Danny Dunn on a Desert Island

by Jay Williams

  “I’ve searched all over for it,” Grimes said. “There’s no trace of it.”

  Danny and Joe looked at each other. Almost imperceptibly Danny’s eyelid drooped in a wink.

  “Well,” said Professor Bullfinch, “why don’t you go on trying this morning to rig something?”

  Dr. Grimes scowled. “I’ve been trying to make some sort of crank, but I can’t manage without some way of fastening one on tightly.”

  “While you’re doing that,” said the Professor, “I’ll gather seaweed for a salad, and try my luck at fishing. Those fat little fish the boys caught yesterday were delicious. I’ll keep my eyes open for a turtle, too. They are excellent eating, and we can make good use of the shell. Danny and Joe—”

  “We thought,” Danny said, “that we might go into the forest and gather some more fruit. We made a special fruit carrier yesterday.”

  “Oh, yes. Well, has anyone any objections to this plan for the morning? No? Good. Now, that reminds me, Grimes. About our duel—”

  “Have you changed your mind about it?”

  “No. But it occurred to me that we ought to have some method of scoring. In our original idea, we were to be judged by Dr. Turbot and his associates. But here, we’re all together on the same island, working as a group. We should have some way of determining who has won when we get home.”

  “If we get home,” Dr. Grimes amended, gloomily. “What’s your scheme?”

  “Perhaps the boys could make tally sticks, something like our calendar, and give us notches for each practical point we score.”

  “A good idea. Are the boys willing?”

  Danny nodded. “We can get some sticks and carve them with your initials. Joe can keep Dr. Grimes’s and I’ll keep the Professor’s.”

  Dr. Grimes’s lips twitched in a smile as he looked at Joe. “It seems to me that I remember your writing me a poem,” he said. “How did it go? ‘My pal, Dr. Grimes.’ I hope this won’t give me an unfair advantage.”

  They all laughed. The Professor said, “I think I ought to get a small notch for the idea.”

  “Half a notch,” said Grimes.

  He went off to work on the transmitter, and Professor Bullfinch got out the fishing line and one of the empty K-ration boxes which he filled with mussels.

  The boys took two spears from the back of the lean-to. They had made them the day before, after a pattern Danny remembered from a book. They were simply straight poles, the ends of which had been sharpened and then charred slowly in the fire until they were very hard. Then they got out the fruit carrier they had made. It consisted of two long wooden shafts, with two shorter ones lashed across them to make a square opening just large enough to accommodate the waterproof carton that had held K rations. This was held in place by a sling of cords that passed underneath it and were fastened to the poles.

  They hung the canteens over their shoulders and took up the carrier. They went up the trail they had beaten to the forest.

  As they ascended, the air grew warmer and damper. The thorn bushes gave way to tall green trees and thick underbrush. They crossed a grassy meadow where flowers made a colorful carpet, and bright green and yellow warblers and finches flew down to sing to them. Their trail ended at a ravine through which the stream flowed. Here bananas and guavas grew, and the slender, smooth-trunked papayas, the fruit of which was both delicious and nourishing. Soon the boys were busy filling their carrier.

  Danny, pulling bananas down, said, “Now I understand the Professor saying last night that primitive people had to work hard just to stay alive.”

  Joe was clinging to the trunk of a papaya and filling the front of his shirt with the melon-shaped fruit. He said, “You should have been here with Dr. Grimes and me that first day. I started to come down this very same tree and lost my hold. I slid all the way and landed right in that mud at the bottom.”

  Danny glanced at his friend. “Your mud coating is nearly worn off by now. You look—well—almost human.”

  “I just wasn’t used to these trees,” said Joe. Carefully, he began inching down the trunk. “It’s like shinnying on a greased pole.”

  His feet touched the ground and he blew out a breath. “Whew! Believe me, I take my time now. I won’t do that—ook!”

