Monkey Mountain

by Justin D'Ath

  Gripping the slippery tail in both hands, I straightened my legs and tried to heave the big flapping fish over the side. But our combined weight nearly capsized the boat. I lost my balance, let go of the stingray, and started to fall.

  Uh oh!

  Arms flailing, I toppled backwards. There wasn’t time to look over my shoulder and see where I was going to land – in the boat or in the water? Thump! My shoulderblade hit wood. It really hurt. But at least I’d landed in the boat, not in the boiling sea.

  The boat dipped sideways and I started to roll. I put a hand down to steady myself, but nothing was there – my arm went straight into the sea, all the way to the elbow.

  Shishkebab! I was balanced on the very edge of the boat. My head, my right shoulder and half my upper body were hanging out over the water. And my right arm was in the water. I reached blindly into the boat with my other hand, grabbed hold of the forward seat, and rolled myself back in. I landed on my hands and knees, facing the bow.

  ‘Look out behind you!’ Mr Griffin gasped.

  The stingray lay belly-up in the bottom of the boat. Its barb was just millimetres from my right ankle. But it couldn’t see me because it was upside down.

  Before I had another go at getting rid of it, I looked around to see if any big waves were coming. I didn’t want a repeat of last time.

  Huh? I blinked and looked again. All around the boat, the sea had gone completely flat. Weird. Where had all the waves gone?

  And why wasn’t the sea steaming anymore?

  I looked at my right hand – the one that had gone into the water. There was no scalding. The skin wasn’t red. I suddenly remembered how the water had felt when my hand went in – cool.

  ‘What’s happening to the sea?’ I called to Mr Griffin, who was down the other end of the boat with the chook and all the monkeys. ‘It isn’t hot anymore. And it’s gone all flat.’

  Mr Griffin gazed out over the water. He couldn’t see very well, but his eyes were good enough to notice something I hadn’t.

  ‘There are waves,’ he said weakly.

  I turned my head one way, then the other. Mr Griffin was right – there were waves. They were all around us. And they were all rolling away from the boat in huge spreading rings, leaving us bobbing gently in a big circle of calm sea.

  How could that be?

  Suddenly, I felt the boat rising.

  The circle of calm sea around us was rising, too. And it was no longer flat – it bulged!

  Mr Griffin’s eyes bulged, too. ‘Are we going up?’

  There was a loud bubbling sound. The sea began to foam and gurgle. And it continued to rise, like a big watery hill, lifting us up with it.

  ‘Shishkebab!’ I gasped in horror. ‘We’re on top of a waterspout!’

  13

  BLASTED SKY HIGH

  I was wrong. Waterspouts are like tornadoes, they come from the sky. But this – whatever was lifting us up –came from the sea.

  Or from under the sea!

  Suddenly I worked it out. And my blood ran cold.

  Sometimes a volcano erupts in more than one place. As well as the main eruption – from the crater at the top of the mountain – there can be a number of smaller eruptions, like mini volcanoes, on its slopes or even further away.

  They can even be under the seabed.

  We were directly above a mini volcano. And it was about to erupt!

  ‘PADDLE!’ I yelled to Mr Griffin.

  The sea would no longer burn our hands. It had turned cold because the pressure of the molten lava below the sea floor must have burst the walls of an underground spring, pushing millions of litres of icy water out into the sea ahead of it. But it wouldn’t be long before the lava followed.

  Paddling would be much too slow, I realised even as I gave the order to Mr Griffin. We were going to be blasted sky high.

  Unless …

  I don’t know where the idea came from. Sometimes our brains surprise us. Before I’d even thought the idea through, I grabbed the stingray’s tail again, rose to my feet and heaved the white-bellied ray over the side like a huge floppy frying pan.

  But I didn’t let go of its tail. Dropping to my knees so I wouldn’t be dragged overboard, and holding the slippery tail with both hands so it wouldn’t pull free, I flipped the ray right-side-up as soon as it hit the water. It tried to swim straight down, but the clouds of bubbles and escaping gas coming up from below kept it on the surface. All it could do was swim away from me, towing the boat behind it. Still holding on with both hands, I scrambled right into the bow. By twisting its tail left or right, I found I could make the big powerful fish go in any direction. I turned it out to sea, and the stingray did the rest.

