by Dick Francis
Thirst had passed, but hunger burrowed like a screw in my stomach. I’d eaten nothing since the barbecue dinner in the Ford house, and I hadn’t wanted breakfast in the run up to the Odin hunt. The uneaten Danish pastries of Owen Roberts airfield tantalized my emptiness until I could almost smell them. In the morning I’d find food and drink, I told myself, but without shoes I wasn’t going foraging in the dark.
The island air, at least, was sweetly warm; and if it rained again, I would be dry. Hurricanes, particularly those like Odin, that formed and gained their strength in the Caribbean, not the Atlantic, were notoriously unpredictable in their travel, but they seldom turned right round one hundred and eighty degrees and retraced their former path. If it had happened, the occurrences had been so rare that it wasn’t worth worrying about.
I closed my eyes, but after its sluggish day my brain accelerated and relentlessly reviewed, remembered and relived all the steps to my present troubles. There were still whole prairies of unanswered questions defeating the simplest speculations, like why grow mushrooms on a tiny island in the Caribbean Sea? Like why send two meteorologists to race a hurricane to see what state the mushrooms were in? But surely Robin Darcy wouldn’t have bought an airplane just for that ... and he’d bought it for Nicky, not Odin.
I supposed that someone, somewhere, might make sense of it. Robin had to know ... didn’t he?
I spent a long time imagining Kris in the orange dinghy, his face looking back at me in horror as the screaming elements seized his future. If he managed to stay in the dinghy he would whirl across the face of the waters faster than racing speedboats. According to the instructions I’d followed too carelessly about how to open the dinghy (I should have climbed in to start with) there were a rudder and two paddles to steer with, but the calm sea they needed lay long hours ahead.
I switched off at the possibility that the gales had sucked the dinghy airborne. I balked at the probability that the canvas inflated shell had gone somersaulting over and over across the seas until Kris fell out into the water and met no Trox cliffs to scoop him to land.
I shifted restlessly on my hard plank bed, and long before dawn went outside to sit with my back against the hut’s exterior wall, my sight filled unexpectedly with stars.
The hurricane had gone over. The night was cloudless and still. Only the waves, heavily hurrying along the ruined mooring stage with a distant slap and hiss, spoke of the terrible force unleashed a day earlier on the little wrecked hamlet.
Hunger set me moving as soon as I could see where I was treading, but I already knew all the cupboards were bare, even if any were still standing. When the people of Trox Island had left they’d packed their lives to go with them. I looked in vain for a container that would hold liquids, and ended by sucking up spoonfuls of rainwater from any sort of hollow I came across.
There was nothing to eat except muddy grass.
I navigated carefully over to the second thick-walled hut, which had been empty anyway on our first visit, and stood inside looking in puzzlement at the change high winds had wrought.
For a start, the inner surface of two of the walls had been peeled away, leaving bare cinderblocks in view. The two huts, though appearing the same from outside, were constructed differently within. The hut I’d passed the night in had been built of solid concrete with a plaster facing. The second hut’s thick walls had been lined with prefabricated panels of plasterlike walling, and it was several of these that had been torn off their fastenings and broken in pieces.
Because I was expecting to see nothing but destruction, it took me a while to notice that there were differences in these ripped-off walls, and that, in particular, one panel, dangling half off its fixings, was half-hiding a door of sorts underneath.
I went over for a closer look and found that the inner door, behind the loose bit of walling, was fastened shut by a combination lock and was the front, in fact, of a safe.
If the thoroughness of the rest of the exodus was anything to go by, that safe too would be as bare as Mother Hub-bard’s. I tried to pull it open, on the basis that the wind had weakened or destroyed everything it reached, but this one barrier stood obstinately fast and, giving it up, I returned to my hunt for food.
The big blue birds with brown legs looked tantalizing, but without shoes I couldn’t catch one. and without fire I’d have to eat one raw. and I wasn’t yet desperate enough to try it. I could perhaps catch one of the larger iguanas, which moved more slowly than the little ones, but again the lack of cooking deterred me.
