Long Voyage Back

by Luke Rhinehart

  Vagabond sailed now in peace. Their harmony was not simply the result of the lassitude brought on by malnutrition, but rather of the trust and affection that had been forged from surviving together the horrors of the previous two and a half months. Neil and Jeanne were lovers, husband and wife; so too were Jim and Lisa, although she still had not recovered from the disease, being barely able to walk. Sheila and Philip were their benevolent Aunt and Uncle; Olly the grandpop. Neil lived now with Jeannne and Skippy in her port cabin, the Wellingtons taking over his aft cabin. Jim had slowly recovered his strength. At first Neil and Jeanne had thought that his quiet dignity was only weakness from the after-effects of the disease, but soon they realized that with the nearness of death Jim had developed the same tranquillity that Frank had come to during his last hours. He developed a new low-key sense of humour and was no longer in awe of Neil but able to poke fun at him.

  Lisa, although the disease had left her pathetically weak, was childlike in the joy she showed in being alive and in love with Jim. Each morning he carried her from their starboard cabin to the open cockpit areas where she could be with the others. Neil urged books upon her; Skippy urged her to play games with him; Philip began to teach her navigation. She did a little of each. Although her weakness was sometimes heartrending - they had no idea how completely she might eventually recover - her joy in Jim, her happiness in living, made it impossible to be depressed in her presence. But as they moved further south they moved, paradoxically, into the late winter of the southern hemisphere. They were pitifully unprepared for the cold, especially after having just suffered through two weeks near the equator. Their bodies were lacking in the fat that could be burned off to warm them. Their ship had little winter clothing. With the propane supply exhausted and the kerosene almost gone, they had no fuel to burn to warm a cabin. The three women took the two woollen blankets aboard and began to convert them to clothing. The only cold weather gear they had was Neil's orange float suit and they needed two or three other winter garments so that at least three people could be out on deck at once if necessary. They cut and sewed one small woollen jumpsuit to fit Lisa and Sheila, and another larger one to fit Jim, Neil and Philip. From the remains of the blankets they managed to create a third jacket to fit Olly and Jeanne. Two pairs of sweatpants became winter underwear. Clothing was no longer individual but held in common by two or three similarly built individuals, items worn as the need arose. They were now without soap so clothing began to stink. Their limited number of socks began to disintegrate.

  The strangeness of their clothing was only another symptom of their dissociation from their previous lives. Just as they were physically, electronically and geographically detached from most of the rest of the planet, so too they were now in some way detached from the mammoth events which

  had transformed the earth. The fears and violence of those in the southern hemisphere against refugees like themselves seemed to them as natural and unhatable as the squalls that had afflicted them north of the equator - something to reef for. The destruction of much of the world by the nuclear war seemed like some natural tragedy, as if the earth had been hit by some errant comet.

  The plague did not reappear. After two weeks they dared assume themselves free of that danger. They were healthy. They were starving. The bringing in of a single fish was cause for a major celebration. The loss of a hooked fish before boarding it left them limp, empty, afraid. When their emergency cache of food was mostly gone; when they were down to a few days' ration of dried fish; when all their previous stores of food were down to a few rotting potatoes and the last unopened rusted can of spam, they turned, filled with dread, again towards land.

  Their lives, which for three weeks had taken on a peaceful, dreamlike quality from their isolation and undernourishment, now, they feared, would once again take on the quality of a nightmare. They approached land feeling themselves aliens. about to visit a foreign planet.

  But the land came out to them. An Argentine frigate met them thirty miles off the coast and warned them through an electric bullhorn that no Norteamericanos' were being allowed on the mainland of Argentina. If they came any closer to the coast their boat would be confiscated and they would be taken to the recently seized Malvinas Islands with other plague victims and illegal immigrants. They: turned back to sea. Yet even as they did so Neil realized that in two or three days they would have to try to land again because they were now almost totally out of food and low on water. They hoped that further south, with the coast often uninhabited, the vigilance would be much less.

