by Fred Koehler
The shrew had chosen what he thought to be the safest approach to Colubra’s garbage patch. A bridge of driftwood and seaweed connected the refrigerator with the jumble of debris where he’d wedged the skiff. Excellent planning, Archie. At least you’ll be safe till you get inside.
Archie took one step and sank immediately up to his neck in a plastic bag. He yelped and flailed about, but the thin plastic was not dense enough to support the shrew. Thus would have ended his adventure if not for his tail and a chopstick. Archie’s thrashing tail found the floating utensil and leveraged it quickly for balance. With effort, he maneuvered the chopstick across the mess of plastic and then pulled himself paw over paw till he reached more stable footing.
Archie shook the water out of his fur and trembled. Colubra must know I’m here now, he thought. The shrew looked around for a place to hide but saw none.
Then, to his horror, a creaking sound reached his ears. It came from the ice maker.
Archie’s heart raced at an astonishing pace, and as his shrew defenses kicked in, he released a foul-smelling odor meant to keep predators away. Every muscle tensed. Nothing happened. Must’ve been the wind. Slowly, Archie’s ears and tail began to relax hair by hair.
And then Colubra’s head emerged. Her tongue flicked rapidly as she smelled the air. Archie clenched his jaw to keep from chirping. I hope that old Popli feels terrible when he finds out I got eaten, thought the shrew. It is his fault after all. The shrew stiffened his back and stood still as the moon—shoulders to his ears and eyes squeezed shut. He waited for the end.
But Colubra paid no attention to the intruder. Turning away from the shrew, she descended the opposite side of the refrigerator. Stymied, Archie wondered what had happened. Did my smell scare her away? Or maybe she’s already eaten the egg and she’s full? Or still hungry and going back for more? It’s not safe out here, that’s for certain. So the shrew scrambled up the side of the refrigerator, through the ice maker, and into Colubra’s lair.
Archie believed the stories he’d heard of the mouse colony before Colubra, but still he tensed and shivered to see evidence of the desolation. A single beam of moonlight shined through the ice-maker door. In its pale glow, Archie glimpsed mouse-sized artifacts littering shelves and drawers—cups and plates and tools and beds, even toys and dolls bereft of owners to play with them.
The last thread of moonlight touched the edge of Colubra’s nest, built with more remnants of the lost mouse civilization. Archie recognized bits of torn clothing mixed with shredded woven mats and even an entire mouse-sized boat that had been splintered and shattered. In the center of the nest he spied the egg. Ha! thought the shrew. She hasn’t eaten it yet. She must be waiting for it to hatch.
As if responding to Archie’s idea, a slight rustling sound echoed through Colubra’s lair. He scrambled over to the egg, and putting his furry cheek up against the leathery white shell, he felt something moving inside. “Hello there,” he said, momentarily forgetting the danger. “Let’s get you someplace a little safer.”
Archie carefully carried the egg back across the desolate lair, stumbling over the tattered remains of a dress that had once been bright blue. He stifled a scream as a bone crunched under a paw. At long last Archie’s twitching nose poked out through the ice maker, scenting for any sign of Colubra. But only the faintest whiff of the snake hung in the dead midnight air.
She’s gone! thought the shrew. Thank goodness. This rescue might be successful after all.
Archie scrambled backward out of the refrigerator, keeping the egg trapped between his snout and the slippery plastic. He got stuck for several harrowing seconds with his front paws clinging to the lip of the ice maker, not sure how to scale down without dropping the egg. In the end he just let go, both shrew and egg sliding swiftly. The egg plopped onto the same mass of soggy plastic bags that had nearly drowned Archie. And Archie splashed into the ocean—right into Colubra’s coils.
The shrew scratched and bit at the snake’s skin surrounding him, releasing his own paralyzing venom from small, pointy teeth. He thrashed, clawing and chomping at everything. Fighting furiously, he waited for the sting of Colubra’s jaws.
That sensation never came.
Near exhaustion, Archie found a splinter of driftwood with one of his paws. He hauled himself up. He kicked over to the egg, and after wrestling it from the plastic, he swam back to the skiff. There, he heaved the egg and then himself over the side.
