Herr-Franz surprised him with his calm demeanor. From this bastard, he expected threats at best, and a beating or death at worst. Leaning forward, as if dispensing a secret, the giant said, “It will surprise you, boy, how forgiving people can be. You are going to live a long life. We can guarantee it. And we can guarantee that your family will not only take you back, you will become leader of the Green Turtle Clan. We are absolutely certain these things will happen.”
Leonglauix said he was chewing on those thoughts, thinking of a polite way to tell the two men they were crazy, when the third man appeared on his left. He said he felt his log move as if someone had sat down beside him. Only there was nobody beside him, just air. In a flash, the shape of a seated body cycled between blinding light and flat black before holding steady on a neutral tan similar to bison leather. The third man’s face appeared as he retracted the visor of his helmet. Leonglauix was halfway out of his seat and ready to run for the hills when the ghost man clamped a hand over his shoulder.
“You will not be a Fish-Eater,” he said through a rectangular hole that made it look like he himself was a turtle. “Look you, to those ravens feeding on the beached porpoise across the river? Watch this.”
The man pointed a short stick at the birds and then thunder and lightning erupted from its end. Leonglauix cowered and shut his eyes. “Look boy, witness the power!” Across the river, the birds had been reduced to bloody piles of feathers. “You will return to your family, and you will become leader of your clan. Do you understand?”
Leonglauix said his head became dizzy as the three strangers outlined their plans. “One summer day,” they said, “more than four hands of years from now, you will encounter other men and women who wear suits like this one. They too will have thunder sticks which shoot flames and deliver death from long distances. Some of the people will be good and some will be bad. You must help Doo-Art. Say it, ‘must help Doo-Art.’ And you must stop Mertoon-elly. ‘Must kill Mertoon-elly.’ Say that.”
Within two days of that meeting, Leonglauix was on his way south, never to return. Not yet at least.
How the strangers came to live with the Fish-Eaters, Leonglauix could not say. When I asked if they might hear about us and attempt to meet us halfway, he scoffed in a way that did not seem all that genuine. I thought it was a fair question, for after all, Sergeant Lorenzo Martinelli made quite large ripples across native society during his time in the Paleolithic.
“It is too far,” he said. “They live in a remote place and do not communicate with other people. They do not like to travel away from their home by the sea.”
Though he answered every question I tossed his way, I had the distinct feeling I was being snookered. “Do you feel better?” he asked when we finished. “Are we friends again?”
TRANSMISSION:
Jones: “Giant sounds like Franz, the asshole German cop. Remember him?”
Bolzano: “Indeed I do, and not favorably. That Bavarian thug was a thorn in my side throughout training. I think he knew only one of us German-speakers would make it through.”
Jones: “Thought you were Italian.”
Bolzano: “In training everybody thought I was Swiss.”
Jones: “That’s right. Forgot about that. Well, Franz and Kaikane weren’t close pals either. Our waterman almost twisted his neck off.”
Bolzano: “That match provided one of my fondest memories of training. It was Franz’s last day. I think we all enjoyed seeing him carried away on a stretcher.”
Jones: “So why’d they send a jerk like him on an important rescue mission?”
Bolzano: “I have been pondering the enigma since Leonglauix mentioned the name ‘Herr-Franz.’ I continue to arrive at the same conclusion. They must have been scraping the bottom of the barrel.”
Jones: “Roger that.” Second guy’s probably Tamashiro, he wasn’t so bad.”
Bolzano: “You are correct, Tamashiro was a good soldier and ethical person. He hailed from Tokyo, if I remember correctly. What happened to him?”
Jones: “Broken leg. Rappelling exercise.”
Bolzano: “I must have been absent that day.”
Jones: “Absent? You?”
Bolzano: “I called in sick every day I could.”
Jones: “Know that. Ya said old man thinks they’re dead?”
Bolzano: “That is what he said. They were old when he met them as a boy.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
TRANSMISSION:
Duarte: “Here he comes again. Oh my–hold on!”
