Robert Crews (6 page)

He caught the sunshine in the mirror, flashing light at the wall of forest. The facade of trees was itself in the sun now, and the reflection could be better imagined than seen, but the principle was sound. For the device to be effective, he would have to manipulate it, focusing the beam at a flying aircraft. It was not the sort of signal that would necessarily work if the glass was static. Nevertheless, remembering movies in which hostile Indians would, at great distances, notice the glitter of a cavalryman's brass buttons, he broke off a forked piece of branch from the
HELP
sign, planted its straight end in the sand, and mounted in its fork, angled toward the sky, the half of the box that framed the little mirror. If he was otherwise occupied at the time an airplane flew over, it was at least possible the pilot might see enough of a glint to circle back, and then detect the sign. Again, it was the something that was surely better than nothing, a principle he had consistently disdained in his life before the crash.

Now something must be done about food. There were fish in this lake. He had heard more than one splash when he was not so distracted as to be deaf to such. He was learning that one alone in the natural world did well to register as many sensory impressions as he could, bringing every practical faculty into play. Moralizing was not only a waste of attention; it could result in a failure of mortal consequence. What he had been in civilization had no useful bearing on what he must do here. He had to continue to think of himself as the man who could put a shaving mirror to emergency use. He was not helpless, even though he could hardly walk, even though added to the light-headedness as a consequence of such a sudden abstention from alcohol was a sense of his fragility with respect to the bear.

He opened the leather-covered cylinder he had retrieved from the plane and saw sufficient segments to make one of the lengthy rods used for fly casting, a sport of which he knew little beyond being vaguely aware that it was practiced while standing in a rubberized, waist-high, booted garment, halfimmersed in a stream.

The accompanying tackle box offered a profusion of plastic receptacles full of little artificial flies, most of them showing colors and configurations of no insects Crews had ever seen. Also in the box was a reel. He had no difficulty in figuring out how to fit it to the buttpiece of the assembled rod, and pulled the line, which was thick and heavy and coated with some varnishlike substance, through the ringed guides along the considerable length of the rod, which when planted vertically in the sand was taller than he.

One artificial fly was as good as another to him. Obviously, each had its use according to the type of fish sought and perhaps the sort of water at hand, the weather, and the season, but he had no means of acquiring knowledge of this complexity in the absence of experience. He therefore chose the fly that looked least bizarre by his standards, which meant that which was least brightly colored. But the line was too thick to go through the eye of the hook. By now he was too impatient to pursue a better resolution to the problem, and he simply battered the end between two rocks until it had been frayed to a usable diameter, threaded it through the eye, with difficulty made a disorderly-looking knot that would probably not hold for long, and tried to cast the tiny, weightless object into the lake. As he had feared, not being unaware of the physical laws that apply to all forms of motion, the fly was too light to travel far or indeed at all.

He considered tying a heavier object to the end of the line, along with the fly, so that the latter would be hurled out when the rod was whipped—for he eventually developed a technique of wrist that would seem right—yet if the added weight did not float, it might drag the fly under water and ruin the illusion by which the fish was supposed to be attracted. But once again he noticed the weight of the line. Of course: the lure might weigh nothing, but the cast could be made using the inertia (or whatever it was) of the heavy line. Pull out a generous length and whip it. He put his theory into action and was thrilled to find that it worked. After many efforts he was finally able to cast the light fly some distance from shore.

Pleasure in this initial achievement was to be the only reward he received from fishing all morning. The pity was that he had no gauge by which to determine what he was doing wrong. Perhaps he had chosen the wrong fly. He tried a series of others. Maybe he was doing a bad job at casting. He tried variations on it, whipping the line out farther, then not quite so far, then in between, retracting it at various rates of speed, sometimes allowing the counterfeit insect to float as if casually, sometimes causing it to jerk and jump along the surface of the water. Could it be that no lake fish was ever attracted by such a lure, that the use of artificial flies must be limited to running streams? Were fish
that
discriminating? But maybe the trouble was that the area of the lake at which he had started—a hundred yards or so along the beach, so that he was as far from the submerged airplane as he found it convenient to hobble, with his bad knee—was simply not one frequented by fish, who might well have favorite neighborhoods, even as did land animals including man. Therefore he laboriously dragged himself elsewhere, casting out the line at each of a series of places, finally finding himself almost at the point, which as he grew nearer he saw was of more topographical substance than he had supposed from his earlier perspectives. The beach there was terminated by a height the sides of which were sheer stone. On top grew the familiar forest of Christmas trees.

Not only did he fail to get even a preliminary bite, he neither saw nor heard any evidence of piscine life; no fish slapped the water today. It occurred to him that for their own reasons the creatures might simply not be feeding in any place or on anything at the moment, or had their own subaqueous sources of nourishment. He had taxed his knee by all the stumbling up and down the beach. He sat down on the sand. At least the day was a warm one, with a hearty and generous sun overhead, though some clouds seemed to be forming in the farthest reaches of the western sky. He really could not understand why no airplanes had appeared. The other men all had families who were surely bringing frantic pressure on the appropriate agencies. Had Spurgeon been so far off course that he could not easily be traced? And again he wondered about the radio: would Dick not have been in touch with whatever had been the nearest airfield, some version of which however modest should be within electronic reach anywhere on the continent? Even if the radio had eventually failed, it was working when they took off. Would not the subsequent silence have alerted those whose business it was to listen?

But perhaps he was being too sentimental about how other people were supposed to perform, he who never had a profession. It was in any event useless to sit there asking questions that could not be answered until he was rescued. Not only useless but morally degrading. He had work to do, for the first time in his life. Half of another day was gone, and he still had no food, no fire, no shelter, and no weapon with which to defend himself against the bear.

