Hatchet Ch5-8 PDF

5 HIS EYES snapped open, hammered open, and there were these things about himself that he knew, instantly. He was unbelievably, viciously thirsty. His mouth was dry and tasted foul and sticky. His lips were cracked and felt as if they were bleeding and if he did not drink some water soon...

5 HIS EYES snapped open, hammered open, and there were these things about himself that he knew, instantly. He was unbelievably, viciously thirsty. His mouth was dry and tasted foul and sticky. His lips were cracked and felt as if they were bleeding and if he did not drink some water soon he felt that he would.wither up and die. Lots of water. All the water he could find. He knew the thirst and felt the bum on his face. It was midafternoon and the sun had come over him and cooked.him while he slept and his face was on fire, would blister, would peel. Which did not help the thirst, made it much worse. He stood, 43 using the tree to pull himself up because there was still some pain and much stiffness, and looked down at the lake. It was water. But he did not know if he could drink it. Nobody had ever told him if you could or could not drink lakes. There was also the thought of the pilot. Down in the blue with the plane, strapped in, the body... Awful, he thought. But the lake was blue, and wet-looking, and his mouth and throat raged with the thirst and he did not know where there might be another form of water he could drink. Besides, he had probably swallowed a ton of it while he was. swimming out of the plane and getting to shore. In the movies they always showed the hero finding a clear spring with pure sweet water to drink but in the movies they didn't have plane wrecks and swol- len foreheads and aching bodies and thirst that tore at the hero until he couldn't think. Brian took small steps down the bank to the lake. Along the edge there were thick grasses and the water looked a little murky and there were small things swimming in the water, small bugs. But there was a log extending about twenty feet out into the water of the lake-a beaver drop from some time before-with old limbs sticking up, almost like han- 44 dIes. He balanced on the log, holding himself up with the limbs, and teetered out past the weeds and murky water. When he was out where the water was clear and he could see no bugs swimming he kneeled on the log to drink. A sip, he thought, still worrying about the lake water-I'll just take a sip. But when he brought a cupped hand to his mouth and felt ~e cold lake water trickle past his cracked lips and over his tongue he could not stop. He had never, not even on long bike trips in the hot sum- mer, been this thirsty. It was as if the water were more than water, as if the water had become all of life, and he could not stop. He stooped and put his mouth to the lake and drank and drank, pulling it deep and swallowing great gulps of it. He drank until his stomach was swollen, until he nearly fell off the log with it, then he rose and stagger-tripped his way back to the bank. Where he was immediately sick and threw up most of the water. But his thirst was gone and the water seemed to reduce the pain in his head as well-although the sunburn still cooked his face. "So." He almost jumped with the word, spoken aloud. It seemed so out of place, the sound. He tried it again. "So. So. So here I am." And there it is, he thought. For the first time since 45 the crash his mind started to work, his brain trig- gereo and he began thinking. Here I am-and where is that? Where am I? He pulled himself once more up the bank to the tall tree without branches and sat again with his back against the rough bark. It was hot now, but the sun was high and to his rear and he sat in the shade of the tree in relative comfort. There were things to sort out. Here I am and that is nowhere~ With his mind opened and thoughts happening it all tried to come in with a rush, all of what had occurred and he could not take it. The whole thing turned into a confused jumble that made no sense. So he fought it down and tried to take one thing at a time. He had been flying north to visit his father for a couple of months, in the summer, and the pilot had had a heart attack and had died, and the plane had crashed somewhere in the Canadian north woods but he did not know how far they had flown or in what direction or where he was... Slow down, he thought. Slow down more. My name is Brian Robeson and I am thirteen years old and I am alone in the north woods of Canada. All tight, he thought, that's simple enough. 