  And so for two more days, during which they ate only the

  last of some rotting potatoes, they sailed southwest another three hundred miles down the coast, remaining seventy miles off. They saw neither another boat nor a plane. A cold front brought with it an overcast sky and Neil was unable to take a sunsight at noon. He had only a rough estimate of his position, but it made little difference. He had absolutely no detailed knowledge of the coast he would be approaching and thus any part of the fifty-mile stretch he estimated himself near was as good as any other. He didn't know whether to expect to crash into towering cliffs or surf up to a sandy beach blooming with tourists.

  They made it into the darkness of the night without being stopped or attacked. Neil wanted to close with the shore just before dawn and anchor or tack off until they could determine their next course of action. Approaching at night they would not only avoid detection but also be able to see the lights of any major town and, close to shore, perhaps the lights of individual houses or farms.

  At four A. M. with Jim at the helm tightly bundled up in the woollen jumpsuit and foulweather gear, the depthmeter indicated the depths were rapidly shoaling. They had seen no lights or other signs of civilization. As Neil stood beside Jim at the wheel he felt as if he were on a foreign planet approaching some shore never seen before by human eyes. All he knew of the land he was visiting was that the natives feared and hated aliens. He and his friends were aliens.

  Ìt's eerie,' said Jim. 'I like sailing in the blackness, but not when we're nearing land.'

  `The sea will let us know when we're getting close,' Neil replied.

  `How far off will we hear the surf?' Jim asked.

  Àt least a mile.'

  Then they became silent. They had both picked up a sound: a distant hum beneath the splash and hissing of Vagabond through the water. For two minutes they stood side by side in the darkness straining to clarify the hum. It

  gradually grew: muted by distance, the crash of the surf on land. Neil flicked on the depthmeter: thirty-six feet.

  `We'll turn and beat slowly upwind,' he said to Jim. 'Ease in towards the shore. At dawn we want to be able to act fast.'

  As they sailed slowly towards the shore, the sky in the east grew faintly brighter, and three hundred yards from shore they dropped their sails and anchored. Jeanne, wearing the homemade woollen jacket over a sweater, jeans and sweatpants, came up to join them. The lightening sky illuminated in front of them the brown, hilly coastline and sand shingle beach. No houses were visible. The line of the coast was more or less straight north and south. Except for a few evergreens the landscape was bleak. They saw no signs of man.

  `Not much of a salvation,' Jeanne commented to Neil, putting an arm around him. Ì hope you know some good recipes using bark and pine needles,' he replied. Then he took the binoculars from Jim and began again to study the surf and beach. Although they could paddle a dinghy through the surf to shore, they would risk their lives trying to get back out again and any food they might gather would likely spill out. He concentrated on the debris line along the beach.

  Ìt's high tide or damn close to it,' he finally concluded aloud. 'We're going to beach the boat.'

  He had Jim wake the others and order them all into life jackets while he and Jeanne raised sails and tacked up over their anchor and pulled it up. Two hundred feet from shore they would drop it again to act later as a safety line to kedge themselves off. When they cam
e to within fifty feet of where the waves were curling to break into their thirtyyard frothy roll to the beach, Neil turned Vagabond downwind. Ìt's too rough, Neil,' Sheila said from beside him, her face lined with concern.

  `What are the options?' he responded, witching the beach.

  Ànchor. Wait until the seas subside.'

  `We'd be seen,' Neil replied. 'I'd rather take my chances with the surf.' When he glanced at her he saw past her shoulder an unusually large swell coming shoreward and felt that this would be their chance: that big one would be their horse to land.

  `WE'RE GOING IN!' he shouted. 'DROP THE ANCHOR!'

  He gauged the progress of the swell, shouted at everyone again to hold on and swung Vagabond to port. Jim and Jeanne sheeted in the sails and Vagabond surged towards the beach. At first Neil feared he had turned too late, but Vagabond zoomed landward only slightly more slowly than the swell, which came up behind them and, just as they entered the surf line, lifted them up and hurled them sizzling down its face, water crashing and roaring all around them. They rushed through the moiling froth on the shoulders of the large roller closer and closer to shore and then, just when it seemed like they might sail right up on to the sand, Vagabond stopped, sending everyone stumbling off balance.