  He had stepped on a slippery log and lost his balance. Wildly, he clutched at the air. He had just time to yell, “Help!” then he fell face downward into the same puddle where he had fallen before.

  Danny ran to help him and dragged him to his feet. “Are you hurt?” he stammered.

  “Nope,” said Joe. He raised one muddy arm and tried to wipe his face. “But look at me. Now I have to start all over again.”

  They rescued his papayas, and while Danny gathered some more fruit, Joe tried to wash himself off in the river, but without too much success.

  When they returned to camp, the Professor was cleaning a string of varicolored fish. He looked at Joe with dismay.

  “Not again, Joe,” he said.

  “It’s getting to be a habit,” grumbled Dr. Grimes. “And the lean-to is beginning to smell like a swamp.”

  The Professor took out his pipe. “We must really get busy making soap,” he observed. “I must say, Grimes, we thought of all sorts of basic things when we were planning the trip, but we forgot soap.”

  He examined Joe thoughtfully. “I wonder how sand would do?” he murmured.

  “Nothing doing!” said Joe. “It would be like scrubbing with a file.”

  “Of course, if he could take a hot bath, it might help,” said Grimes.

  “Not in an oyster shell,” the Professor said. He stuck his empty pipe in his mouth. “I wish I’d managed to save some tobacco. It’s hard to think without it.”

  Danny was watching him fiddle with his pipe. He looked from the Professor to Joe, and suddenly he clapped his hands.

  “I’ve got it!” Danny cried. “We’ll make a pipeline!”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Crank Turns Up

  The others stared at him. Then Joe said slowly, “How can we? We’ve only got the one pipe, and the Professor wouldn’t want to give that up.”

  “Wait a minute’” said the Professor. “Just what are you thinking of, Dan?”

  “Well, the stream runs on the other side of that rocky ridge, no more than fifty paces from here.”

  “Go on.”

  “Why couldn’t we chop the insides out of some rotten logs like the one Joe slipped on, or find some hollow logs, and pipe some water from the stream.”

  “Well? What then?”

  “Then pipe it into a hole about three feet deep. When the hole’s full of water, we put hot stones in it—”

  “I see,” said the Professor. “Like a Swedish bath. The stones would heat the water.”

  “Not bad,” commented Dr. Grimes. “I’ll vote for that. I could do with a good hot bath myself.”

  “Part of the history of human progress,” said Professor Bullfinch, “is the development of comforts, such as the bathtub. We are advancing upward in the scale of history.”

  “Never mind that,” said Dr. Grimes. “Let’s get busy.”

  They set to work that very afternoon. They all went up into the forest, to begin with, to search for hollow logs. Near the marsh where Joe had fallen in, they found two that would do, and beyond the banana grove they found a fallen tree that was soft enough for them to gouge out the inside to make a long trough. They found pieces of obsidian and bound them to sticks to use as rough scrapers, and Joe found a curved branch and made a kind of hoe with a long piece of the glassy stone.

  They pried the heavy logs out of the mud, using long poles as levers. They tied the nylon rope to the logs and hauled them away to the spot on the stream which they had selected. This was a place where there was a little waterfall, no more than three feet high. They carefully propped up
the scooped-out log so that one end of it was under the falling water, and arranged the other two logs to carry the water farther on, to the hole they dug.

  The hole, which was about four feet square, gave them the greatest trouble. They could break the ground with sharp pointed sticks, but scooping the dirt out with nothing but large shells as shovels was a long, laborious process, and before it was over all of them had backaches.

  The job took them three days to accomplish, for they had to spend a great deal of their time gathering food. They took turns fishing and collecting fruit and eggs. The boys practiced throwing their wooden spears every morning, and one day Joe, with a lucky cast, killed an iguana among the rocks. It was over three feet long, and a handsome gray-and-black color. They were, by then, so hungry for meat that they felt no squeamishness about eating lizard. As it turned out, when roasted the meat was stringy but quite good, tasting something like a cross between rabbit and chicken. After that they made it part of their regular diet.