46  I was fiying to visit my father and the plane crashed and sank in a lake.. There, keep it that way. Short thoughts. I do not know where I am. Which doesn't mean much. More to the pOint, they do not know where I am-they meaning any- body who might be wanting to loolk for me. The searchers. They would look for him, look for the plane. His father and mother would be frantic. They would tear the world apart to find him. Brian had seen searches on the news, seen movies about lost planes. When a plane went down they mounted. extensive searches and almost always they found the plane within a day or two. Pilots all filed flight plans---a detailed plan for where and when they were going to fiy, with all the courses explained. They would come, they would look for him. The searchers would get government planes and cover both sides of the flight plan filed by the pilot and search until they found him. Maybe even today. They might come today. This was the second day after the crash. No. Brian frowned. Was it the first day or the second day? They had gone down in the afternoon and he had spent the whole night out cold. So this was the first real day. But they could still come today. They 47 would have started the search immediately when Brian's plane did not arrive. Yeah, they would probably come today. Probably come in here with amphibious planes, small bushplanes with floats that could land right here on the lake and pick him up and take him home. Which home? The father home or the mother home. He stopped the thinking. It didn't matter.. Either on to his dad or back to his mother. Either way he would probably be home by late night or early morning, home where he could sit down and eat a large, cheesy, juicy burger with tomatoes and double fries with ketchup and a thick chocolate shake. And there came hunger. Brian rubbed his stomach. The hunger had been there but something else-fear, pain-had held it down. Now, with the thought of the burger, the emptiness roared at him. He could not believe the hunger, had never felt it this way. The lake water had filled his stomach but left it hungry, and now it demanded food, screamed for food. And there was, he thought, absolutely nothing to eat. Nothing. What did they do in the movies when they got 48 stranded like this? Oh, yes, the hero usually found some kind of plant that he knew was good to eat and that took care of it. Just ate the plant until he w~ full or used some kind of cute trap to catch an animal and cook it over a slick little fire and pretty soon he had a full eight-course meal. The trouble, Brlan thought, looking around, was that all he could see was graSs and brush. There was nothing obvious to eat and aside from about a million birds and the beaver he hadn't seen animals to trap and cook, and even if he got one somehow he didn't have any matches so he couldn't have a fire... Nothing. It kept -coming back to that. He had nothing. Well, almost nothing. As a matter of fact, he thought, I don't know what I've got or haven't got: Maybe I should try and figure out just how I stand. It will give me something to do--keep me from thinking of food. Until they come to find me. Brian had once had an English teacher, a guy named Perpich, who was always talking about being positive, thinking positive, staying on top of things. That's how Perpich had put it-stay positive and stay on top of things. Brian though~ of him now- wondered how to stay positive and stay on top of - this. All Perpich would say is that I have to get 49 motivated. He was always telling kids to get motivated. Brian changed position so he was sitting on his knees. He reached into his pockets and took out everything he had and laid it on the grass in front of him. It was pitiful enough. A quarter, three dimes, a nickel, and two pennies. A fingernail clipper. A bill- fold with a twenty dollar bill-"In case you get stranded at the airport in some small town and have to buy food," his mother had said-and some odd pieces of paper. And on his belt, somehow still there, the hatchet his mother had given him. He had forgotten it and now reached around and took it out and put it in the grass. There was a touch of rust already forming' on the cutting edge of the blade and he rubbed it off with his thumb. That was it. He frowned. No, wait-if he was going to play the game, might as well play it right. Perpich would tell him to quit messing around. Get motivated. Look ·at all of it, Robeson. He had on a pair of good tennis shoes, now almost dry. And socks. And jeans and underwear and a thin leather belt and a T-shirt with a windbreaker so tom it hung on him in tatters. 50  And a watch. He had a digital watch still on his wrist but it was broken from the crash-the little screen blank-arid he took it off and almost threw it away but stopped the hand motion and lay the watch on the grass with the rest of it. There. That was it. No, wait. One other thing. Those were all the things he had, but he also had himself. Perpich used to drum that into them-"You are your most val- uable asset. Don't forget that. You are the best thing you have." Brian looked around again. I wish you were here, Perpich. I'm hungry and I'd trade everything I have for a hamburger. "I'm hungry." He said it aloud. In normal tones at first, then louder and louder until he was yelling it. ''I'm hungry, I'm hungry, I'm hungry!" When he stopped there was sudden silence, not just from him but the clicks and blurps and bird sounds of the forest as well. The noise of his voice had startled everything and it was quiet. He looked around, listened with his mouth open, and realized. that in all his life he had never heard silence before. Complete silence. There had always been some sound, some kind of sound. It lasted only a few seconds, but it was so intense that it seemed to become part of him. Nothing. 