Robert Crews by Thomas Berger

remained cooler than the air.
    He was hungry enough by now to swallow the little fish raw, but forced himself into distractions. He examined his hand. The wound had continued to heal, making so much progress, despite all the dirty labor, that it was all but gone.… Because his attention had been elsewhere, he had worn the same pair of pants for many days, and they were a disgrace. He exchanged them now for the jeans from the duffel bag (which already were loose at the waist), and while he was at it, he changed his drawers. He wore socks as little as possible, to save wear and tear on his supply of four pairs. He checked the birch-bark pot once again. It might have been only his imagination, but the water no longer felt positively cool to the fingertip.
    He gathered together his dirty laundry and went to the stream. He had no soap, so the clothes would not get really clean, but on the positive side was the fact that washing them would not befoul the brook, for all the dirt on the garments had come from this quarter mile of wilderness.
    When he had returned from that chore and spread the clothes to dry on the roof of the lean-to, he found that the water in the birch-bark vessel had, when not watched, reached the proper temperature and was simmering with conviction. So it was true that the miraculous sometimes happened in nature. Why the bark failed to burn was not his business. He got his minnows and put them to boil.
    Probably he cooked the little fish too long: they were falling apart when he took them from the pan. But the fact was that they proved to be the most delicious food he had ever put into his mouth. Even most of the bones were edible. The trouble was that the supply proved woefully meager. He devoured the entire catch in hardly more time than it took to empty the steaming contents of the bark kettle onto a bed of clean leaves.
    He put another potful of water on the fire and went to seine up more minnows. By the time the bark vessel boiled again and seconds had been caught, cooked, and eaten, much of another afternoon was gone.
    It was a luxury now to sprawl next to the pond, with a full belly, in benevolent light and warmth, stout lean-to nearby, laundry drying on its roof, breeze stirring the rushes, sun shimmering on the water. It could be that he was less alien here than in society, were the truth known, and, thoroughly sober for the first time in years, he could reflect on what he had been with another and less limiting emotion than self-pity.
    He felt so good that he had the courage to lean over and catch a glimpse of himself on the looking-glass surface of the pond. He was shocked. He knew he had not shaved or combed his hair (which in fact had needed a trim for some weeks before the trip), and though he had bathed his person, willy-nilly, by sporadic immersions, he had not often washed his face nor brushed his teeth, but he was not prepared to see the swarthy derelict who stared back at him. He could have looked at himself at any time since recovering the shaving mirror from the airplane, but he had not considered so doing. The mirror was a tool by which he sought to survive. To see his face in magnification had never been a pleasure.
    At that moment—and suddenly, because the wind was blowing in the wrong direction—he heard a plane hardly sooner than he saw it fly overhead, at an altitude much lower than that of the one that had come the day after the crash.
    He scrambled to his feet and waved. He shouted uselessly. He ran to fetch the mirror and signal with it. He ripped at the nearest greenery and threw it on the fire, which by now, the cooking long since completed, had been allowed to go to embers. Wisps came soon, but a good mass of smoke, enough to be visible from above, was excruciatingly slow to gather, and did not really do so until the craft, after a wide and momentarily promising circle, picked up speed and shot beyond the horizon of treetops. Had he stayed on the shore of the lake, he