Robert Crews by Thomas Berger Read Free Book Online Page A

have been, and continued to be, including this reflection upon it, a dream. But the trembling was real. Yet even that took him a moment to understand. It was not a reaction to the mirage in which the bear had figured. He was in the grip of a savage chill. The several layers of cotton were as nothing against the cold. Never before now had he been aware that teeth actually can chatter involuntarily. He tore away the rest of the roof and wrapped it around his upper body, under the thin jacket. He continued all night to shiver violently, and his teeth chattered whenever he unclenched them.
    That he did nevertheless sleep, he understood only on being awakened by the morning light, and not the first light that had woken him the previous day but rather a sun that was already lifting itself above the treetops to the east. The woods were especially dense there. For all he knew, a town might not be very far beyond, but the continuous wall of greenery tended to discourage speculation. Better stranded near open water than wandering in circles through an inland thicket without boundaries.
    He writhed out of his now roofless trench. It would take a while before he tried to stand erect. His knee had stopped hurting during the night, or anyway he had been distracted from it by the cold, but he had to prepare himself for the possibility it would prove worse when used. He crawled, favoring his right hand, some distance from all that he could currently call home, and rising to his feet at last, urinated.
    The place he had chosen to pee was near the edge of the forest. Only when he had finished and was ready to start back did he notice the enormous tracks that led from the woods across the sand to the wretched excuse for a shelter in which he had spent the night.

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    C REWS FORGOT HIS KNEE AND RAN TO THE campsite. From the tracks he could see that the bear had in fact paused to stare down at him, but decided to attack not his person but rather what was left of the food, tearing the hamper apart and devouring the remaining sandwiches.
    He shared the area with a wild beast far more powerful than he, armed with deadly natural weapons, and omnivorously voracious by instinct. News reports told of bears that were sometimes hungry enough to bite chunks out of sleeping campers: legs, shoulders, or even, he remembered hearing, heads . At first he could not even imagine what form of defense to mount against the bear’s return. Some sort of pathetic bow and arrow? He had nothing with which to sharpen either arrow or spear, and any missile too feeble to bring such a creature down would only infuriate it.
    He had been thrust into the situation of the first primitive man to face an animal adversary. No doubt it had been the beasts who won the earliest encounters, until the man could effectively bring his mind into play, he who after all was the wiliest of the apes. You could comfort yourself with such reflections, but realizing a natural potential long buried under softer concerns was another matter.
    Fire was the answer. He could not remain another day in this place without fire. There was no animal on earth that was not terrified by fire. Fire would also warm him and cook the food he had to find now, for his larder was empty. With fire you could signal to searchers: smoke by day, flame by night. But how to make fire? He had constantly to face the truth that he was helpless when in the wild. There was not a moment in which he could afford to ignore his vulnerability to the menaces of the world in which he was stranded. Added to them now was a lack of food, and of course, for the first time in many years, he had woken up hungry.
    The bear was the most frightening of his problems, but Crews had a feeling it would not return immediately. He had no authority for that feeling: he was simply basing it on his own disinclination to hang around some place that had run out of what he wanted from it. Any creature would go elsewhere under those conditions. He was