51  There was no sound. Then the bird started again, and some kind of buzzing insect, and then a chat- tering and a cawing, and soon there was the same background of sound. Which left him still hungry. Of course, he thought, putting the coins and the rest back in his pocket and the hatchet in his belt- of course if they come tOnight or even if they take as long as tomorrow the hunger is no big thing. People have gone for many days without food as· long as they've got water. Even if they don't come until late tomorrow I'll be all right. Lose a little weight, maybe, but the first hamburger and a malt and fries will bring it right back. A mental picture ·of a hamburger, the way they showed it in the television commercials, thundered into his thoughts. Rich colors, the meat juicy and hot... He pushed the picture away. So even if they didn't find him until tomorrow, he thought, he would be all right. He had plenty of water, although he wasn't ,. sure if it was good and clean or not. He sat again by the tree, his back against it. There was a thing bothering him. He wasn't quite sure what it was but it kept chewing at the edge of his thoughts. Something about the plane and the pilot that would change things... Ahh, there it was.--the moment when the pilot 52 had his heart attack his right foot had jerked down on the rudder pedal and the plane had slewed side- ways. What did that mean? Why did that keep com- ing into his thinking that way, nudging and pushing? It means, a voice in his thoughts said, that they might not be coming for you tOnight or even to- morrow. When the pilot pushed the rudder pedal the plane had jerked to the side and assumed a new course. Brian could not remember how much it had pulled around, but it wouldn't have had to be much because after that, with the pilot dead, Brian had flown for hour after hour on the new course. Well away from the flight plan the pilot had filed. Many hours, at maybe 160 miJes an hour. Even if it was only a little off course, with that speed and time Brian might now be Sitting several hundred miles off to the side of the recorded flight plan. And they would probably search most heavily at first along the flight plan course. They might go out to the side a little, but he could easily be three, four hundred miles to the side. He could not know, could not think of how far he might have flown wrong because he didn't know the original course and didn't know how much they had pulled Sideways. Quite a bit-that's how he remembered it. Quite a jerk to the side. It pulled his head over sharply when the plane had swung around. They might not find him for two or three days. 53 He felt his heartbeat increase as the fear started. The thought was there but he fought it down for a time, pushed it away, then it exploded out. They might not find him for -a long time. And the next thought was there as well, that they might never find him, but that was panic and he fought it down and tried to stay positive.. They searched hard when a plane went down, they used many men and planes and they would go to the side, they would kllow he was off from the flight path, he had talked to the man on the radio, they would somehow know... It would be all right. They would find him. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon. Soon. Soon. They would find him soon. Gradually, like sloshing oil his thoughts settled back and the panic was gone. Say they didn't come for two days--no, say they didn't come for three days, even push that to four days--he could live with that. He would have to live with that. He didn't want to think of them taking longer. But say four days. He had to do something. He couldn't just sit at the bottom of this tree and stare down at the lake for four days. And nights. He was in deep woods and didn't have any matches, couldn't make a fire. There were large 54  things in the woods. There were wolves, he thought, and bears--other things. In the dar~ he would be.in the open here, just sitting at the bottom of a tree. He looked around suddenly, felt the hair on the back of his neck go up. Things might be looking at him right now, waiting for him-waiting for dark so they could move in and take him. He fingered the hatchet at his belt. It was the only weapon he had, but it was something. He had to have some kind of shelter. No, make that more: He had to have some kind of shelter and he had to have something to eat. He pulled himself to his feet and jerked the back of his shirt down before the mosquitos could get at it. He had to do something to help himself. I have to get motivated, he thought, remembering Perpich. Right now I'm all I've got. I have to do something. 