  When the pit was finished, and the bottom lined with smooth pieces of lava, they swung the trough into place under the waterfall. At first the water merely splashed all over the log without really filling it. After a few experiments, however, they found the right angle at which to set it, and soon a stream was flowing down through the pipeline and their improvised bathtub began to fill up.

  They all stood round and watched it, grinning at each other.

  “It was quite a job,” said Professor Bullfinch. “But getting it done makes you feel good, doesn’t it?”

  “There’s one thing we forgot,” Joe said. “We ought to have a drainpipe.”

  “We won’t really need one,” said Dr. Grimes. “We can cut a shallow trench at one side, where the ground slopes toward the cliff. Then, when we’re through bathing, we let the water run in again until all the dirty water has been replaced.”

  “Good. Now let’s get a fireplace ready to heat the stones in,” said the Professor.

  It was the work of only a few minutes to build a second, circular fireplace close to the bathtub. They brought a burning branch up from their camp and started a fire, and when it was blazing they began piling smooth stones in it. When the stones were hot, they would be rolled the short distance to the bathtub.

  “I never thought I’d go to so much trouble to wash my face,” Danny chuckled, as they were searching about for stones of the proper size. “I’ll remember this next time Mom tells me to wash behind my ears.”

  He stopped, white-faced, and stood up. For a terrible thought had come to him, even as he said those words.

  “Joe!” he said softly. “It just occurred to me. All this time we’ve been missing. Do you suppose our folks think we’re dead?”

  Joe straightened. “Golly! That’s right.”

  Danny rubbed his forehead. “I never thought of it when we hid the crank of the radio. But I’ll bet they think we drowned. I know I’m alive, so I just didn’t think that anybody else would think I wasn’t.”

  “Danny! We better return that crank.”

  “But—oh, you’re right, Joe.”

  Before he could say another word, there was a shout from Dr. Grimes. “Look at this, Bullfinch! Look what I’ve found!”

  They all hurried over to see. Dr. Grimes was holding up a curiously shaped piece of stone.

  “I pulled that rock out of the sand, and under it found this thing,” he explained. “Do you recognize it?”

  “Why, it’s a stone ax-head, or hammer head,” said Professor Bullfinch.

  “You mean there are other castaways like us on this island?” Joe cried.

  “Not castaways, Joe,” the Professor smiled. “There may be natives who work in stone.”

  “Not at all,” Dr. Grimes said, pressing his lips together.

  “Why not?”

  “I am certain this island is uninhabited. In the first place, we’ve been here for more than a week. Surely, if there were natives they would have investigated the smoke from our fires.”

  “Maybe they’re shy,” Danny suggested.

  “In the second place, the birds and animals have obviously never seen men before.”

  “Perhaps the men haven’t harmed them,” said the Professor.

  “Nonsense! And in the third place, the Galapagos Islands are known to be uninhabited.”

  “But, Grimes, we may not be on one of the Galapagos Islands,” the Professor objected. “Perhaps we’re on a remote island near the chain, but one that has not yet been discovered. It might be better to withhold judgment until all the facts are in.”

  “It’s as unlikely as that there is life on Mars,” Dr. Grimes said firmly. “Look at this ax-head. Why, it was obviously made in the Late Stone Age. I judge it to be at least ten thousand years old.”

  Danny said, “Anyway, there’s no reason why we can’t use it. Our obsidian ax-head is beginning to be too chipped to use.”

  The Professor began poking in the sand with a stick. “If we search about,” he began, “we may come upon some other evidence—”

  Danny said nervously, “Farther up the hill might be a good place to look…”

  He broke off. The Professor was picking a small object out of the sand.

  “I’ve found something already!” crowed Professor Bullfinch.

  “Head of a war club!” Dr. Grimes said authoritatively. “Late Stone Age?”

