Getting Air

by Dan Gutman

  “Wait a minute!” Mrs. Herschel said. “What if these are poisonous?”

  We all looked at Julia.

  “We should do an edibility test,” she said, “but just about all purple, blue, or black berries are edible. The poisonous ones are usually green, yellow, or white.”

  “How do you know so much?” Henry asked her.

  “There are these things called books,” Julia replied. “You might want to read one sometime.”

  “Ooh, zing!” Henry said, grabbing his chest like he’d been hit by an arrow.

  “What’s an edibility test?” Mrs. Herschel asked.

  Julia took a couple of the berries off the bush and sniffed them. Then she rubbed them against the inside of her wrist.

  “If it’s poisonous,” she said, “it might cause a reaction.”

  There was no rash or anything, so Julia rubbed the berries against her lips. They still seemed okay, so she put them in her mouth and held them on her tongue for a few seconds. Then she chewed slowly.

  “Seems okay,” she said.

  Arcadia and Mrs. Herschel and I began to strip berries off the bush and stuff them into our mouths in bunches. They weren’t all that sweet, but they were food. Berry juice was running down my chin because I was stuffing my face faster than I could swallow. At some point I noticed that Henry wasn’t eating and I asked him why.

  “I have my own personal edibility test,” he said.

  “What’s that?” Julia asked.

  “If the four of you drop dead,” Henry said, “the berries are probably poisonous.”

  None of us dropped dead, and Henry could only restrain himself for a minute or two longer before he was grabbing for berries and stuffing them into his mouth just like the rest of us.

  Julia advised us to take it easy. Our stomachs weren’t used to being full. We could always come back for more. Besides, it was starting to get dark out and she didn’t want to risk getting lost. We grabbed handfuls and stuffed them in a plastic bag to bring back to the campsite for later.

  As we walked back, I actually felt good for the first time since the crash. I may have looked ridiculous wearing some old lady’s clothes, but I was warm and dry. I’d had something to drink and there was food in my belly. My cuts were healing. My muscles weren’t too sore anymore. More than anything else, I was in good company.

  Then, about halfway back to camp, I heard a noise in the woods off to the right. It didn’t sound like a bird or some animal or the wind whistling between the trees. It was somebody moaning.

  As we got closer, I figured out who it was.

  David.

  CHAPTER 16:

  A Darker Dark

  All five of us heard the groans in the forest. Nobody needed to say a word. We rushed toward David as a group.

  He was sitting on the ground, his back against a tree. His clothes were wet and filthy and his eyes were closed. He was a mess. My skateboard was on the ground next to him.

  “David!” I shouted.

  “Wake up!” Henry said, shaking him

  David turned his head slightly and his eyelids slowly opened, like it was hard work to raise them. He looked at us and smiled a little.

  “This is a dream, right, Zimmerman?” David said. “Or I’m hallucinating.”

  “No, you’re not,” I told him.

  “Then why are you wearing a dress?” he asked.

  “It’s not a dress,” my sister told him. “It’s a pantsuit.”

  “Whatever,” said David.

  “It’s a long story,” Henry said. “What happened to you?”

  “I was hungry,” David explained, “so hungry. And there was nothing. I ate a bunch of acorns and got sick to my stomach. So I sat down here to rest. I guess I fell asleep. That’s when the snake came.”

  “Snake?” Mrs. Herschel asked. “What snake?”

  David pointed to his left and we saw it. About four feet away was a nasty-looking black snake. It had a whitish belly with black markings.

  “Eeek!” Arcadia screamed.

  “Relax,” David said. “It’s dead. Lucky I had Zimmerman’s board.”

  Next to my skateboard on the ground was the snake’s head. David had chopped it off. There were snake guts stuck to the side of the board. It was gross.

  Julia poured some water into David’s mouth and Arcadia fed him some berries.

  “You’ll be okay,” Arcadia said. “You’re just dehydrated.”

  “It looks like a rat snake,” Julia said, picking the thing up. “It’s the largest snake found in Canada.”