55 6 Two YEARS before he and Terry had been fooling around down near the park, where the city seemed to end for a time and the trees grew thick and came down to the small river that went through the park. It was thick there and seemed kind of wild, and they had been joking and making things up and they pretended that they were lost in the woods and talked in the afternoon about what they would do. Of course they figured they'd have all sorts of good- ies like a gun and a knife and fishing gear and matches so they could hunt and fish and have a fire. I wish you w~re here, Terry, he thought. _With a gun and a knife and some matches... In the park that time they had decided the best 56 shelter was a lean-to and Brian set out now to make one up. Maybe cover it with grass or leaves or sticks, he thought, and he starte.d to go down to the lake again, where there were some willows he could cut down for braces. But it struck him that he ought to find a good place for the lean-to and so he decided to look around first. He wanted to stay near the lake because he thought the plane, even deep in the water, might show up to somebody flying over and he didn't want to diminish any chance he might have of being found. His eyes fell upon the stone ridge to his left and he thought at first he should build his shelter against the stone. But before that he decided to check out the far side of the ridge and that was where he got lucky. Using the sun and the fact that it rose in the east and set in the west, he decided that the far side was the northern side of the ridge. At one time in the far past it had been scooped by something, probably a glacier, and this scooping had left a kind of side- ways bowl, back in under a ledge. It wasn't very deep, not a cave, but it was smooth and made a perfect roof and he could almost stand in under the ledge. He had to hold his head slightly tipped for- ward at the front to keep it from hitting the top: Some of the rock that had been scooped out had 57 also been pulverized by the glacial· action, turned into sand, and now made a small sand beach that went down to the edge of the water in front and to the right of the overhang. It was his first good luck. No, he thouglit. He had good luck in the landing. But this was good luck as well, luck he needed. All he had to do was wall off part of the bowl and leave an opening as a doorway and he would have a perfect shelter-much stronger than a lean-to and dry because the overhang made a watertight roof.. He crawled back in, under the ledge, and sat. The sand was cool here in the shade, and the coolness felt wonderful to his face, which was already starting to blister and get especially painful on his forehead, with the blisters on top of the swelling. He was also stm weak. Just the walk around the back of the ridge and the slight climb over the top had left his legs rubbery. It felt good to sit for a bit under the shade of the overhang in the cool sand. And now, he thought, if I just had something to eat. Anything. When he had rested a bit he went back down to the lake and drank a couple of swallows of water. He wasn't all that thirsty but he thought the water might help to take the edge off his hunger. It didn't. 58 Somehow the cold lake water actually made it worse, sharpened it. He thought of dragging in wood to make a wall on part of the overhang, and picked. u~' one piece to pull up, but his arms were too weak a d he knew then that it wasn't just the crash and inj ry to his body and head, it was also that he was weak from hunger. He would have to find something to eat. Before he did anything else he would have to have some- thing to eat. But what? Brian leaned against the rock and stared out at the -lake. What, in all of this, was there to eat? He was so used to having food just be there, just always being there. When he was hungry he went to the icebox, or to the store, or sat down at a meal his mother cooked. Oh, he thought, remembering a meal now~h. It was the last Thanksgiving, last year, the last Thanksgiving they had as a family before his mother demanded the divorce and his father moved out in the following]anuary. Brian already knew the Secret but did not know it would cause them to break up and thought it might work out, the Secret that his father still did not know but that he would try to tell him. When he saw him. 59  The meal had been turkey and they cooked it in the back yard in the barbecue over charcoal with the lid down tight. His father had put hickory chips on the charcoal and the smell of the cooking turkey and ~e hickory smoke had filled the yard. When his father took the lid off, smiling, the· smell that had come out was unbelievable, and when they sat to eat the meat was wet with jui,e and rich and· had the taste of the smoke in it... He had to stop this. His mouth was Jull of saliva and his stomach was twisting and growling. What was there to eat? What had he read or seen that told him about food in the wilderness? Hadn't there been some- thing? A show, yes, a show on television about air force pilots and some kind of course they took. A survival course. All right, he had the show c;oming into his thoughts now. The pilots had to live in the desert. They put them in the desert down in Arizona or someplace and they had to live for a week. They had to find food and water for a week. For water they had made a sheet of pl~tic into a dew-gathering device and for food they ate lizards. That was it. Of course Brian had lots of water and there weren't too many lizards in the Canadian woods, that he knew. One of the pilots had used a watch crystal as a magnifying glass to focus the sun and start a fire so they didn't have to eat the lizards 60  · raw. But Brian had a digital watch, without a crystal, broken at that. So the show didn't help him much. Wait, there was one thing. One