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started to walk toward the forest. He had been immune to pain when in the water, or simply distracted, but could move on land only with gritted teeth and frequent rests.
    When he reached the trees, he had nothing with which to cut the larger branches, ones large enough to be conspicuous from the air, and the minor extremities of the evergreens proved too elastic to be easily snapped with his limited strength. These trees, which he assumed were genetically pines, seemed not to have the readily available dead limbs natural to their distant deciduous relatives, according anyway to his dim boyhood memories. Furthermore, if you did locate a brown branch, what usually came off to the pull was only the moribund needles rather than the shaft.
    But finally he was able to move an armload of materials from the forest to the widest area of the beach and begin to spell out, in letters he hoped were large enough to be seen from the air, the word HELP . Halfway through the job, he ran out of branches and had to return to the trees for more. The pain in his knee was worsening with use. He favored it awhile by hopping along on his right leg only, but stepping on a pine cone with a foot clad only in a cotton sock, he lost his balance and fell. Now the instep of his good foot was sore, and in clawing out as he went down, he managed to wound his right hand on impact with a sharp twig on the floor of the woods.
    Before completing the distress sign, he unscrewed the cap and with his left hand hoisted the heavy half-gallon container and splashingly disinfected the wound with vodka. Now that he had not drunk any for an entire twenty-four hours, he discovered that the liquid did have a faint smell: very medicinal, repulsive to him.
    Making the sign was much simpler than exploring the wrecked airplane, certainly less taxing than the dives and swimming out and back, yet he found it tired him, what with the extra expenditure of energy required to avoid further hurt to his left leg and his right hand. The latter impediment, though no doubt temporary, was the more inconvenient. He had never been able to do much with his left, not even eat in the European way without switching the fork after cutting the meat into morsels. In school he had boxed some, but was hampered by this constitutional inability to give his left hand its due. Now he was stuck with it.
    When the HELP sign was at last completed, however, he doubted that even five-foot letters could be seen from very high in the air. A much more conspicuous signal was needed, but he had exhausted his strength by now, and his leg hurt him so much that he groaned aloud. Judging from the position of the sun, it was already late afternoon. He still had no taste for food and felt internally ill, no doubt as a result of the sudden withdrawal from alcohol, but knew he should eat something more for his survival. So he munched on a Cornish-hen leg. No doubt it had been marinated in wine and herbs and carefully broiled, but he was insensitive to all tastes at the moment, despite his new ability to smell, or think he smelled, the normally odorless vodka. He tried to avoid thinking about how long it might be before rescue came. It was clear that he would not soon be able to hike out, in stocking feet and with a bad leg, to the nearest human community, even if one was relatively close by. And he could spare no more immediate concern for the bodies in the airplane. Until help arrived, self-preservation must be his obsession.
    He had to find refuge again before darkness came. The sun, which he had taken for granted his life long, was now the sole available source of light and heat, and gauge of time and direction. As it sank toward the treetops on the far shore of the lake, he looked for alternatives to the sand burial that had served on the previous night but was unattractive to him now, if only in the moral sense: determined to survive, he could not afford the connotation of interment. If defiance was part of this