Chapter 13
For more than a hundred years, Dolphin Island had been haunted by a legend. Johnny would have heard of it soon enough, but, as it happened, he made the discovery by himself.
He had been taking a short cut through the forest, which covered three-quarters of the island, and, as usual, it turned out to be not short at all. Almost as soon as he left the path, he lost his direction in the densely packed pandanus and pisonia trees, and was floundering up to his knees in the sandy soil that the muttonbirds had riddled with their burrows.
It was a strange feeling, being "lost" only a few hundred feet from the crowded settlement and all his friends. He could easily imagine that he was in the heart of some vast jungle, a thousand miles from civilization. There was all the loneliness and mystery of the untamed wild, with none of its danger, for if he pushed on in any direction, he would be out of the tiny forest in five minutes. True, he wouldn't come out in the place he had intended, but that hardly mattered on so small an island.
Suddenly he became aware of something odd about the patch of jungle into which he had blundered. The trees were smaller and farther apart than elsewhere, and as he looked around him, Johnny slowly realized that this had once been a clearing in the forest. It must have been abandoned a long, long time ago, for it had become almost completely overgrown. In a few more years, all trace of it would be lost.
Who could have lived here, he wondered, years before radio and aircraft had brought the Great Barrier Reef into contact with the world? Criminals? Pirates? All sorts of romantic ideas flashed through his mind, and he began to poke around among the roots of the trees to see what he could find.
He had become a little discouraged, and was wondering if he was simply imagining things, when he came across some smoke-blackened stones half covered by leaves and earth. A fireplace, he decided, and redoubled his efforts. Almost at once, he found some pieces of rusty iron, a cup that had lost its handle, and a broken spoon.
That was all. It was not a very exciting treasure trove, but it did prove that civilized people, not savages, had been here long ago. No one would come to Dolphin Island, so far from land, merely to have a picnic; whoever they were, they must have had a good reason.
Taking the spoon as a souvenir, Johnny left the clearing, and ten minutes later was back on the beach. He went in search of Mick, whom he found in the classroom, nearing the end of Mathematics II, tape 3. As soon as Mick had finished, switched off the teaching machine, and thumbed his nose at it, Johnny showed him the spoon and described where he had found it.
To his surprise, Mick seemed ill at ease.
"I wish you hadn't taken that," he said. "Better put it back."
"But why?" asked Johnny in amazement.
Mick was quite embarrassed. He scuffed his large, bare feet on the polished plastic floor and did not answer directly.
"Of course," he said, "I don't really believe in ghosts, but I'd hate to be there by myself on a dark night."
Johnny was now getting a little exasperated, but he knew that he'd have to let Mick tell the story in his own way. Mick began by taking Johnny to the Message Center, putting through a local call to the Brisbane Museum, and speaking a few words to the Assistant Curator of the Queensland History Department.
A few seconds later, a strange object appeared on the vision screen. It was a small iron tank, or cistern, about four feet square and two feet deep, standing in a glass display case. Beside it were two crude oars.
"What do you think that is?" asked Mick.
"It looks like a water tank to me," said Johnny.
"Yes," said Mick, "but it was a boat, too, and it sailed from this island a hundred and thirty years ago—with three people in it."
" Three people—in a thing that size!"
"Well, one was a baby. The grownups were an Englishwoman, Mary Watson, and her Chinese cook, whose name I don't remember—it was Ah Something…"
As the strange story unfolded, Johnny was transported back in time to an age that he could scarcely imagine. Yet it was only 1881—not yet a century and a half ago. There had been telephones and steam engines then, and Albert Einstein had already been born.
But along the Great Barrier Reef, cannibals still paddled their war canoes.
Despite this, the young husband, Captain Watson had set up his home on Dolphin Island.
His business was collecting and selling sea cucumbers, or bêche-de-mer, the ugly, sausagelike creatures that crawled sluggishly in every coral pool. The Chinese paid high prices for the dried skins, which they valued for medical purposes.
Soon the island's supplies of bêche-de-mer were exhausted, and the Captain had to search farther and farther from home. He was away in his small ship for weeks at a time, leaving his young wife to look after the house and their newborn son, with the help of two Chinese servants.
It was while the Captain was away that the savages landed. They killed one of the Chinese houseboys and seriously injured the other, before Mary Watson drove them off with rifle and revolver. But she knew that they would return—and that her husband's ship would not be back for another month.
The situation was desperate, but Mary Watson was a brave and resourceful woman. She decided to escape from the island, with the baby and the houseboy, in a small iron tank used for boiling bêche-de-mer, hoping to be picked up by one of the ships plying along the Reef.
She stocked her tiny, unstable craft with food and water, and paddled away from her home. The houseboy was gravely injured and could give her little help, and her four-month-old son must have needed constant attention. She had just one stroke of luck, without which the voyage would not have lasted ten minutes: the sea was perfectly calm.
The next day they grounded on a neighboring reef and remained there for two days, hoping to see a boat. But no ships came in sight, so they pushed off again and eventually reached a small island, forty-two miles from their starting point.
And it was from this island that they saw a steamer going by, but no one on board noticed Mrs. Watson frantically waving her baby's shawl.