From the log of Maria Duarte
Chief Botanist
Even though Paul is an accomplished fisherman, I knew it was hopeless as he stammered out his plan to drag a booby-trapped carcass behind the boat to catch the shark. Our clash against the monstrous beast would come down to spear versus tooth–and we would lose. It was inevitable.
As we hashed out his bait-towing plot, every time I said “catch,” he would correct me with, “ill, ill, ill!” I fought back a bitchy urge to inquire if he was planning to ‘ill’ it with a flu virus or something.
Once his chum trail of crushed fish, shrimp and krill attracted enough of the food chain to include larger pelagic fish and marine mammals, Paul instructed me to harpoon one of the happy-faced porpoise surfacing alongside the boat. The porpoise weighed about 230 pounds and was looking up at Paul with a fish in her mouth when I plunged the heavy wooden spear into her cerebral cortex. Though I anticipated her death throes, once again I nearly found myself sailing overboard headfirst. Paul was ready, however. From his seat, he clinched me around the thighs with one arm to prevent me from toppling. Together, we muscled the twitching body aboard.
Blood dripping through the deck excited the shark into a pair of very slow passes with his body high in the water–high enough to scan the deck with those soulless, black eyes big as plates. My heart felt ready to pound from my chest, yet Paul barely glanced up when, on his third pass, the shark surfaced under the right hull to lift it four feet out of the water. Paul had his feet hooked in a support rope and barely swayed as the deck tilted. Only a wild grab for the mast kept me from tumbling off the deck.
The shark dragged us for at least 60 feet, rolling his head in frustration and slapping wildly at the offending kayak with a dorsal fin taller than me. I held the mast in a death-grip, mouth hanging wide open.
The wound Paul inflicted months ago with his ill-advised cast of a yew spear still showed signs of pink. The giant, gray triangle of cartilage and sandpapery skin had been punctured squarely in its middle. There is no way of telling how the shark ripped the hindrance free, but its passing tore a gaping fissure roughly two feet in length and six inches at its widest where it exited the back of the fin.
Shedding us with a mighty flick of his tail, the shark sent the boat splashing down. Watching him dart down into the dark, blue depths sent my anxiety levels off the charts. What to do? Where to go? I felt like a rat trapped in a burning cage. Nothing to do! Nowhere to go! We hadn’t seen land in more than a week. Meanwhile, Paul was trying to position the porpoise for his first cut, but was moving way too slowly for my tastes. I understood the plan and I had two good working hands, so I sort of took over and did things my way. Even when Paul made frustrated noises and slapped at my legs to get me to slow down, I barreled onward.
The porpoise was to carry a payload of red-hot coals, flint shards and fish oils. I didn’t relish the idea of sacrificing my cook pot, the one which had provided so many warm meals over the past months, but didn’t even think twice about stoking up the fire and loading it with deadly cargo.
My first real mistake was cutting the pot’s hole directly on top of the porpoise’s neck and not on its side. I didn’t think the carcass would be so prone to rolling over. Paul did. We had to rig wooden floats under the animal’s pectoral fins, which took time, time enough for two more solid bumps from our friend. I admit, I was close to panic as I set the pot into the porpoise and carefully pushed the sizzling anima
l off the back of the boat. I had attached our longest rope to the makeshift lure and it played out to its full length of 56 feet.
The look on Paul’s face told me he didn’t approve of my methods. The carcass cut a wake behind us for at least a half hour, and the fire was probably out by the time the shark made his first tentative pass. Charging directly behind the porpoise, the shark sent my hopes soaring, then dove underwater about 15 feet short. His bow wake jostled the porpoise, rocked it so much that it high-centered and tipped over. My beloved pot was already at the bottom of the sea by the time we hauled the dead mammal back to the stern.
“Ut it loose,” Paul said.
Once I cast the animal adrift and coiled the rope, Paul motioned me to sit with him in the center of the deck.
“Not dumb,” he said haltingly. “Slow.”
“I know, Paul–”
He raised his good arm to shush me.
“Trust. Trust me.”
So that is what I did.
