Free Robert Crews by Thomas Berger Page A

they had been simply too heavy for the animals, as they were for him as well, but he found enough of those he could move to build a sturdy frame by employing as uprights two rooted stumps seven or eight feet apart and gnawed to roughly a common yard in height, and managing to heft a log to stretch between them. But not before making a crude depression at either end to accommodate the jagged tips of the stumps, which resembled sharpened pencil points only from a distance: close up, they were not all that keen. His tools again were rocks: an intact one he used as hammer; another, split, provided chisel-like edges. But with these implements he could not gouge holes sufficiently deep to offer sound connections that would serve for long unassisted. He needed some kind of binding.
    He waded in the pond to the nearest stand of reeds, flushing out several small fish that had been feeding or lurking at the base of the plants, as seen through the water—so he had been right: there was potential food here!—and brought back an armload of long green fronds. They proved tough enough to lash the cross member at each end to its supporting stump, though it took him a while to develop a means by which the reeds could get a purchase on the smooth-peeled vertical shafts. More pounding with his crude tools, the hammer-rock sometimes slipping and bruising the hand with which he held the make-believe chisel, produced circumferential grooves to hold the twisted lashings.
    Once the frame was up, the arranging of the lengths of wood—in some cases trimmed branches, in others real logs—that made up the slanted roof/wall required no effort of design, but the job was physically taxing, for not only were some of the logs at the limit of what he could tote, but he was obliged to work rapidly before the coming of another night. He arranged the lengths side by side, ends on the earth, irregular tops skyward, at roughly an angle of forty-five degrees. When he was done he had a structure that might be called half a wooden tent.
    At the moment he had gone as far as he practically could. He had built a roof that was as sound as possible without its elements (except the upright frame) being tied one to the other, which was to say that if there was another such violent storm as the one of the night before, most of it would probably be blown apart and away. But the sky had cleared and was darkening now by reason only of the hour. The rain had ceased to fall some time since. Nevertheless, he carried back from the nearest evergreens sufficient shaggily foliaged boughs to lay over the bare poles, with their many interstices, of his roof, arriving at a result that surely was not waterproof but at least would repel some drizzle if it came. The structure was open to the south, so as to catch the sun when it next appeared, but a storm like the recent one would have soaked the interior of any lean-to no matter which direction it faced.
    Not until he was ready to retire inside the structure did he remember that his extra clothing remained back at the fallen log, wherever that might be. The air, though dry enough now, had cooled considerably with the coming of evening. Further-more, though he had built his shelter on solid ground beyond the deliquescence of the marsh, the earth was soaked from the heavy rains and there would be no material anywhere from which he could make a dry bed. He tried to dig a shallow trench of the kind that had been of some service on the beach, but the ground here was not sand and though wet had stayed too hard to penetrate easily with a sharpened stick. He was too exhausted to chop much with the stone ax.
    The fact was that he faced his worst night yet. But while just enough light remained so that he would not lose his way, he remembered seeing a patch of mud near the route he had taken to fetch the reeds from the marshland. He made his way there now and, having stripped naked, scooped up handfuls of the stuff and coated every