And suddenly they were on the top of a wave. There was no controlling the raft’s progress now. White water surged all around them as they rushed towards the new island. Beck braced himself for another rough landing…

  Chapter 28

  The raft shuddered and shook as it grounded, and white water rushed all around and over them. Beck felt his body scrape against the sand. He propped himself up on his knees, though the new effort made him grunt and groan, as the water streamed away again.

  He swept his eyes up and down the beach of their new home. He had already known this island would be larger than the last one. The beach was a sandy stretch – proper sand, not gravel like the last one – that was wrapped around the base of the island like a skirt. There was plenty of sand beyond the high water mark, followed by rising ground covered with shrubs and bushes and trees. Unlike the last island, most of this one would always be above the water even at high tide.

  But there would be time for exploring later. Right now, Beck could hear a fresh wave gathering strength behind him.

  “C’mon,” he grunted, “before the next one…”

  He and Ju-Long staggered to their feet and helped Jian clamber out from beneath the net. Together they dragged the raft up the beach. The wave caught them before they were all the way up, but it only surged around their knees and they hung onto the raft easily as it bobbed in the foam. The wave actually made it easier for them, carrying the raft a little bit further up the sand before the water ran out again.

  Once the raft was above the high water mark, as though there had been some unseen signal, all three of them sank down onto it with a sigh. They sat side by side and looked across the water, back at the island they had abandoned.

  Jian was cradling his injured arm, which he often did, but he looked more drawn than usual.

  “Are you all right?” Ju-Long asked.

  The older boy nodded wearily.

  “I am.” He sounded as tired as Beck felt. “But I am not looking forward to having to start all over again.”

  “Well, it’s not completely from scratch,” Beck pointed out. He jerked a thumb back at the pile of goods on the raft. “We have all this. And this place is bigger.” He stretched his neck to look from left to right behind them. “Doesn’t look as rocky so we’ll have to fish in a different way.” A crab scuttled past his toes – a tiddler, barely the size of his palm. “Okay, the crabs are weedy, but there’s bound to be more animal life, probably ones we can eat, and probably more water too.”

  “As long as the animal life is not more dragons,” Ju-Long said grimly.

  “Well, if it is, we’ll have more to protect ourselves with– Ow.”

  He slapped at his neck at the sudden feel of something jabbing there, like Jian had decided to stick a pin into him when his head was turned. He inspected his hand. There was nothing there but he already knew what it was.

  “And part of the animal life is sandflies,” he said with a sigh. There would be no protecting against them. They were only about half a centimetre long, and they moved so fast they were practically invisible, but they packed a punch like several mosquitoes all rolled into one. The bite on his neck would be red and itchy before he knew it, and if they stayed down here on the beach they would soon be covered with scratchy lumps.

  “We need to get away from the sand. Let’s see what else this place has.”

  “I will… stay a while. Risk the sandflies. You two go,” Jian said. Beck shot him a look. Jian was sitting, slightly bent over, still cradling his wrist. His face was pale and sweaty – and it was sweat that had come up since they arrived, not just splashes of sea water from their journey. Beck wondered if the splinted bones had maybe broken loose, rubbing against each other…

  “Is it getting worse? I could resplint it–”

  “Perhaps. Perhaps.” Jian forced a smile. “But not now. I am just… tired, and exploring the island will be more tiring. Is there anything I could do here on the beach?”

  “Well, if you’re sure…” Beck looked back at the trees beyond the beach. If the island was uninhabited by humans, there would be no natural paths, no clear areas for one-handed people to walk through without having to pick their way. Jian had a point. “Okay. If you don’t mind being bitten, you could spell out ‘S.O.S.’ in the sand? Using nice, big characters. As big as you can get.”

  “That, I can do,” Jian agreed gratefully. “And with this–” He nodded at his hand. “I think a few bites will make no difference to how I feel.”

  Considering everything Jian, and especially Jian’s hand, had been through, Beck could understand the boy feeling drained. But he would check on the hand later – resplint the wrist, and put a freshly boiled bandage on the dragon bite.

  “Come on,” he said to Ju-Long. “Let’s see what we’ve got.”

  Chapter 29

  “I think he is hurting more than he will admit,” Ju-Long said anxiously, once they were out of earshot. She and Beck picked their way through closely packed trees and bushes, following the slope of the ground upwards. Beck wanted to find the island’s highest point, like he had on the last one, so he could make a map in his mind of how things lay. After that, he could plan.

  This would have been a much better island to be wrecked on, he had already decided glumly. The basic geology had to be the same, but all the rocks here were buried beneath sand and earth. The soil was richer than on the last island, and obviously deeper and better watered, which made it able to support the plant life around them. Which meant there was a good chance of water somewhere – water that pooled instead of just draining away into trickles.