  Rays have bigger fins in relation to their body size than almost any other fish. They’re really strong swimmers. Even towing a boat-load of monkeys and two humans, it churned through the water at a good speed.

  The mini volcano helped. The escaping spring water and underground gases had pushed the sea upwards, creating a wide watery dome two or three metres higher than the surrounding sea. We surfed down the side of it, helped by the slope and also by the current that flowed out from the centre.

  In ten seconds we must have travelled nearly a hundred metres.

  Then the mini volcano erupted.

  14

  LAVA STORM

  There was nothing ‘mini’ about the eruption. A tower of water the size of a skyscraper blasted out of the sea exactly where our boat had been floating ten seconds earlier. And a massive green wave came rolling towards us. It must have been five metres high and was coming at us faster than any wave I’d ever seen. The closer it came, the bigger it looked. I let go of the stingray’s tail and threw myself into the bottom of the boat. I thought we were dead.

  But instead of smashing our flimsy craft to smithereens, the giant wave picked us up and propelled us ahead of it like a surf board. At about a hundred kilometres per hour.

  That’s what saved us. Because two seconds after the wave hit, the lava broke through the seabed behind us.

  BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

  I didn’t see the explosion because the wave blocked our view. But I did see an orangey-red glow shining right through the wave. And I saw something else – thousands of flaming meteors falling out of the sky. Each one trailed a line of white smoke like a tracer shell. It was a lava storm. The red-hot missiles landed all around the boat – POW! POW! POW! – splashing us with boiling water, filling the air with clouds of steam. It was like someone was bombing us. All I could do was cower in the bottom of the speeding boat, put my arms over my head, and hope for the best.

  I don’t know how long I lay there. It’s hard to estimate time in a situation like that, when you think you could die at any moment. It seemed like ten minutes, but it might have only been thirty seconds.

  Finally, it was water that snapped me out of it – water in my eyes, water in my nose, water in my mouth. Holy guacamole, what was going on?

  Spluttering and choking, I lifted my head.

  There was water all around me. It was about ten centimetres deep. It sloshed from one side of the boat to the other as we rocked in the gentle swell.

  What had happened to the big wave?

  I rolled over and sat up.

  A wet monkey jumped away from me. Five or six others eyeballed me from the seats and the sides of the boat. The chook was perched on the tip of the bow. Stephanie’s backpack and the yellow water container bumped about between the two front seats. I searched for Mr Griffin, but all I could see were monkeys. They looked as confused and scared as I felt.

  ‘Mr Griffin!’ I called.

  There was roaring in the distance. The sound of two volcanoes. The latest one had risen out of the sea like a brand new island. It was only a fraction of the size of Mount Bako, but it looked just as spectacular as it belched globs of lava and clouds of thick black smoke high into the sky. But we were safe – the wave had carried us more than a kilometre out to sea. It had saved
us from the volcanoes.

  However we weren’t out of trouble yet.

  ‘Mr Griffin!’ I called again.

  ‘Over here,’ said a faint, raspy voice.

  I splashed on my hands and knees towards the other end of the boat. Wet monkeys jumped out of my way.

  ‘Are you all right?’ I asked.

  Mr Griffin wasn’t all right. He lay on his back in the bottom of the boat. Water washed in and out of his ears and his wispy grey hair floated around his head. He looked like a drowned man.

  ‘Can you help me sit up?’ he asked weakly.

  I propped him against the seat. His body slumped as if he had no muscles.

  ‘Thank you,’ Mr Griffin gasped. He tried to smile but it seemed like too much effort. His face was grey. He said something else but the volcano noise was too loud for me to hear properly. I only heard one word: heart.

  Earlier I’d thought Mr Griffin was wrong about having a heart attack, but now I believed him.

  ‘Try to take it easy, Mr Griffin. I’ll get you to a hospital.’

