Shark Adventure

by Anthony McGowan

  ‘I get it,’ said Frazer. ‘You kill the sharks and that leaves a niche open for the squid.’

  ‘It’s a lesson we’ve got to learn,’ said Bluey. ‘You mess with the environment, and you never know what the consequences are going to be.’

  ‘I think I’ve seen enough of this,’ said Amazon as another once magnificent oceanic whitetip shark bumped against the prow, floating belly up. ‘Let’s go check on Matahi.’

  At the sickbay door, however, they were stopped by the ship’s doctor.

  ‘No see,’ she commanded in her usual abrupt manner. ‘Too sick.’

  And so, gloomily, they went to Bluey’s cabin and played a rather subdued game of bridge. Then there came a knock at the door. It was the captain.

  He bowed and said in his usual polite but formal way, ‘For the final evening of the voyage Mr Chung has requested that you dine in his cabin.’

  ‘We’d be honoured,’ Bluey replied.

  ‘Better dress up nice,’ Frazer said to Amazon, after the captain had bowed again and left.

  ‘Oh yes, I’ll put on my finest ball gown,’ she answered.

  Even at the best of times Amazon wasn’t a dressing-up kind of girl, and all she had with her in the TRACKS backpack were the standard-issue expedition matching khaki trousers and shirt, so she had to do the best she could with her jeans and a clean T-shirt.

  Frazer had the annoying ability to look good in whatever he was wearing: he had the capacity that comes from an easy confidence, to fit in anywhere. Bluey, as ever, looked like a beach bum. He was one of those people who, the harder they try, the scruffier they look.

  The three of them were shown by one of the crew to Mr Chung’s quarters. The whole of the schooner was elegantly fitted out, but Mr Chung’s cabin had taken it all to the next level. Everything that wasn’t polished mahogany was burnished brass or gleaming chrome. There were two rooms: a bedroom and the dining/living area, dominated by a large table. The table was beautifully set, with pure white plates and heavy silver cutlery. The ship was rolling gently, and Amazon saw that there were little ridges on the table helping to keep everything in place. If the seas grew any rougher, then things could get interesting …

  The captain, in full dress uniform, was there, as was the doctor, wearing a pretty cocktail dress, although her face remained rather aloof.

  But it wasn’t the cabin or the table or the captain or the doctor that captured Amazon and Frazer’s attention. It was the short, stocky man who was grinning and stepping towards them – the same unprepossessing character Frazer had seen lurking in the back of the wheelhouse. There was an irrepressible energy to the figure, as if he’d been directly wired into an electric socket. It almost made Amazon hesitate when he thrust out his hand.

  ‘Ah, little girl all better, very good, very good,’ said Chung, his voice machine-gun rapid. ‘Hope doctor help. She best doctor in Pacific. I had all kinds terrible disease, such as athlete’s foot, verruca, varicose vein, dandruffs, bad breath, sweaty hand, baldness, she make all better with special tonic and massage.’

  Then he beamed his electric energy on Frazer.

  ‘And this is young master Frazer Hunt, animal boy, yes?’

  ‘Pleased to m–’ began Frazer, but it was hopeless.

  ‘Big strong boy, like father. I read all about in National Geographic magazine. All save nice animals from bad men – rhino, tiger, all kind of monkey and ape. And Mr Blue,’ he continued without pause, ‘from Australia. I good friend of your president. Also good friends with English Queen, Prime Minister, President of US of A, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.’

  Mr Chung carried on talking like this all the way through dinner. There were many courses, and although some were tasty, others rather tested the good manners of the Trackers.

  Frazer’s least favourite dish was the sea cucumbers, which looked exactly like the normal kind of cucumber, or rather like a rubber toy version of one – which is pretty much what they tasted of.

  ‘It’s like a haddock burped into a rubber glove,’ said Frazer, making Amazon giggle.

  A little later came a soup with something soft and gelatinous floating in it. Amazon looked quizzically at Frazer, who in turn looked at Bluey, who just shrugged.