Did I kill Colubra? he wondered. Perhaps I have! I’ll be a hero when I haul her body back to the island, and that Mr. Popli will owe me quite an apology. Perhaps I’ll forgive him. Once I’ve shown off the telescope and we’ve built new and better ships, perhaps I’ll let him serve tea on our maiden voyage.
With renewed energy, Archie rowed the skiff back to the refrigerator and looked for signs of the snake. There, just below the surface, moonlight glinted off a long, scaly body. Archie reached down with an oar and lifted, much to his surprise, a flimsy, all-but-transparent outline of Colubra, like a suit she might have slipped off. She shed her skin! thought Archie. Well, that explains why she never fought back.
The shrew pulled the snake skin into his skiff and checked the egg one last time. He helped himself to a dozen fresh barnacles from the side of the refrigerator, satiating his hunger for now. Then he set oars for home, completely unaware of the calamity he brought with him.
Chapter 6
When the island broke apart, Archie was not completely to blame.
“Archibald!” Mr. Popli called, banging on the shrew’s door. “Archibald Shrew, wake up!”
Archie opened his door and blinked in the early sunlight. “Sorry, Mr. Popli. Those late nights on the Watchtower seem to have caught up with me. I overslept. Did you bring breakfast?”
“Never mind that,” said Mr. Popli, nosing his way past the shrew into Archie’s front room. “We’ve got a catastrophe on our hands. Angus woke up this morning to find a school of frogfish in the algae garden—it’ll be near impossible to clear them out! How could it happen? You said that if we added your netting contraption to the wall, not even a minnow could squeeze its way through.”
“Not even a wedge of turnip?”
“Archibald! How can you think about food at a time like this?!”
“I always think about food,” said Archie soberly. “And I can’t imagine how the frogfish got in. I inspected every inch of the netting last week. And the outer wall is solid as wood! There’s not a whisker of space between any two pieces. Unless …” He thought back to the night before, arriving home hours later to find his secret door wide open.
“Unless what?”
“Unless … um … unless that old cigar box that we used to patch the north wall came loose,” Archie lied. “That would’ve given those frogfish just enough room to wiggle their way into the lagoon.”
“Snakespit,” said Mr. Popli. “I suppose that could have done it. You’re sure there’s nothing else it could have been?”
“No. Not—um. Nothing, Mayor Popli.”
Such a terrible liar, thought the mouse. What are you hiding, Archibald Shrew? “Carry on, then. I’ll go and check the wall myself.” The mouse turned to leave. “And Archibald?”
“Yes?”
“You’ve somehow managed to lose another lens in your glasses.”
“I know. Unfortunate incident at the Watchtower.”
“Well, go ahead and fix them if you can. I won’t keep you from that. Besides, how much damage could you do tinkering with a tiny piece of glass?”
“Not much, I’m sure.”
Mr. Popli felt most at home on a boat by himself, untethered to the mainland. Now a sense of liberation overcame him each time his skiff climbed to the crest of a wave and then sped down into the trough of the next. For a moment, he wished the island didn’t exist at all and he could just look out for himself.
You can’t afford to be so selfish, he scolded. If you don’t keep everyone working together, the whole island cou
ld fall apart.
He gripped the oars with small, strong paws and pulled against the current. This must be the way Archibald always feels. Fewer real responsibilities than a fruit fly and all the time in the world for his little inventions. He suddenly wondered if he was jealous of the shrew. No, he most certainly wasn’t. If not for Merri, Archibald Shrew had hardly a friend in the ocean. And all the foulest jobs that no one else would do. Whenever Archibald bottles snail slime you can smell him coming for days afterward.
The supposed loose panel in the outer wall was only accessible by rowing around the island, and the task would take all morning. By the time he reached the panel, he’d already devoured his lunch. He’d planned to make a fine snack of any loose barnacles along the way, but it looked as though Archie had picked them all when he’d completed the work previously. Grumbling to no one in particular, Mr. Popli tied his skiff to the wall.