of the pilots, a woman, had found some kind of beans on a bush and she had used them with her lizard meat to make a little stew in a tin can she had found. Bean lizard stew. There weren't any beans here, but there must be berries. There had to be berry bushes around. Sure, the woods were full of berry bushes. That's what everybody always said. Well, he'd actually never heard anybody say it. But he felt that it should be true. There must be berry bushes. He stood and moved out into the sand and looked up at the sun. It was still high. He didn't know what time it must be. At home it would be one or two if the sun were that high. At home at one or two his mother would be putting away the lunch dishes and getting ready for her exercise class. No, that would have been yesterday. Today she would be going to see him. Today was Thursday and she al- ways went to see him on Thursdays. Wednesday was the exercise class and Thursdays she went to see him. Hot little jets of hate worked into his thoughts, pushed once, moved back. If his mother \ hadn't begun to see him and forced the divorce, Brian wouldn't be here now. He shook his head. Had to stop that kind of think- 61  - ing. The sun was still high and" that meant that he had some time before darkness to find berries. He didn't want to be away from his---he almost thought of it as home-shelter when it came to be dark. He didn't want to be anywhere in the woods when it came to be dark. And he didn't want to get lost-which was a real problem. All he knew in the world was the lake in front of him and the hill at his back and the ridge-if he lost Sight of them there was a really good chance that he would get turned around and not find his way back. So he had to look for berry bushes, but keep the lake or the rock ridge in Sight at all times. He looked up the lake shore, to the north. For a good distance, perhaps two hundred yards, it was fairly clear. There were tall pines, the kind with no limbs until very close to the top, with a gentle breez~ sighing in them, but not too much low brush. Two hundred yards up there seemed to be a belt of thick, lower brush starting-about ten or twelve feet high-and that formed a wall he could not see through. It seemed to-go on around the lake, thick and lushly green, but he could not be sure. If there were berries they would be in that brush, he felt, and as long as he stayed close to the lake, so he could keep the water on his right and know it was there, he wouldn't get lost. When he was 62 done or found berries, he thought, he would just tum around so the water was on his left and walk back until he came to the ridge and his shelter. Simple. Keep it simple. I am Brian Robeson. I have been in a plane crash. I am going to find some food. I am going to find berries. He walked slowly-still a bit pained in his joints and weak from hunger-up along the side of the lake. The trees were full of birds singing ahead of him in the sun. Some he knew, some he didn't. He saw a robin, and some kind of sparrows, and a flock of reddish orange birds with thick beaks. Twenty or thirty of them were Sitting in one of the pines. They made much noise and flew away ahead of him when he walked under the tree. He watched them fly, their color a bright slash in solid green, and in this way he found the berries. The birds landed in some taller willow type of undergrowth with wide leaves and started jumping and making noise. At first he was too far away to see what th.ey were doing, but their color drew him and he moyed to- ward them, keeping the lake in Sight on his right, cmd when he got closer he saw they were eating berries. He could not believe it was that easy. It was as if the birds had taken him right to the berries. The slender _branches went up about twenty feet and were heavy, drooping with clusters of bright red berries. They were half as big as grapes but hung in bunches much like grapes and when Brian· saw them, glistening red in the sunlight, he almost yelled. His pace quickened and he was in them in mo- me~ts, scattering the birds, grabbing branches, stripping them to fill his mouth with berries. He almost spit them out. It wasn't that they were bitter so much as that they lacked any sweetness, had a tart flavor that left his mouth dry feeling. And they were like cherries in that they had large pits, which made them hard to chew. But there was such a hunger on him, such an emptiness, that he could not stop and kept stripping branches and eating berries by the handful, grabbing and jamming them. into his mouth and swallowing them pits and all. He could not stop and when, at last, his stomach was full he was still hungry. Two days without food must have shrunken his stomach, but the drive of hunger was still there. Thinking of the birds, and how they would come back into the berries when he left, he made a carrying pouch of his torn wind- breaker and kept picking. Finally, when he judged he had close to four pounds in the jacket he stopped and went back to his camp by the ridge. Now, he thought. Now I have some food and I 64 can do something about fixing this place up. He glanced at the sun and saw he had some time before dark. If only I had matches, he thought, looking ruefully at the