He slept till the sunlight washed down the cliff, dazzling him as he opened his eyes.
It was long past dawn. The tracks around the pool told him that animals had drunk and gone while he was asleep. Hunger gnawed at him, but he felt stronger after the water, the food and sleep. He sat up, glanced at his knee, then looked away again.
A shadow moved above him. It was the dog, her fur golden in the sun, lying on the rock, watching him. ‘Hello,’ he said.
Her head tilted to one side as though she was trying to understand. He almost grinned. He pushed himself to his feet. He needed food. He needed to explore this world.
He drank, then hopped up to the ridge again. The dog pushed her way in front of him. It seemed like she wanted to be with him too.
He gazed around. Over on the horizon, clouds lingered like round blue mountains. The air felt different: heavy and moister. The Thunder Season is coming early, he thought. That was why the storm had caught him unawares. But he felt relief too. This new land had the same seasons as the world he’d known.
Still no signs of people — no canoes, no smoke. Could a land this size really be empty?
Suddenly he felt small. Tiny. The sea went on forever … and so did the land … and the sky above — and he was all alone. He looked down at his body. It was a good body, for a boy his age. But was it strong enough for him to survive alone?
‘Yes.’ He said it aloud, even though there was only the dog to hear. She pricked up her ears, looking at him thoughtfully. ‘We got here, didn’t we, girl? The sea didn’t get us. We’ll manage.’
The dog’s tail thudded on the ground. Did that mean anything?
I’m talking to a dog, he thought. And then, No. I’m talking to the animal who saved my life. All at once he knew that, no matter what, he was safe with her. He could be injured, helpless, and she wouldn’t attack him. And even if he was starving, he would never see her as food again. If a crocodile attacked he’d fight for both of them.
Meanwhile they needed to eat.
He limped slowly along the path. It led to another muddy mangrove cove, bigger than the one where he’d been wrecked. The tide was low again, leaving a vast stretch of mud and trees.
He hopped down to it, the dog padding after him. His leg still hurt enough to make him giddy with pain if he tried to put all his weight on it or twisted it, and it gave way if he tried to stand on it, but if he went slowly, dragging it, lifting it where necessary, it was all right.
The raw bird hadn’t even begun to satisfy his hunger. He looked at the fruit bats hanging from their roosts, at the holes in the mud that meant crabs lurked below. Fruit bat and crab were good food, but both had to be cooked.
Some foods like pandanus nuts killed you if you ate them raw. Others made you sick.
He hauled himself from tree to tree again, through the soft bubbling mud the tide had left, then used his knife to prise through half-rotted timber.
Yes! There was a mangrove worm, small and white …
… and useless. White mangrove worms had to be cooked, or they left your throat sore and swollen. Every child had tried eating one when they were small; none ever tried it again.
He thrust the knife into another tree, then grabbed at the flash of pink and grey, laughing with delight. The giant worm dangled from his fingers to his elbow, fat and succulent. Not quite as fat as the worms would be during the Wet, but so good. He nipped off the sharp head with his teeth and spat it out, then sucked the creamy inside.
The dog made a small noise beside him.
‘You want one too?’
‘Gff,’ said the dog.
He laughed again, and threw her the rest of the worm. She leaped up and grabbed it out of the air, then chewed it thoroughly, swallowing finally as though she had decided it was good.
He lurched over to another tree, and another, digging and feasting and throwing worms to the dog till he was full. The dog looked satisfied too.
He looked at his hands, covered in worm juice.
Babies’ food. Women’s food. Men hunted pigs. They speared giant rats or fish. They didn’t gather worms that any toddler could find.
What were they doing back at the camp? Had Leki told them he was leaving? Or was she so rapt in Bu that she never even noticed Loa was gone?
For the first time he was glad that there was no one to see him. Not Loa the pig hunter, but Loa the cripple, digging mangrove worms.
He needed fire.
If he had fire he’d be a man again. He could eat cooked fruit bat. Arrowroot plants grew where the water seeped from the rocks. Their tubers would be sour and stringy at this time of year, but better than nothing. But they too needed to be cooked, like fruit bat.
He limped back up the track, trying to work out what he needed most. Fire first, and wood and tinder to make it. Then the right sort of rock and wood to make a spear. Fire would give him hot sand to straighten the spear shaft, but the rock here was crumbly. It would never pierce an animal’s hide — it probably wouldn’t even spear a fish, which he couldn’t do anyway till his leg was better.
The path wasn’t as steep down to the grasslands. He took his time, hauling down dead bits of branch as he walked, the crumbliest, driest wood he could find, then two long hard sticks. At last he sat, the tinder in a small pile next to him, and pressed the hard stick onto the long rotten one.
This was how Grandfather had done it, wasn’t it?
The dog watched from a rock nearby, curious at first. Eventually she shut her eyes, though her ears stayed pricked.
Loa began to rub the vertical stick between his palms. Patience, he thought. It had taken Grandfather a long time to get the tinder smouldering so he could blow in it to produce flame. Rolling and rolling the stick into the rotten wood …
The sun shone above him, hot and white. How long had he been rolling the stick? Far longer than Grandfather. He touched a finger to the tinder.
It wasn’t even warm.
He let the sticks fall. It wasn’t going to work. Not unless he could remember some other trick Grandfather used to make a spark.
He glanced up at the dog. She snapped lazily at a passing fly and crunched it.
Not a fly. A bee!
He sat perfectly still and listened. There was no telltale hum from any of the nearby trees. He watched the air instead, till he found another bee, then blinked.
The bee had vanished into the ground!
Bees lived in trees back home. But he was sure that had been a bee.
He grabbed one of the sticks he’d hoped to use as firewood, and used it to help him limp over to the tiny hole in the ground. He put his head down to the soil and listened.
A hive!
He grinned. He poked the stick into the hole, making it bigger and bigger still. The bees poured out. He brushed them away, glad that bees couldn’t sting like biting flies, then bent down and scooped out two handfuls of honey and wax.
It was wonderful, though not as sweet as the honey he’d known before. This was runnier and slightly green-tinged. He ate handful after handful, spitting out the wax onto a little mound that grew as he ate.
A shadow sat next to him. The dog. He held out a hand, sticky with honey.
The dog licked it, blinked, licked again, then gave an almost-grin of distaste. It was so funny he had to laugh.
At last he gathered the wax and stood up. The wax had given him an idea. He mightn’t have a spear point, but he had his knife. He could use wax and twine to fasten it to a long stick.
It wouldn’t be a proper spear, not balanced enough to hunt with, not until he could straighten the stick with hot wet sand. But it would be good enough to spear fish. He could stand still on the rocks at the edge of the sandy beach he’d tried to land on and let the fish come to him, then strike. His bad leg wouldn’t matter. You could eat fish raw if you had to.
And he’d be a hunter. A man.