He looked at Amazon. She had not given up. Her face was determined and strong. He was proud of his cousin. She was the real deal. A Tracker.
So he held on and hoped, and slowly began to pass out from exposure.
A cacophonous roar filled his head, as if an asylum’s worth of lunatics had been miniaturized and teleported between his ears. Huge grey shapes loomed, and then receded. He was frozen and burned, frozen and burned again. He couldn’t breathe. He could breathe. He couldn’t breathe. Ogres grabbed and twisted his body, as if trying to wring him out like a dishcloth. And then there was peace, the peace of absence and emptiness.
‘Slightly bored now.’
Frazer opened his eyes – he had been dreaming.
And closed them again, dazzled by the light. He opened them a slit and realized that the light wasn’t actually that dazzling. In fact, the world was rather grey.
And then the grey world was filled by a smiling face.
‘Amazon …’ Frazer croaked. ‘We’re alive … I thought we were going to …’
‘Yeah, me too.’
‘Where …?’
‘Somewhere in the Pacific.’
‘And how did we get …? I must have been knocked out.’
‘Actually you just fell asleep. You’ve been snoring worse than Bluey. Scared all the frigate birds away.’
Of course Amazon was hiding her true feelings. She’d been terrified when she woke up on the beach and found Frazer next to her, unmoving. Now she quickly wiped a tear away with her torn sleeve, hoping that he hadn’t seen it.
‘Can you really not remember how we got here?’ she said quickly. ‘How that big wave left us on the beach, but then the backwash pulled us off again and we had to scrabble for our lives?’
‘Sort of. Bit hazy.’ Frazer rubbed his eyes, which stung with the sea salt. ‘But I don’t quite get how we’re on solid ground. The storm … we were being blown all over the place. And … my compass … I thought we were going east, and there’s nothing that way. We should still be floating out there.’ He waved out into the empty blue.
‘I think,’ said Amazon, ‘the key term is “cyclone”, as in “circle”. The wind was spiralling round all the time, and it blew us back west again.’
‘It certainly blew your hair to every point of the compass,’ Frazer said, smiling.
In fact, now that he knew that, for the time being at least, they were safe, he felt happier than he could ever remember feeling before. There’s nothing like rubbing shoulders with death for cheering you up.
‘Cheek!’ said Amazon, pretending to be annoyed. ‘What do you expect: it’s been through a hurricane – literally! And have you seen the state of yourself?’
Frazer stood up and checked his body. Everything seemed to be there, although his T-shirt and shorts were pretty ripped up, and the yellow waterproofs had been torn away and lost somewhere out on the wide Pacific.
He was more concerned about the canoe. Luckily, it had washed up with them. It had taken a beating: the outrigger had snapped off, as had the built-up sections at the prow and the stern. But the main hull – basically a hollowed-out tree trunk – was still in one piece.
‘I think we can fix this up,’ he said. ‘But first I need a drink. My mouth feels like a lizard crawled in there and died.’
‘I’ve already had a quick scout, while you were sleeping,’ replied Amazon. ‘There are a few puddles, but the rainwater’s mixed in with the seawater, so you can’t drink it. Loads of these, though –’ She picked up a green coconut. ‘If we could get into one then we’d at least have something to eat and drink.’
Frazer stood on a fallen trunk and had a proper look around. They were on a tiny atoll – a doughnut-shaped ring of sand that enclosed a lagoon the size of a football field. The ring of coral sand and rock was no more than ten metres wide. Everywhere he looked there were blown-down palm trees, their roots reaching grotesquely out of the earth, like trolls trying to burst from underground caverns. There were scarcely a dozen of the trees left standing in the whole atoll.
Above them, the sky was still troubled, but the huge oppressiveness of the past few days had gone, and it was obvious that the horrors of the typhoon would not be returning.
‘Let’s have an explore,’ Frazer said. ‘The first rule of survival is get to know your environment.’
‘It’s an island. There’s sand. And some trees. That’s it.’
‘That’s to your untrained eye,’ said Frazer, knowing he was dicing with death. ‘I’ve done a lot more of this sort of thing than you. So trust me.’
Amazon shrugged, and together they explored their sandy doughnut. It would probably have been idyllic had the storm not torn the atoll to shreds. The lagoon was full of broken branches and scattered palm leaves and, more encouragingly, coconuts – some blown down from the trees on the atoll, others from further afield.
Frazer scooped one out of the lagoon. It was heavy and dense, but still floated.
‘I think I know how to get into these,’ he said. ‘I’ve read about it. What you need is a …’ He didn’t finish his sentence, but went foraging amid the broken trees.
Amazon heard a yelp, and Frazer came running out again, holding a stick in his hand. Right behind him was one of the giant coconut crabs.
‘I hate those things!’ said Frazer. ‘You’d think there’d be one island where they weren’t waiting in ambush to get me.’
Despite the predicament they were in, Amazon found it hard to suppress a giggle.
‘Don’t be so crabby!’
