Robert Crews by Thomas Berger Read Free Book Online Page B

pleased to be thinking like an animal, if indeed such was what he was doing; it had no precedent. The bear aside, then, there remained the matter of: a source of food; better means to keep warm; an improved method of signaling to aircraft…
    He broke off here to gather the boughs used ineffectively to roof the trench and quickly reconstructed the HELP sign—while suspecting that a pilot who flew low enough to see letters of this size would be able to spot his person as easily, all the more so if he waved vigorously. But at the time of the flyover he might be underwater or back in the woods, and something was better than nothing. He did need a more conspicuous signal…. A mirror!
    His disloyal knee chose this moment to remind him that its sudden recovery had been a hoax. It began to hurt more than ever. He hopped on the good leg to the duffel bag and took from it the little padded box in which his electric razor traveled. A hand-sized mirror was affixed to the interior of its upper lid. Because it seemed to be cemented firmly in place, instead of trying to pry the mirror off and perhaps cracking the glass, he neatly ripped the entire lid away from the small hinges attaching it to the lower half of the case.
    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