beach and lakeside. There was driftwood everywhere, not to mention dead and dry wood all over the hill and dead-dry branches hanging from every tree. All firewood. And no matches. How did they used to do it? he thought. Rub two sticks together? He tucked the berries in the pouch back in under the overhang in the cool shade and found a couple of sticks. After ten minutes of rubbing he felt the sticks and they were almost cool to the touch. Not that, he thought. They didn't do fire that way. He threw the sticks down in disgust. So no fire. But he could still fix the shelter and make it-here the word "safer" came into his mind and he didn't know why-more livable. Kind of close in it, he thought. I'll just close it in a bit. He started dragging sticks up from the lake and pulling long dead branches down.from the hill, never getting out of Sight of the water and the ridge. With these - he interlaced - and wove a wall across the opening of the front of the rock. It took over two hours, and he had to stop several times because 65 he still felt a bit weak and once because he felt a strange new twinge in his stomach. A tightening, rolling. Too many berries, he thought. I ate too many of them. But it was gone soon and he kept working until the entire front of the overhang was covered save for a small opening. at the right end, nearest the lake. The doorway was about three feet, and when he went in he found himself in a room almost fifteen feet long and eight to ten feet deep, with the rock wall sloping down at the rear. "Good," he said, nodding. "Good... " Outside the sun was going down, finally, and in the initial coolness the mosquitos came out again and clouded in on him. They were thick, terrible, if not quite as bad as in the morning, and he kept brushing them off his arms until he couldn't stand it and then dumped the berries and put the torn windbreaker on. At least the sleeves covered his arms. Wrapped in the jacket, with darkness coming down fast now, he crawled back in under the rock and huddled and tried to sleep. He was deeply tired, and still aching some, but sleep was slow coming and did not finally settle in until the evening cool turned to night cool and the mosquitos slowed. Then, at last, with his stomach turning on the berries, Brian went to sleep. 66  7 "MOTHER!" He screamed it and he could not be sure if the scream awakened him or the pain in his stomach. His whole abdomen was torn with great rolling jolts of pain, pain that doubled him in the darkness of the little shelter, put him over and face down in the sand to moan again and again: "Mother, mother, mother... " Never anything like this. Never. It was as if all the berries, all the pits had exploded in the center of him, ripped and tore at him. He crawled out the doorway and was sick in the sand, then crawled still farther and was sick again, vomiting and with ter- rible diarrhea for over an hour, for over a year he 67 thought, until he was at last empty and drained of all strength. Then he crawled back into the shelter and fell again to the sand but could not sleep at first, could do nothing except lie there, and his mind decided then to bring the memory up again. In the mall. Every detail. His mother sitting in the station wagon with the man. And she had leaned across and kissed him, kissed the man with the short blond hair, and it was not a friendly peck, but a kiss. A kiss where she turned her head over at an angle and put her mouth against the mouth of the blond man who was not his father and kissed, mouth to mouth, and then brought her hand up to touch his cheek, his forehead, while they were kissing. And Brian saw it. Saw this thing that his mother did with the blond man. Saw the kiss that became the Secret that his father still did not know about, know all about. The memory was so real that he could feel the heat in the mall that day, could remember the worry that Terry would turn and see his mother, could remember the worry of the shame of it and then the memory faded and he. slept again... Awake. For a second, perhaps two, he did not know 68 where he was, was still in his sleep somewhere. Then he saw the sun streaming in the open doorway of the shelter and heard the close, vicious whine of the mosquitos and knew. He brushed his face, com- pletely welted now with two days of bites, com- c pletely covered with lumps and bites, and was surprised to find the swelling on his forehead had gone down a great deal, was almost gone. The smell was awful and he couldn't place it. Then he saw the pile of berries at the back of t\le shelter and remembered the night and being sick. "Too many of them," he said aloud. "Too many gut cherries... " He crawled out of the shelter and found where he'd messed the sand. He used sticks and cleaned it as best he could, covered it with clean sand and went down to the lake to wash his hands and get a drink. It was still very early, only just past true dawn, and the water was so calm he could see his reflec- tion. It frightened him-the face was cut and bleed- ing, swollen and lumpy, the hair all matted, and on his forehead a cut had healed but left the hair stuck with blood and scab. His eyes were slits in the bites and he was--somehow--covered with dirt. He slapped the water with his hand to destroy the mirror. 