  “How do you know?” Henry asked.

  “I read an article in National Geographic Kids,” she replied.

  “There’s one more thing,” David told us. “Before I could nail him with the board, he sort of…bit me.”

  “What!?”

  “On the leg,” David said. “He got me pretty good.”

  We rolled up David’s pants leg and found puncture marks above his left ankle.

  “When did it happen?” Julia asked urgently.

  “Not long ago,” David said. “Fifteen minutes I think, maybe half an hour. I lost track of time.”

  I didn’t know a whole lot about snakes, but I remembered hearing about some species whose venom is so powerful it could kill a man in minutes. David could die. Maybe he knew it. For the first time, I noticed his eyes were watery.

  “I’m sorry,” David said, trying not to cry.

  “What for?” I asked.

  “I shouldn’t have left you guys,” he said. “I was a jerk. This was my own fault.”

  “Forget it,” Arcadia said. “You’re going to be okay.”

  “I saw a James Bond movie once,” Henry said. “This girl got bitten by a snake or a sea urchin or something and James Bond sucked the venom out of her foot.”

  I didn’t really want to suck on David’s foot, but I would if it would save his life.

  “Sucking out venom isn’t a good idea,” Julia told us. “If you get it in your mouth, it can enter your bloodstream.”

  “So what do we do?” I asked. “He could die any minute!”

  “Calm down,” Julia told me. “There are thousands of species of snakes, and almost all of them are harmless. Hardly anybody ever dies from snakebite.”

  There was some swelling around the bite mark, but David didn’t feel weakness or numbness in his leg. Julia concluded that the bite wasn’t poisonous. But to be on the safe side, she said we should immobilize David’s leg and keep it lower than his heart. She squeezed the skin around the wound to push any venom out. Arcadia got some vines and tied them around David’s leg a couple of inches above and below the bite to slow the spread of any poison. Then she cleaned the puncture marks with water and wrapped a few big leaves around as a homemade bandage.

  The water and berries were already making David feel better. Henry and I helped him to his feet. Julia grabbed the longer piece of the snake.

  “Souvenir?” I asked her.

  “No,” she replied. “Dinner.”

  David was able to walk back to the campsite. He seemed a lot quieter than he ever did before. I think what had happened threw a scare into him. He realized how lucky he was that we found him.

  “Nice,” he said when we reached camp and saw the airplane seats arranged in a circle around the fire. “I like what you’ve done to the place.”

  He didn’t even put up a fight when Mrs. Herschel took off his clothes and gave him a dress to put on. We parked David in one of the seats around the fire to rest. Julia found a rock with a sharp edge, and she used it to skin and gut the snake.

  “Are you really going to eat that thing?” Arcadia asked. “It’s gross!”

  “I’ll take your share if you don’t want it,” Julia said.

  I didn’t exactly want to eat snake, but I wanted to eat something. Beggars can’t be choosers, as they say. I found a long stick and gave it to Julia. She stuck the sharp end into the fire briefly to harden it, then she cut a piece of snake off
and put it on the end of the stick. She held it over the fire, turning it like she was toasting a marshmallow.

  “Who wants the first piece?” she asked, blowing on it to cool it off.

  Nobody volunteered, so Julia shrugged and popped the snake into her mouth. We all looked at her, half expecting her to throw up, or keel over, or something.

  “Tastes like chicken,” she said, putting another piece on the end of the stick.

  That was good enough for me. I got the next piece, and it not only tasted like chicken, it tasted like the best chicken I had ever eaten. Julia roasted pieces for Henry, David, and Mrs. Herschel. When he got his piece, David said, “He bit me, so I’m biting him back.”

  In the end, even Arcadia decided to have a piece of the snake, grimacing the whole time she chewed it. After that, it was gone. You don’t get a whole lot of meat out of a snake.

  It was completely dark now. There was no visible moon in the sky. The only light was our crackling fire.

  When were we going to get rescued? I wondered as I poked at the fire with a stick. People were out there in the woods looking for us, I tried to convince myself. It was only a matter of time.

