“Quite so,” De L’Isle agreed sombrely.
Chapter 9
Saturday 8th April
Little Inagua Island, West Indies
The two men were wide awake as the first full light of dawn lanced across the sea, roused by the buzzing, angry roar of multiple aero-engines.
“We ought to fire off a flare,” Ted Forest suggested feebly.
“No,” Abe said definitively. “I don’t think those are our kites.”
“Oh…”
“They approached from the south. I think they are using this island as a way point.”
“Cuban planes?”
“Maybe.”
It had been the best part of thirty-six hours ago, shortly after Abe had collapsed in a heap after dragging the dead goat back to the site of the crash, that he had decided he had got practically everything wrong.
He was supposed to be the expert backwoodsman, skilled in the ways of the hunt and living off the landscape and yet, for whatever reason – his wound, worrying about his friend, not to mention the battle over the Windward Passage and the almost certain loss of their ship and crewmates, and their other too numerous to mention troubles – he, Abraham Lincoln, the Son of the Hunter – had neglected to focus on the absolute basics of wilderness survival.
Shelter, warmth, water…
True, he had been preoccupied with trying to stop Ted dying of shock and the ongoing effects of his injuries, and he had not exactly been – nor was he now or likely to be in the near future – in tip top shape himself, nevertheless, he had neglected to organise ‘shelter’ and thereafter, allowed his thinking to become so muddled that had he not pulled himself together just in time, they might both be dead by now.
Had he been in any mood to give himself the benefit of the doubt, he might also have taken into account the fact that he found himself in an alien, utterly unfamiliar island environment when all his previous outdoor, field, hunting skills had been learned – mostly while playing at being a backwoodsman with Kate in tow; meaning there had been a lot of times when he had not actually being paying attention to anything other than… Kate – but Abe was in no frame of mind to go easy on himself.
Deep down he recognised that he needed to be angry if he was to carry on. If he was ever to see Kate and his son again, or to hold his unborn second child in his arms, he had to stop making stupid mistakes!
Thus, when next he was able to physically pick himself up, he had made a plan.
He and Ted Forest were horribly exposed to the elements on the beach, so he scouted around nearby in the thickest shrubs for somewhere he could stretch a makeshift awning. This achieved with splintered wooden struts, several large pieces of doped fabric torn off the shattered fuselage of the wrecked Sea Fox, he administered one of the last two doses of morphine to his friend and dragged, carried – he fainted later from pain and exhaustion – Ted some fifty yards back from the beach to their new sun-sheltered hiding place. In the dry, scratchy undergrowth they were now invisible from the beach, yet by peering through the undergrowth they could still observe any movement on the sea to the south.
Only then had Abe gone back to the goat carcass, butchered it crudely with the hand axe from the aircraft and set about lighting a small fire in the windbreak provided by the wreck. This was less than straightforward because the stench of dripping aviation fuel, forced him to make the fire at a distance which largely nullified the ‘windbreak’ effect of the wreckage. That was when he discovered that nothing was quite as bone dry as it seemed, nevertheless, smoke was soon pluming into the still air of the late afternoon. He tried to prop two severed goat legs – the hindmost – to cook. He must have passed out again because the meat was burning in the ashes when he awoke.
Wasting time trying to procure fresh meat had been another huge mistake. He had seen what must have been turtle tracks on the beach. That was a thought he had filed away as he carried dripping, half-cooked, bloody pieces of goat meat back to his friend. Abe had been astonished that Ted managed to eat more than a little of the scorched flesh, messily, obviously, before he collapsed and slept, and Abe wiped the grease and gobbets of stray flesh off his friend’s chin. He tried to eat as much of the variously burned or near raw meat as he could but by the evening the remains of the carcass were a fly-covered morass and the fire had died to cooling cinders. By the time he had fetched a fresh canteen of water it was dark and the last thing he remembered of that day – their second day, yesterday – on the island was re-arranging his flying jacket over his friend.
Now Abe peered out from beneath the awning.
“There must be about twenty planes,” he reported. “They’re flying at about a thousand feet. Old string bags, a bit like Bristol IVs and Vs. They’re heading,” Abe hesitated, “south west, I think.”
Ted Forest actually tried to prop himself up on a shaky elbow.
“Easy, old man,” Abe cautioned, holding the two-thirds empty canteen to his friend’s cracked lips. “I’ve already had a slurp of water; you finish what’s left.”
The two men became aware of more engines in the sky.
Abe peeked again.
“That’s a second group. Another ten or twelve kites, following the first lot.”
“They must be on the way to attack Matthew Town,” Ted Forest croaked. There was a new clearness in his eyes, an un-befuddled consciousness for the first time since the crash, which made Abe feel ten times better. “There’s a proper port down there. A telegraph station, too. Several hundred people, mostly workers from the salt flats…”
Abe was suddenly thinking other thoughts.
Turtles come ashore at night…
He began to scramble into the open, remembering belatedly that he had planned to get down to the beach before dawn.
“Where are you going?” Ted inquired.
“Turtles,” Abe retorted enigmatically and was gone.
He kept low as he moved through the scrub. Not that he was particularly worried about being seen from the air. Those chaps above him had other things to think about although it was likely that some keen-eyed fellow was bound to see the wreck of the Sea Fox.
How do you kill a turtle?
Reaching the beach, he moaned in frustration.
Tracks all the way down to the surf but no bloody turtles!
He scanned farther, eyeing the near distance.
He was about to give up; then he saw it.
Something moving in the sand fifty to sixty yards away, almost in the scrub. A turtle struggling to get around an outgrowth of razor-sharp coral jutting up through the low dunes.
Flies buzzed around the butchered carcass of the goat near the nose of the broken Sea Fox, Abe brushed through the swarm to recover the hand axe.
I should have buried the goat or dragged it into the sea…
Too late now.
The turtle did not seem very big, eighteen inches from beak to tail.
However, even after Abe had decapitated it, the damned thing weighed what seemed like a ton. Of course, he only had one fully serviceable arm and he was more than somewhat knocked about. Nevertheless, it must have taken him the best part of an hour to wrestle the beast back to the aircraft.
Oh, well, no problems cooking the blasted thing.
I light a fire, roll it into the embers and keep adding twigs and driftwood until the thing is tender! It did not matter if it took all day to be half-way edible, in the meantime he would do two or three water runs, and hopefully see if he needed to do anything about Ted’s wound dressings.
The wreck still stank of petrol.
Closer investigation revealed that eighty-seven octane was dripping from the fuel tank, slowly soaking the sand beneath the what was left of the telescoped nose, engine and forward cockpit of the Sea Fox.