Dolphin Song

by Lauren St. John

  Ben laughed. He’d cut the husk off the first coconut and now he pierced three little holes in the top of it and handed it to Martine. “Drink this and I’ll show you.”

  Martine had never appreciated any liquid more, although it wasn’t as coconutty as she was expecting, and was really quite sour and dusty and fermented. Still, it was wonderfully soothing to her cracked lips and parched throat. When she was done, she broke the brown-bristled shell against a rock. The moist coconut meat inside was sweet and crunchy. With every mouthful, she could feel the energy returning to her limbs.

  Ben nibbled at his while he worked at de-husking the remaining coconuts. Martine watched, wondering how he’d managed to scrub up so well in the sea. She felt very self-conscious beside him. Her salt-stiffened hair was sticking up like a punk rocker’s Mohawk, and she was quite certain she smelled like a day-old haddock. She was very relieved when Ben put the coconuts in the shade and said that he had something to show her. She followed him up the high dune with difficulty, the soft sand sinking like snow beneath her feet, her muscles protesting.

  Over the other side, the ground was firmer. Ben led her through palm groves and trees draped with tropical creepers, walking with an enthusiasm she was far from sharing. She plodded behind him, feeling breathless. Her head hurt. Colorful birds skittered through the leaves, but Martine barely noticed them. She was remembering what Alberto had told her about all the snakes on the Mozambican islands.

  “Ben, I don’t understand why you’re so cheerful.” She was unable to keep the frustration out of her voice. “We nearly died last night, and now we’re marooned on an island in the middle of the Indian Ocean. It’s a disaster and you’re acting like we’re on vacation or something.”

  “I’m not happy because we nearly died last night, I’m happy because we’re alive this morning,” Ben explained. “I’m happy because the dolphins saved us, which is sort of a miracle, and because we’ve already found two of the things we’re going to need to survive. Obviously, I’d rather be eating breakfast on the Sea Kestrel, but whatever happens now it’ll be an adventure. A real adventure.”

  “You said we’ve found two of the things we need to survive. We’ve found food. What’s the other thing?”

  They’d reached the edge of the trees. Ben stepped aside. Before them, fringed with reeds, was a small lake. “This,” he said.

  “Is that really . . . ?” Martine was reluctant to put what she saw into words in case it too turned out to be a mirage.

  “Clean water? Well, no, not exactly, but it is freshwater. Just to be on the safe side, use the bandanna to strain it into one of the gourds from that monkey apple tree before you drink it, but I’d say it’s pretty pure. It’s definitely pure enough to bathe in. You’ll need to be careful, though. Mozambique has lots of freshwater crocodiles, and this kind of habitat is perfect for them.”

  Martine, who’d been so eager for a drink and a bath that she’d been poised to leap into the shallows, fully clothed, decided that cleanliness was not a priority after all. She’d had enough problems with sharks; she didn’t need new nightmares about crocodiles. “Maybe I’ve had enough of being in water for the time being . . .” she began.

  She stopped. Ben was holding his nose.

  “Okay, I take the hint,” she said crossly, “but if I get attacked by a crocodile, you’re going to have to answer to my grandmother.”

  As soon as the words were out, it hit her that she’d been so preoccupied with searching for Ben and thinking about how hungry she was and how much her head hurt, she hadn’t taken in that there was no guarantee she would see her grandmother or her beloved white giraffe ever again. It was heartbreaking to realize that her grandmother’s last memory of her might be of their fight, and that Jemmy would never understand that something had happened to prevent her returning to him. He’d think she’d abandoned him.

  Ben saw the anguish on her face and his own sobered. “Listen, if there’s a way off this island, we’ll find it, I promise. You will see your grandmother and Jemmy again, and I will see my mum and dad. But I have a feeling that the dolphins have brought us here for a reason. It’s up to us to figure out what that reason might be.”

  13

  Twenty minutes later Martine was drying off in the sunshine at a respectful distance from possible passing crocodiles. She was marveling at how rapidly she’d recovered from the previous night’s trauma once she’d had a drink of water and washed the salt and grit from her hair, when there was a blood-curdling screech. Ben came running out of the trees. He’d climbed up to the lighthouse while she was bathing.