  ‘This special for you, Miss Amazon,’ said Chung. ‘It bird nest soup. Very nice texture, you know, feel in mouth. And help make strong, like Chung!’

  Then Mr Chung rolled back the sleeves of his shirt and flexed his bicep muscles for his guests. They looked like two peas stuck to a twig.

  ‘Bird nest …? You don’t mean that they’re actually made out of birds’ nests?’ Amazon enquired. She couldn’t see any twigs or feathers in the soup …

  ‘Ah yes, nests from cave swifts. They make out of their own spit. When they put spit on wall of cave, it go hard. Then, when you cook, it go soft again. You try!’

  ‘But isn’t it cruel to take their nests? What about the eggs, and the baby swifts?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Chung, ‘some bad people just empty out the eggs and steal nest. But these are special. These are farmed in little bird houses in Indonesia. People take nest before eggs are laid, then daddy swift make another nest. All very happy – bird, people who sell nests, people who eat nests. So, you eat!’

  The whole room focused on Amazon. She put her spoon in the bowl and moved it around, as if in a trance. She lifted the spoon up to her mouth and took a sip. Luckily, she had failed to capture a bird’s nest, and all she got was a mouthful of the salty soup. But she wasn’t going to let on to the audience. She chewed expansively and put on a face of radiant pleasure.

  ‘Delicious!’ she said. ‘It’s a little pocket of heaven in my mouth.’

  Chung grunted in satisfaction, and returned to his favourite topic of conversation – himself. Not that his guests minded. The one advantage of Mr Chung’s hyperactive monologue was that it meant that his guests didn’t have to think of anything to say. This caused Amazon to drift off for a while. She was thinking of her parents, lost somewhere in the Canadian wilderness, when she suddenly realized that Mr Chung was addressing her. And he wasn’t speaking English, or the Cantonese that he used with the crew. He was speaking in clear Mandarin.

  It took Amazon a couple of seconds to translate the words – her Mandarin was a little rusty. Mr Chung had said, ‘I hope you are enjoying your chicken feet.’

  Amazon almost replied in the same language. Then something stopped her. She wasn’t quite sure what. Perhaps it was something to do with the subtle way that Chung had changed languages. Or perhaps to do with the sudden watchfulness that she thought she detected in his glance. Either way, Amazon ignored him and continued to pick at the pickled vegetables on her plate, and Chung did not ask again.

  From that point on their host rather lost interest in Amazon, and directed most of his conversation towards Bluey.

  ‘So, Mr Blue –’

  ‘Bluey is fine. My name isn’t actually Mr –’

  ‘OK, Mr Bluey, you want go Puka-Puka in Disappointment Isles, yes? But that not where you finish, no?’

  ‘No,’ replied Bluey, trying to appear blasé, ‘we’re going on to another smaller island – just a tiny coral atoll.’

  ‘And what you do when you get there? Not holiday? Save animals, yes?’

  Bluey looked a little uncomfortable.

  ‘Well, we’re not really supposed to talk about –’

  ‘No, no, quite understand, Top secret. Special agent James Bond 007 type stuff. And how you get from Puka-Puka to this other island, eh? You swim, yes? Soon get eat by shark, ha ha.’

  ‘I’ve been told we can hire a boat on Puka.’

  �
�Oh, no no no no no. I can tell you that there are no boat sail from Puka-Puka. Only have little boat, and big seas, big wind coming. Only fine ship like Tian-long brave enough for this. You will be stranded on Puka-Puka like Robinson Crusoe. Hope you like eat coconut, because that all they have.’

  Bluey’s face fell. Amazon knew what he was thinking: this was his first mission in charge, and he’d messed it up.

  ‘But,’ continued Chung, ‘maybe I help. Tian-long not only go to Puka-Puka, but to many of Disappointment Islands. Black pearls in many place. Chung Industries buy them all. You tell me where you want to go, and I take, no questions asked.’