I wonder how badly that shrew has botched this job, he thought. Probably hammered in two nails and then spent the rest of the day loafing.
The half-submerged panel, a cigar box lid, was weathered nearly beyond recognition. Patches of color on it revealed the remnants of an illustrated landscape—an island girl in a long skirt beckoned toward a sun-kissed field blossoming with banana trees and tobacco plants. To Mr. Popli, who had never seen a tree, much less a person, the picture made no more sense than the spaceships from Colubra’s lunchbox that haunted his dreams.
Waves lapped lazily against the wall as Mr. Popli dove into the water. He carried a bag of nails in a belt, a hammer in one paw, and a chisel between his teeth. Strapped to his leg was a long, thin knife fashioned from a shard of broken glass. Sharp as a gill on both edges with a handle made of rubber strapping, it had spilled more blood than Mr. Popli would have preferred. He hoped he wouldn’t need it today.
Mentally, the mouse went through an inspection checklist as he climbed portions of the wall and dove down to look at others. He scrutinized every inch of the cigar box and each of the adjoining pieces of the wall. Lashings—tight but not too tight; knots—secure; wood—no rot or soft spots; main line—some tattering but holding strong in all directions; nails—straight through. But look here; it’s a wonder this patch is holding at all! Archibald’s put too few nails in it. Still, the frogfish couldn’t have come through here. I wonder what Archibald knows that he’s not telling.
Mr. Popli hammered seven more nails into the cigar box and turned for home.
As the mouse made his way back around the point of the island, an unseasonably large wave rolled beneath his skiff, lifting him nearly high enough to see over the wall. Curious, he thought, as the wave continued along the wall and out of sight. By then, he was too far away to hear the sharp crack of the cigar box splintering where his fifth nail had been hammered. The two pieces held together for a moment before shearing in half.
Below the split patch, part of the wall dropped down, coming to rest right on an exposed section of the main line. If any of the islanders felt the slight shudder that reverberated through the garbage patch, they dismissed it as the wake from a migrating humpback whale.
Chapter 7
Archie rubbed his backside, sore from sitting on the egg for nearly an hour. It seemed in no hurry to hatch, still wrapped in the shed snake skin and hidden in the short passage near the Watchtower. It needs to be warmer, he thought. And I need a snack! I suppose we’ll have to head home. And so, hoping no one would see him, Archie slipped the skiff and the egg out of the passage and into a canal that led to the lagoon. Halfway home, he nearly collided with the one animal he least wanted to see.
“Hullo there, Archibald!” said Mr. Popli. “Just the shrew I was looking for. The patch is holding fine. Our frogfish problem must’ve come from somewhere else.”
“That’s curious news,” Archie replied. “But I’m glad to know the patch is holding strong.” He pulled even harder on his oars, trying to put distance between himself and the mouse.
But Mr. Popli seemed determined to make conversation and matched his pace.
“We’ll need a top-to-bottom inspection of the wall before the summer storms begin, which could be any day. I’ll assign Merri and Reginald to collaborate with you on this. They’re both hard workers, and Merri’s craftsmanship surpasses anyone’s. I say—what have you got in your skiff?”
“Nothing!” Archie’s voice cracked and he redoubled his rowing. “Nothing at all.”
“It doesn’t look like nothing,” said Mr. Popli, angling his course to intercept the shrew. The egg rested at Archie’s feet but poked up high enough to be barely visible. Mr. Popli pulled ahead, parking his skiff directly in Archie’s path. The shrew dug his oars into the water, but it was too late. The two boats collided, jarring both animals from their seats. Mr. Popli jumped up, angrier than ever.
“Archibald, what exactly have you been working on today?”
“I, um, well—” Archie began.
“Come with me,” Mr. Popli commanded. “And that’s an order you’d better obey.”
A large wave rolled between them.
Mr. Popli’s houseboat had begun its life as a milk jug at a dairy processing plant in California. After it tumbled from a trash barge in the Port of Los Angeles, it rode the ocean waves for seven months before drifting, barnacled but watertight, into the garbage patch. Mr. Popli had found it on his birthday, and spent months scrubbing it clean and rigging it out.
