Free Robert Crews by Thomas Berger

trail or path, let alone a road. He backed out of the water onto the soaked earth and leaned against one of the pencil-ended stumps. It was almost waist-high and had been neatly carved to a ragged point by someone using what must have been a rather small ax or hatchet, judging by the size of the chop marks.
    Across the pond, perhaps forty yards away, was a floating field of lily pads, and while he watched, an enormous horse-like creature emerged from the woods, waded into the water, and began to feed on the aquatic plants. It had a small rack of velvety horns, obviously not full-grown. Crews needed a moment to identify the animal as, probably, a moose.
    He remained motionless against the stump. He was not likely to see a living moose, as opposed to a cartoon version, soon again. He had no plans to return to the wilderness once having escaped from it, but he would treasure the memories he had accumulated here: the bear and now the moose … and next the two beavers he saw swimming to shore. One of them, sleekly fat but agile, was leaving the water when he suddenly understood who it was that had gnawed the trees down and stripped away the bark.
    There would be no human path or trail to find, at least not one associated with the naked tree trunks at hand. The beavers—perhaps, given the devastation, a whole tribe of them—had done this work. He made a motion of chagrin, which was followed quickly by a report so loud that for a heart-lifting instant he took it for a gunshot but then recognized that the leading beaver had leaped back into the pond, smartly slapping the water with his big flat tail. The two glistening heads disappeared beneath the surface. The moose too, for all its size and ungainliness, could move rapidly. It hurled itself from the pond and penetrated the woods with a crash of branches. Before he could sigh, Crews was alone again.
    In a moment he looked for compensation for the disappointment. He now knew of the pond’s existence. Maybe fish would be easier to catch there than in the lake. Also, where did ponds get their water? If in this case the source was a stream, perhaps it led in a direction taking which, on a makeshift raft, one could eventually find fishermen or campers.
    But the rain had started up again and soon was falling in volume, discouraging further exploration. He turned and headed back to the log that was his new home…. Such was his intended destination, but he had no landmarks by which to be guided. The cone-gnawed stumps were indistinguishable from one to the next, nor were the living trees of the forest behind them any more helpful. Sometimes he had walked in shallow water, which retained no tracks. For every fallen tree trunk that looked familiar, there was another nearby that seemed even more so until he took another perspective on it. Crews had a poor sense of direction even when driving a car on paved country roads marked regularly with route signs.
    It was all he could do to restrain himself from panicking and running so far into the woods as to make his problem even worse. Better to keep the pond in sight than to lose even it by a disorienting plunge into a forest that to him was featureless and from which it might be difficult to see the sun when it finally came out. He could reestablish directions once the weather cleared up.
    He decided to build a lean-to on the drier ground at the edge of the swampy area. It would give him a task in which to put to work that anxious energy that might otherwise be wasted or put to a destructive use. And though he admitted that the feeling might be sheer sentimentality, this neighborhood, because of the beavers and the moose (who, unlike the bear, were afraid of him), seemed friendlier than any he had yet encountered.
    The lengths of tree felled by the beavers but not hauled away after the bark was stripped and apparently (since it was gone) eaten were stout material for building. When he sought to lift some of them he suspected