“We’re going to collect dew for water,” Mr. O’Connell said. “If you have a cotton T-shirt, we’re going to need it. Or even a bandanna. We’re going to drag the grass with our T-shirts, then wring them out into the one drinking bottle we have with us. It will be a slow, tedious process, but it’s a known survival technique.”
“What about food?” Bob Worm asked.
“We can probably survive without food, but the ocean is our best chance of finding something. We need everyone to be vigilant. Also, we need to come up with a signaling system so that if someone does come by in a boat or a plane, we’ll be noticed. Who wants to be on that team?”
No one raised a hand.
Ms. Carpenter stepped forward and pointed to Bob, Harry, and Mary. That left Sandy alone with Mr. O’Connell.
“Sandy, you’re on fire duty. Keep it going, but don’t use more wood than necessary. I’m going to start dragging the grass for dew.”
“Is it too early?” Harry asked.
“Maybe it will be more frost than dew, but it might work. It’s our one source of water. If it works, we’ll be in better shape.”
A cold wind blew across the top of the island. Mary turned to be out of it. The fire flickered and made a sound like a piece of sail coming free in a breeze.
Bob Worm found the boat. It was weird to spot it because he realized that he had walked past it a dozen times without picking it out. Someone had covered it with a camouflage tarp, and the pattern blended surprisingly well. It resembled rocks and sand and a bunch of puckerbush, and even after he saw it he had to step closer to make sure his eyes weren’t playing tricks on him.
But no, it was a boat. It looked to be old as a donkey, as his aunt Bertha would have said, but it was a boat. Fourteen footer, he guessed, a skiff. Or dory. Something to deliver goods back and forth to the mainland or to a boat at anchor. He started to laugh when he saw it.
“Hey,” he yelled, but was surprised to discover his voice was merely a croak. He had to bend over, get a little spit in his mouth, then try it again.
“Hey, over here! A boat!”
He saw Ms. Carpenter look up. She had them writing out HELP on the beach closest to the mainland. They had a bunch of white rocks already forming the H and E and part of the L.
“A boat,” he said. “I just found a boat.”
He pointed. One after another, they stood and scrambled toward him.
“I never even saw it!” Mary exclaimed. “It was right under our noses.”
“It’s a boat!” Harry said. “An actual boat.”
“Is it in good shape?” Ms. Carpenter asked. “Let’s pull the tarp back. Is it okay?”
Bob grabbed one end of the tarp and walked it backward along the side of the boat. The tarp didn’t want to come off. It stuck where the cold had trapped it against the wooden bottom and plants had grown through it and anchored it to the spot. It made a sound like snaps coming loose, but Bob kept pulling, feeling pretty excited. The tarp was in rough shape.
“Wow,” Harry said when Bob had the tarp pretty far back. “That’s an old boat.”
Bob saw it, too. It was an old wooden rowboat. Heavy as anything, Bob guessed. Probably dense and partially waterlogged already. Bob studied the rotted keel, no longer feeling the same sense of triumph he had a moment before. Yes, it was a boat, he saw, but it was hard to say if it was reliable.
“Do you think it’s any good?” Mary asked. “Do you think it’s seaworthy?”
“It’s not very far to the mainland,” Harry said. “Probably a mile, maybe.”
“That is a long way to row,” Ms. Carpenter said, her eyes running up and down the boat. “Does anyone see any oars? Can we lift it up and look underneath?”
Bob knew who was going to do the lifting. It was the same old story. This time, though, he didn’t mind. They all arranged themselves along one edge and hoisted. Something gooey followed the boat up. Mushrooms, Bob thought. The wood on the gunwale he held felt mushy and soft. The boat appeared in worse shape than he had thought.
But the oars were there. They looked much younger and better than the rest of the vessel.
“Gee, I don’t know,” Ms. Carpenter said. “What do you guys think?”
“It’s not great,” Harry said.
“I’ll go get Mr. O’Connell,” Mary said, turning to jog off. “He’ll want to see this.”