The squarish milk jug balanced in the water like an ark. The molded plastic handle faced the sky, and, at the end of its nozzle, the porthole pointed toward the lagoon. Outside, Mr. Popli had lashed smaller bottles, some to act as pontoons and some as rain barrels. A butter dish fastened to the rear served as his bathtub. Up top he’d created a sun deck of driftwood. Stretched across the whole ensemble, bits of plastic had been sewn together to form a tarp. The tarpaulin helped protect the houseboat from the sun, and when it rained, it funneled fresh water into the barrels.
Inside, he’d run plastic coffee stirrers across the lower third to form a bottom deck. Precise holes gnawed in the ceiling supported a system of ropes, notched planks, and pulleys that allowed the mouse to perch at nearly any height. With careful knots and thoughtful design, he’d fashioned a hanging bedroom, a living area, and even a tiny box garden where a sugar snap pea plant promised an early harvest. His few pieces of furniture could be moved to and fro by pulling on this rope or that, and everything could be securely battened down for the summer storms.
He’d named his houseboat the Abigail, after his mother. He often imagined showing her the vessel, certain she’d be impressed by his hard work and innovation. Today, however, he had no such reveries.
“Eggs and snake skins!” Mr. Popli’s voice echoed so loudly it rattled the walls of the Abigail. He looked contemptuously at the egg that Archie had brought inside and insisted be wrapped in blankets. He refused to allow the snake skin in, however, leaving it in the loosely tethered skiff outside. Medium-sized waves now rolled through every other minute, but neither took any notice.
“Your ears are turning bright red, Mr. Popli. You might want to calm down.”
“I AM PERFECTLY CALM!” The mouse breathed in deeply and gathered himself for a moment. “Perhaps you should calm down.”
“I’m fine, thank you.”
“You should be fine, Archibald Shrew! With your careless, carefree life and fewer actual responsibilities than an inchworm.”
“That’s unfair! I work harder than anyone else on the island!”
“Doing what? Dreaming all day instead of completing your work?”
“Even if I did, it’d be more than you do, MR. MAYOR! It must be nice to spend your days assigning ridiculous jobs to other animals while you sit around sipping dandelion tea and nibbling poppy seeds.
“‘Look at me,’” the shrew mocked in a high-pitched voice, sipping from an invisible cup. “‘I’m the mayor! Do what I say, or I’ll catapult you over the wall!’”
“THAT’S NOT AT ALL HOW I S
OUND!”
Archie continued with his impression. “‘And besides being insufferable, I’m a ridiculous excuse for a mammal. My tail is too long and I’m missing a toe on each foot.’”
“What? What do you mean my tail is too—oh. I see. Well. Your tail is too short! And quit trying to change the subject, Archibald Shrew! You will tell me where this egg came from and how you got it here. And I’ll take nothing but the truth!”
And so Archie told the complete story of how he’d gotten the egg. Except for the part about inventing the telescope. And the small detail about the secret door. And the embarrassing bit where he valiantly conquered the snake skin. But other than that, he told the whole truth.
Color rose again in Mr. Popli’s ears as Archie spoke. By the time he had finished, Mr. Popli was as red as a bottle cap. “Insubordination! Dereliction of duty!” he shouted. “Did you even think about what would happen if Colubra had seen you? A dozen walls would not keep her out. This time they’ll send you away forever, and I won’t be able to stop them!”
He paused his tirade to steady himself as the largest wave yet shoved the houseboat up against its mooring. The lashings held firm, and the duo leaned in to the shifting floor until it stabilized.
Just below the split patch on the northern part of the wall, a rusty panel of corrugated steel shifted down even farther, putting all its weight on the main line that held the island together. The undulating waves moved it back and forth like a saw blade.
Archie hadn’t considered the repercussions of entering Colubra’s lair. But he had saved a life! Mr. Popli had to see that. He wondered what banishment might be like. Perhaps he’d build a new sea-cycle and find his lost family. And what of the egg? Would he be here long enough to see it hatch? Not if Mr. Popli had anything to say about it. Of that he was certain.