  Amazon could see the dilemma playing out in Bluey’s normally untroubled features. It would mean abandoning the secrecy of the mission, but it might make the difference between getting to the island on time, and missing the hatching out of the baby turtles altogether.

  But Amazon didn’t trust Chung. She thought there was something fake about his performance this evening, that he was merely playing the buffoon.

  She tried to kick Bluey under the table to warn him to be careful, but somehow Frazer’s leg got in the way, and his loud ‘Ow!’ emerged at the same time as Bluey’s, ‘Why that’s a very kind offer, Mr Chung. It’s Uva’avu we’re trying to get to. Do you know it?’

  ‘Ah yes, know well.’ Mr Chung then addressed the captain in Cantonese. The captain stood up, bowed and left.

  ‘Captain Zhang, he navigate us to this island. I do some business with pearl, then take you back Marquesas or Puka, whichever you like. All settled, all sorted, hip hip hurray. And now for main course.’

  He clapped, and in came a steward carrying a large dish with a domed silver lid. The steward put it down on the table and took off the lid with a flourish. Inside there was a stir-fry with white pieces of meat, green peppers and black beans. It smelled delicious.

  ‘What is it?’ Amazon asked.

  ‘Chicken?’ Frazer suggested.

  Mr Chung erupted into a spluttering laugh, although Amazon couldn’t see what was funny.

  ‘No, not chicken,’ he said, wiping his eyes. ‘It giant squid fish. Same one that you pull on deck with big stick. Joke is, you see, that he want to eat your friend, but now we eat him. Ha ha ha.’

  Amazon, Frazer and Bluey were very glad when they were eventually able to escape to the quiet and safety of their cabins.

  They finally sighted Uva’avu in the middle of the next morning. The sun still hadn’t emerged, and the island was a low smudge of white and green against the various greys of sea and sky. Bluey and Frazer were on deck, facing into the wind and spray at the bow, when Amazon came to join them. Her recent dunking had successfully cured her seasickness (although Frazer still claimed it was down to the fish baseball).

  ‘That can’t really be it,’ said Frazer. ‘It looks like you could spit from one side of it to the other, if you had the wind behind you. And you say that people actually live there?’

  ‘It’s a little bigger than it looks, but yes, there are thirty or so people there in the village.’

  ‘But what do they live on?’

  ‘Same thing they’ve been living on for the past thousand years: the sea, mainly. The reef is rich with fish, and then they have all the coconuts they can eat. They also grow taro and a few other vegetables, but it’s true that the land isn’t very fertile – it’s really just sand with some rotted-down vegetation.’

  ‘It’s nothing like the Marquesas, is it, Bluey?’

  ‘No, but it might once have been.’

  ‘Really? Are you kidding us?’

  Frazer just couldn’t see how you could get from a land of high mountainous peaks to this low mound of sand.

  Bluey smiled. ‘This is one of the Earth’s most volcanically active areas, and pretty well all Pacific islands began as volcanoes, thrown up from the sea floor. And some of these guys are huge – measured from the bottom of the ocean, Mauna Kea in Hawaii is more than ten thousand metres tall, which makes it higher than Everest. So that’s always the starting point – a volcano. Then, if the volcano’s in the right sort of place, a coral reef will form round its base.

  ‘Calcium is absorbed from the water and used to build the reef. And that draws in all the other species that either feed off the coral, or shelter there, or feed off the creatures that feed off the coral. Suddenly you’ve got a whole ecosystem – one of the richest on the planet and, if you ask me, the most beautiful. And, as the coral is building up under the sea, the wind and the rain get to work and grind down the volcano that started it all off.

  ‘After a while – millions of years – the volcano looks like the Marquesas – those deep valleys and jagged peaks, carved out by the rain and the streams and rivers. And, after a few more million years, all that’s left of the once-mighty mountain is a low sandy island, surrounded by a shallow lagoon. Eventually, the volcano completely disappears beneath the lagoon, and the only land that’s left is built up on top of the coral. So you get a ring, like a sandy doughnut, with the lagoon on the inside. That’s called an atoll.’