  Mr Griffin took a long, shaky breath. ‘You’re a good lad, Sam,’ he whispered, and finally managed to smile.

  Then he closed his eyes and his head tipped back against the seat behind him with a sickening thump.

  15

  GRUMPY

  You’re a good lad, Sam.

  That was the last thing Mr Griffin said. And it was wrong. If I hadn’t played the hero up on Mount Bako and tried to rescue Stephanie’s backpack, he wouldn’t have had a heart attack. He and I would be on the bus with the rest of our school group, heading back to Kuching. Both of us would be alive.

  My eyes filled with tears.

  Don’t be a sook! growled the little voice in my head. Mr Griffin wouldn’t want you to sit around feeling sorry for yourself. He’d want you to survive.

  If I was going to survive, I had to act fast. The water in the boat was getting deeper every moment. I had to find where it was getting in and fix the problem. If I didn’t, we’d sink.

  It didn’t take long to find – a neat little hole, about two centimetres in diameter, right in the middle of the boat. Its edges were burned black. The boat must have taken a direct hit from one of the lava missiles. Luckily it hadn’t hit anyone – they would have been killed instantly. It still might kill us, I thought, if I couldn’t find some way to plug the hole it had made. Water was coming in fast.

  I tried putting my foot over the hole, but that didn’t work – I could feel the water squeezing in under my sneaker. The boat was half full now. It had sunk so low that its sides were barely clear of the surrounding sea. Luckily, the sea was quite calm. The big wave that had carried us away from the new volcano must have disappeared over the horizon. But even a calm sea would swamp us in the next two or three minutes if I didn’t fix the leak.

  In desperation, I jammed a finger into the hole. Too skinny. I tried my thumb. It was a tighter fit. By pushing my thumb in all the way to the fleshy part where it joined my hand, I stopped the flow of incoming water.

  Phew!

  But I didn’t feel relieved for long. My thumb was poking through the bottom of the boat into the sea underneath. At least the water hadn’t become boiling hot again – we were too far from shore – but who knew what was down there? Sharks? Crocodiles? Barracudas?

  Crouched in the middle of the boat with my thumb plugging the hole, I checked the sea in all directions. There were no shark fins and no sign of crocodiles. But there was something in the water about a hundred metres away. It barely poked above the surface and kept disappearing into the troughs between swells. I only caught brief glimpses of it – about a half-second view every fifteen seconds – and even then not much was visible. It looked a bit like an old brown coconut with two white sticks attached. The sticks were moving, thrashing about in the water like arms.

  A coconut with arms?

  Ridiculous. But whatever it was, the strange object was alive. And it seemed to be getting closer, splashing clumsily through the water like a learner swimmer.

  The macaques had seen it, too. They were going ballistic, screeching at the tops of their voices and rushing back and forth along the length of the semi-submerged boat, nearly drowning me every time they splashed past. The poor chook had to take refuge on Stephanie’s floating backpack.

  ‘CUT IT OUT!’ I roared at the monkeys. ‘YOU’RE GOING TO SINK US!’

  They didn’t understand me, of course, but the urgency in my voice got through to them. The hyper monkeys stopped running back and forth. They stopped screeching. But several of the larger ones – the adult males and the female with the baby – started up an excited chatter. And all fifteen monkeys frowned as they watched the odd-looking thing splash towards us. They looked worried.

  I was worried, too. What I’d at first mistaken for a coconut was beginning to resemble a head. With a very human-looking face – brown hair, pink cheeks and a large droopy nose.

  It looked like an old man!

  But what was an old man doing so far out to sea? The same as me, I supposed – trying to get away from the volcano. His boat must have sunk, forcing him to swim. And he was running out of puff. As I looked on in horror, the old man stopped swimming and began bobbing up and down in the wide green sea. He no longer had the strength to lift his arms out of the water. He was going to drown!

  I didn’t know what to do. He was still fifty metres from the boat. I had to help him. But I couldn’t remove my thumb from the hole in the bottom of the boat – if I did, the boat would sink.

  Was there something else I could use to plug the hole?

