That night they all sat around the campfire, some eating, some not. The two boys who’d been to the site of the attack had disappeared. Nobody was talking. Everyone seemed to be totally engrossed in watching the tiny fire, whose light barely made it up the canyon walls. Sluff was sitting on his stretcher with his back up against the wall. When he could stand the silence no longer, he decided to ask the question.
“Jennifer,” he said.
“What,” she replied. Her tone of voice was not exactly friendly.
“We have to get out of here, right?”
“You have to get out of here,” she said, softly.
“I don’t understand.”
“This island is my home,” she snapped. “The plantation is lost, my husband is dead, but this island is my home. I’m staying. I’ll stay long bush until these goddamned japans either leave or we kill them all.”
“You said they were going to shut the station down and pull you out,” he said.
“What I said is that they were going to shut the station down. It was up to us to get over to Guadalcanal. As long as Jack came out with me, I was all right with that. Now I’m not.”
He nodded his head. “Can you help me get out then?” he asked.
“I need to think that through,” she said, after a long pause. “Because there’s a problem, yes?”
“What’s that?” he asked.
“The way these people see it, you have been nogut kas here. Bad luck. You showed up, everything went to hell, and now this disaster. Half these boys here will slip away into the bush by morning after seeing what happened at the station. Some will stay loyal and exact revenge on the japans when they can, but many of the others have had enough of this white man’s war. I know that’s unfair. We knew that the japans would eventually come for the rubber, but that’s how they see it.” She stopped for a moment and then sighed. “My world has gone upside down. I’ll think about it.”
With that she turned her face away. Sluff realized there was no more talking to be done. Either she’d help him get across Ironbottom Sound to the big island, or she wouldn’t. He also understood that some of her anger was really directed at Jack for defying orders, getting back on the air, and thereby beaconing an attack. Stupid she was not.
He lay back down on his stretcher and observed the natives’ faces. They were all still fascinated by that fire, except when they shot furtive looks at one another, and then at Jennifer. But not at him.
Oh, boy, he thought, and then the day’s exertions overcame him and he slept.
The following morning he awoke to an empty camp. The fire was long out and the brook was making the only sound. He sat up in the stretcher, carefully, so as not to annoy his battered head bone. There was a small canvas bag on the ground. It contained a pound or so of rice stuffed into an antique army mess cup, a gourd canteen, a small knife, a small metal cylinder, which he hoped contained some matches, and that last bandage that David had shown Jennifer. He thought he saw something under the bag and pulled it aside. It was a large revolver, and it looked familiar. Then he remembered: Jack had been wearing it in a holster the last time Sluff had spoken to him. Jennifer must have retrieved it. He bent over the edge of the stretcher and picked it up. It was pretty heavy, but he could see six brass rims in the cylinder.
He lifted his upper body into the stretcher and lay still until his head stopped swimming. He had his answer: She and whatever remained of her “boys” had gone long bush, as she termed it—into the deep backcountry on this island. He, alien bringer of nogut kas, was on his own.
Fair enough, he thought. There’d be more battle survivors, seamen as well as airmen, who would turn up on the beaches. She, on the other hand, would have to survive for many months here, maybe even years, until the Japs were driven out. For that she depended on the boys. He was a Jonah in their eyes, and he remembered what happened when the crews of sailing ships of old decided someone was a Jonah: They put him into a boat with some water and food and cast him away.
Okay, Jonah, he thought: Time to get under way, RFS or not. He got out of the stretcher, steadied himself, and then filled the gourd with water. He drank it all and then refilled it. He put everything back into the bag except the gun, which he put into his waistband, which in turn made his khaki trousers slide right off his hips. One way to lose weight, he decided: get stranded on a hostile island. He used the knife to poke holes in his canvas web uniform belt, re-cinched the belt, and then tried again with the heavy gun. This time everything held up, literally. He picked up the bag and started walking down the canyon toward the open meadow beyond. As he approached the opening he thought he felt something.
He stopped and listened. There was a vibration, a thrumming that seemed familiar, something powerful pummeling the tropic air.
Kawanishi, he thought.
He backed into the shadow of the canyon entrance and put the bag down. He still couldn’t hear the engines, but he could definitely feel them. Approaching, too. He looked up. Even though he was in the shadow of the canyon entrance, narrow as it was, he realized that from the air they might be able to see a white man standing there. He knelt down and then went prone, putting that canvas bag over his neck so that there was no white skin showing, and pushed himself up against the canyon wall. Then he waited.
Finally he could hear the actual engines as the seaplane came up the slopes of the valley and then over the ridge containing the canyon. He lay perfectly still and watched a patch of sunlight that was ten feet from where he lay. The engines got louder and louder and then the plane roared overhead and was going away, its line of motion confirmed by the black shadow that flitted briefly across that patch of sunlight. He waited for the shrill sound of an approaching bomb, but there was nothing. The sounds of the engines diminished until they were gone, somewhere out toward the western shores of the island.
He waited some more to make sure the plane wasn’t going to reappear, and then got up, gathered his small pack, and stepped out into the sunlight. Before him lay an expanse of jungle in every direction. Looking out over the descending ridgelines, he could see Ironbottom Sound, with the green cone of Savo Island to his right. Beyond that in the far distance was the gray-green eight-thousand-foot-high central massif of Guadalcanal itself. He tried to remember the charts: ten, maybe twelve miles across the sound? All he needed was one of those sea canoes. After that? Piece of cake.
Right. He gathered up his meager belongings and started down the hill toward the sea.
Seven hours later, he realized that he was done for the day and started to look for a place to hole up. A walk through the jungle forest of Kalai Island was not like a walk through the forests of Minnesota. Between the intense heat, bugs, an occasional snake, the vines, mud, and razor-edged bushes, downhill hadn’t always been obvious until he finally came to a fast-moving stream. By then he’d been more than ready to just sit down in the water and submerge up to his neck. Since his compass rule was to keep going downhill, no matter what, he’d decided to just follow the stream on the assumption that all streams would lead to the South Pacific Ocean. He’d cut two bamboo walking sticks, used a vine to tie his supply bag to his chest, and begun picking his way down the streambed. Even though his navigation problem had been solved, the footing had been interesting. The best part was that his water problem had also been solved.
The good news was that he was physically able to make his way down the slopes of the island. His skull was still damaged, but the lightning bolts he’d experienced when he’d first been wounded had mostly gone away. He’d elected not to change the bandage, as there didn’t seem to be any indications of infection, not that there would have been anything he could do about that. He worried about malaria from the mosquitoes and dysentery from drinking water of unknown quality. Aboard ship everyone had been taking antimalaria pills, but right now there was nothing he could do about that, either.
Finally he came upon a small sandbar along the stream where it threaded its way around an enormous boulder and decided to make camp. The rock was at least twenty feet high and twice that around. He wondered if it had come down off one of the top cliffs, like the building-sized one that had wiped out the coast-watcher station along with all of his chances for rescue. He sat down with his back to the rock and wiggled his legs into the warm sand while his sandals began drying off on the bamboo poles he’d stuck into the sand. The sun was getting lower and starting to bend long shafts of sunlight through the tops of the trees. He’d been surprised to hear none of the jungle sounds one heard in the Tarzan movies. The jungle was as silent as a tomb, and he wondered if that was because of his presence. Or perhaps someone else? He strained to hear any animal sounds at all, and then he fell asleep.
When he woke up, he found four Japanese soldiers squatting in a semicircle right in front of him, staring at him. One of them laughed when he saw the horrified expression come over Sluff’s face.