  ‘And what’s Uva’avu?’ asked Frazer. ‘Has it reached the atoll stage?’

  ‘No, it’s the classic desert island: a hump of sand with palm trees, surrounded by a lagoon full of fish, and then the reef, which is like a living wall, and then the open ocean. Luckily, there’s a gap in the reef, or we wouldn’t be able to get to the island at all.’

  ‘Will a big ship like this be able to get through?’ asked Frazer.

  ‘Not a chance. Even if it could squeeze through the gap, the lagoon’s way too shallow and she’d run aground. We’ll have to take the launch.’

  Frazer, at last, noticed that something seemed to be troubling Amazon.

  ‘What’s up, Zonnie? Don’t tell me the seasickness is back. Do you want me to go fetch your bucket? Or would you rather just lean over the side and feed the fish your breakfast directly?’

  Amazon ignored Frazer’s teasing. ‘It’s Mr Chung …’ she said uncertainly. ‘Do you think he’s legit?’

  ‘Legit? Hmmm … well, he probably rips off the islanders when he buys up their pearls. And I never want to have to eat another meal with him, but I’m pretty sure he’s harmless enough. And without him we’d never have made it here, and that would be bad news for the turtles.’

  At the word ‘turtles’ Amazon drew a sharp breath.

  ‘What is it, Zonnie?’ said Bluey, looking at her closely.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. I’m just not convinced that he’s the idiot he pretends to be. I think he was checking me out at dinner last night to see if I could speak Mandarin.’

  Bluey looked thoughtful. ‘Why would he do that?’

  ‘Oh, I dunno. But then this morning I realized that I’d left my scrunchy –’

  ‘Your what?’ said Frazer, who was a stranger to the things that girls do with their hair.

  ‘The thing I use to tie my hair up. So I went back to his cabin. I knocked on the door and he just said “come in”, in Cantonese – I suppose he was probably expecting someone. Anyway, I know just enough Cantonese to recognize “come in”. So in I went, and Mr Chung was there with his back to me, bent over his table signing papers.

  ‘I was pretty sure my scrunchy was going to be on the floor under the table, so I went over towards it, thinking he’d look up and I could explain why I was there. But he was so into whatever he was doing that he didn’t look up – he was talking to himself in that funny way of his … Anyway, there were various documents strewn about, and some were facing me. I glanced at one of them, not spying or anything, just, I don’t know, vaguely looking in that direction.’

  ‘Admit it, g
irl, you were snooping,’ laughed Frazer.

  ‘No! Well, maybe a bit. But the thing is that I recognized one of the Chinese characters on the paper.’

  ‘I thought that you didn’t understand Cantonese?’ said Frazer.

  ‘I don’t – not the spoken form. But written Cantonese is more or less exactly the same as written Mandarin. It’s one of the weird things about the Chinese alphabet. Most Chinese characters don’t stand for a sound, like English letters, but for the thing itself. So even if the two languages pronounce it differently, the character is the same.

  ‘Huh?’ said Frazer, pretending to be dumber than he was.

  ‘Look, it’s as if in written European languages we used a picture instead of writing a word. So an English person would say the word “dog” and a French person would say the word “chien”, but the written form would be the same – a little picture of a dog.’

  ‘What are you jabbering about, Zonnie? Was there a picture of a dog on this piece of paper? I’m sorry, I drifted off for a moment there, you were being so boring.’

  ‘Not a dog, no. And not quite a picture, either.’

  ‘What was it, Amazon?’ asked Bluey, suddenly rather serious.

  ‘It was the Chinese character for sea turtle.’

  Frazer and Bluey both stared at her. Then Bluey shook his head.

  ‘Nah, gotta be a coincidence. He can’t know anything about this. There’s no way … not unless either of you two has blabbed …?’

  Amazon and Frazer both exclaimed ‘No!’ at the same time.

  ‘You sure you didn’t let anything slip to Matahi, did you? I mean on the day you were exploring the island?’

  ‘Not a word, I swear,’ said Frazer.