69  Ugly, he thought. Very, very ugly. And he was, at that moment, almost overcome with self-pity. He was dirty and starving and bitten and hurt and lonely and ugly and afraid and so com- pletely miserable that it was like being in a pit, a dark, deep pit with no way out. He sat back on the bank and fought crying. Then let it come and cried for perhaps three, four min- utes. Long tears, self-pity tears, wasted tears. He stood, went back to the water, and took small drinks. -As soon as the cold water hit his stomach he felt the hunger sharpen, as it had before, and he stood and held his abdomen until the hunger cramps receded. He had to eat. He was weak with it again, down with the hunger, and he had to eat. Back at the shelter the berries lay in a pile where he had dumped them when he grabbed his wind- breaker-gut cherries he called them in his mind now-and he thought of eating some of them. Not such -a crazy amount, as he had, which he felt brought on the sickness in the night-but just enough to stave off the hunger a bit. He crawled into the shelter. Some flies were on the berries and he brushed them off. He selected only the berries that were solidly ripe-not the light red ones, but the berries that were dark, maroon 70 red to black and swollen in ripeness. When he' had a small handful of them he went back down to the lake and washed them in the water-small fish scat- tered away when he splashed the water up and he wished he had a fishing line and hook-then he ate them carefully, spitting out the pits. They were still tart, but had a sweetness to them, although they seemed to make his lips a-bit numb. When he finished he was still hungry, but the edge was gone and his legs didn't feel as weak as they had. He went back to the shelter_ It took him half an hour to go through the rest of the berries and s6rt them, putting all the fully ripe ones in a pile on some leaves, the rest in another pile. When he was done he covered the two piles with grass he tore from the lake shore to keep the flies off and went back outside. They were awful berries, those gut cherries, he thought. But there was food there, food of some kind, and he could eat a bit more later tOnight if he had to. For now he had a full day ahead of him. He looked at the sky through the trees and saw that while there were clouds they were scattered and did not seem to hold rain. There was a light breeze that seemed to keep the mosquitos down and, he thought, look- 71. ing up along the lake shore, if there was one kind of berry there should be other kinds. Sweeter kinds. If he kept the lake in sight as he had done yes- terday he should be all right, should be able to find home again-and it stopped him. He had actually thought it that time. Home. Three days, no, two-or was it three? Yes, this was the third day and he had thought of the shelter as home. He turned and looked at it, studied the crude work. The brush made a fair wall, not weathertight but it cut most of the wind off. He hadn't done so badly at that. Maybe it wasn't much, but also maybe it was all he had for a home. All right, he thought, so I'll call it home. He turned back and set off up the side of the lake, heading for the gut cherry bushes, his windbreaker- bag in his hand. Things were bad, he thought, but maybe not that bad. Maybe he could find some better berries. When he came to the gut cherry bushes he paused. The branches were empty of birds but still had many berries, and some of those that had been merely red yesterday were now a dark maroon to black. Much riper. Maybe he should stay and pick them to save them. But the explosion in the night was still much in his memory and he decided to go on. Gut cherries 72 were food, but tricky to eat. He needed something better. Another hundred yards up the shore there was a place where the wind had torn another path. These must have been fierce winds, he thought, to tear places up like this-as they had the path he had found with the plane when he crashed. Here the trees were not all the way down but twisted and snapped off halfway up from the ground, so their tops were all down and rotted and gone, leaving the snags poking into the sky like broken teeth. It made for tons of dead and dry wood and he wished once more he could get a fire going. It also made a kind of clearing-with the tops of the trees gone the sun could get down to the ground-and it was filled with small thorny bushes that were covered with berries. Raspberries. These he knew because there were some rasp- berry bushes in the park and he and Terry were always picking and eating them when they biked past. The berries were full and ripe, and he tasted one to find it sweet, and with none of the problems of the gut cherries. Although they did not grow in clusters, there were many of them and they were easy to pick and Brian smiled and started eating. Sweet juice, he thought. Oh, they were sweet 73 with just a tiny. tang and he picked and ate and picked and ate 'and thought that he had never tasted anything this good. Soon, as before, his stomach was full, but now he had some sense and he did not gorge or cram more down. Instead he picked more and put them