But where were the cows?
Cows gave milk, and milk was food. There had been a large free-roaming herd of cattle on the island two days ago. and surely some of them had had calves, and calves needed milk ...
As long as the whole herd hadn’t been blasted into the sea. as long as I could get a cow to stand still, as long as I could find any decent container such as an empty Coca-Cola can to drink from. my worst and most immediate predicament would be solved.
Problem: I couldn’t see the herd.
Trox was a mile long, with the village at one end and the consolidated grass airstrip extending from it to the other. I carefully walked to the beginning of the strip, from where we’d raced to get off in the airplane, but search as I could for cows. I saw not so much as a tail swishing.
What I did find, though, to my delight, was my dropped camera. Second thoughts cooled the enthusiasm somewhat as although it was supposed to be waterproof and was still in its protective leather slipcover, it had been lying deep in mud as if I’d also stamped on it when I’d dropped it. I picked it up sadly and held it dangling with its straps entwined in the tapes of the life jacket.
With hunger still a priority I set off along one side of the runway, seeing a rocky fringe of land sloping down between the flat grass and the tossing sea. There was room for a herd there, but not a cow in sight. Depressed. I left that side of the runway and crossed over it to the other, and on the way thought that although that landing strip had been fabricated of earth and grass, it had been quite a feat of engineering, as its dimensions were wide and long enough to accommodate full-sized cargo and passenger aircraft, not just small twin-engined toys.
On the other side of the runway there was a much wider extent of rocky land, much of it scraped bare by abrasive winds. Palm trees lay on their sides, roots helpless in the air, palm crowns like sodden mopheads on the ground. Palm trees ... coconuts ... I diverged from cows to coconut milk and lost a bit more skin from legs and feet in descending from runway height down nearer to sea level.
Before I found a coconut, I found the cows.
They were lying in a long dark group, their stomachs on the ground. A low cliff beyond them had given shelter of sorts against the gales, and I supposed their own weight and mass had done the rest.
Many of them turned their heads as I approached, and a few lumbered to their feet, at which point I took note of bulls among the cows and wondered if the milking expedition wasn’t after all a bad idea.
Three of the bulls were heavy-shouldered Brahmans. Two were cream-colored Charolais. Four were brownish red-and-white Herefords. Four more were what in horse circles would have been called chestnut in color, but were outside my rudimentary agriculture. Several were black-and-white Friesians.
Satisfied that I meant no harm, the gentlemen of the herd lost interest, moved their great heads around without menace and settled down again in peace.
As Friesians, I distantly remembered, were lavish milk producers, I inched a wincingly careful way round the vast throng of big animals until I came to a large docile-looking Friesian cow with a satisfied calf lying beside her. I hadn’t actually ever milked a cow before, and as soon as I touched her the big creature lumbered to her feet and looked at me balefully with mournful off-putting eyes. if hunger hadn’t been so pressingly painful I would have stopped right there, particularly when she stretched her neck and issued a long, hollow comment, which brought a whole lot of her companions to their fee
t.
The only container I had was the slipcover of my camera, a filthy, muddy, soaking-wet soft black leather pouch.
I went down on my knees to the Friesian lady, who looked round in manifest surprise at my attempt to use her milk as dish-washing liquid, and although my best efforts yielded little, by the fourth filling, rubbing and emptying, the contents of the pouch looked whiter and cleaner and getting on for drinkable.
I sipped the sixth pouchful. The milk was warm, rich and frothy, and tasted faintly of mud. I tested the next few amounts with increasing confidence, and I drank the pretty clean tenth pouchful entirely, before the cow ran out of patience, swished her tail in my face and with dignity swayed conclusively away.
With a stomach quietened for the moment I walked back to the ruined village and by one of the mud-laden rainwater cisterns rinsed the pouch as best I could. Using a damp shirt-tail, I wiped mud from my now-dry camera until when I pressed the shutter release button for a third try, it actually worked, and not only clicked but automatically wound on the film.
