CHAPTER 2

At noon, feeling himself like the ship-wrecked mariner who from his raft

sees the steamer cross along the horizon, he heard the sound of cars, two

of them, coming up the steep road. They approached, and then went on,

without stopping. He called to them, but by now he was weak, and his voice,

he was sure, did not carry the hundred yards to the turn-off where the cars

were passing.

Even so, before dusk he struggled to his feet, and lighted the kerosene

lamp. He did not want to be left in the dark.

Apprehensively, he bent his lanky body down to peer into the little mirror,

set too low for him because of the sloping roof of the cabin. His long face

was thin always, and scarcely seemed thinner now, but a reddish flush

showed through the sun-tan of his cheeks. His big blue eyes were

blood-shot, and stared back at him wildly with the glare of fever. His

light brown hair, unruly always, now stuck out in all directions,

completing the mirror-portrait of a very sick young man.

He got back into his bunk, feeling no great sense of fear although now he

more than half expected that he was dying. Soon a violent chill struck him;

from that he passed into a fever. The lamp burned steadily on the table,

and he could see around the cabin. The hammer which he had dropped on the

floor still stood there, handle pointed stiffly upwards, precariously

balanced. Being right before his eyes, the hammer occupied an unduly large

part of his consciousness-he thought about it a little disorderedly, as if

he were making his will, an old-fashioned will in which he described the

chattels he was leaving. "One hammer, called a *single-jack,* weight of

head four pounds, handle one foot long, slightly cracked, injured by

exposure to weather, head of hammer somewhat rusted, still serviceable." He

had been extraordinarily pleased when he had found the hammer, appreciating

that actual link with the past. It had been used by some miner in the old

days when rock-drills were driven home in a low tunnel with a man swinging

a hammer in one hand; four pounds was about the weight a man could handle

in that way, and it was called a single-jack because it was managed

one-handedly. He thought, feverishly, that he might even include a picture

of the hammer as an illustration in his thesis.

Most of those hours of darkness he passed in little better than a

nightmare, racked by coughing, choking frequently, shaking with the chill

and then burning with the fever. A pink measles-like rash broke out on him.

At daybreak he felt himself again sinking into a deep sleep.

*"It has never happened!" cannot be construed to mean, "It can never

happen!"--as well say, "Because I have never broken my leg, my leg is

unbreakable," or "Because I've never died, I am immortal." One thinks first

of some great plague of insects-locusts or grasshoppers-when the species

suddenly increases out of all proportion, and then just as dramatically

sinks to a tiny fraction of what it has recently been. The higher animals

also fluctuate. The lernmings work upon their cycle. The snowshoe-rabbits

build up through a period of years until they reach a climax when they seem

to be everywhere; then with dramatic suddenness their pestilence falls upon

them. Some zoologists have even suggested a biological law: that the number

of individuals in a species never remains constant, but always rises and

falls-the higher the animal and the slower its breeding-rate, the longer

its period of fluctuation.*

*During most of the nineteenth century the African buffalo was a common

creature on the veldt. It was a powerful beast with few natural enemies,

and if its census could have been taken by decades, it would have proved to

be increasing steadily. Then toward the century's end it reached its

climax, and was suddenly struck by a plague of rinderpest. Afterwards the

buffalo was almost a curiosity, extinct in many parts of its range. In the

last fifty years it has again slowly built up its numbers. *

*As for man, there is little reason to think that he can in the long run

escape the fate of other creatures, and if there is a biological law of

flux and reflux, his situation is now a highly perilous one. During ten

thousand years his numbers have been on the upgrade in spite of wars,

pestilences, and famines. This increase in population has become more and

more rapid. Biologically, man has for too long a time been rolling an

uninterrupted run of sevens. *

When he awoke in the middle of the morning, he felt a sudden sense of

pleasure. He had feared he would be sicker than ever, but he felt much

better. He was not choking any more, and also his hand felt cooler. The

swelling had gone down. On the preceding day he had felt so bad, from

whatever other trouble had struck him, that he had had no time to think

about the hand. Now both the hand and the illness seemed better, as if the

one had stopped the other and they had both receded. By noon he was feeling

clear-headed and not even particularly weak.

He ate some lunch, and decided that he could make it down to Johnson's. He

did not bother to pack up everything. He took his precious notebooks and

his camera. At the last moment also, as if by some kind of compulsion, he

picked up the hammer, carried it to the car, and threw it in on the floor

by his feet. He drove off slowly, using his right hand as little as possible.

At Johnson's everything was quiet. He let the car roll to a stop at the

gasoline-pump. Nobody came out to fill his tank, but that was not

peculiar,, because the Johnson pump, like so many in the mountains, was

tended on a haphazard basis. He blew the horn, and waited again. After

another minute he got out, and went up the rickety steps which led to the

room serving as an informal store where campers could pick up cigarettes

and canned goods. He went in, but there was nobody there.

He had a certain sense of surprise. As often, when he had been by himself

for a while, he was not exactly sure what day it might be. Wednesday, he

thought. But it might be Tuesday or Thursday. Yet he was certain that it

was somewhere in the middle of the week, not a Sunday. On a Sunday, or even

for a whole weekend, the Johnsons might possibly shut up the store and go

somewhere on a trip of their own. They were easygoing and did not believe

too strongly in letting business interfere with pleasure. Yet they were

really dependent to a large extent upon the sales which the store made

during the fishing season; they could hardly afford to go away very long.

And if they had gone on a vacation, they would have locked the door. Still

you never could tell about these mountain people. The incident might even

be worth a paragraph in his thesis. In any case, his tank was nearly empty.

The pump was unlocked, and so he helped himself to ten gallons of gas and

with difficulty scrawled a check which he left on the counter along with a

note: "Found you all away. Took 10 gal. Ish."

As he drove down the road, he had suddenly a slight sense of uneasiness-the

Johnsons gone on a weekday, the door unlocked, no fishermen, a car going by

in the night, and (most of all) those men who had run away when they had

seen another man lying sick in his bunk in a lonely mountain cabin. Yet the

day was bright, and his hand was not paining him much; moreover, he seemed

to be cured of that other strange infection, if it was something else and

not the snake-bite. He felt almost back to normal again. Now the road wound

down restfully between open groves of pine trees along a little rushing

stream. By the time he came to Black Creek Power-house, he felt normal in

his mind again also.