“My parents will bring legal action,” Sandy said, baiting Sam with that little morsel. “Don’t think they won’t. Mr. Puffin may be all high and mighty out here, but wait till he has to go back and face the music. Face the legal proceedings that will come from this lame adventure on Puffin Island.”
“It’s not Puffin Island, you dope,” Sam said, his arm tucked over his eyes to keep the sun out.
“I’m just saying. We all have legal cases to bring.”
“You’re alive, aren’t you? What could you sue about?”
“How about mental anguish?” Sandy said, her voice surprising her with its anger. “About the cruelty of keeping us here without supplies.”
“The rocks fell on the supplies.”
“Not my problem.”
“Well, what was Mr. Puffin supposed to do about that? The supplies are buried.”
“Oh, gee, let me see. Well, he insisted we not bring cell phones, didn’t he? Think one of those might be handy about now?”
“He was doing a thing,” Sam said. “A trip thing. You know what he was doing.”
She stood up on one of the rocks and looked toward the mainland. Nothing. Nothing at all.
In the late-afternoon light, Eamon studied the rock slide below the fort wall for a long time. It wasn’t the first time he had looked at it, but now, with Bertie not appearing, the situation had become more desperate. Specifically, he wondered if he could creep around and probe into some of the hollows to check for food. It didn’t look entirely unsafe, but he didn’t trust his judgment. His judgment had led them to the island in the first place, and had put them in the magazine exactly when the quake had hit, and it had contributed to Ursula’s disappearance in the boat.
When he stood back and assessed the rocks objectively, the area resembled a mousetrap. The scattered blocks of granite spread out on the ground replicated the wooden base of the mousetrap. The backpacks and tents served as the cheese. And the spring-loaded metal hasp that snapped down? The teetering rock wall provided that little hazard. The wall stood stiffly enough in the sharp wind that broke from the landward side of the island, but if a tremor came, or if anything happened to give way, then whoever was underneath it was going to be pulp.
Hunger on one side of the balance. The mousetrap on the other.
Someone would have to come for them soon, he thought. It was pointless to risk any more lives. As long as they had water, they would survive. Long before anyone starved to death, they would be rescued. That simply stood to reason. So it made no sense whatsoever to creep around on the fallen rocks, sticking your hands and arms into the hollow places. No sense to be an ant on a pile of spilled sugar cubes.
And even though he knew better, he began walking toward it.
“I give you permission to eat me,” Bob Worm said. “I mean if things go bad, really bad. Have at it. I won’t mind.”
Harry laughed. Everyone laughed. Bob Worm, to Harry’s amazement, had turned out to be pretty funny. Bob Worm had an armful of wood — scraps, really, and twigs from shrubs that wouldn’t burn at all, Harry knew — and he led the procession back to the campsite. The sun had already begun to slide into the forest over on the mainland. Bertie wasn’t coming, Harry knew. Something had happened to Bertie. They had all worked through the calendar carefully as they collected wood, matching events with days, and they had agreed one and all that today was Tuesday and they were scheduled to be met by Bertie.
On the other side of the situation, things were not good. Harry knew that. They were heading back to camp and they only had a little wood. They could do the two-in-the-sleeping-bag routine again, but if the temperature dropped further still even that wouldn’t save them. Clear nights bring low temperatures, Harry knew.
They needed a fire and they needed to be inside, but they couldn’t stay inside with the fire because the smoke drove them out. Harry had an idea he wanted to try. He had seen a pile of old cans and metal up on the ridge to the seaward side of the island, and he wondered about a brown metal drum he had spotted. He wondered if they couldn’t fashion it into a stove. A stove was the thing. If they could set up a stove in the magazine, then they would have the best of both worlds: heat and shelter. With a little luck, a stove could heat up the stonework in the magazine. They might actually be comfortable for a few hours.
When they got back to the campsite, Harry grabbed Bob Worm and explained his idea.
“It’s worth a try,” Bob Worm said. “Let’s go.”
