Robert Crews (16 page)

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.