Robert Crews by Thomas Berger Page B

almost noiseless air. This inchoate whistle intrigued the beast, which now brought its face near enough to take a prodigious bite of his if it so decided.
    At last he managed an inner scream, but what emerged was the thinnest of whimpers. Something in it gave pause to the bear, which arrested the movement of its head, then withdrew slightly. Crews was encouraged. Using all his strength, he whimpered again, persisting until he was able to develop an outright whine. Repeated, the whine became a moan, descending from nose to diaphragm.
    The bear slowly backed away, giving him reason to believe its purpose had been more investigatory than hostile. But it no longer looked curious. Perhaps he had annoyed the creature, and it was preparing for a brutal charge. He continued to produce vocal noise, converting the moan into a hum that in turn became a melodious chant, a recitative with bogus words, sheer gibberish, and eventually, by a progression that was almost natural in the sense that he did not think consciously about it, he was singing at almost full volume the lyrics of a song he had not heard since childhood: the theme of a television cartoon series of which the hero was a multicolored parrot that not only spoke comic Brooklynese but solved crimes. In truth, the rendition was far from adequate. Having a tin ear, he was aware he butchered the tune, nor did he remember the words with any clarity. The bird was named Gus, and it made a fuss when something, something, got in a muss, or went bust, or went out of line and was a crime…
    The bear continued to back away, though its expression seemed to grow more unfriendly. But Crews’s morale rose with every receding step the animal took. Soon it had withdrawn so far that it could not conveniently be seen from his supine position. He sat up and stopped singing. The bear ceased to move. Crews hastily resumed his song, but stayed in the seated position. The bear gave him a lengthy stare with its little glittering eyes, then quickly swung its snout around, taking its bulky black body along, and left the beach in a kind of lope that for all its ponderousness also looked carefree.
    Crews continued to sing the nonsense song for some moments after the animal had ambled out of sight among the trees. He sang in relief and triumph, and also as insurance against the bear’s return. The experience had flushed from his mind all previous doubts as to his sanity, and some of his earlier fear of the bear, though he had even more respect for the power of the big beast now that he had been close enough to smell it, and suspecting that his musical weapon might not have been so efficacious had the bear been really hungry, he was far from being blasé. Were he to remain in this region for long, he would have to take more substantial defensive measures, though what kind of barriers could be built, with make-shift tools and vulnerable wooden materials, could not be said. In zoos, dangerous animals were separated from the public by smooth walls of concrete and perhaps a moat as well. In summer, they floated cakes of ice in the latter, and the polar bears plunged in and swam with obvious pleasure….
    This was no time for nostalgia. The matter of feeding himself was paramount. He could only assume he had lost the wrecked plane because of a mental confusion due to physical weakness, which in turn owed to the lack of nourishment in his system. He had applied reason to the problem of the bear, when the animal was face to face with him. He must do as well with the problem of acquiring food. What did bears eat to become so large and burly? He believed they were omnivorous, stealing pawfuls of honeycomb as bees swarmed furiously about them, stings impotent against the thick and long-haired hide. And were they not famous fishermen, wading in rapids and scooping up and tossing huge salmon onto the shore? But as with berries and nuts, he had seen no bees nor salmon locally.
    The beavers had gotten so