  “Do you think one of the girls is in trouble?”

  “Oh, I think Lucy probably just found a crab nesting in her hair,” said Martine.

  Ben gave her a quizzical look, but didn’t ask how she was so sure.

  Martine used a gourd to trickle water onto Grace’s wilted leaves. She’d found a home for them and the thread of root that bound them together in the fertile soil near the lake. On the one hand there didn’t seem much point in trying to revive them, but on the other hand they were symbolic of Grace and Sawubona. It was as if a little piece of both were here on the island with her. That made the scrap of plant as important as her survival kit.

  She felt like a new person after her wash and a drink of water. Her headache had gone. She’d used the knife to cut her jeans into shorts like Ben’s, and washed her T-shirt and sweatshirt. They were still a little soggy, but the sun was so warm she didn’t mind. As they wandered back to the others, Ben told her about the lighthouse, which was derelict, although solar panels and a timer kept its beam working at night.

  Alas, there was no friendly lighthouse keeper and no working radio. The only useful thing he’d discovered was a piece of broken sign. It was written in Portuguese but in the center was a partial word in bold letters: “BA Z . . .”

  “Bazaruto!” breathed Martine. “I bet you we’re on one of the Bazaruto Islands in Mozambique. We were about a hundred miles from them at lunchtime yesterday, so I guess it’s possible. Alberto told me that there are six main islands and some tiny ones, but that they’re not all inhabited. Trust us to have landed on an abandoned one.”

  At the beach, they collected the coconuts. Ben counted out five.

  “Are you really going to give one to Claudius after what he did to you?” Martine asked, unsure whether to be impressed or disgusted.

  Ben shrugged. “It’s only a coconut.”

  “But you could have drowned without your life jacket.”

  “Yes, but I didn’t,” was Ben’s reply, and Martine could tell that it was his final word on the subject.

  Their fellow castaways were in a huddle on the beach, red-eyed and bedraggled. Nathan, a boy so obsessively neat that at school he had never been known to have a wrinkle or stain on his uniform, was miserably brushing wet sand and kelp slime from his clothes. Lucy was shuddering and inspecting her hair strand by strand for wildlife. Sherilyn was so distressed, she was practically sitting on Jake’s lap. A large orange crab was moving ponderously off toward the sea.

  “Well, if it isn’t Robinson Crusoe and Girl Friday!” Claudius drawled, but not before Martine caught the flicker of shame or perhaps fear (fear of exposure, she was sure) that passed across his plump gold cheeks. She couldn’t look at him directly. It made her too angry. Ben might have been able to forgive and forget, but the sight of a rain-lashed Claudius trying to rip Ben’s life jacket from his body was not something she was going to forget in a hurry.

  “Where have you been?” Nathan asked. “We were starting to worry.”

  “Were we?” Jake muttered.

  Martine ignored him. “We’ve brought you some breakfast,” she said by way of a reply, and she and Ben dished out the coconuts.

  Squeals of delight greeted this news. Even Claudius managed a grudging “Thanks.” There were sucking noises as they swallowed down the milk, followed by a horrible hawking from Claudius as he spat it out. “Ugh!” he said,
wiping his mouth. “That’s revolting. Where’s a soda fountain when you need one?”

  He hurled away the coconut and it struck a rock and split open. The remaining milk leaked onto the sand. Grit covered the white meat.

  Martine shot a look at Ben, but his face was impassive.

  “Claudius, mate, that’s not cool,” scolded Jake. “One of us could have eaten that.”

  “Get a grip, Jake,” Claudius said impatiently. “We’ll probably be off this island by dinnertime. Provided the Sea Kestrel didn’t sink—”

  “Don’t say that!” shrieked Lucy. “What if Luke has been shipwrecked? What if our friends have all drowned?”

  “—which is highly unlikely, as the captain would have sent a mayday call for help. As soon as my father hears I’m missing, he’ll launch the biggest air and sea rescue ever undertaken in Southern Africa. We’ll be tucking into bacon double cheeseburgers in Maputo in under twenty-four hours. Two days, tops. All we have to do is survive till then.”