It only took a few minutes to find the metal pile. It went deeper than Harry had anticipated. It represented years and years of junk — tin cans, cleaning bottles, anything you could imagine around a house. The tin drum Harry had spotted earlier was in rough shape, but it was still in one piece. He tried to see what had been stored inside the drum. It looked like oil or kerosene or something that smelled of petroleum. With Bob’s help, he turned the barrel upside down and let it drain. Then he looked around for piping and found a length of something that looked like a rusted exhaust pipe for a muffler.
“We can try that,” he told Bob Worm. “We can use that to vent the stove.”
“Through the slot?” Bob asked.
Harry nodded.
“Not bad,” Bob Worm said. “Where did you learn how to do this stuff? The seagull trap and everything?”
“My dad is a wannabe inventor. He’s always down in the basement messing around. I guess I picked it up.”
“Let’s try it.”
But it was not easy. Not only did it take them a long time to get the barrel down to the mouth of the magazine, it also took a superhuman effort to squeeze it through the opening Mary had pioneered. It made a lot of noise and it rolled when you didn’t want it to roll, and as they worked with it Harry realized they needed vents. They had to draw air in, then let it escape. That was the basic airflow with a stove. With decent tools, it might have been a reasonably easy job, but the only way to punch holes into the barrel was to use sharp stones. Eventually, though, they had the barrel up on two rocks for support and they had hooked the exhaust pipe to a punched hole in the center of the body. They hammered away a portion of the front of the stove so they could shove wood into the fire.
“Ready to try it?” Harry asked when they had it where they wanted it.
Bob nodded. Everyone had gathered around. Even if the stove failed, at least it gave them something to root for, Harry reflected. That was worth something on the face of it.
Bob made a small fire, using some of the charcoal from the outside fire as a bed. The dried pine went up immediately, giving a wonderful light. Carefully, Harry and Bob fed twigs to the fire. Smoke escaped — you couldn’t pretend that it didn’t — but the main share of it went up the exhaust pipe. It was tolerable, Harry thought. It was possible to stay next to the stove as long as you didn’t stand and get a face full of the smoke that collected near the ceiling.
“Well, look at that,” Bob said. “Pretty slick, isn’t it?”
“It’s warm,” Mary said. “It’s actually getting warm.”
“I hope it doesn’t explode,” Harry said. “It’s anyone’s guess what was inside it.”
But he felt good. He felt proud. The stove was the best idea anyone had had in a while. It conserved wood and gave greater heat than an open fire. The room of the magazine, if they had sufficient wood, might actually get warm. That was something of a miracle. Harry bent close to the stove and held out his hands. Heat radiated off the sides of the barrel.
“Not sure how hot we can get it,” Bob Worm said. “Might be too rusty. It could burn up itself.”
“Just keep it small, then,” Mary said. “Just nice and easy.”
Harry fed the sticks to Bob, who in turn fed the sticks to the fire. The fire burned at a calm, steady rate. Coals eventually formed at the bottom.
They were still working to establish the fire when Sam came through the opening of the magazine.
“Hey, you guys,” he said, his voice excited, “there are five
seals down by the boat landing. I saw them come ashore. They’re right down there.”
An ant on a pile of sugar cubes, Eamon thought.
That was probably a mixed metaphor. Before he had imagined the rock slide as a mousetrap, but now he had the ant image going through his brain. It had something to do with the slowness he had to employ to get anywhere. The rocks were incredibly slick, glazed as they were with ice and salt and who knew what else. Most of the time he had to travel in a kind of apelike four-point crawl, moving slowly from point to point. Another metaphor, he reminded himself. Mice and apes and ants.
He did not look at the rock wall dangling above him. If he permitted himself to look at the wall, he realized, he would not be able to move. At least he knew now that he had made the correct decision to forbid any of the students to crawl around in search of food. It was a stupid, dangerous thing to do. He knew it was stupid, and he knew it was dangerous, but he did it anyway …
… because some way or another he had to pay for his first stupid decision to bring them here.
