But there was no sign of my Stephen.
In my panic I sucked in a mouthful of salt water. It burned my lungs and I was immediately aware that I might drown. I struck out toward the lighter water, cleared the edge of the jagged hull, then surged straight up.
My head broke the surface and I coughed up the water, desperate for oxygen. But my mind was on Stephen, and even as I gasped for air, I twisted back and forth, looking for my baby.
I saw that I was in a glass sea in early dawn light. A thin layer of fog perhaps six inches deep drifted over the water.
“Stephen!”
But how could any baby have survived such a pounding? He’d been tied to the bench seat. Unless that cushion had come free of its frame, he’d surely been dragged under and drowned.
If Stephen had drowned, then I too was dead, lifeless in my mind and soul, because he was my life. I spun around and screamed his name again.
“Stephen!”
The morning sea swallowed my cry. I twisted and yelled at the top of my lungs.
“Stephen!”
I first set eyes on them then. The seven tall dark figures towering over the fog twenty feet from the broken hull looked like wraiths. Black vultures watching me with unblinking eyes, waiting for their turn at my carcass.
Then I saw the dugout canoe beneath them, and the sharpened paddles in their hands, and I knew they were human. They were naked from head to foot, without any covering except for bright yellow and red bands woven from some kind of palm bark, then wound around their muscled arms and thighs. Their skin was as black as midnight. Each wore a head covering made from the face and snout of a brown furry animal unknown to me.
They stood in stoic formation, silent and unmoving, without a hint of emotion. Behind the canoe floated a second, this one holding only two men and cargo heaped in the space between them.
I might have experienced some relief in being found, even if by savages such as these. They were in long canoes scarcely two feet deep; surely they had come from land nearby. But I was still in a state of dread. My mind could not process relief.
“My baby!” I cried. I doubted they could understand my words, but such considerations weren’t at the forefront of my mind. “We have to find him.”
The canoes were slowly drifting my way, I realized. I trod water close enough now to see the whites of the warriors’ eyes. Several wore curved bones through their nostrils. All of them watched me with the same expressionless stare.
Not a shred of concern. No fear. No aggression. No hint of either amusement or sorrow. They might have been dead.
But one look into their steady eyes and I saw that the beings before me were pillars of life. Like gods watching a lesser being at their feet. A new kind of fear edged into my mind.
The first dugout canoe slid forward like a serpent, parting the blanket of fog in silence. I had seen photographs of natives before, certainly. But the man who stood on the bow of that canoe filled me with an awe and dread I had never experienced. I knew immediately that this man was their leader.
Part of my reaction was to his unabashed stance—his perfect form, his boldness and unwavering confidence as he stared directly into my eyes. He was a tower of brute strength and poise, void of emotion at having found a woman alone in the sea. By the set of his jaw and his bearing, I knew that in his world he was master and I the humblest slave.
A long thin scar ran down his left side, from his chest all the way to his hip bone. He’d survived someone’s attempt to gut him and looked no worse for the wear.
Two of the men behind him gently lowered their paddles into the water to slow their drift. Water gurgled over the carved blades. It was the only sound beyond my own breathing as I continued kicking and clawing at the water to stay afloat.
They came within arm’s reach of me, looming above the fog with brazen dignity. I cannot possibly do justice to that first encounter with the gods of the earth, as I quickly came to think of them. Tears swam in my eyes. I opened my mouth, desperate for their help, but only a whimper came out.
The warrior on the bow lifted his eyes and gazed at the horizon, perhaps to a distant shore, though I could not see one. The men behind him dipped their paddles beneath the water again, as if responding to an unspoken order made by the single shift of his eyes. The sleek dugout slid past me, floating through the fog. Not one of the seven men in the canoe gave me another glance. Their eyes were fixed on the horizon.
I stared after them, confused by their indifference. I was a white woman from an important family, flailing in the ocean next to a capsized sailboat, and they had shrugged me off as a bull might shake off a fly.
The object that struck my head then could only have been a paddle, swung by the first of the two men in the second canoe as I stared after the first. Sharp pain flashed down my neck, and I felt myself falling beneath the sea once again.
Chapter Four
IT WAS dark when my mind crawled from unconsciousness. Pinpricks of light that I first mistook for stars spotted my field of vision. I lay on my back in a puddle of warm water that sloshed gently around my legs and elbows. The strongest scent of rotting mud filled my nostrils and I found it hard to breathe.
Only then did I realize my predicament. I was bound up like a mummy in the bottom of a dugout canoe, and the pricks of light were tiny holes in some kind of bag that covered my head.
My first reaction was to cry out, but the moment I tried to open my mouth I learned that I was gagged as well.
The canoe rocked under the thrust of heavy paddle strokes, pushing the dugout forward in unbroken cadence. I might have struggled, but I had the sense to know that any attempt to break free would be pointless. Clearly the men who’d taken me were not given to my concerns. If they’d asked me to climb into their canoe I would have been in no position to refuse. They could have thrown me a rope and dragged me to shore and bound me up there.
Instead they’d smashed my head and hauled me aboard like a large fish. For all I knew, they thought I was dead. Showing my discomfort now might only earn me another blow to the head.
So I lay still and focused all my will on suppressing the waves of terror washing over me.
The air was hot—no August in Atlanta could possibly compare to that heat. A steady chorus of insects surrounded us, punctuated by the calls of birds as we passed their perches. Trees. I could hear no crash of waves on any nearby shore.
We weren’t out to sea. We were on a river driving into the jungle. To what end, I couldn’t begin to comprehend. Were we in Australia? I doubted it. These natives were vastly different from any photographs I’d seen of aboriginals.
The only possibility I could think of was New Guinea, north of Australia, the fanciful paradise I had dreamed of.
The eastern half of the island was hospitable, yes, but the southern coast of western New Guinea, known as Irian Jaya, was vastly unexplored and reported to be one of the most forbidding regions on the planet, inhabited by a mysterious and harsh people.
My dilemma felt surreal to me. That I, an American citizen from Georgia, could possibly be bound and gagged in a canoe like cargo, refused to rightly align with my reality.
That I had lost my son aligned even less.
An image of Stephen’s tiny form drifted through my mind. He was lost to the sea, consumed by the deep, gone from this world. Had he struggled? I prayed he hadn’t awakened before drowning.
The men whose cargo I’d become could burn my body, cut me into pieces, feed me to their dogs—it hardly seemed to matter. In fact, I think I might have preferred it. My life without my son was no life at all.