‘Not even a tiny bit funny,’ said Frazer, but then his face crinkled and cracked, and the two of them had to hold on to each other or they’d have fallen to the sand, so hard were they laughing.
They weren’t really laughing at Amazon’s pretty lame joke, but rather it was the result of the pent-up terror they had felt, combined with the simple joy of being alive.
‘What’s the stick for?’ asked Amazon when they’d regained control of themselves again.
‘I’ll show you.’
It was a good stout stick, which had snapped, leaving one jagged edge.
‘You really need a knife or a machete to sharpen one end – but then if you had a machete you wouldn’t really need the stick. Anyway, here we go.’
He drove and twisted the blunt end of the stick into the sand. Then he sat with his legs either side of it, raised the coconut over his head and began to bash it down on the stick.
‘The hardest part,’ he said as he worked, ‘is getting through the outer husk – all this fibrous stuff. Once you’ve got that out of the way, you reach the nut on the inside, which you can simply break with a stone.’
By this time there was barely a mark on the coconut, but the stick was reduced to splinters.
‘Dang,’ was all he said.
However, they both knew that this was a serious situation. They had to find something to drink, soon, or they would be in trouble. The clouds were getting thinner, and the sun for the first time began to show through. It was going to be hot.
‘Let’s keep looking,’ said Frazer. ‘Who knows what we’ll find.’
At the northern end of their doughnut they saw an encouraging sight – it was the distant outline of an island.
‘Do you think there are people there?’ asked Amazon excitedly.
‘Can’t tell. I don’t see any smoke from fires …’
‘How far do you think it is?’
‘It’s hard to judge. Ten kilometres, maybe?’
‘Can we make it there?’ Amazon was thinking of the broken canoe – she certainly had no intention of trying to swim through
the shark-infested seas.
‘You keep asking me stuff I don’t know. Maybe … But if it’s just another uninhabited atoll then we’ll have taken the chance for nothing.’
‘If only we knew where we were. Wait, your watch. It’s got GPS, hasn’t it?’
Frazer stared at his wrist. ‘Yeah, but that won’t really help us without a map. I haven’t got the entire longitude and latitude of the globe stored in my head, you know.’
Nevertheless, Frazer flicked through the various buttons on his watch, until he found the GPS function.
‘OK, it’s working. This is where we’re at.’
Frazer held the watch up for Amazon. Its screen read:
18.14.862S
136.12.139W
‘What on earth does that mean?’
‘Well, these are the latitude and longitude. The first tells that we are 18 degrees, 14 minutes and 862 seconds south of the equator. The second that we are 136 degrees, 12 minutes and 139 seconds west of Greenwich.’
‘What use is that?’
‘No use at all … except, hang on. Yes! I took a reading just before we left the schooner. It should be stored on the watch’s memory. Let me see … Here it is.’
He showed Amazon the old reading.
18.16.427S
136.21.139W
‘I don’t quite … what does it mean?’
‘It means,’ said Frazer, ‘that the island over there is Uva’avu.’
They ran back to the broken canoe.
‘It doesn’t look too bad,’ said Frazer. ‘But we need to find some way of attaching the outrigger.’
The outrigger section was joined to the main hull by three wooden spars, but each had snapped, leaving just a few strands of shattered wood holding them together.
‘Can’t we just use the dugout section? I’ve seen lots of native people do it …’
‘Fine if you’re on a river, but on the open sea you’d roll over and be shark food in no time. No, we’ve got to fix it.’
‘And we can’t just wait here until we’re rescued?’
As soon as she said it, Amazon knew that that was a forlorn hope. The chances were that every canoe on Uva’avu had been smashed or blown out to sea. And why would they even think of looking here for them? The witnesses – if there were any – to their fate would have seen them being blown in the opposite direction. But there was something else on Frazer’s mind.
‘They need us. The people over there need help almost as much as we do. Their homes were totally destroyed, and most of their food. My sat phone is the only way of contacting the outside world. And we both know where it is, but nobody else does. We did what we could to help the turtles, now it’s time we helped the people. And that includes us!’
‘OK, but then how do we fix the canoe?’
‘We need some rope to bind those spars together.’
‘Where do we get rope from?’
Frazer chewed his lip. ‘I’ve heard about people making rope from hair. I could cut yours off with a sharpened clamshell …’
‘You are kidding? And your hair’s almost as long as mine.’
‘Keep your hair on – yes, I was kidding. Maybe we could use strips of bark …’
‘I saw the women in the village making rope from coconut fibres. They sort of twist and plait them together …’
‘Yes,’ said Frazer in an exasperated tone, ‘but we can’t even get into the wretched things.’
And then Amazon had a brainwave that might just answer their two pressing needs – for something to drink and for rope.
‘How many of those coconut crabs did you see under the trees?’ she asked.
‘Oh, loads of them. They looked pretty hungry. All the coconuts are in the lagoon, and those crazy crabs don’t even know how to sw–’
Frazer looked at Amazon and grinned. ‘Clever girl,’ he said.