  “I’m sure of it,” he agreed. “And if I was in his place, I probably wouldn’t be admitting it either.”

  “Boys!” she exclaimed in frustration, and he grinned.

  “Yeah, that’s part of it. And part of it is not wanting to be a burden, and part of it is knowing there’s nothing anyone can do about his hand anyway. Well, apart from cutting it off altogether.”

  She looked sideways at him.

  “Please tell me that was an English joke.”

  “It was an English joke.”

  “Thank you. English jokes are not funny.” But she still gave Beck a smile.

  The ground ahead of them levelled out, and almost immediately dropped down again. Beck stopped and looked from left to right. It looked like this was the island’s highest point – in fact, a ridge ran along the entire length of it. The island was shaped like a giant wedge pointing upwards, and everything was either one side or the other of the thin end. He cocked his head and looked along the ridge with interest. An animal trail ran along it.

  Ju-Long hadn’t noticed, but Beck knew the signs to look for. The way fallen leaves were disturbed, small branches bent, the ground was trodden down, and all in a thin line. That was worth knowing. He was praying it wasn’t dragons.

  The trees were too close together for him to see far in any direction.

  “Wait here a mo,” he said. He picked the thickest tree he could see, one that looked like it wouldn’t bend under his weight, and quickly shinned up it, holding himself against the trunk with the pressure of his knees, pulling himself up with his hands, moving his knees up, and repeating. In a few moments he was level with the branches. He pulled himself up to stand on the one that looked the sturdiest, holding himself up with a hand on the trunk, and moved the leaves aside to peer through.

  In one direction was the dragon island. In the other, Beck could see a couple more islands, and maybe the hint of a third beyond them. None of the islands were as close as the dragon one, so they wouldn’t be heading on to them, he thought, unless there was a really good reason. And he really hoped there wouldn’t be.

  He took a couple more moments to make his observations, then started to climb down. One last thing caught his eye. The sea was still blue and sparkling beneath a clear sky, but a dark line to the south east suggested there was a different kind of weather below the horizon. Beck didn’t know if it would be coming their way or not. If it was then it would take at least a day to arrive, whatever it was.

  He climbed quickly back down to the ground and dusted his hands on his trousers. Ju-Long was waiting with a big smile.

  “Do you want to see what I found while you were up there?”

  She led him away, but only a few metres, downslope from the ridge. His eyes lit up when he saw what she was talking about.

  “Oh, yes!”

  It was a dry furrow in the ground, slightly ragged, like someone had dug it out with a trowel. It was obviously well established, not recently made. The earth was dry and it was full of dead leaves. It seemed to start from nowhere and head off into the trees down the slope.

  But there was only one thing that could have made it, and that was running water. The ridge was the island’s watershed. Rain ran off it in one direction or another, and this was obviously one of the channels it used, carved out over probably hundreds of years.

  “Let’s see where it goes…”

  They followed it for five minutes before the ground levelled off. A natural bump in the slope of the ridge created a flat ledge with a dimple in the middle, and in the dimple was a pool.

  It wasn’t the kind either of them wanted to dive into. It must have been recharged with rainwater during the typhoon, and that had only been a week ago, but it wasn’t what you would call fresh. Leaves had blown in and rotted; animals would have peed and pooed in it too. But, it was the nicest sight Beck had seen for a long time.

  “Hey, don’t worry,” Beck said when he saw Ju-Long’s look of disappointment. “It might be the only water on the island, but it’ll be fine if we filter it and boil it. So, we can set up camp here and have a water bank going, and… hello…”

  His attention was caught by something on the ground. Marks in the soil. He knelt down to touch them and Ju-Long stepped forward to see what it was. Just then the bushes across from the pool suddenly rustled. They looked up sharply.

  The bush rustled again and there was the sound of something large moving away.

  “Oh, no,” Ju-Long breathed. “Not more dragons!”

  Chapter 30

  The bush rustled again. Beck had the feeling of being watched by careful, suspicious eyes.

  “No,” he said thoughtfully, “these aren’t dragons.”

  He had known what it was when he saw the soil marks by the edge of the pool, pressed into the soft, damp mud. And the breeze carried a distinctly mammalian, farmyard smell towards him. He couldn’t have identified the animal from the smell alone, but the marks were the giveaway. Each one was a pair of indentations, side by side as if he had pressed his first two fingers into the ground, over and over again. He tapped them to show what he meant.

  “These are pig footprints. There are wild pigs on this island. They must come here to drink.”

  And he would bet it was pigs that had created the animal track along the ridge. They must use it as their personal highway along the island – high ground, looking down on both sides, with a good view of any predators. But there couldn’t be any predators on this island, because if there were on an island this size, there wouldn’t be any pigs at all. Which meant the pigs were the top life form – or had been, until the three of them had arrived.