  His friends looked encouraged, but not entirely convinced.

  “What if we’re not?” demanded Lucy. “Have you thought about that? My brother will be going nuts wondering what’s happened to me. You should have seen the look on his face when I slid off the edge of the Sea Kestrel. If I live to be a hundred I’m never going to forget how the sea looked like boiling black oil from above, but it felt like swimming in a freezer, and how hard it was when I hit it. I thought my back was broken or my head had split open or something.”

  There were murmurs from the group as they relived their own nightmarish falls.

  “If it weren’t for the dolphins, we wouldn’t be here right now,” Lucy went on. “And that’s great except that now we’re stranded on some desert island in the middle of nowhere. If nobody finds us we’ll probably starve to death.”

  “It’s hard to get lost these days,” Claudius assured her. “The coastguard has very sophisticated search and rescue equipment.”

  “I’m thirsty,” Sherilyn whined.

  “So am I,” Nathan said with sympathy.

  “We found freshwater,” Martine told them. “There’s a lake in the valley on the other side of the dunes. Also, Ben went to look at the lighthouse. The bad news is that, although it’s a working lighthouse, it runs on solar panels. It’s not operated by anyone. The good news is that while he was there, he found a piece of a sign. We think we’re on one of the uninhabited islands in the Bazaruto Archipelago.”

  “The Bazaruto Archipelago?” Lucy repeated. “That’s a huge tourist destination. Some friends of ours stayed at a luxury lodge on Benguerra Island. That means we’re really, really close to civilization. The tourists who visit the islands go deep-sea fishing and cruising and snorkeling all the time. That’s fantastic news. That means we’ll definitely be rescued.”

  “What did I tell you?” said Claudius with a confident grin. “And since that’s the case, I think Crusoe and his friend can find somewhere else to hang out until the rescue boats come. We don’t get along with them at school. I don’t see why we should have to put up with them on an island as big as this one.”

  “But they brought us food,” objected Sherilyn.

  “We did say thank you,” Lucy pointed out.

  Martine was spitting mad, but she tried to follow Tendai’s survival advice about not acting impulsively or making rash decisions. “Don’t you think we should stick together?” she asked, looking to the others for support. “We’re in a survival situation and we should really be helping each other.”

  “I’m not being funny,” Lucy said, “but neither of you look as if you could cross the street safely by yourselves, let alone help anyone else. Besides, you’re annoying and Ben is just weird. I agree with Claudius.”

  “So do I,” put in Jake.

  Nathan and Sherilyn pretended that their mouths were suddenly full of coconut.

  “That’s settled,” announced Claudius. “We’ll call you when the search party gets here. Until then, stay away from us.”

  14

  As soon as they were out of earshot of the others, Ben said, “Phew, that’s a relief.”

  He set down the crab. Much to Sherilyn’s horror, he’d scooped it up with his bare hands as they’d left.

  “What do we do now?” asked Martine, biting her lip. She was as glad as Ben was to be away from the others, but she found it difficult to share his holiday spirit. Tendai had drummed into her that a group of lost kids had more chance if they stayed together, and the first thing this group had done was split.

  She was also quite shy. In the two months that Ben had been her unofficial best friend, she’d never actually done any best friend things with him, mainly because she only really saw him at school and he never talked there. Plus, she was not exactly up to speed with best friend etiquette, never having had a best friend before apart from Jemmy.

  “I think Claudius and Lucy are right about one thing,” Ben observed. “It’s very likely that we’ll be rescued, if not by the coastguard, then by a tourist boat or some local fishermen. But we can’t count on it being a day or two. It might take a couple of weeks, or even a month. We need to survive until then.”

