I spit out sand and regained my feet. Carried a sandstone clod to the bow. Lifting the bow was not that hard, and I rolled the clod under it to keep it up. If I had had the sense to put the seaweed in the boat I would have been set, but at this point I wasn’t thinking that far in advance. The seaweed just fit under the gap, and I stuffed it under, strand after strand, until all that I had dragged over with me was under the boat. Getting myself under was more difficult—I scraped my back, and finally pushed up with my head until the bow was lifted far enough to get my butt in.
Once under the boat I was tempted to just lie there, because I was beat. But I was still shivering like a dog, so I felt around in the blackness and pulled all the seaweed together. It made a pretty thick mat, and when I had crawled on it there was still a lot of weed left to pull over me, in a sort of blanket. I pulled the sandstone clod under the boat with me and was out of the wind, in a dry bed.
I started to shiver in a serious way. I shivered so hard my jaw hurt, and the seaweed around me cracked and rustled. Yet I didn’t feel any warmer for it. Flurries of rain or slushy snow hit the bottom of the boat, and I was pleased with myself for being sheltered. But I couldn’t stop shivering. I twisted around, put my hands in my armpits, gathered seaweed closer to me—anything to get warmer. It was a fight.
There passed one of those long hours that you seldom hear about when people are telling their tales—a cold, fearful time, spent entirely in the effort to warm up. It went on and on and on, and eventually I did warm a little. I was not toasty, you understand, but after the cold sea and the open windy beach my bed of dry seaweed under the boat felt pretty good. I wanted to stay there forever, just huddle up and fall asleep and never have to move again.
But another part of me knew I should locate Tom and the San Diegans before they got out of my reach. I figured they would be waiting out the night in some sort of shelter, like I was, and that they would take off in the morning. Pushing up the bow of the dinghy I saw a thin slice of the dawn: sand, broken cliff bottom, dark cloud. The darkest and most miserable day ever. The wind whistled over the boat, but I decided it was time to find them, before they took off and left me.
Getting out from under the boat was easier than slipping beneath it had been; I lifted the bow, setting the sandstone block under it, and slithered through the gap. Returning to the wind was a shock. All my precious warmth was blown away in an instant. In the dawn I could see down the beach much farther than before. It was bare and empty, a desolate gray reach. Moving the boat to one side exposed the seaweed, and I tied strands of it around me and looped them over my shoulders until I was fairly well covered by the crackly black leaves. It was better wind protection than I would have guessed, and far better than nothing at all.
The ravine had cut a V in the cliff almost to the level of the beach, so that I could walk right up it, in the streambed to avoid brush. I was beyond caring what might happen to my feet in the creekbed, and luckily the bottom was rounded stones.
After climbing a short waterfall I found myself among trees, and the brush became less dense. The ravine took a sharp bend to the right, then bent back again; after that the air was almost still. Overhead the treetops swayed and their needles whistled. Flurries of snow drifted among them, blurring their sharp black lines. I groaned at the sight and hiked on.
Taller waterfalls fell when the ravine got steeper, and to ascend them I had to climb through mesquite, ignoring my skin’s suffering and losing my seaweed coat strand by strand. I was so weak that when I came to the third of these tiny cliffs I didn’t think I could make it. I climbed on hands and knees, crawling right up the creek itself to avoid the brush to either side. That was stupid, maybe, because I started shivering again, but at that point I wasn’t going to win any prizes for thinking. I’m not sure there was any other way to get up the cliff anyway. Near the top I slipped and fell right under the water—I almost drowned in a knee-deep creek, after surviving the deep sea. But I managed to pull my head out, and to make it up the cliff. Once on top I was almost too tired to walk. If only I had Tom’s fins, I thought. When I realized what I had thought I choked out a laugh, and then started to cry. I waded the pool at the top of the little falls and continued on beside the stream, hunched over and trailing seaweed behind me, snuffling and crying, sure I was about to die of the cold.
That was the state I was in when I stumbled into their camp. I rounded a thicket and almost walked into the fire, blink-brilliant yellow among all the grays and blacks.
“Hey!” someone cried, and suddenly several men were on their feet. Lee had a hatchet cocked at his ear.
“Here you are,” I said.
“Henry!”
“Jesus—”
“What the hell—”
“Henry! Henry Fletcher, by God!” That was Tom’s voice. I located him. Right in front of me.
“Tom,” I said. Arms held me. “Glad to see you.”
“You’re glad to see me?” He was hugging me. Lee pulled him away to get a wool coat around me. Tom laughed, a cracked joyous laugh. “Henry, Henry! Hank, boy, are you okay?”
“Cold.”
Jennings was throwing wood on the fire, grinning and talking to me or someone else, I couldn’t tell. Lee pulled Tom off me and adjusted the coat. The fire began to smoke, and I coughed and almost fell.
Lee took me under the arms and put me by the fire. The others stared at me. They had a little lean-to made of cut branches, floored with firewood. In front of it the fire blazed, big enough to burn damp wood.
“Henry—did you swim to shore?”
I nodded.
“Jesus, Henry, we rowed around out there for the longest time, but we never saw you! You must have swum right by us somehow.”
I shook my head, but Lee said, “Shut up, now, and start rubbing his legs. This boy could die right here if we don’t get him warm, can’t you see how blue he is? And he can’t talk. Lay him down here by the fire. He can tell us what happened later.”
They laid me down at the open edge of the shelter, next to the fire. Pulled my seaweed from me and dried me with shirts. I was all sandy and I could tell the drying was scraping me, but I didn’t feel it much. I was relieved, very relieved. I could relax at last. The fire felt like an opened oven. The heat struck me in pulses, wave after wave of it washing over me, slowly penetrating me. I’d never felt anything so wonderful. I held my hand just over some side flames, and Tom pulled it up a bit and held it there for me. Lee wrapped a thick wool blanket around my legs when they were fully dry.
“W-where’d you get all the c-clothes?” I managed to say.
“We had quite a bit of stuff in the dinghy,” Jennings replied.
Tom put my arm back at my side and lifted the other one. “Boy, you don’t know how happy I am to see you. Whoo!”
“No lie,” Jennings said. “You should have seen him moaning. He sounded terrible.”
“I felt terrible, I mean to tell you. But now I feel just fine. You have no idea how glad I am to see you, boy! I haven’t been this happy in as long as I can remember.”
“Too bad we missed you in the dark,” Jennings said. “You could have rowed in with the rest of us and saved a lot of trouble, I bet. We had lots of room.” Thompson and the rest laughed hard at that.
“I got picked up by the Japanese,” I said.
“What’s this?” cried Jennings.
I told them as best I could about the captain and his questioning. “Then he said we were going to Catalina, so I jumped over the side.”