“It’s been out in the weather for years, looks like,” Ms. Carpenter said. “But it might be solid enough to make it to the mainland. That tarp was shot a long time ago.”
“I don’t think the oarlocks will hold,” Bob said. “Let’s drop it back down.”
They counted to three and dropped it. It almost nipped Harry’s toes, but he jumped backward just in time.
Mr. O’Connell arrived a few minutes later with Mary.
“What do you think?” Ms. Carpenter asked after they had repeated the process of lifting it and showing it to Mr. O’Connell.
“It’s hard to say, isn’t it?” he asked. “I think we should drag it down to the water and check it out. We can float it and see if it holds or starts to leak right away.”
“I’m not sure it’s seaworthy,” Ms. Carpenter said.
“Well, I guess we won’t know until we try it. If it can carry one of us to the mainland, then that solves a lot of problems.”
Then they flipped the boat. It was easier said than done. When they dragged it off a few paces, they discovered a dried carcass underneath it. The carcass was so dry and so flattened that it was difficult to say what kind of animal it had been. Fox, Bob thought. Or maybe a cat or raccoon. He didn’t inspect it too closely.
Luckily, the boat wasn’t far from the water. Still, it reminded Bob of a time when he and his dad had lifted a refrigerator up a set of basement stairs without a hand truck. Lift, shove, rest. Lift, shove, rest. The boat felt watery and soft and a couple times Bob wondered if they weren’t going to peel the bottom right off it.
But it made it. They shoved the nose of the boat into the water and it suddenly lifted and was no longer an unwieldy, heavy thing.
“Well, at least it floats,” Mary said when they slowly turned it around on the water so that the prow faced them. “That’s a start.”
“It might leak a little until the joints swell,” Mr. Puffin said, examining the interior. “That’s the way it is with these old wooden boats.”
“Do you really think someone should chance it?” Bob asked. “If you get halfway to the mainland and it starts to leak big-time, you’re a dead man.”
“We’re in a bit of a pickle, in case you didn’t notice,” Mr. Puffin said offhandedly, his eyes still running back and forth over the boat. “I’m worried about Sam. He needs medical attention and he needs water and food. We all do.”
“Still,” Bob said.
“If the boat floats, it’s doable,” Ms. Carpenter said. “I rowed in college. We did miles at a time.”
But not in a big, heavy tub, Bob thought, his mind trying to figure the odds. This boat, even when it was freshly minted, wasn’t cut out for long voyages. He imagined people might have made it over to the mainland on a soft summer day, but this was no soft summer day, that was for sure.
“Let’s let it sit for a while and see how it does,” Mr. Puffin said. “If it takes on water, then we’ll have that as information. Grab some of that rope, would you, Mary?”
Mary grabbed a length of rope. It was nylon rope, yellow and red strands intertwined, one of a thousand pieces around the island’s shoreline. The rope came off lobster pots and washed around, jamming propellers and getting tangled on everything. Eventually, it washed up on the island, frayed and bleached. That was supposed to be a large part of the reason for visiting the island in the first place, Bob recalled. They were going to clean off nesting sites for puffins. That plan seemed like something from a million years ago.
But at least they had plenty of rope. Bob helped Mr. Puffin tie the boat off and attach the free end to a huge metal ring
that had been cemented into a granite block. The boat rode comfortably on its leash, bobbing and occasionally nudging forward to click softly against the rocky shore. When Bob looked inside the boat, he saw that it had taken on water, definitely, but it wasn’t a drastic situation. It looked like the wood had become spongy and soft, but maybe it had one more trip in it.
“Okay, that’s pretty good,” Mr. Puffin said. “That’s a little ray of hope right there, isn’t it? Now, if I can make some water out of dew, we’ll be in business.”
“This is intense,” Harry said, following Mr. Puffin back. “I mean it. This is way intense.”
Bob fell in behind them. It was intense, Bob thought. He made a quick detour and went back to look at the carcass they had unearthed by lifting the boat. A fox, he thought. He was pretty sure it had been a fox.