That was the truth. Terrible as it was, that was why he kept crawling across the rocks, risking his life for the possibility of finding a backpack. It was not rational and it was not intelligent, but it felt like paying for his mistake.
Let the rocks fall if they had to, he reflected. He would rather perish trying to do something good at last than sit like an idiot and let more harm come to his student group.
He was thinking that way when a rock fell from the wall.
It was not a big rock, and he did not hear it leave the wall, but suddenly it exploded near him with a violence that shocked him. It sparked! It sparked against the bottom rocks when it landed. Then a piece of the rock flew off and splintered in a somersault, and he crabbed to one side away from it, hoping that if more rocks came he would be out of harm’s way. Adrenaline slipped into his bloodstream and made him breathe through his mouth. His fingers skidded off a handhold and he slammed down, jamming his cheek against a slab of granite. He felt his teeth crack against the rock and he let out a sharp, painful breath of air, and he caught himself with his shoulder, jamming it down, and when he stopped moving he saw a bright-green tent directly below him.
There. Right there, his mind whispered. You’ve got it now.
He had blood in his mouth and his teeth felt wobbly and smashed on one side, but he had found a tent. A green, lovely tent. Slowly, slowly, he lowered his hand down into the hole and his finger grazed the nylon of the tent. It was smashed and pounded down, but he could distinguish lumps inside it. He knew the lumps had to be a backpack, maybe one with food, and so he lowered himself more, pressing into the stones, reaching in as someone reaches through a half-closed window for a jar of jam.
Please, please, please, he thought. Please let me do this at least.
He wished he had a longer arm. He wished the rocks were not so sharp and slimy.
At last his fingers grabbed the lump through the nylon. It was a backpack; he was nearly certain of it. He jammed his arm in farther, and he felt the tendons in his shoulder stretching too far. But he didn’t care. He yanked and the backpack came up, but it was still wrapped inside the shell of the tent. He kept pulling anyway, and when the backpack was not too far beneath him, he propped it against a different rock and made sure it could no longer sink. As quickly as he could, he reached back and dug his penknife out of his pocket and he sliced around the base of the backpack. Part by part, the backpack came free, and as it did he heard another rock explode near him. Another fell, too, and this one sent a chip his way and he flinched and nearly dropped the backpack down the newly created hole. Instead he stuck the shoulder strap in his mouth and bit down on it, then he lifted and fell backward, and the backpack came out and nearly landed on top of him.
His mouth felt bloody, but he had retrieved a backpack at least. He sat for a moment panting, and so involved was he with his own drama that he nearly missed the kids hurrying past the rock pile on their way to the landing site.
Mary crept behind the rocks and tried to keep quiet. She hadn’t seen the seals yet, but she heard them. They made sharp, empty barking sounds that sometimes came to them, and sometimes only swept out to sea.
Harry carried a makeshift spear. He had talked about hunting them.
Which was not realistic, Mary thought. Even if they managed to kill a seal — and she gave Harry credit, he was surprisingly talented with small machines and mechanical solutions to problems — what would they possibly do with all the blubber?
She doubted, too, that Mr. Puffin would permit it. Not that he had every say in the world at this point. But he was still a teacher, still technically in command, and she doubted he would approve an assault on a creature weighing several hundred pounds. Not now. Not this close to the finish line.
“Down there,” Harry whispered close to her ear. “I can see one. They’re big!”
“You think you can get him?” Bob Worm asked.
Harry shook his head. That was a sensible response, Mary thought.
Still, they continued to stalk the creatures. The seals were astonishing animals. Mary watched them bob their heads this way and that, taking rest but being talkative, too. It was not yet full evening and so they still had a bit of light by which to hunt. If they needed light. Mary realized she didn’t know a thing about seals in any real sense.
“What kind are they?” someone whispered.
“Harbor seals,” someone said.
“They smell like fish,” Bob Worm said.