Now they had exhausted all their water, and there was none on the island. Yet they survived another four days, slowly dying of thirst, hoping for rains that never came and for ships that never appeared.
Three months later, quite by chance, a passing schooner sent men ashore to search for food. Instead, they found the body of the Chinese cook, and, hidden in the undergrowth, the iron tank. Huddled inside it was Mary Watson, with her baby son still in her arms.
And beside her was the log of the eight-day voyage, which she had kept to the very end.
"I've seen it in the Museum," said Mick, very solemnly. "It's on half a dozen sheets of paper, torn out of a notebook. You can still read most of it, and I'll never forget the last entry. It just says: "No water—nearly dead with thirst."
For a long time, neither boy said anything. Then Johnny looked at the broken spoon he was still holding. It was foolish, of course, but he would put it back, out of respect for Mary Watson's gallant ghost. He could understand the feelings of Mick and his people toward her memory. He wondered how often, on moonlit nights, the more imaginative islanders did believe that they had seen a young woman pushing an iron box out to sea…
Then another, and much more disturbing, thought suddenly struck him. He turned toward Mick, wondering just how to put the question. But it was not necessary, for Mick answered without prompting.
"I feel pretty bad about the whole thing," he said, "even though it was such a long time ago. You see, I know for a fact that my grandfather's grandfather helped to eat the other Chinaman."
Chapter 14
Every day now, Johnny and Mick would go swimming with the two dolphins, trying to find the limits of their intelligence and their co-operation. They now tolerated Mick and would obey his requests when he was using the communicator, but they remained unfriendly to him. Sometimes they would try to scare him, by charging him with teeth showing, then turning aside at the last possible
moment. They never played such tricks with Johnny, though they would often nibble at his flippers or rub gently against him, expecting to be tickled and stroked in return.
This prejudice upset Mick, who couldn't see why Susie and Sputnik preferred, as he put it, "an undersized little pale-skin" like Johnny. But dolphins are as temperamental as human people, and there is no accounting for tastes. Mick's opportunity was to come later, though in a way that no one could have guessed.
Despite occasional arguments and quarrels, the boys were now firm friends and were seldom far apart. Mick was, indeed, the first really close friend that Johnny had ever made. There was good reason for this, though he did not know it. After losing both his parents, at such an early age, he had been afraid to risk his affections elsewhere, but now the break with his past was so complete that it had lost much of its power over him.
Besides, Mick was someone whom anybody could admire. Like most of the islanders, he had a splendid physique; generations of sea-battling forefathers had made sure of that.
He was alert and intelligent and full of information about things of which Johnny had never heard. His faults were minor ones—rashness, exaggeration, and a fondness for practical jokes, which sometimes got him into trouble.
Toward Johnny he felt protective, almost fatherly, as a big man can often be toward a much smaller one. And perhaps the warmhearted island boy, with his four brothers, three sisters, and scores of aunts, uncles, cousins, nephews, and nieces, felt the inner loneliness of this runaway orphan from the other side of the world.
Ever since he had mastered the basic technique of diving, Johnny had been pestering Mick to take him exploring off the edge of the reef, where he could test his new skills in deep water and among big fish. But Mick had taken his time. Though he was impatient in small matters, he could be cautious in big ones. He knew that diving in a small, safe pool, or close to the jetty, was very different from operating in the open sea. So many things could go wrong: there were powerful currents, unexpected storms might spring up, sharks might make a nuisance of themselves—the sea was full of surprises, even for the most experienced diver. It was merciless to those who made mistakes and did not give them a second chance.
Johnny's opportunity came in a way that he had not expected. Susie and Sputnik were responsible. Professor Kazan had decided that it was time they went out into the world to earn their own living. He never kept a pair of dolphins longer than a year, believing that it was not fair to do so. They were social creatures and needed to make contact with their own kind. Most of his subjects, when he released them, remained close to the island and could always be called through the underwater loud-speakers. He was quite sure that Susie and Sputnik would behave in the same way.
In fact, they simply refused to leave. When the gate of the pool was opened, they swam a little way down the channel leading into the sea, then darted back as if afraid that they would be shut outside.
"I know what's wrong," said Mick in disgust. "They're so used to being fed by us that they're too lazy to catch their own fish."
There might have been some truth in that, but it was not the whole explanation. For when Professor Kazan asked Johnny to swim down the channel, they followed him out to sea. He did not even have to press any of the buttons on the communicator.
After that, there was no more swimming in the deserted pool, for which, though no one knew it, Professor Kazan now had other purposes in mind. Every morning, immediately after their first session at school, Mick and Johnny would meet the two dolphins and head out to the reef. Usually they took Mick's surfboard with them, as a floating base on which they could load their gear and any fish that they caught.
Mick told a hair-raising tale of sitting on this same board while a tiger shark prowled around, trying to take a bite out of a thirty-pound barracuda he'd shot and foolishly left dangling in the water. "If you want to live a long time on the Great Barrier Reef," he said, "get your speared fish out of the sea as quickly as you can. Australian sharks are the meanest in the world—they grab three or four divers every year."
