Free Robert Crews by Thomas Berger Page B

part of his body he could reach except for the head and the privates. To protect his back, which got coldest when he slept, he smeared a thick coating inside the T-shirt he would wear against his skin. The mud happily turned out to be rather a kind of clay, a stiffer ointment to apply but no doubt preferable as insulation and with less of a connotation of dirt, though he was getting beyond such concerns. At the moment of application the wet stuff felt cold, but only a few moments later he had at least the illusion of being encapsulated in a deliciously warm investment, a sort of armor, and he began to feel as if protected against the bear as well as the cold. Before returning to the lean-to, he even capped most of his head in clay, including the backs of his ears, leaving only his face uncovered.
    Under the roof of poles, he had a mattress of more shaggy pine branches, which when shaken vigorously were not as wet as the ground. When he lay down upon its springiness he felt warm enough by reason of the clay coating underneath his damp clothes to recognize that, given the conditions, he had actually attained, wondrously, a state of comfort. He went to sleep immediately.
    When he woke, as usual now, at first light, the clay had dried here and there on his body and for a moment it might have seemed as though he were imprisoned in pottery. But when he vigorously flexed his limbs, chunks of the armor loosened and, as he rose, fell down the legs of his pants. The chest plating too detached itself easily and collected in fragments at his belt, bulging there until, leaving the lean-to, he freed the tail of the T-shirt and let most of the rest of his clay underwear fall to the ground. It had done the job in an emergency, as had he.
    The air was still cool at that hour but seemed to grow warmer by the moment, for the sky was beautifully clear except for the intense striated colors of the rising sun, which was just at the point of his horizon that was farthest from where he would have placed the east. Therefore his lean-to faced north, not south. How right he had been the day before to stay here by the pond and not attempt to return lakeward. Caution was the way to survive. The moose, big as it was, was not ashamed to run from a harmless midget like himself. When in doubt, choose the prudent alternative. That was nature’s way.
    His hair was still full of dried clay, and a good deal remained stuck inside the T-shirt, making him itch. He stripped, ran to the pond, plunged in, and almost fainted from the heart-stopping, suffocating cold of the water, which felt as if at a much lower temperature than that of the lake. This enterprise had scarcely been prudent. For a few instants he could not move his gelid arms, and his immobile legs were inanimate weights that pulled him down…. He was standing on the bottom, in water that was waist-deep. Prudently, he had belly-flopped. But very soon his personal temperature had altered, and suddenly finding the air colder than the water, he crouched to cover his trunk while he rinsed the clay from his head.
    By the time he had finished his ablutions the sun was all the way up and though still not at quite the angle to provide maximum warmth, it was a glorious sight for the cheering of spirits—which, however, fell with his worry as to whether he could locate the fallen log near which could be found the top of the electric-razor case with its magnifying mirror.
    He toweled himself on his T-shirt, which he wrung out after having washed it free of clay in the pond. He left it to dry on the roof of the lean-to and, dressed in the trousers and polo shirt, barefoot, set off through the trees. He had apparently not strayed that far the day before: he soon arrived at the shore of the lake, though seemingly not near the place where he had camped the first two days. In any event, he could not find the trench nor what remained of the HELP sign, and finally had to believe they had been obliterated by