Half an hour later, the cousins had set up a nice little production line. They had retrieved a stash of coconuts from the lagoon, which they had then placed in a line at the edge of the beach. It didn’t take long for the hungry crabs to emerge from the undergrowth. Amazon and Frazer watched in fascination as the enormous crustaceans wrestled with the coconuts, shifting them around in their grip until they were satisfied. And then the huge pincers got to work.
Their method was to gouge at the top part of the coconut until they’d made a gash in the green husk, and then tear and scrape away at the fibres until the hard brown kernel was exposed. Then they bore down with all the might of their claws and cracked open the ‘lid’, with a sound like gunshot.
The first time it happened Frazer stood back while Amazon wrestled the coconut out of the crab’s claws. That meant she had the first drink.
‘Oh, oh, oh,’ was all she could say as she gulped down the milk. ‘It is magical.’
She passed it to Frazer, who was trembling with anticipation. The milk was warm, and sweet, and he didn’t think he had ever tasted anything finer. He also felt the moisture coursing through his body, bringing back vitality and vigour.
They gave the meat back to the crab and waited for the next crack. It didn’t take too long and this time Frazer did the stealing.
Soon they were sated and ready to work on the rope. Now that the crabs had made a start on the coconuts, Frazer was able to use his stick method to prise away most of the husk. Then he and Amazon pulled off the short brown fibres in tussocky clumps of about ten centimetres long.
Then, while Frazer worked at freeing more of the husk, Amazon took over: her fingers were much more adept and nimble than Frazer’s. It helped that she had watched the village women at work. She rubbed and twisted the fibres between her hands, binding them together. Then she took another of the clumps and plaited the loose and straggly end together with the first section. It was difficult and painful work – after a while, Amazon’s hands were red-raw – but in an hour she had a length of rope as long as her arm.
The second section of rope was ready when Frazer heard a strange noise and looked up.
‘What on earth … ?’
‘Don’t disturb me, this is a tricky bit,’ said Amazon.
‘No, seriously, check this out.’
Amazon tutted and followed Frazer’s gaze. She was rewarded with something extraordinary. For there, floating towards their atoll, was a large white box. And draped over the top of it was a human. That it was a living human was indicated by the moaning noises it was emitting.
‘Is that …?’
‘It is.’
Mr Leopold Chung, Chief Executive of Chung Industries, and the main illegal importer of endangered animals for the pet trade in the United States, was clearly in a very bad way. As they dragged him ashore, he raved and jabbered and flapped weakly at them, and then collapsed on to the sand like a dead Portuguese man-of-war.
There was also a large tear in the seat of his trousers, from which blood was weeping.
Gingerly, Frazer had a look. There was a bite mark, and a chunk of flesh was missing, almost as if a small shark had taken a nibble. And yet it didn’t look like a shark bite …
‘That’s nasty,’ said Amazon. ‘But he’s lucky that the sharks didn’t follow the blood trail and finish him.’
Chung suddenly opened his eyes wide and screamed, ‘Not shark! Huru Huru. He tried to eat me in sea. Began with softest part. It was shark that saved Chung by eating Huru Huru!’
Then he subsided again, and fell back to mumbling and moaning.
Amazon looked at Frazer. ‘Is he for real? I mean, did Huru Huru really try to eat him?’
Frazer shrugged. ‘Who knows? I think he may have drun
k some seawater. It’s supposed to make you mad.’
And truly Chung did seem to be deranged.
Amazon held his head while Frazer poured a little of the coconut milk into his parched lips.
He babbled some more and cried out, ‘Mummy!’ before subsiding again.
‘It could just be exposure,’ Amazon replied. ‘Doesn’t really matter, though. We should shove him off on his box again.’
And then Amazon and Frazer both remembered what was in the box. They rushed over to where it lay, washed by the now rather gentle waves. Amazon flicked the catch and opened the lid. Inside, the top layer of little turtles all looked up at her at the same moment. Tears sprang to her eyes and she squeezed Frazer’s hand.
‘Let’s set them free,’ said Frazer and they did, gently lifting the turtles down to the water, and watching them swim away. They both knew that many of them would perish before they grew to maturity, but some would make it through, and return, one day, to this beach on this little atoll, to lay their own eggs.
‘This is why we do this,’ said Frazer. ‘For these moments …’
‘Stupid English. We could have eat those, lived like kings till rescue.’
Amazon and Frazer turned back to the animal trader, who suddenly looked and sounded more like his old self.
‘You really are a nasty piece of work,’ spat Frazer. ‘You were going to leave Bluey to drown back there, and we should have done the same for you.’
‘Oh, I know someone come save your friend. No hard feelings. We all on same side now. Humans against the planet. We work together, we win, we live. We make fire, my schooner see it and come save us. I give you lift back to Marquesas. All happy. You help, yes?’
‘Chung, you are a joke. I’ll tell you what’s going to happen. We’re going to paddle this canoe back to Uva’avu, radio my dad in the States, who will inform the authorities in Tahiti what’s been going on here. What you tried to do with the turtles is against all kinds of international treaties. You’ll be rotting in jail for the next ten years.’
Shark Adventure Page 15