Through the rest of the morning and late into the afternoon, Paul and I set up our defenses. Slips of wood were carefully lashed to the tips of every spear to create barbs for wedging under the shark’s tough skin. Every spear had a rope and float attached. On some of the lighter spears, we attached weights to their hafts to help give me the force to drive them home deep. We both knew I would be the one casting the spears. We also knew I needed all the help I could get. When things were squared away, Paul asked me to dig his beloved meteorite club from his kayak.
Sometime not long after, Paul shucked off all his clothes. I told him Gray Beard would be proud that his warrior son prepared to meet his challenger with his balls on the line, but left out how sad he looked sitting there shrunken and naked with his special club lashed by a short cord to his weak right wrist.
Once we had accomplished all we could on the weapons front, we returned to Paul’s pet project of constructing his second shark lure, a miniature catamaran made from driftwood and deck planking. It was his concept and design, but I was in charge of tying the knots and burning materials down to size. Killing time, dreading the inevitable fight, we worked together quietly. We also did our best to ignore the shark as it steadily kept pace alongside the boat. Working together reminded me of the old days, before his injury, when we were a team that shared duties and never questioned each other’s abilities.
The fact that his boat matched the shape and size of my fire hearth and its armature of petrified antlers and willow branches did not escape my notice. I tried to balk at its use, but he insisted we must at least give his idea a try. Though I agreed, I knew it would never work. To the bottom of his little boat, we secured leather strips that were supposed to resemble something along the lines of a pinniped’s flippers and rudder-like tail. I tried to create something more realistic, but he insisted, in his halting way, that it didn’t need to look real. It just had to attract interest and excitement.
Paul had me extract our two remaining chunks of raw basalt, as well as all of our spare flint points, knives and leatherworking tools from the holds of his kayak. We let the fire die down, then carefully lowered the hearth and its holder onto its custom-built, twin-hulled boat. The wind had calmed and the sea was more or less flat as we stoked the fire with the last of our firewood. Once the fire was blazing, we loaded the flints and stones into the embers and gently set the boat adrift.
Never letting the rope play out to its very end, Paul worked it as he would one of his smaller lures. Tug, tug, rest, haul it in quickly four feet, then let it stop and drift for a minute. I was standing there watching his technique when the shark surfaced directly under the boat. Slap, slap, slap! I could feel the dorsal fin move beneath the deck poles as it thrashed between the twin kayak hulls. Grabbing one of our narrow-gauge spears, I wedged it through a gap in the poles to plunge it deep into the shark’s massive back. “No, you don’t,” I cried out, pressing downward with all my weight, fighting him as he tried to lift the boat out of the water.
Grinding down, feeling my weapon cutting into the gristle of the shark’s back, I tipped my head to issue a war cry when the shaft was suddenly yanked from my hands. The shark’s dive sent me smashing face-first to the deck just as the spear shaft snapped in half, the part not embedded in the fish pinwheeling dangerously close to my left eye. The jagged end caught me on the temple to leave me a little scratched and a lot woozy.
The shark soon made another close pass, riding high out of the water to study us with his big black eye again–a perfect target–but I was too groggy to throw a spear. Paul shook his meteorite spear at him. Scooting over to wipe the blood from my cheek, told me, “Going be OK. You right, must kill him with spears. Y-y-y-you kill him!”
Retrieving the little boat, letting his frustration show through, he man-handled it in with one arm. The flames had died and our fire was barely smoking, but I knew the fire hearth would shatter the moment it touched cold water. “Slow down,” I scolded, before turning away. I couldn’t bear to watch as it jostled and nearly tipped over with each reckless pull of the rope.
Shaking my head to clear it, I lofted a spear weighted with a coil of thick auroch leather and prepared to do battle. A familiar sound caught my ear. It was a sound we had come to dread over the past few months, the sound of a geyser, the sound of a shark launching itself from the depths of the sea to snap a sea lion in half. I turned to an amazing sight. The shark seemed suspended in midair, rising straight up out of the water like a silver-striped rocket. Casting a shadow over Paul’s seat at the tiller, the shark was no more than 12 feet from the stern of our boat as my husband calmly scooted himself forward to crank the tiller hard to the right.