Eamon dragged his T-shirt over the grass at the foot of the fort. Mary and Sandy and Harry walked higher up on the hillside, their T-shirts dragging behind them, too. It was working. To his amazement, it was working, and he felt a glimmer of pride in remembering this small survival tip from a weekend Scouting trip he had taken when he was ten.
The trick was to take your T-shirt, twist one end and turn it into a little ghost, tie a rope around the knotted head, then drag the whole contraption behind you as you walked. A ghost or a small dog. If you walked slowly and carefully, the T-shirt absorbed the dew, then you could squeeze the extra water into a drinking vessel, and voilà, survival. It was slow, tedious work, and you had to be careful not to drag the T-shirt ghost through poisonous weeds, but little by little you gathered water. Eamon felt confident that later, when the hard frost settled on the island, they would harvest more water faster. Now that they knew the trick, they could have a team harvesting all night long if need be. Dehydration, remarkably, was no longer a serious threat.
When he judged his T-shirt to be well soaked, he walked to the spilling station, where Ursula kept the Nalgene bottle. She held a bandanna over the mouth of the vessel as a filter. Eamon squeezed the water into the cavity she had poked into the mouth of the cloth and watched a thin trickle of water drip down into the bottle.
“Not bad,” Ursula said. “I took the first drink up to Sam. He wouldn’t wake up so I gave him a little, just dripped it into his mouth, but I worried he’d choke.”
Eamon nodded. Sam was the issue. Sam was the very big issue.
“Let’s try to keep count and go in rotation so that everyone gets a fair portion. You can adjust for body size, but everyone needs some right away.”
“Agreed.”
Eamon started to head off when Ursula asked him to wait a moment.
“I think I should take the boat,” she said when he came back toward her. “It’s still floating.”
“It’s taken on a lot of water.”
“I know. But I could bail, too. We have that rusty paint can, and we could use it as a bailer. I could go alone. We wouldn’t be risking two lives.”
“We only have to make it till Tuesday. It’s Sunday already.”
“I know, but I don’t think Sam can last,” she said, her voice going low as Sandy came up with her T-shirt of frost. Sandy, to her credit, Eamon thought, actually performed the task well and didn’t complain for a change. She went off to keep reloading her T-shirt with water.
When Sandy left, Ursula continued.
“If I can make it across, Sam will have medical attention a day and a half earlier. It might be the difference.”
“You mean life and death? You really think so?”
Ursula shrugged.
“It seems like it. I’m not a doctor, but his pulse seems light and irregular. He hasn’t eaten and has had only a little water. We’ve made him as comfortable as possible, but he’s probably cold. Whatever fell on him almost scraped his ear off. Maybe it injured his head, too.”
Eamon nodded. She had just outlined his own thinking, too.
“If anybody goes, I’ll go,” he said. “I’m the one who brought us here; I’m the one who should assume the risk.”
“But I’m a better rower. I was a great rower in college, Eamon. I’m really good at it, and I’m really strong.”
“I don’t like it.”
“If the boat floats through the night and the sea is calm tomorrow, I want to try it. We owe it to Sam.”
“True, but it won’t help Sam if you are midway to the mainland and the boat sinks.”
“I agree. But we’re going to be careful and check it out first.”
She stopped talking. Harry came up with his T-shirt and squeezed its moisture into the bottle. His addition gave them a half bottle. That was one and a half bottles in maybe an hour, an hour and a half, Eamon calculated. Not much, but enough to get them through. The frost, after the sun went down, might yield better results.
“Let’s look at it in the morning,” Eamon said. “Let’s see how the boat does during the night.”
She nodded. He went off to drag his T-shirt through the grass. It was a cold, bright late afternoon.
