting back into the smaller denim jacket.

He took a last look at the house he had built. He was proud of what he had done and wished that he could have shown it to her under different circumstances.

“We’ll stay back from the lakeshore. We won’t make as good time through the woods, but he won’t be able to see us as easily, if he’s looking. I’ll lead the way. Anytime I’m going too fast or you don’t feel good and want to stop, just tell me. And please stay close. I can’t keep looking back to check.”

Nevertheless, he did keep looking back, every few paces, on their way along the bank of the stream, for the route was much more demanding than it had been when he used it alone. There were places where he had simply waded in an undergrowth that then had seemed sparse, but mysteriously had since grown burrs and thorns, too cruel to lead her through. There were fallen trees which, alone, he had easily climbed over but now considered too formidable for her. Because of his detours they made much poorer time than he had anticipated and sometimes encountered even worse terrain than that they were avoiding, which required still further evasive action.

But at last he could say, “Right down there is where the woods end and the marsh begins. That’s where I built the raft. It’s an exposed position: we could be seen from the opposite shore. So we’ll turn right here and keep in the trees.”

Despite the pains with which he had led her around the worst thickets, a little twig end had caught and broken off in the abundant fall of rich brown hair that swung across her left ear. He thought about removing the twiglet, but doctoring was one thing and grooming another. Also, it was not unattractive, a kind of wilderness jewelry.

He had forgotten that before long the woods gave way to the meadow where the wildflowers grew. He halted at its edge. The alternative was to go the long way around, keeping to the trees a quarter mile behind.

“We’ll go on across. He’s probably still way back in the woods over there. He may even be farther away.” The smoke had never been seen again once they had come down from their observation post on the cliff, but Crews had decided that that was a matter of relative perspectives and not necessarily evidence that the man had put out his campfire and gone back to the hunt.

They started into the field in single file, wading through grasses that were usually no more than knee-deep, from which rose the occasional plant only slightly taller, not enough for cover. The wildflowers, somewhat disappointing on his earlier trip, were more profuse now. At a distance those of the same hue seemed to be massed into floating islands of gold, orange-red, or purple, but when approached separated first into confetti and finally became distinct blossoms, some a foot or more from any other. But there were also kaleidoscopic areas shared by many colors.

At one such place, without breaking his regular stride, Crews broke off a little flower of dusty blue. An irritated bee chased his hand for six or eight inches before turning back to more serious work. The sun was warm on his back. The woman was behind him, walking in his swath. He often glanced back at her, should she forget or neglect to signal him. Her eyes were always down. The twig was gone from her hair now. He would have liked to replace it with the blue flower.

On the other side of the meadow they entered wooded, rising ground. Once they were well within the trees, on the gentle slope, he halted, took the cap from the thermos on his belt, and swinging the container on its loop of fishline, poured some water. He offered the cup to the woman. She gulped greedily at it.

“You must be hungry, too. When we come to a likely spot, I’ll do some fishing.” He refilled the cup. “I’ve been thinking. We need a contingency plan. If we run into this guy, I’ll keep his attention on me as long as I can. You take off and head for cover. His attention will be diverted. He’ll have to deal with me. You should get a few seconds anyway.” She did nothing to indicate she had heard what he was saying.

He took the lead again. In silence they gained the crest of the hill, where he paused to look down onto a valley that was familiar to him, as was the cliff behind it.

“Down there, over on the lake side, is where he took my raft. I had previously seen him up there.” He pointed at the cliff, higher than where they were, and on their right. “I yelled and waved, then I climbed up. But he was long gone. He must have come down somewhere else, circled around, and grabbed the raft. It was coming apart, but I guess it held together awhile.” He was still in effect speaking to himself. “You were hiding someplace? I only wish I had known it then.” He stepped so as to face her. Her eyes fell. “If we don’t encounter any rougher going than we’ve had so far, it should only be a couple more hours. I went by raft, so I don’t know the ground between here and there. But you do. Can you remember any obstacles?”

She shook her head.

He took the can from his pocket. “Let’s have a look at that wound again.” She lifted the jacket and the hem of his shirt, which she wore tails out. It was hard to say whether the scab had claimed more of the raw flesh. He sprayed the area and then lowered the shirttail himself, to determine whether it cleared the wound. “It’s knitting up,” he told her. “Lucky his aim wasn’t better.” Her eyes rose, full of anguish. “Forgive me,” he said. “Dumb thing to say. I was just trying to make conversation…. Let’s get going. We’ve got lots to do before dark, and you can never tell what problems will suddenly come up. I’ve never yet found one thing in nature that I could have predicted.”