“I’m going to charge them,” Harry said. “Just for fun.”
“Don’t,” Mary said. “Let them be.”
“I won’t hurt them.”
“They might hurt you,” Bob Worm said. “They’ve got sharp teeth.”
That stopped Harry, Mary saw. Sandy whispered that she was going back and that she was cold. Harry, though, couldn’t resist entirely. He stood up suddenly and yelled a nonsense word, something like cowabunga, and the seal closest to the water slid in like a torpedo. Then a second one followed, but the third, a big, brutish-looking fellow, turned back and postured for a moment. Then he took to the water, too, while two others, out of eyesight, apparently jumped in also. Five sleek heads appeared in the water, all of them looking back. They looked human, Mary realized. Or like Labrador retrievers from the neck up.
And she was still staring at them, smiling hard and feeling good for the first time in days, when it suddenly occurred to her that the seals had been joined by a bright-blue sea kayak. And that kayak had been joined by another ten. The line of kayaks had been following the seals around the harbor, and they had come to the island as their last stop before calling it a night, and now Mary had somehow to piece the two visions together.
Seals and kayaks. Kayaks and seals.
“Hello,” someone called from the boat, “did you have to scare them?”
Mary couldn’t speak. She opened her mouth twice but nothing came out. Then she saw Mr. Puffin walking near them. He had a backpack in his hand and the side of his face looked swollen. He had blood on his shirt.
“Help!” Mr. Puffin called, his voice somehow broken and shaky. “We need help.”
Mary had never heard anyone actually call for help before. She looked at Mr. Puffin and he said it again, this time swallowing it back so it broke in his chest and went nowhere.
The leader’s name was Ernest. He wore a rubberized wet suit and a yellow helmet, and a bright silver whistle dangled on his chest. Sam took in the details. The other kayakers ranged behind him, all of them whispering and repeating things down the line whenever Mr. Puffin explained something. You could tell Ernest was good at this kayaking stuff, because it was no joke to be out in these currents in near-winter conditions. But it was also a kind of challenge, and Ernest said several times they had been following seal groups and burning off their Thanksgiving dinner, no worries, and they had planned to be headed into port when they had stopped temporarily at the island to watch the seals up
on shore.
“Then you scared them off,” Ernest said, which he knew, which they all knew, was hardly the point at the moment.
“We don’t know where Bertie is,” Mr. Puffin said. “We expected to be picked up today.”
“And the earthquake …” Ernest said, motioning with his chin toward the rock pile.
“Took everything.”
“Well, we can help you with some food, and then we’ll make a beeline to the mainland and get you a boat. We don’t have a phone. Lucky we came by.”
“It’s very lucky,” Sandy said.
“It’s not even a mile to the mainland. We can make it in short order. You should be on a boat by sunset or a little later.”
Meanwhile, Sam saw, one of the women in a rubber suit had gone from kayak to kayak, collecting food. She had parts of sandwiches and clementines and even a few packs of sweet-and-sour chips. Someone had a bunch of cookies in a Tupperware container, too, and they loaded the woman up as she went along.
“Here,” she said, handing the food to Sandy. “I’m so sorry this happened to you.”
It was everything Sam could do to stop from telling the woman that Sandy was the worst person to distribute the food. But before he could say anything, the woman looked at his ear. She didn’t make a big fuss about it. She turned his head back and forth so she could see it better.
“You need to be cleaned up,” she said. “This ear needs stitches.”
“Are you a doctor?” Sam asked.
The woman nodded.
The kayakers reassembled in their boats a few yards out to sea. It looks so easy, Sam thought. It was easy for them, he reflected. It was just an afternoon’s mini-adventure, a way to get outdoors on a late-fall weekend, and they had no idea that a drama had unfolded on the island. Seeing the boats paddle off, their strokes strong and rhythmic, made Sam wonder how he could capture such a thing on film. Maybe you couldn’t. Maybe it was too strange for duplication.
Cave-in Page 10