Sandy sat on the beach and thought about the mall. Actually, it didn’t feel as though she thought about the mall as much as the mall invaded her consciousness. She pictured the warm air coming out of the vents; the sunglasses shop where the cute boy, Victor, worked and let her try on as many pairs as she liked; the clothing outlet with all the flashy, beautiful things and the free vials of perfume; Mrs. Johnson, who liked to gossip as she folded things; and the food court, where Sandy could slowly work her way around from Panda Pasta to Pizza Express to Oriental Chaos. Yes, she missed the mall. She missed its orderly presence, its comfort, its warm, soothing environment. She promised herself that she would never, ever come camping again. Not for any reason. Not for anyone.
She was still sitting there when Mary came by and told her they still needed more wood for the fire.
“I’m resting,” Sandy said.
She didn’t really want to work, but more than that, she didn’t want to leave her daydream of the mall.
“We need wood,” Mary repeated.
“Does it look like my ears fell off?”
“If you heard me, why don’t you do what you’re asked?”
“Because you are not the queen of England.”
“I don’t need to be the queen of England to ask you to do your share.”
“Get over yourself, Mary.”
Sandy didn’t even bother looking at Mary. She kept her eyes on the ocean and her brain on the mall. She heard Mary give a little huff of exasperation, then stalk off. Sandy didn’t care. If you didn’t care, it usually didn’t matter what other people did. She had discovered that a long time ago.
Mr. Puffin came by a little later and sat down beside her. Sandy didn’t acknowledge him because she knew he came to give her the talk. Teachers loved to give you the talk, she knew. She had heard it plenty of times and Mr. Puffin didn’t hold out much promise of originality. She wondered what he would say if she turned the tables and tried to lecture him about responsibility.
“So, Mary said you two had a disagreement about collecting wood,” Mr. Puffin started. “Is that fair to say?”
“Not really.”
“Why not?”
“Because I didn’t disagree. I just said I was resting.”
“But other people are working. You must be able to see how it bothers people to see you sitting here while they are working.”
“If they need a rest, they should stop and take it. I won’t tell them they have to keep going.”
“But we all have to pitch in.”
“I’m the one who climbed through the window, remember? I’m the one who risked her life.”
“I wouldn’t say you risked your life by doing that.”
“Well, you weren’t the one who had to squeeze through that little slot, were you?”
She didn’t look at him, but she could feel his slow burn. It almost made her laugh. Why didn’t other people know what she knew? All you had to do was say no, calmly and surely
, and people couldn’t do much about it.
“Listen, I’m on your side, Sandy. I’m trying to make you understand why people may sometimes have a hard time with you.”
“Gee, thanks.”
“You’re being sarcastic. I’m being sincere.”
“I don’t want your sincerity. Thanks, but no thanks.”
He didn’t say anything, but she heard him breathing harder.
“You’ve got a long life ahead of you,” Mr. Puffin said, his voice a little tattered with emotion. “It’s going to be difficult if you don’t mend your ways.”
“You mean so I can be a person like you who leads a bunch of kids onto an island and gets them in this situation? If I change, I can be like you?”
He didn’t say anything. She felt him boiling. People boiled easier than you might guess if you knew how to do it.
“I’ll ignore that remark,” he said.
She didn’t reply.
“So it’s your position that you should sit and do nothing while other people work? Is that what you’re saying?”
“Is that what I said?”
“It’s what you imply.”
“Take it how you want to.”
“Sandy, quit being so unreasonable.”
“People always say you’re unreasonable if you don’t do what they want you to do.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
She shrugged. For a second, she imagined fast food — the steel-colored scooper going through a new pile of fries. Then salt. Then a blat of ketchup next to it. That’s what she wanted to think about.
She didn’t say anything else. Mr. Puffin finally got the message.
After his departure, it took her a few minutes to regain her mental map of the mall. She liked going into the candle store. Nothing made her happier than the scent of a bunch of candles. Some people hated it, but not her. She thought candles smelled better than just about anything.
Ursula pushed the boat off the rocky shore and climbed nimbly onto the rowing bench. It was early morning, the water as calm as a puddle. Gulls sang and reeled above her. The grassy slope rising up to the fort had been coated white by frost. It was a cold morning, but calm, and Ursula imagined making the crossing nearly before the others had come fully awake.
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