That was nice to know; Johnny wondered how long it would take a shark to chew through the two inches of foam-and-Fiberglas in Mick's board, if it really tried…
But with Susie and Sputnik as escorts, there was no danger from sharks; indeed, they hardly ever saw one. The presence of the two dolphins gave them a wonderful sense of security, such as no diver in the open sea could ever have felt before. Sometimes Susie and Sputnik were joined by Einar and Peggy, and once a school of at least fifty dolphins accompanied them on one of their swims. This was too much of a good thing, for the water was so crowded that visibility was almost zero; but Johnny could not bring himself to hurt their feelings by pressing the GO button.
He had swum often enough in the shallow pools on the great coral plateau around the island, but to dive off the reefs outer edge was a much more awe-inspiring experience.
The water was sometimes so clear that Johnny felt he was floating in mid-air, with no means of support. He could look down and see absolutely nothing between himself and a jagged coral landscape forty feet below, and he had to keep reminding himself that it was impossible to fall.
In some areas the great fringing reef around the island ended sharply in an almost vertical wall of coral. It was fascinating to sink slowly down the face of this wall, surprising the gorgeously colored fish that lived in its cracks and recesses. At the end of a dive, Johnny would try to identify the most striking of the reef butterflies in the Institute's reference books, but he usually found that they had no popular names, only unpronounceable Latin ones. Almost everywhere one might run into isolated boulders and pinnacles, rising suddenly out of the sea bed and reaching almost to the surface.
Mick called these "bommies," and sometimes they reminded Johnny of the carved rock formations in the Grand Canyon. These, however, had not been shaped by the forces of erosion; they had grown into their present forms, for they were the accumulated skeletons of countless coral animals. Only the thin surface was now alive, over a massive core of dead limestone weighing many tons, and ten or twenty feet high. When the underwater visibility was poor, as was sometimes the case after a storm or rain shower, it was startling to come across one of these stone monsters looming suddenly out of the mist.
Many of them were riddled with caves, and these caves were always inhabited; it was not a good idea to enter them until you had discovered who was at home. It might be a moray eel, constantly snapping his hideous jaws; it might be a family of friendly but dangerous scorpion fish, waving their poison-tipped spines like a bundle of turkey feathers; and if the cave was a large one, it would usually be a rock cod, or grouper.
Some of these were much bigger than Johnny, but they were quite harmless and backed nervously away when he approached them.
In a surprisingly short time he grew to recognize individual fish and to know where to find them. The groupers never strayed far from their own particular caves, and Johnny soon began to look on some of them as personal friends. One scarred veteran had a fishhook embedded in his lower lip, with a piece of line still hanging from it. Despite his unfortunate experience with mankind, he was not unfriendly and even allowed Johnny to come close enough to stroke him.
The groupers, the morays, the scorpion fish—these were the permanent residents of the submarine landscape that Johnny was beginning to know and love. But sometimes there would be unexpected and exciting visitors swimming in from deeper water. It was part of the reefs attraction that you never knew what you would meet on any given dive, even in an area that you had visited a dozen times before and knew like the proverbial back of your hand.
Sharks were, of course, the commonest prowlers of the reef. Johnny never forgot the first he met, one day when he and Mick had given their escorts the slip by going out an hour earlier than usual. He never saw it coming; it was suddenly there, a gray, superbly streamlined torpedo, moving slowly and effortlessly toward him. It was so beautiful and so graceful that
it was impossible to think of it as dangerous. Not until it had approached to within twenty feet did Johnny look around anxiously for Mick. He was relieved to find his friend snorkling immediately above him, eying the situation calmly but with loaded spear gun at the ready.
The shark, like almost all sharks, was merely inquisitive. It looked Johnny over with its cold, staring eyes—so different from the friendly, intelligent eyes of the dolphins —and swerved off to the right when it was ten feet away. Johnny had a perfect view of the pilot fish swimming in front of its nose, and the remora, or sucker fish, clamped onto its back
—an ocean-going hitchhiker, using his suction pad to give him a free ride through life.
There was nothing that a diver could do about sharks, except to watch out for them and to leave them alone, in the hope that they would do the same to him. If you faced up to them, they would always go away. But if you lost your nerve and tried to run—well, anyone who was stupid enough to run deserved little sympathy, for a shark could swim thirty miles per hour to a skin-diver's three, without even exerting himself.
More unnerving than any sharks were the packs of barracuda that roamed along the edge of the reef. Johnny was very glad that the surfboard was floating overhead the first time he discovered that the water around him was full of the silver sea pike, with their hostile eyes and aggressive, underslung jaws. They were not very large—three feet long at the most—but there were hundreds of them, and they formed a circular wall, with Johnny at the center. It was a wall that came closer and closer as the barracuda spiraled in to get a better look at him, until presently he could see nothing but their glittering bodies.
Though he waved his arms and shouted into the water, it made not the slightest difference: they inspected him at their leisure— then, for no reason that he could see, turned suddenly away and disappeared into the blue.
Johnny surfaced, grabbed the board, and held an anxious conference with Mick across it Every few seconds he kept bobbing his head underwater, to see if the wolf pack had returned.
Dolphin Island Page 8