… At first the sound was too faint to be identified. It could have been an insect or even the humming of his own blood in his ears. In two days here he had got himself under such management that he could allow for the delusions of hope; he refused to admit he heard an airplane until he finally saw it.

But it was high, far too high! If the plane was to him a winged speck, what must he be to it? He ran, knee throbbing with pain, back to the mirror, tore it from its forked mount, and flashed it at the sky. Now that he put it into play, the glass seemed much smaller than before. He had no way of knowing whether he was catching the sun, let alone projecting a signal in the proper direction. If this pilot was looking for him, the man was doing a bad job. For an instant, Crews yearned for a gun, not for signaling but for firing at the aircraft, bringing it down in flames with a lucky shot.

He continued to gesticulate with the mirror until he could no longer hear a sound and the speck had first lost its wings and then its reality in the blue vastness. His anger was succeeded by a profound depression of spirit that left him momentarily too weak to make any further effort to preserve himself. He dropped the mirror on the sand and sank down beside it, convinced, on no better evidence than this single failure, that he would never be found while alive. He had been able to control his hope, but self-pity overwhelmed him. If he had not been able to cope with civilization, what could be expected of him now?

He felt a warmth on his forearm, through the shirt that, with his trousers, he had pulled on when emerging from the water after the latest dives—he could scarcely afford to sunburn his spring-pale skin. In another moment his arm was painfully hot. Had he been stung or bitten by a venomous creature? He rolled up the sleeve and examined the skin, finding nothing untoward. Was it a withdrawal effect of the two days' abstention from alcohol? Would he suffer imaginary pains at various places on his body? Drinking had surely got him into, or anyway exacerbated his part in, many scrapes, but he had not previously been afflicted with hallucinatory phenomena that could be associated with either the presence or the absence of drink. He knew the DTs only by way of vintage movies. Perhaps they came from the contaminated liquor of yore. But he had suffered a scare at one point when an apartment, hitherto innocent of mice and roaches, was abruptly invaded by both: or
seemed
to be, for examples of both were visible for such brief instants that, to senses corrupted by alcohol, they might well have been illusions. When, having fled to the nearest bar, he saw a mouse run under his stool, it took all his courage, and four drinks, to confess as much to the bartender, from whom, thank God, he heard reassurance. “Been all over the neighborhood since they tore down that building next door.”

He returned his arm to its former position. Soon afterward he felt the warmth again. He noticed that the shaver-case top that held the mirror had fallen to embed itself in the sand at an angle from which the mirror reflected the sun as a focused beam on his forearm. He picked the thing up and noticed for the first time, never having used it for shaving, that the glass was not the standard straightforward reflector but rather a magnifying mirror. If it could be accidentally focused to warm his skin to a point of discomfort, maybe it could be intentionally used to make fire.

He went into the trees to fetch firewood, disregarding the pain in his knee, which seemed to belong to someone else, perhaps himself in a dream.

He brought back an armload of dead branches. Some were of brown-needled pine, but he had also foraged beyond the evergreens to find other, huskier trees, among them one of the few he could identify, namely the birch, from which he was able without implements to pull some filaments of bark so thin as to be almost transparent, from places where peeling had begun to occur for natural causes.

To contain the tinder against a random breeze, he scooped out a little depression in the sand. It took a few moments of adjustment in the distance between the mirror and the inflammable matter before the focus could be refined to reduce the point of light to its minimum diameter. But even when he had done this, it seemed far too blunt, too pale, to coax out flame from inert matter at the temperature of cool air…. He told himself as much even as he watched the miracle in which the paleness of the tinder slowly turned dark, from tan to brown, then went quickly to a blackening at the heart of which was soon a pinhead of red glow. He blew on it too soon, eliciting a wisp of gray smoke, but returning the mirror to play and, breathing more gently on the new embers, produced a small yellow flame, the most glorious achievement of his life. He piled on the dry pine needles and shreds or threads of birch bark, and finally the pieces of fallen branches, graduated as to thickness.

In a few moments the fire burned so lustily that he feared his supply of fuel would soon be exhausted. He went to get more from the woods, but now had to range farther. Already the excitement of making flame had been diminished by the fact of its having been made, and once again he remembered his sore knee. But he reflected that now he could heat water with which, with strips of T-shirt, a warm compress could be fashioned—that is, if he could find something in which to heat water. The cups from the thermos were made of plastic, but they were sufficiently heat-resistant to accept the hottest liquids. Primitive peoples, of whom he was now a fellow, were ingenious within the conditions of their ignorance. Before arriving at a sophistication that would enable them to slice off a cross section of a log and call it a wheel, they had used the whole thing on which to roll heavy objects. Before crafting vessels that could endure direct fire, they had heated and dropped rocks into holes in the ground filled with water.

He located some small stones, pebbles, and with care situated them in the fire at a place where they could be retrieved with tonged sticks. With the addition of a third application of wood, the flames were now rising to a formidable height, smoking, sparking, and he was gratified to be almost singed as he dropped pebbles into the embers. If you had fire, you had one of the essential elements of survival anywhere. Except in drenching rain, fire could in itself be the better part of shelter: with a hot enough blaze, you could do without a roof or walls. Also fire could serve as a deterrent against animal enemies. He was no longer defenseless against the bear.

He filled both plastic cups with water from the lake. When the stones seemed to have been heated sufficiently, he rolled them out of the coals with a long stick he had broken from a pine branch that was still green and thus resistant to flame. With another stick of the same sort, which served as the other member of the tongs, he managed after a few unsuccessful attempts to get the hot stones into the cups. This project too worked as intended. He poured the warm water onto the T-shirt and applied the compress to his knee. He felt better than at any time since the crash, but he knew he must resist hubris. He was still lost and still hungry.