A sudden burst of sound came from the trees just ahead of them on the downward slope, and instinctively he recoiled. A small deer, a doe or not fully grown fawn, unantlered, was sprinting uphill, at an angle to them. Each instant less of it could be discerned through the intervening trees, and in a moment it had vanished altogether.

The hike to the end of the lake probably took more than the two hours he anticipated, even though the route was without serious topographical barriers, the terrain being mostly level, not densely forested, and marked by only one narrow stream, shallow enough to wade across. But just where the lake’s “end” could be identifiably located was another matter. He had been so disoriented on his previous trip of exploration that he had encircled the shore while believing he was traveling in a straight line.

He tried again to speak with the woman. “This is really important. Can you take your mind back to before your husband was shot?” They were now among the pines just behind the beach. “Do you remember anything we might look for? Any kind of landmark? So much of the shore is the same in one place as it is in another. You did come out to the water?” He squinted at the sun. “I’d say it’s late afternoon, and we’ve been going north, more or less, all day. While the light’s still good, maybe we should go out to the lake and have you take a look. Maybe you’ll recognize something.”

She stared through the trees at the sparkling water. “I took a swim. I was hot and dirty after the hike in from the river, where the current was too strong to safely swim in, or anyway that’s what Michael said, I wonder why now, because it didn’t look like it. So I hadn’t had a bath since leaving Fort Judson. He wasn’t that good a swimmer himself to help me, he said, if I got in trouble. I was actually touched by his saying that. He wasn’t usually so protective—anything but, in fact. Once—” She stopped herself.

“River?” Crews asked. “You came by the river, on a boat of some kind?”

She was still abstracted. “Godforsaken place. You get there by a little plane. Nothing much is at Fort Judson but this outfitter who rents the canoes.”

“Where did you leave the canoe?” Crews asked. “How far away is this Fort Judson? How far from your camp was the river?” That there was a human settlement of any kind that could eventually be reached from this wilderness, which to him had grown to seem infinite, was exhilarating.

“I hated it all,” she said. “I don’t mean that: it was beautiful. I just hated my being there.” Tears came to her eyes, and she turned away.

“If we can get to the river and find the canoe—you must have left it someplace there for the return trip? … But it’s getting late in the day. I’d better make camp. Otherwise it’ll get dark before you know it, which always happens quicker when you’re lost, I couldn’t say why, except all the normal things have to be looked at in a different way. Everything’s new. That’s really hard to get accustomed to at first. It’s like being a child again, only not so comfortably.” He was still addressing her back. “I’m going to build a lean-to. Can you give me some help? Collect a lot of pine boughs?”

He prowled until he found a deciduous tree from which to cut a fishing pole, then gave her the tool. “I’m going to try to catch something. It’s time you had a meal. I’ll go right over there, where you can see me all the while. If anything unusual happens, anything at all, or you just get lonely, just give me a yell.”

She showed some slight spirit. “I want to do my part.”

“Fine,” Crews said. “Look, if you want: we’ll need two forked sticks about this high, and thick enough to hold another stick or pole between them.” He made explanatory gestures. “Then pine boughs can be put against the frame to make a tent-shaped structure, you see. Don’t worry if it doesn’t seem terribly substantial. It’s only going to serve as a decoy. If this guy shows up, we won’t be sleeping there.” He had just got this idea and was proud of it, but if she really understood what he was saying, she displayed nothing that could be called a reaction.

He went to the lake at the place he had indicated, a grassy point that extended only eight or ten feet into the water but broke the uniformity of the shoreline. He attached one of the artificial flies to his line, and extending the pole as far as possible, jerked the fake insect along the surface in a fashion he had never tried before, testing another of his ideas. This one worked. In about half an hour he caught two fish, one of a reasonable size for a meal, the other hardly larger than a minnow.

Remembering the torch with which the woman had discovered him in the cave, he asked for her matches, but she had none left. He had neglected this matter until the sun was too low in the sky to furnish rays strong enough for ignition when reflected from the mirror.

The remaining means of making fire from scratch were flint and steel and the bow and drill, both known to him only as depicted in movies, probably inauthentically at that. He chose the latter as being least incredible.

He cut and bent several lengths of limber branch before finding one that would serve. From the end of a dead log he split off a flattish section of very dry wood. He prepared an ignition-attracting wad of stuff from the pods of dead weeds and fragments of desiccated bark. He went to the woman, who was doing a good job of accumulating materials for the lean-to.

“I need to borrow a shoestring.” Without waiting for a response, he knelt and began to unlace the running shoe on her left foot. She wore thickly knit athletic socks that were, at least in the part covered by the shoes, wondrously white for anything to be seen in the woods by someone like himself who had been lost there so long.

