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determination, then what he defied was what he had been before the crash. Destroying oneself had a point only under conditions of civilization. The situation was otherwise when your adversary was nature.
    But digging in made sense. He had no tools with which to build much, and no strength to drag back and forth to the woods for materials. After a while he found the pair of plastic cups that nested under the cap of the thermos. Using one as a trowel, he scooped out in the sand a shallow cavity long enough to hold his body. If seeing it as a grave was out of the question, it could be called a burrow or slit trench or the cellar of the structure to come. In the course of this project he soon discovered—or remembered, for he had dug in sand as a child—that there are physical laws ordaining how far you can dig down perpendicularly before the walls of a hole threaten to cave in altogether. Sand in volume has its natural conformations; a cupful on a level surface forms a miniature dune. Therefore he scooped to a depth of no more than a foot and graded the sides of the depression into natural slopes, not walls.
    Given the season, he had enough clothes to survive another night, but he cursed himself for neglecting to bring along extra shoes. In collecting the branches for the HELP sign, he had picked up solefuls of pine needles, some of which pierced the weave of his socks to prick his feet. At the moment he could think of no better countermeasure than putting on a second pair of socks over the first. Were he faced with the need to walk far, and if his leg permitted such, he would have to fashion some version of footgear from the materials available, but it was premature to think of that eventuality, as well as being defeatist.
    They might come for him at any time, though no more tonight; he had to accept that fact as dusk approached, and he worked, as well as he could with a wounded hand that hurt more than his knee, to make a better shelter of the shallow trench. To spare his leg, he crawled to the distress sign and pillaged branches from it and erected them, stems embedded in the sand, around the rim of the trench. Across their tops he tried stretching the empty duffel bag, which was supposed to be waterproof but even when flattened out was only wide enough to protect his head and shoulders. However, the thick canvas proved too heavy to be supported by such slender uprights. After reerecting the latter, he constructed a flimsy roof of whichever garments he was not wearing, mainly extra underwear. The result was not in the least water-resistant should rain fall—the T-shirts would grow more weighty when wet and probably pull the structure down on him—but until then it would provide a ceiling under which one could enjoy the illusion anyway of being less at the mercy of the elements. The sense of irony that had become Crews’s dominant emotion toward his fellow men could serve little purpose in this realm of the literal, where you made the most of what you could get and were grateful for it.
    Before retiring for the night he once again scanned the shoreline for signs of humanity. He had of course been doing as much, periodically, since crawling from the lake after the crash, but what he could discern of the rest of the shore was as deserted as his own patch. It was a sizable body of water, perhaps a mile across in the part he could see, but his view was limited by a headland in the middle distance on his side of the water. Perhaps he was on a kind of bay, and just beyond the headland lay a village full of people.
    He was startled by the sound of a splash and looked just in time to see, in what little light remained, a strand of silver glide beneath the surface of the lake. He knew so little of nature. He had never been a Scout. His swimming had been done always in pools and private areas of beach, not the sort of thing from which you learned to identify species of wildlife or edible plants, or anything of use in