A rope dangling from the corner of the beast’s smoking mouth sheared away as its jaws distended and retracted in quick succession. Reaching the apex of his leap, furious eyes locked on the boat, the shark arched his body for landing. Looking up, all I could see was shark. My legs frozen in place, arms wrapped around the mast, the best I could do was scream.
I think the shark felt as certain as I did that he would smash down squarely in the middle of our deck. How could he miss? But the winds were in our favor. The catamaran heaved over just far enough to keep us from being flattened under the massive body. Instead, the shark caught the left hull with his tail and one pectoral fin. The force of the impact capsized the boat and catapulted Paul and me over the animal’s back into the open ocean.
We tread water side by side and tried to look small as the crazed shark thrashed the sea into froth. Searching for us with a belly full of hot flints and clay shards driving him into a frenetic rage, the shark dove deep and launched himself into the air three times. After the third jump, the dying fish keeled over on his side to swim crazy circles between us and the boat.
I was watching all this in disbelief, watching the catamaran drift farther and farther away, when Paul surfaced to block my view. Playfully splashing me in the face, he treated me to a big smile. His eye patch was gone and both eyes shined brightly.
“Feels good!” He shouted as the shark flipped belly up.
The meteorite club was still attached to Paul’s wrist, but the weight of the weapon did not seem to restrict his movements as he dove and surfaced unseen to blow a stream of water into my left ear. Without clothes, he swam like a one-armed otter, while my leather duds were threatening to carry me under. Finally, I shucked them off and let them sink away.
The shark’s stripes and spots had lost most of their color by the time we paddled wide around his floating body. He appeared bleached out. The one eye I could see was covered in a white, milky film, like a fungus. The first of many, many gulls and other birds already spiraled down from the sky–vultures of the sea starting an epic race with the aquatic scavengers to see which side of the shark, above or below water, would be consumed first.
It took nearly an hour for us to reach the capsized boat. Though extremely cold, it felt invigorating to swim in my birthday suit next to my happy husband.
The ma
st and sail floated just below the surface. The deck projected up into the air at an angle not quite perpendicular to the ocean’s surface. We held onto the hull still in the water and heaved to catch our breath. As I gently massaged the sore on my head, Paul swam around and under the boat to inspect its rigging.
“You right our ship,” he panted upon his return. “Climb up. Furl sail. I can’t. Throw me down a rope. We’ll tip it. Together.”
It took us many tries, but I eventually stood at the top of the damn boat with my bare ass leaning out into space as Paul tugged on a rope from below. As the mast and soggy sail began to lift out of the water, I feared the boat or I would smash down on top of Paul, but it righted itself slowly. When the hull and I touched down with barely a splash, Paul was there, treading water with a sheepish smile on his face.
“Works like charm,” he said.
As soon as he was aboard ship, Paul ordered me to unfurl the sail. Maybe I had become accustomed to serving as captain, for I abruptly questioned the order.
“We need to repair the rigging, see if the hulls have leaked,” I protested.
“Plenty time… that,” he countered. “Wind’s dying. Need get our stuff.”
Turning to where he pointed, I spotted our No. 2 sail floating off with the current. Bobbing alongside the fiber sail were numerous pieces of driftwood, all tied off with twine.
The boat was badly damaged, but not irreparably. Much of the rigging on the left side had been either snapped or loosened, but it held up OK as I spread the sail wide and set off after our belongings. I maneuvered a slalom course as Paul scooted from one side of the boat to the other to retrieve all but one of our spears. It took both of us to haul in the spare sail. By then, the wind had more or less stopped altogether.
Imagine my joy the next day when I spotted the beads of my abandoned leather outfit floating about five feet below the surface. We fished it out with a harpoon and hung it to dry on one of the diagonal lines that holds the mast in place. I have been treating the leather jacket and shift with seal grease. After a few more rubdowns, I hope to have returned them to their former glory.
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