  `DROP SAILS!' Neil shouted and then ordered Jim to take the second anchor ashore. A second big wave following the one they'd ridden smashed loudly into their stern, sending spray flying across all three open cockpits and inching Vagabond another two feet up the beach. A third big wave struck her another thundering smack, water cascading across the aft cabin and into the wheelhouse area. But Vagabond's stern remained directly out to sea and the fourth wave they didn't even notice. Jim had carried the twenty-two-pound Danforth anchor through the low white undertow up on to the sand and pebble beach. After more than six weeks they were again on land. 1 1

  Land was a sand and pebble beach, low stunted shrubs and deciduous trees, dry dead grasses, a few low evergreens and low hills. Along the beach was a line of dried seaweed. Except for a single seagull that flew over them and settled on a small rock fifty feet away there was no sign of life.

  In the first hour Vagabond was thinly camouflaged with pine branches to alter her shape and mute the whiteness of deck and cabin top from air surveillance. As the tide receded she was left in an ungainly position high and dry; at dusk the rising tide would let the surf attack her again.

  Their purpose was simple and single: to gather food and water to permit them to proceed again to sea. Water they found in abundance almost immediately: a freshwater stream flowing into a tiny brackish inlet a little less than a mile south of their landing spot. Food was more difficult. Both Sheila and Olly began to search the immediate area for edible herbs and plants but their initial reports were discouraging. The late winter season meant that almost all plant life was dormant. They found a few dry berries, a shrub they didn't recognize with a fruit or leaf-type growth still hanging on its branches, and a variety of dried grasses. They began to gather what they felt they might be able to use. Olly discovered fish, mostly small, in the brackish pond that their freshwater stream fed into and suggested he take his fine-mesh net and try to catch some. He would need Jim to help. Neil agreed and asked them also to drag five-gallon containers of water back to the boat.

  He and Jeanne had also hunted for edible plants but the search had depressed him. He was out of his element, his ignorance of plant life appalling. After an hour he decided that his time could be better spent exploring up and down the beach five miles each way for possible changes in vegetation or signs of wildlife or domesticated animals. By early afternoon their scavenging for food had produced only berries, grasses, a few possibly edible leaves, some shellfish, a few dozen minnows, and seaweed. Olly planned to use the minnows in the afternoon as bait for larger fish. Jeanne had seen a herd of cattle on a hill three miles to the south, so, gathering together the ship's two largest and strongest knives, a carrying harness and line, Neil went with her to explore the area, hoping to find not only an animal he could kill but perhaps also stored food, animal fodder even.

  As they hiked along the beach he was disturbed at how quickly he was tiring. He hadn't slept since two o'clock that morning and hadn't eaten anything of substance in a day. Jeanne too was weak. They held hands as they walked along, Neil aware of the incongruity of this strangely dressed pair holding hands meandering along the beach only a few weeks from starving to death. By the time they neared the place where she had seen the cattle they were both staggering. The day was still overcast, the sky slate grey, the sun already low in the sky.

  Ten minutes later they turned inland towards a second hill, even though no cattle were now visible. As they followed some sort of animal path up a ravine Neil realized that he feared man almost more than he wanted food.

  After a forty-minute hike and with the sun within less than an hour of setting, they came within sight of a small herd of cattle high on a ridge half a mile away. By now both Neil and Jeanne were exhausted. Neil wasn't certain he had the strength left to kill a steer. He decided he should sleep near the herd and attempt a kill the next morning. He reluctantly sent Jeanne back to Vagabond to report his plans. Exhausted, he sank almost immediately to sleep, the earth seeming to be rolling like the sea beneath him. When he awoke at dawn and began walking up the barren

  hills his purpose seemed strange, unreal. He was intending to kill a steer, butcher it, and drag the usable meat miles back to Vagabond, which sat perched on the beach like a ship drydocked for the winter. The cold air and hard earth, both so unfamiliar after months of summer at sea, stung his body. They too were strange, dreamlike. He trled to focus his thoughts on the killing of the steer, its butchering, but the US Naval Academy had never taught him that particular craft.

