By some quirk of good fortune, more by luck than conscious design, yesterday he had lit his fire a couple of yards beyond the petrol-wet sand…
The sound of aircraft had long receded by the time he rekindled a fire and added to yesterday’s small pile of flotsam and jetsam, mostly wood fragments he had collected off the beach and found trapped in the surrounding shrubs, no doubt deposited in the storms or hurricanes which periodically tore through these islands.
Hurricane season…
Had that passed now?
He guessed the answer was probably… yes.
He cursed as he picked himself up, having inadvertently tripped over the tail fin of the small bomb – a twenty-five pounder he guessed – he had discovered sticking out of the ground beside the aircraft… yesterday.
The passage of time already had very little meaning to him.
How strange was that?
Presently, he tipped the dead turtle into the flames, belly up, hoping not to extinguish the fire, before spreading more flammable material on top. He waited for the kindling to catch alight, piled on several more substantial pieces of driftwood and dead wood from the nearby brush around the carcass, and left the kill to cook.
He checked on Ted.
They chatted hoarsely for a couple of minutes.
“I might be able to sit up,” Abe’s friend muttered.
“We’ll see about that when I’ve re-filled the canteen.”
Ted confessed he thought he was about to foul himself.
“I’ll clean you up when I get back. We need to wash our clothes, anyway. I can do that in the surf, they’ll dry in no time flat stretched over the bushes,” Abe assured the other man.
They had to have water to keep hydrated or they would die. Everything else came a poor second to that.
He patted his friend’s shoulder and departed.
The secret to survival is to be organised: problematically, it had taken Abe nearly two days to start to get organised, they had been very lucky, the proof of that thus far was that they had survived.
Returning to the wreck from the rain pool where he had killed the goat two days ago, Abe saw that the fire had either gone out or was reduced to embers, ash, because there was no smoke rising from the vicinity of the wrecked Sea Fox. The island was relatively flat, more or less uniformly covered with waist or chest high scrubby vegetation with here and there, saplings leaning into the wind at head, or slightly greater height. Here and there scrub-covered dunes stood above the general lie of the land, otherwise there was little to obscure the horizon in any direction. This meant the wreck was clearly visible even a mile away.
I have to camouflage it…
Ted Forest had indeed soiled himself in his absence but as he appeared to be sleeping Abe had returned to the crash site and begun hacking at the scrub to break up the outline of what was left of the aircraft – its tail was twenty yards away, one wing nearby, its ribs standing proud since Abe had stripped off its doped canvas skin to provide a covering for his and Ted’s hide-cum-shelter. He worked until he was spent, stumped back to attend to his friend.
“What does turtle taste like?” Ted Forest inquired, stupidly embarrassed to have to rely on his friend to wipe his nether regions like a baby, and generally attempt to clean him up somewhat.
“Food, hopefully!”
Abe knew he had to keep moving or he would stiffen up, doze off and be useless for the rest of the day. He stumbled back down to the surf to dunk himself, and Ted’s now ragged trousers – he had had to tear the left leg to shreds to splint up his broken leg that first day on Little Inagua – into the gently roiling, marvellously clear waters. The cold soothed his angry shoulder. He floated awhile, then when some minutes later he heard aircraft, far to the south he peered, unavailingly into the blue skies.
He must have passed out again soon afterwards because the next thing he knew he came around to discover he had washed up on the beach.
He retched uncontrollably.
Dammit, I must have swallowed some sea water!
Back at the hide in the scrub he stretched his shirt and his friend’s trousers over the top of the awning to dry in the afternoon sun, and mechanically now, carried the empty again water canteen on his latest trek to a rain pool.
Most of the time he was operating like a man in a dream.
He returned to stoke the ‘turtle fire’ at least twice before evening, making another journey to fetch brackish water from a closer, newly found rain pool, brushing past feral donkeys and goats who seemed to have no memory whatsoever of their fright of a day or so ago…
Briefly, Abe became obsessed attempting to reconstruct a timeline of recent events.
We crashed early in the morning, that means we have been on the island two, or three days?
The exercise defeated him.
Abe gave up trying to keep track, he simply did not have the energy or the spare mental capacity.
Using a stick, he rolled the scorched turtle out of the cinders as the sun began to set.
One part of his mind wondered what had befallen Matthew Town that morning. The outpost was far below the horizon and the aircraft must have flown south after their attack.
The blade of the hand axe careened off the top of the shell.
Abe swore out aloud.
With the stick he rolled the headless turtle onto its back, tried to hack at the belly carapace which, after a third blow, split with a satisfying, brittle ‘crack’.
He was so preoccupied hacking and prising at the shell to get at what looked like pink cooked flesh, that when he glanced up, he blinked incredulously, disbelieving the evidence of his eyes, possibly for several long seconds at the sight of the ship unhurriedly cruising east through the five-mile-wide channel between Great and Little Inagua Islands.
The ship, a warship, looked… odd.
Like something out of a very old book…
Three slim funnels, the first two belching thick black plumes of coal smoke, a low hull with a minimal bridge and after searchlight platform, no turrets but single-gunned mounts, each with a blast shield, forward of the bridge, amidships – mounted on the beam – and aft. And the bow was more like the ram he had seen on pictures of Greek triremes of classical antiquity than anything remotely contemporary.
The vessel was too distant to make out a name on her prow or stern, and what looked like a two-digit pennant number on her hull below the bridge was equally indecipherable.
Abe cursed his inattention.
That was no Royal Navy ship; had it been he might have missed the one chance he got to signal, the one chance he got to save his and Ted’s life…
The signal gun was back at their makeshift redoubt in the dunes.
Worse, he had no idea how effective his attempts to disguise the wreck of the Sea Fox had been, or if he was visible squatting down beside it. He had seen no sign of human habitation or even of occasional visits on the island; therefore, any sighting by a passing ship would inevitably give rise to, in this case, hugely unwanted curiosity.
Belatedly, he flattened himself in the scrub.
It was over an hour later that he brought turtle meat and a re-filled canteen of water back to Ted Forest, who insisted on sitting upright once Abe had painfully helped him back into his now salt encrusted trousers.
“That’s better,” his friend quipped feebly. “A chap hates to be exposed in public. Especially, if one is likely to have to entertain guests.”
“You saw that ship?” Abe queried. He did not ask his friend how he had raised himself high enough to see through the undergrowth.