Robert Crews by Thomas Berger

reason of the storm. He had established no landmarks on the opposite shore, an unbroken wall of green. He would not have understood, at any earlier time, how easy it was to become disoriented in a state of nature from which all other men were absent.
    By now he had gone without food for several days, which days had furthermore been characterized by strenuous physical labor. Therefore when he returned to the pond he decided to focus his immediate energy on the acquisition of food. The fish seen swimming in the water around the reeds were an obvious choice. After several attempts with various dead branches and one that he had chopped off a living tree—some of the dry ones were too brittle, whereas the fresh limb was too tough, too wiry, to sharpen with his tools—Crews fashioned a pointed spear that looked and felt as though it would do the job.
    He waded into the water. He was barefoot but he kept his pants on, not even rolling them up. He entrusted his naked feet to the pond, the bottom of which he could feel as an ooze, not unpleasant, but he was leery of exposing his naked legs to carnivorous eels, snapping turtles, or God knew what.
    But the problem with the pond turned out to be not the presence of hostile creatures but rather the absence of any animate thing. Today he failed to see a single fish in or near the reeds. When at last he emerged, spear trailing, he almost stepped on a small green frog sitting in no more than a quarter inch of water. By the time he brought up the weapon, the miniature creature had long since leaped to invisibility among aquatic weeds. It had anyway been too little to provide much food. He remembered from schoolboy biology that the plump midsection was all guts and such meat as there was could be found only in the legs, which on this tiny fellow had been lean indeed.
    The sun had already climbed high in today’s clear skies. More important than food—such food as he would be able to provide even when his efforts were efficacious—was the matter of an effective means of signaling to aircraft, and he had come up with a good idea. The submerged airplane surely still held some gasoline. If he dived down and opened the cap of the fuel tank, the gas, being lighter than water, would soon rise to the surface of the lake, where it could be ignited at the first sound of an engine overhead. He also remembered that the others’ baggage, no doubt packed with warm clothes, had been stowed in the wing compartments.
    But first he had to locate the fallen log at which the magnifying mirror, along with the rest of his possessions, was cached. He made exploratory trips into the woods in various directions, but after several of these in which he recognized nothing in the terrain, he was once again threatened with demoralization. It was ridiculous and degrading to get lost within a few hundred yards of trees, and all the more so when you were already lost in the larger sense. In chagrin he sat down on another huge fallen tree, which was somewhat similar to the one he sought, in fact very similar though different in a subtle way, tapering at the wrong end, which meant it had fallen to point south, not north like his…. But the fact was that when he had last seen “his” log, rain was falling, the sun was not in evidence, and he had had no idea of where either north or south was.
    At last he stood up, walked around to look at the other side of the log, and saw the den he had dug out of the dead branches and leaves to take refuge in two nights before, and therein lay the goods he had cached. He cried out in triumph, the first sound he had produced vocally since the crash. He knelt and touched his precious possessions, each in turn. Never before had he been a materialist. In the early years of his drinking, when he still had things that other people coveted, he was quite capable of presenting costly gifts to near-strangers, such as the Patek Philippe he slid from his wrist and