  The sky was a different dark, a darker dark from any dark I had ever seen. And I knew why. We were so far from any city. Bright lights make it hard to see the night sky. So does pollution from cars and factories. There were no cars or factories or cities where we were. It was perfectly dark.

  “This is the life,” Henry said, leaning his seat back. “I’m not even sure I want to be rescued.”

  “I do,” I said. “I miss skateboarding.”

  I don’t think I had ever gone so long without skating. I wondered how long you have to stop before you forget all your tricks. It occurred to me that if we never got rescued, I would never skate again. That would be horrible.

  There was an opening in the trees over our heads, and we could see the stars. Each of us leaned back our seats to look. It was calming, peaceful.

  “Do you think there’s anybody out there?” Julia asked. “I mean, life?”

  “Maybe somebody’s out there looking at Earth right now,” Henry said, “and wondering if there’s life here.”

  “Could be,” said Mrs. Herschel.

  “Where do you think it ends?” I asked. “Outer space, I mean.”

  “It goes on forever,” David said.

  “It’s got to end somewhere,” Henry said.

  “Why?” David replied. “Maybe it’s infinite.”

  I was afraid David and Henry were going to get into another religious argument. But the sky was just so beautiful, I don’t think either of them wanted to debate how it started or where it was going.

  “Do you think they’re looking for us?” Julia asked.

  “Sure they are,” said Arcadia.

  “They should have found us by now,” Henry said.

  “They’re coming,” Mrs. Herschel said. “We just need to be patient. Can you see the North Star? It’s also called Polaris.”

  The sky was just a big mass of twinkling stars to me. I couldn’t identify anything. Mrs. Herschel helped us find the Big Dipper, and told us to line up the two stars at the far edge of the dipper and extend the line to the North Star.

  “The Big Dipper rotates around Polaris like an hour hand on a clock,” she explained.

  “I see it,” Julia said.

  So did I. Mrs. Herschel showed us where Venus was, and told us the Milky Way is made up of a hundred billion stars.

  “When we look at a star that’s a million light years from Earth,” she told us, “we’re actually looking at light that left that star a million years ago.”

  “Wow,” we all said.

  “So does that mean light leaving a star today might not reach Earth for a million years?” asked Henry.

  “That’s right,” Mrs. Herschel said.

  “Wow.”

  “How do you know so much about astronomy?” David asked.

  “It runs in my family,” Mrs. Herschel said. “My great-great-great-grandfather was an astronomer.”

  “Really?” Arcadia said.

  “Indeed,” Mrs. Herschel replied. “William Herschel. He was quite famous in his day.”

  None of us had ever heard of William Herschel, and Mrs. Herschel seemed a little disappointed.

  “In fact, he discovered one of the planets,” she said.

  “You’re kidding me!” said David.

  “Not at all,” Mrs. Herschel insisted.

  “Which one?” Henry asked. “Venus? Jupiter?”

  “Uranus.”

  Well, it took about five minutes for the rest of us to stop giggling. Mrs. Herschel rolled her eyes, like she’d been through this many times before.

  But what did she expect? Uranus! It’s the funniest planet, easy. It may be the funniest word in the English language. All you have to do is say it and people crack up.

  “It’s not that bloody funny,” Mrs. Herschel said while we were doubled over.

  “I can’t believe it,” Henry said. “Your great-great-great-grandfather discovered Uranus.” He had fallen off his seat and was rolling around on the ground, holding his sides.

  Scientists have proven that it’s impossible to say the word “Uranus” in any group of people without at least a few of them snickering. Any word that sounds like “anus” is funny. A couple of years ago Burger King had a sandwich they called the “Angus,” and everyone at my school insisted on calling it the “anus burger.” That’s probably why Burger King pulled it off the market.

  “I always thought that naming the planet Uranus was the greatest practical joke in history,” Henry said, “and here I am, sitting next to a lady who’s related to the guy who actually did it.”