  Weak from hunger he eyed the leafless shrubs and the evergreens in unconscious hope that an apple or orange would be hanging there.

  On the crest of a small hill he saw a herd of about thirty cattle feeding two hundred yards off in a small gully with a pond or pool. As he let his eyes sweep the horizon he could see to the east, where bright clouds marked the presence of the rising sun, the distant line of the ocean beyond the hills. As he continued his survey he stopped: to the south he saw smoke - a campfire or house. The sight chilled him. Although he had thought that he would explore for such human habitation in the hope of finding vegetable foods he could steal, his instinct at seeing the smoke was to flee. His interest in exploring disappeared at the first contact with the feared enemy.

  So it was to the hunt. Arranging one knife in the deep pocket of his orange floatsuit and carrying the other, he began hiking down to the herd.

  When he neared them the individual cattle seemed gigantic. They looked at him out of one eye as if watching a harmless alien from outer space. He felt alien. He felt he was on some other planet and these immense bovines were august senators debating what to do with him.

  He considered what to do. He would kill the smallest, but there seemed no smallest. They all dwarfed him. To get at a throat seemed ridiculously improbable; his knife now felt no larger or more lethal than a toothpick. Yet kill he must. The thought of his own bony body and those of his loved ones sent a chill through him. The placid beings munching the dry

  grass represented life. If he had to attack an elephant in order to help his family survive then the elephant had better beware.

  The small herd had moved twenty yards further on, a few lingering at the far end of the small pond, most grazing on tiny tufts of dried grasses they discovered in what appeared to Neil to be barren ground. He chose as his victim an especially listless steer that seemed to be daydreaming near the pond. As he walked towards it some of the herd moved slowly away from him, but his intended victim continued to stand in his dreamworld. Knife at the ready he ran the last five strides and leapt on to the steer's back. In nightmarish surprise his frail body struck the side of the steer and slid harmlessly off, collapsing to the earth.

  Neil lay s
tunned. He had been unable to jump on the steer's back. He had made no more impact on the animal than that of a thrown orange rag. He stood up. The whole herd seemed to be eyeing him: strange habits, these orange aliens. His steer had moved ten feet away.

  But Neil's failure had aroused some primitive fear and determination. He needed that meat. If he were this weak now, what would happen if he failed? He walked slowly back to the steer and stopped at his side. He considered the angles, his strength, the hand-and footholds. Clenching the knife with his teeth he grabbed the steer's horns and swung himself up on its back.

  The animal exploded into life, galloping forward past the others. Holding on to a horn with his left hand and clenching the steer's back with his legs, Neil rode him. He took the knife from between his teeth, pulled himself forward and plunged his knife into the throat area, trying to rip it sideways.

  The beast galloped on, Neil cutting and ripping with the five-inch blade, feeling again a sickening powerlessness. The steer finally slowed his gallop, shaking his head and knocking Neil's knife arm down and out away from his throat. The steer swung again, bucking, and Neil was sent sliding off his back, his left hand scraped by a horn. He lay on the earth and stared up at the steer who stared back, blood spilling down from its neck like an open faucet. Neil slowly arose and backed away, fearing a charge. The rest of the herd had stopped thirty yards off and was circling restlessly, several of them lowing mournfully.

  Trembling, Neil waited until the steer finally lay down and died. Then he went to it and began cutting the animal into portable chunks.

  He worked for an hour and a half, having to stop to rest at frequent intervals. He chewed greedily on several pieces of the meat and cupped some of the blood in a hand and drank it.

  It was three full hours from the time of his kill before he had wrapped some eighty pounds of meat and bone and liver into the jacket, bundled it with line and harnessed it for carrying on his back. It was too heavy for him to carry for long in his weakened condition and he had to drag it up the hill.