He found a sturdy dry stick to use as drill. He put one end of it into the depression he had gouged in the flat piece of wood, and spun it therein by means of the little bow of which her shoelace made the string. There were the usual fits and starts, the miscarriages inevitable with all primitive efforts—he had neglected to provide something to hold against the end of the drill to steady it vertically while pressing down on the horizontal member of the apparatus—and before ignition came, two drill sticks and one bow cracked under the strain, but her shoestring held fast, and finally a blackness appeared in the socket and his nostrils caught the first faint bouquet of burning wood. More grinding produced a wisp of outright smoke, bits of tinder were pressed against the infinitesimal spark, and he not so much blew as breathed heavily on it…. The spark went out, as did a succession of them, but at last one was snared and fed and reared to be a genuine flame.

They had been able to see the killer’s campfire at a considerable distance, but the criminal had no reason to conceal his presence by keeping his fire to the minimum. Crews’s purpose was to attract as little attention as possible. By now he had learned a good deal about the fuels in his patch of the world, and though he could not have identified many woods by name, he knew which gave the most heat with the least smoke. He dug a little pit in which to contain his modest blaze and limit how far its radiance would extend when darkness came. He was still taking a chance, for however sparse the smoke, the odor could surely be detected at a great distance. But it was to counteract that risk that he planned the decoy lean-to.

Making fire had taken so much of his attention that he was not aware the woman had not only assembled all the materials for the structure but had almost completed the construction thereof when he turned to that task.

“You were able to do this just from a description?” He walked admiringly around the little structure. “It beats the first one I made, I’ll say that.” She shrugged in apparent indifference, though his praise was sincere. “It’s a fine job. Now come on and eat some dinner. There’s only one course, but at least it’s fresh.”

She came and sat near the fire while he grilled both fish on the same stick. He restrained his usual impatience and took more care with the cooking and thus did not char the larger. Owing to the difference in size, the same could not be said for the smaller, but that was the one he gave to himself. He had found a birch and cut from it a section of bark to serve as plate for her meal.

“Forks are in short supply in this establishment,” he said. “But at least let me cut it into pieces that are easier to pick up.” He warned her against burned fingers.

She was able to eat very little, and he did not press her on the matter. There would be other meals. What she probably needed most at this point was rest. It was apparent to him that the effects of shock, postponed during the time she ran for her life, had accumulated throughout the day she had been under his protection. Taking the longer view, this could be seen as healthy. Nevertheless he would worry.

He led her into the thick underbrush behind the clearing in which the lean-to stood. “I don’t think he’s anywhere near here. Where we saw smoke was off in the other direction. I watched the lakeshore all day long. If he was heading this way, he’d have had to come out to the water at one point or another. But we’ll play it safe. We’ll make a place for you back here. I’ll find somewhere to conceal myself nearer the lean-to: if he does come, that will naturally be his focus.”

While she was fashioning a kind of burrow within the bushes, Crews cut some pine boughs to keep her off the ground. He took such equipment as he might need before dawn from the pockets of his tattered jacket and presented the garment to her for a cover against the chill of the night.

“No matter what, don’t make any noise,” he said. “I’ll be on guard all night. He won’t get past me if he comes, but he won’t come. You’ll be all right here.” He had plumped up some of the boughs to serve as pillows, but the weight of her head had compressed them. What wretched accommodations he had provided. Tomorrow he must heat water so she could wash her face. He timidly took her hand, which was lifeless but at least did not recoil. “Try to get some rest. I won’t be far away.” He was reluctant to leave her.

She seemed to be weeping quietly, obscurely, her face on its unbruised side, her dark hair across it. He left her, pulling the bushes together as he went out to the clearing. In what was left of the twilight, she could not be seen.

Crews had always been pretty good with his fists, giving as good as he got, even with larger opponents, probably because alcohol removed the inhibitions against violence that restrain the sober. But he was not drunk now, and his adversary was a cold-blooded murderer, not some acquaintance whom he had offended at a party or an intrusive stranger in a bar. He required as deadly a weapon as he could quickly fashion without looking far in the near darkness.

He was too squeamish to run a crude spear into a man’s back from ambush, but would be capable of using a club. He fashioned the caveman type of bludgeon, lashing a hefty rock into the split end of a stout handle.

He had extinguished the fire with water long since. In a stand of dense-grown brush twenty yards from the lean-to he took up a post from which he could see both that structure and the place beyond the other end of the clearing where the woman was concealed. For a while, at the beginning of his vigil, he feared that the absence of all light would confine him to such sounds as he could detect, but in time two-thirds of a moon appeared in a half-clouded sky, and enough of its illumination reached the clearing to identify shapes with a night vision that seemed better than it should be, but perhaps that was due to the same will that kept him awake and alert till morning.