I used two more exposures taking views of the village’s destruction. I would probably then have snapped the cattle, most of whom had followed me slowly up the island and were now standing around watching me in curiosity, except that of the roll of thirty-six exposures I’d begun with, there were only a few left. Cows were cows were cows anywhere. Cows were as interesting as no mushrooms.
Sunshine returned to the Caribbean.
By midday, judging time according to the sun’s height in the sky, no one had come.
Two days had passed since Kris and I had left Grand Cayman. We would surely be missed.
Someone would come.
I wandered into the second of the thick-walled huts merely for something to do, and in the same aimless fashion pulled the loose flapping panels of off-white walling entirely away from the concrete underneath. Minus its cover, the safe was revealed as a square gray metal box of about two feet by two, let bodily into the wall at waist height. I frowned. If it hadn’t been for the hurricane, the safe would have remained out of general sight: and it wasn’t unusual, I thought, to find some way of camouflaging the very existence of a cache.
I tried again to open its door, but it seemed a hurricane-proof steel box could easily deny access to the soft hands of meteorologists.
The way in consisted most obviously of a short flat lever, but to allow the lever to be moved there was an electronic key pad—tetters as well as numbers—like that of a touch telephone. It seemed a complicated lock to find on a mushroom farm; just one more mystery, in the whole series of unanswerable questions.
Sighing, I strolled outside again, where the cattle now populated what was left of the village’s foundations and were behaving with aversion round the uncovered parts of the muddy cisterns. If they stretched their necks down far enough they might just be able to drink the filthy water, but thirst hadn’t yet driven them to such lengths.
It was interesting. I thought, that the cattle mostly hadn’t sorted themselves into separate breeds but stood in haphazard groups, Charolais mixed with Friesians. a Brahman bull from sacred-cow India in a clump of beef-producing Herefords, and on the fringes there were a few hulking dark shapes that I hadn’t noticed before, of black Aberdeen Angus.
The brain plays odd tricks. and besides, taught by my grandmother, I’d always given brain-cell room to random connections of apparently unconnected thoughts.
I’d had a friend called Angus when we were both about ten, and he had had very large stick-out cars. Teasing, people laughed at him and called him Aberdeen because his stick-out ears looked like a cow’s, and he had cried about it, and sank so deep in depression that his parents had let him have cosmetic surgery, and then other boys had teased him about “pinning back his lugholes” until he cried about that too. My grandmother had told “Aberdeen” Angus to his sad little face to be glad he had ears at all, it was better then being deaf.
Trox Island was a ridiculous place to be remembering stick-out-ears Angus. My grandmother would be admonishing me that I might not have food better than milk, nor shoes, nor comfort, but I did have life.
I went back into the concrete hut and without hesitation tapped out ANGUS in numbers—26487—on the touch pad of the combination lock of the safe.
Nothing happened. No clicks, no encouraging blips. Stick-out-ears Angus didn’t work the lever to open the box, and of course there was no reason to suppose it would.
With nothing much else to do to pass the time I walked across what might have been a sort of village square and looked again at the damaged interior of the hut I’d spent half the night in.
Why did a mushroom farm need a hut with walls four feet thick and a hurricane-proof roof? A mushroom farm didn’t. was the concise answer; but a meteorological or seismic station might. The instruments and the records would have left with the general inhabitants, but a building that housed a seismograph, for instance, would need to be constructed to be of extreme inertia in itself before it could measure earthquake tremors far away. The concrete floor, I guessed, would be at least as thick as the walls.
Outside again, I looked up at the clear blue sky and listened to the subsiding march of the waves, but what I really needed was a rescuing aircraft, and of that there was no sign.
Evelyn, perhaps, was lying in the sun on Sand Dollar Beach wondering where Kris and Perry had got to. But Odin was still on the rampage somewhere, and Evelyn, perhaps, had taken to the hills ... of which Florida had few.