  A couple of weeks, or even a month. The reality of their situation hit Martine and a curious thing happened. A calmness came over her. She thought about Grace and the Bushmen paintings on the cave wall: “Only time and experience will give you the eyes to see them,” the sangoma had predicted. Martine had seen them when she was supposed to. That meant that, whether she liked it or not, this was her destiny. This African island, with its shimmering dolphins and squeaking white sand and clear, azure waters. And she owed it to Grace, who had counseled her on her gift, and Tendai, who’d spent hours patiently teaching her the secrets of the African landscape, as well as to Jemmy and even to her grandmother, to return safely to them. She had to wake up, be positive, and prepare herself for whatever came next.

  She smiled at Ben. “Should we start by making a shelter?”

  His eyes lit up. “What about building a fort up at the lighthouse?”

  Before leaving the beach, Martine filled her sweatshirt with coconuts and helped Ben search for more crabs. They found five large orange ones and a blue and white one with a shell like a willow-pattern plate. “Sorry, fellas,” Ben said as he bundled them into his Windbreaker, pincers waving threateningly.

  They didn’t have a container, so they stopped at the lake and drank as much water as they could. The long climb to the lighthouse meant scaling the high, honey-colored sand dunes. It was torture. Every stride Martine took created a mini-avalanche, causing her to slip two or three steps back. The sand fell away in sheets. The coconuts seemed to increase in weight as she went. Halfway up, one of the crabs crawled out of a hole in Ben’s Windbreaker, which he had slung across his shoulders in a makeshift rucksack, and crushed his earlobe with its pincers.

  “Ow!” he yelled as his ear turned crimson. “Ow!” He detached the crab with difficulty and returned it to the Windbreaker. “You’ll be the first to be eaten for dinner if you aren’t careful!”

  When they did reach the lighthouse, it was worth it just for the view—all Sahara-type dunes, green valleys, and white beaches. Seen from above, the turquoise water was streaked with splashes of jade and ultramarine blue. The island itself was triangular in shape. Two sides of it were protected by reef, but the third was pounded by rough seas. Red cliffs reared over a rocky coastline, curving around to a calm bay.

  The lighthouse had the year 1902 etched above its entrance. The tower was more or less intact, but the building attached to it was in ruins and missing most of its roof. The concrete floor was cracked and the steps crumbled beneath their feet. Entire pine trees grew out of yellow fissures in the walls. Red-hot poker flowers, which looked like spiky flames, nodded in empty doorways. Pine needles whispered in the breeze.

  Martine and Ben walked from room to echoing room, looking for the most habitable. Every window framed a spectacular vista, although the gl
ass was shattered or gone. A smudge of an island—little more than a sandbar—was just about visible through the midday haze. Martine wondered if it was Death Island. Alberto had claimed that, at low tide, centuries earlier, the jailers at Santa Carolina used to take prisoners to Death Island, a tiny shell sand-bar, and tell them that if they could swim the five miles or so back to the mainland—a stretch of water cursed by vicious crosscurrents and even more vicious sharks—they’d be freed. Needless to say, few did. At high tide the sea completely covered the island, and those who were unable to swim simply drowned.

  Martine shuddered at the thought of lives so ruthlessly squandered.

  “Ghosts?” Ben asked, and she nodded without saying anything.

  They decided to sleep under the stars in the raised living area of what would have been the operating center of the lighthouse, beside the room with the largest section of roof intact. That way if it rained they could quickly find shelter. The room would also be useful for storing food during the sweltering days. Ben dragged a couple of rocks across the doorway and set the crabs free to roam around in the shade.

  It was when the two of them started to stock their new home that they found they had skills that complemented each other. Martine had learned bushcraft techniques from Tendai and a little bit of islandcraft from Alberto, and Ben had learned how to tie knots and the basics of marine survival, like making a signal fire, from his sailor father. So, for instance, while Martine knew that maintaining body heat in a survival situation was vital, and that one simple way to achieve that was to sleep off the ground, Ben was able to construct the low beds that she envisioned in her head, using a combination of bamboo and palm fronds. He tied them together with reef knots, aided by the strips of bark Martine had collected with her knife.

  Of course, none of these things were exactly handy, and they required a further three grueling trips down the dunes in the heat. While they were gathering bamboo, they discovered that there really were crocodiles. Ben had to do a long-jump-style leap to escape from the jaws of a gargantuan one.