  Suddenly, I remembered the EpiPen. It was about the same thickness as my thumb. Fumbling it out of its pouch, I removed my thumb from the hole and jammed the EpiPen in.

  A perfect fit.

  I chased the monkeys off the rear seat and started paddling with my hands. It would have been quicker to swim, but I wasn’t sure if my lifesaving skills were good enough to swim fifty metres back to the boat while supporting a drowning man. And what if he struggled?

  All the water in the boat made it heavy. I finally managed to turn its bow towards the old man, but even though I paddled like mad, churning my arms like a butterfly swimmer on steroids, we hardly seemed to be moving. The monkeys crowded in the front half of the boat, watching the old man. They were careful not to stand on Mr Griffin, who was still lying exactly as I’d left him. I tried not to look at him, but kept my eyes on the old man in the sea – or on the spot where the old man was. For fourteen and a half seconds out of every fifteen, he wasn’t visible behind the swells. Each time he rose back into view, I heaved a big sigh of relief.

  I wasn’t sure I’d be able to cope with two dead men.

  I didn’t have to. The boat began moving at last. Slowly, we drew closer to the head in the water. When we’d crossed half the distance and he rose suddenly back into view, I got a shock. It wasn’t a man, it was a monkey! A monkey with a huge pink nose like Grumpy in Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.

  It was a male proboscis monkey, the most famous monkey in Borneo. And the weirdest. You have to see a proboscis monkey to believe anything could have a nose like that. It droops almost to the monkey’s chin and is so big the adult male has to push it to one side to get food into his mouth. If I’d met one in another situation, I probably would have laughed. But not this time.

  There had been no question about not rescuing an old man, but could I afford to bring a proboscis monkey on board? They’re big – four times larger than macaques – and the boat was already overcrowded and half underwater. Also, I wasn’t sure how the two species would get on in such a confined space. What if there was a fight: macaques versus the proboscis monkey? There’d be casualties, for sure – monkeys would get hurt. I might get hurt. What if the proboscis monkey attacked me?

  But I couldn’t just leave it. The poor creature must have been driven into the sea by the lava flow, just like we had. Somehow it had avoided the sharks, the crocodiles
and the boiling hot water, but now it was exhausted. It would die if I didn’t lend a hand.

  Puffing and sweating, I paddled the boat fifty metres through the pitching sea. At last I reached the stricken monkey. It hooked a long hairy hand over the bow, then a long hairy foot. The boat tipped alarmingly. Fifteen screaming macaques came charging down my end as their big ginger-and-white relative hauled itself out of the water and tumbled in over the bow.

  ‘Welcome aboard, Grumpy,’ I said nervously.

  16

  NOAH’S ARK

  Mr Griffin still lay in the forward part of the boat, with his head resting on the front seat. Grumpy grunted in surprise when he saw the lifeless body and shuffled away. Which brought him closer to me, the chook and the macaques down my end of the boat. He made a raspberry sound through his lips – it sounded like a warning, telling us to keep our distance. We didn’t need to be warned. Up close, the big male proboscis monkey didn’t look anything like an old man or one of the seven dwarves. He looked like a big, scary, wild animal.

  The macaques were wild, too, but they were much smaller than Grumpy and we were used to each other by now. They crowded around me like a bunch of small, furry children and nervously checked out their strange dripping relative at the other end of the boat.

  Grumpy soon lost interest in us. He looked at Mr Griffin again. Stretching out one long white-furred arm, he gently poked him on the shoulder.

  Mr Griffin’s eyes fluttered open.

  ‘Blimey!’ he gasped, when he saw the big droopy-nosed monkey leaning over him.

  Grumpy got a fright, too. With a loud grunt, he jerked his hand away and scrambled up into the point of the bow, as far away from Mr Griffin as he could possibly get without falling overboard.

  I clambered forward and knelt next to Mr Griffin.

  ‘You’re alive!’ I said, and my eyes went blurry.

  ‘I think so,’ croaked Mr Griffin. ‘Unless there are big ugly monkeys in heaven.’