Thoughts dribbled on. In Robin’s house the police came waving guns at houseguests who swam at three in the morning, and the security checked by telephone to make sure all was well. “Yes,” Robin had said easily, “yes, it’s Hereford.”
Hereford? I stood on Trox looking at a red and white cow, a Hereford. So what if Robin’s Hereford was to the Sand Dollar Beach security firm a sort of password. Hereford ... Hereford ... All is well.
Why not?
People used the same password over and over in many different configurations, because it was easier to remember one password than many.
With still all the time in the world, I was simply playing games. I went back to the touchpad of the safe and tapped 4373 (HERE) and 3673 (FORD) and instantly there was a loud click.
Astonished, I grasped the lever by its flat handle and tried lifting it upwards, and without the slightest stiffness in its travel the lever rose upward and the door silently opened.
Treasure there was none, or at least not to my eyes at that first meeting. Two objects only lay on the cloth-covered lining of the gray metal safe. One of them was a yellow box. an electronic-looking instrument complete with a dial with a pointer and a short rod on the end of a curled cable like that on a telephone. It seemed to me from much past acquaintance that the box was probably a Geiger counter, and when I lifted it out and pressed an on-off switch, it rewarded me with slow irregular unurgent clicks. A Geiger counter indeed, with few Geigers to count. Technically, a Geiger counter counted high-speed particles emitted by the decay of radioactive material. The short rod contained a tube invented long ago by physicists Geiger and Müller. A high-energy particle, entering the tube, ionized the gas inside, which allowed the gas to conduct electricity, thus creating a pulse of current, which in turn caused the click.
Lying beside the Geiger counter, the only other thing hidden away was a single fawn folder, the sort used universally in offices to help with filing.
The folder, when I lifted it out in its turn, contained roughly twenty sheets of paper, nearly all in different sizes, with and without formal headings, and all in foreign scripts, most of which I didn’t recognize. There were combinations of letters-with-numbers on almost every page, whatever the language, and it was those that I recognized positively and with alarm. A few sheets were stapled together in pairs and two seemed to be lists of addresses, though as they were written in a script I thought might be Arabic, I couldn’t read any of them.
I put the folder back in the sa
fe, but left the door open, and went thoughtfully outside again into the sun. The cattle turned their heads to watch me. Several of them mooed, several more made slopping pats of steaming waste. As a day’s entertainment, they were hardly a riot.
Counting, I found I had four exposures left on my reel of film. I changed my mind and took one view of the cattle, including in it as many different breeds as I could find grouped in one place. Then I went back to the safe, to sort out which three of the papers in the folder were most worth immortality.
Trying to assess them all carefully out in bright daylight made the choice no easier, but in the end I settled on four of them, photographing two separately, and the last two side by side. The film ran out after that last exposure, and to my frustration the automatic rewind stopped and stuck at the place where I had cleaned off the mud. There was no way of knowing if any pictures at all had survived, though I didn’t think it mattered enormously if they were ruined. However, to save it from any further rain, I tied the camera by its strap to a convenient beam near the safe, high up and out of reach of cows.
I wondered, as I put the papers back in the folder and the folder back in the safe, whether or not I should leave everything locked in as I had found it; and I did so chiefly to keep the papers too away from the cows, some of whom had come after me with so much curiosity that they were crowding the doorway and trying to push themselves and their big heads inside. I shooed them out again, but in a strange way I was glad of their company, and not as lonely as I would have been without them.
The day seemed endless, and nobody came.
Twelve hours of darkness. A long time until dawn.
I slept in brief patches, uncomfortably, and woke finally in the early gray light to the sole comfort that in the setting sun’s rays the evening before, I had seen a gleam which had proved to be an empty soup can wedged into the ruins of one of the houses; and although it was misshapen and filled with dusty debris, it made a better milk-carton than the camera case.