  “Oh, no,” Mrs. Herschel said. “William Herschel discovered Uranus, but he didn’t name it. He wanted to name it in honor of King George. But some German bloke dubbed it Uranus, and it somehow stuck.”

  “What does Uranus really mean, anyway?” Arcadia asked, trying to be serious.

  “The ancient Greeks had a god of the sky,” Mrs. Herschel said. “It was called Ouranos.”

  Ouranos?

  Well, the five of us didn’t stop laughing for another five minutes.

  CHAPTER 17:

  Macho, Macho Men

  We finished stargazing, and Julia said she would “bank the fire” before we went to sleep. None of us knew what she was talking about, so she showed us. She covered the fire pit lightly with ashes. The flames were snuffed out, but Julia said that in the morning it would be easy to take off the ashes, lay on a little tinder, and blow on the smoldering embers to get the fire back to life again. When did my sister get to be so smart?

  When we woke up that next morning, Julia’s leg felt a little better and David had recovered from his encounter with the snake. I guess it wasn’t poisonous after all.

  The snake. Just thinking about it got my stomach rumbling again. The berries we had found were good, but they didn’t satisfy my appetite. I felt a general weakness that I wasn’t used to. My body was crying out for some milk, or cheese, or meat. I’d eat another snake in a minute if we could catch one.

  “We need protein,” I said to nobody in particular. “A person can’t live on berries.”

  “Well, there’s no protein out here,” Henry said. “So just forget about it.”

  “That’s not altogether true,” Julia told him. “Did you ever try entomophagous cuisine?”

  “Is that like Ethiopian?” Arcadia asked. “I went to an Ethiopian restaurant in New York once. You eat with your hands.”

  “Not exactly,” Julia said. She went over to a fallen tree at the edge of the campsite. The bark was loose and rotting away. Julia peeled back a piece of the wood. “See? This place is crawling with protein.”

  There were all kinds of creepy-crawly things in there.

  “Ugh! Don’t even think about it!” Arcadia said. “I’m not eating bugs!”

  “Why not?” Julia asked. “You a
te snake.”

  “Snake is meat,” David said.

  “Yeah,” Henry said. “Bugs are…bugs!”

  “Don’t be silly,” Julia said. “You eat lobsters. They’re weird looking. You eat shrimp. You eat cows and chickens and pigs. What’s the difference?”

  “I can’t eat bugs,” Henry said. “It’s against my religion.”

  “You’re an atheist, you foon,” David said.

  “Well, I’m on a bug-free diet,” Henry said. “Doctor’s orders.”

  “Bugs have more protein per pound than fish or meat,” Julia told us. “They have a lot of vitamins, too.”

  “You probably take one-a-day cockroaches,” Henry cracked.

  “When did you ever eat a bug?” I asked my sister.

  “In Girl Scouts,” she said. “I earned a badge for entomophagy. We tried cicadas, locusts, grubs, slugs, ants, maggots…”

  “Eeeewww,” we all went.

  “Remind me not to join the Girl Scouts,” Henry said.

  “The grasshoppers were the best,” Julia continued. “We roasted them. You have to cut away their wings and legs first. They’re crunchy. Earthworms are good too. You just remove the shell and head, and then you mash them up in a stew.”

  “Thanks for sharing that with us,” Arcadia said. “If you don’t mind, I need to go vomit now.”

  “Squirt is goofing on us,” David said. “She never ate a bug.”

  “Oh, no?”

  Julia reached down and picked up some little disgusting crawling critter with her fingertips. Its little legs were flailing around. Then she popped the thing in her mouth like it was candy.

  “Eeeewww!”

  “You’re sick!”

  “You have mental problems!”

  “There goes my appetite.”

  “I can’t believe we come from the same parents,” I told my sister.

  “Delicious!” Julia said, smacking her lips. “Tastes like a Tic Tac.”

  “Really?” Arcadia asked.

  “Sure,” said Julia. “Try one.”

  Julia found another little critter and held it out for Arcadia.

  “I don’t want to touch it,” Arcadia said.