  “I’m afraid not,” said the Professor. “Early Atomic Age.”

  Danny and Joe turned pale. The Professor was holding the missing crank of the emergency radio.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The Water Wheel

  “It must have dropped off,” said the Professor. “Then as we walked about we kicked sand over it—”

  Danny took a deep breath. “No, Professor,” he said, forcing the words out. “I buried it there.”

  “And I helped him,” Joe blurted.

  Professor Bullfinch stared from one to the other. “But—but I don’t understand,” he said. “Why on earth—?”

  “I thought,” Danny said miserably, “that it would be fun to stay here for a while.”

  “It was my fault just as much as his,” Joe said.

  “Fun? But—”

  “It’s perfectly clear,” Dr. Grimes snapped. “Boys have no sense whatever. They were thinking only of the adventure.”

  “Didn’t you realize,” Professor Bullfinch asked in a gentle voice, “that your parents would be worried sick?”

  “No, Professor,” Danny said. “To be honest, we didn’t till just a few minutes ago. I—I guess I just acted without stopping to think. But we were going to get it back today. Honestly we were. It was only when Dr. Grimes found that stone ax that we were sidetracked.”

  The Professor sighed. “It was a foolish thing to do, my boy,” he said. “However, there is never any point in crying over what’s past.”

  “I think they deserve a severe punishment,” said Dr. Grimes.

  “Perhaps now that they know what a mistake they made, it’s punishment enough.”

  “I don’t agree. I think they should be made to operate the transmitter all day today. That will help make up for the week we’ve lost.”

  “We haven’t exactly lost the week,” the Professor said. “We’ve all learned a good deal, and knowledge can’t be counted lost time. However, perhaps you’re right. It won’t hurt the boys to act as radiomen for one day. Tomorrow we can go back on our hourly schedule. Do you agree, boys?”

  The two nodded silently.

  They took the waterproof cover off the transmitter and replaced the crank. There was a tiny setscrew that held it in place, and Professor Bullfinch asked, “How did you manage to unscrew this? Have you a screwdriver, Dan?”

  “No. But remember what you said about the different uses for the same tool? I used the point of my smallest knife blade.�
��

  He tightened the little screw and experimentally turned the crank. After a few seconds the light glowed dimly.

  “Very well,” said Professor Bullfinch. “Grimes, you and I will be food gatherers this afternoon, and we’ll also be the first to take hot baths. The boys can bathe tonight.”

  “Get busy, you two,” growled Dr. Grimes. “Let’s hope there’s a ship steaming within hearing distance.”

  The two men walked back up the hill and began rolling hot stones into the water. A cloud of steam arose, and they tossed a coin to see who would wash first. Meantime, Danny sat down and strapped the transmitter between his legs. He began cranking without a word.

  He and Joe took it in turn, fifteen minutes at a stretch. During one of his rest periods, as he was rubbing his hands to get the cramp out of them, Danny said, “The thing I hate is wasting time this way.”

  “It won’t be a waste of time if they find us,” said Joe.

  “I know that. I mean, we could be exploring the island, or making things we need.”

  “Now, Danny. Don’t start anything that means trouble again,” Joe wailed. “We got into enough hot water—well, you know what I mean.”

  “Yes. But if there was some way of working this thing mechanically…”

  “How could we do that?”

  “I don’t know,” Danny said, shaking his head. “But I’m going to think about it.”

  “All right,” said Joe. “And I’m going to hope you don’t get any ideas.”

  By mid-afternoon it became clear that the boys’ strength was running out, and the two men relented and took over the transmitter. The boys went for a swim to refresh themselves, and after that they felt so relaxed that they couldn’t face the labor of heating stones, so they decided to let the hot bath go until the next day. But Danny spent a long time staring at the pipeline and then at the waterfall which fed it.

  At dinner he said abruptly, “Professor Bullfinch, I’ve been wondering whether there isn’t some way of turning the handle of the transmitter by water power.”