in' his. windbreaker, feeling the morn- ing sun on his back and thinking he was rich, rich with food now, just iich, and he heard a noise to his rear, a slight noise, and he turned and saw the bear. He could do nothing, think nothing. His tongue, stained with berry juice, stuck to the roof.of his mouth and he stared at the bear. It was black, with a cinnamon-colored nose, not twenty feet from him and big. No, huge. It was all black fur and huge. He had seen one in the zoo in the city once, a black bear, but it had been from India or somewhere. This one was wild, and much bigger than the one in the zoo and it was right there. Right there. The sun caught the ends of the hairs along his back. Shining black and silky the bear stood on its hind legs, half up, and studied Brian, just studied him, then lowered itself and moved slowly to the left, eating berries as it rolled along, wufiling and delicately using its mouth to lift each berry from the stem,. and in seconds it was gone. Gone, and 74 Brian still had not moved. His tongue was stuck to the top of his mouth, the tip half out, his eyes were wide and his hands were reaching for a berry. Then he made a sound, a lqw: "Nnnnnnggg." It made no sense, was just a sound of fear, of disbelief that something that large could have come so close to him without his knowing. It just walked up to him and could hav~ eaten him and he could have done nothing. Nothing. And when the sound was half done a th.ing happened with his legs, a thing he had nothing to do with, and they were running in the opposite direction from the bear, back toward the ·shelter. He would have run all the way, in panic, but after he had gone perhaps fifty yaids his brain took over and slowed and, finally, stopped him. If the bear had wanted you, his brain said, he would have taken you. It is something to under- stand, he thought, not something to run away from. The bear was eating berries. Not people. The bear made no move to hurt you, to threaten you. It stood to see you better, study you, then went on its way eating berries. It was a big bear, but it did not want you, did not want to cause you harm, and that is the thing to understand here. He turned and looked back at the stand of rasp- 75 berries. The bear was gone, the birds were singing, he saw nothing that could hurt him. There was no danger here that he could sense, could feel. In the city, at night, there was sometimes danger. You could not be in the park at night, after dark, because of the danger. But here, the bear had looked at him and had moved on and-this filled his thoughts- the berries were so good. So good. So sweet and rich and his body was so empty. And.the bear had almost indicated that it didn't mind sharing-had just walked from him. And the berries were so good. And, he t!t0ught, finally, if he did not go back and get the berries he would have to eat th~ gut cherries again tonight. That convinced him and he walked slowly back to the raspberry patch and continued picking for the entire morning, although with great caution, and :once when a squirrel rustled some pine needles at the base of -a tree he nearly jumped out of his skin. About noon-the sun was almost straight over- head-the clouds began to thicke-n and look dark. In moments it started to rain and he took what he had picked and trotted back to the shelter. He had eaten probably two pounds of raspberries and had 76 maybe another three pounds in his jacket, rolled in a pouch. He made it to the shelter just as the clouds com- pletely opened and the rain roared down in sheets. Soon the sand outside was drenched and there were rivulets running down to the lake. But inside he was dry and snug. He started to put the picked berries back in the sorted pile with the gut cherries but noticed that the raspberries were seeping through the jacket. They were much softer than the gut cherries and apparently were being crushed a bit with their own weight. When he held the jacket up and looked beneath it he saw a stream of red liquid. He put a finger in it and found it to be sweet and tangy, like pop without the fizz, and he grinned and lay back on the sand, holding the bag up over his face and letting the seepage drip into his mouth. Outside the rain poured down, but Brian lay back, drinking the syrup from the berries, dry and with the pain almost all gone, the stiffness also gone, his belly full and a good taste in his mouth. For the first time since the crash he was not think- ing of himself, of his own life. Brian was wondering if the bear was as surprised as he to find another being in the berries. Later in the afternoon, as evening came down, he 77 went to the lake and washed the sticky berry juice from his face and hands, then went back to prepare for the night. While he had accepted and understood that the bear did not want to hurt him, it was still much in his thoughts and as darkness came into the shelter he took the hatchet out of his belt and put it by his head, his hand on the handle, as the day caught up with him and he slept. 78  8 AT FIRST he thought it was a growl. In the still dark- ness of the shelter in the middle of the night his eyes came open and he was awake and he thought there was a growl. But it was the