  “As far as I know,” Ju-Long said thoughtfully, “pigs are not endangered.”

  “Not generally.” He grinned, and looked at the bushes that hid the pig. They moved again, but only because the pig was sniffing around and moving away.

  He ran in his head through what they needed to do, and the time it would take. It was mid-afternoon. Could they squeeze everything into the last four hours of daylight?

  Yes, he decided, they could. They would.

  “We’ll bring everything up here for our camp to be near the water.” There might be mosquitoes, he thought, but that was inevitable anywhere on the island, and it was better than sandflies. “Then we’ll build another signal fire down on the beach – there’s nowhere clear up here we can use for a signal point, so the beach is the next best thing. And then, we can see what we can do to help us survive a little longer!”

  *

  The tree was three metres tall and it stood next to the pig trail. Its trunk was just right and Beck could get both his hands around it. It wasn’t so thick that he couldn’t pull it down to the ground, and it wasn’t so thin that it just snapped if he tried.

  And when he did, and let go, it sprang back up into the air to stand upright again.

  Perfect.

  Catching a pig, even on an island this size, would be a big challenge. He was the only one of the three of them with any hunting experience, and even if the island wasn’t exactly big, it was big enough.

  So, the pigs had to be trapped. And thanks to the trail, he knew where a trap could be set.

  Ju-Long had cut a length of rope with a slip knot at one end. She fed the other end of the rope back through the knot’s loop, and now the rope was a noose. A pig that blundered into it would pull the rope through the knot and make it tighter.

  But there was always the chance it could just pull itself free again. To make extra sure it stayed caught, it had to be lifted off the ground – and that was where the tree came in.

  Beck cut a notch in the stem of a sapling that grew next to the trail. He tied a loop in one end of a piece of rope, and tied the other end of the rope around the tree. Then he heaved the tree down with both hands, straining as he fought the tree’s desire to return upright, and hooked the loop into the notch. The rope stretched taut, but it held and the tree stayed bent over.

  It needed to be tested. He stood back a safe distance and gave the rope an experimental prod with a length of wood. It slid out of the notch and the tree whipped itself smartly upright, yanking the wood out of his hand.

  Okay, he decided, that would do.

  He pulled the tree back down again and fastened it again with the rope back in the notch. Then he tied the free end of the snare to the tree a little higher up, laid the loop gently down on the ground, and covered it up with a scattering of leaves. The pig would come blundering through and knock the tree free without realising it was standing in the snare. The tree would whip itself upright. The snare would close around the pig, or at least one of its legs, and lift it up.

  That was the theory.

  He had to be absolutely sure, of course, that the pig would stand in that precise spot. That was what Ju-Long was doing now. He went to help her.

  For a distance of ten metres on either side of the snare, and up to a height of about one metre, Ju-Long was lashing the branches of the undergrowth together. Some she tied with net rope, some she just twined together. From a distance it looked untouched, but any animal that tried to run through it, expecting to push the branches apart, wouldn’t be able to. Animals took the path of least resistance unless they had a good reason not to. Ju-Long and Beck would build a barrier like this on either side of the trail, angled towards the snare, and the pig would find itself funnelled towards the trap. The killing zone.

  The barriers were in place; the trap was set. Beck checked his watch. They had about an hour of daylight left. Getting across from the last island, then exploring this one, and then setting the trap, had taken up a good chunk of day. If they were going to do this today, they needed to act now. Not that it would be the end of the world if they waited until tomorrow, but roast pork tonight would be good.

  “Ready?” he asked. Ju-Long nodded. He checked his watch. “Be in position in five minutes, then go for it.”

  “Five minutes.” Ju-Long set the alarm on her own watch. “Understood.” She turned to go.

  “Wait, hang on a moment!” Beck called. She looked back, and he handed her a thick, sturdy stick. She flashed him a smile of understanding and took it, then carried on her way. The whole point of what they were about to do was to spook a pig to run into the trap – but spooked animals can turn nasty on whoever is spooking them. Even domesticated farm pigs could get aggressive if they were angry, and this would be a wild animal, not domesticated at all. It would have teeth and, if it was a male, it would have tusks – sharp ones, too, every bit as dangerous as a dragon’s bite.

  She would need protection.

  Beck didn’t have a stick – he had a spear. They had brought the triple-pointed spear with them from the old island, but this island wasn’t suitable for diving in rock pools, so he had modified it. First he had cut a slot in one end and wrapped rope tight around it to stop the slot from splitting the shaft further down. Then he had opened his knife’s sharp cutting blade up and wedged the handle into the slot, tying more rope to hold it firmly in place. The blade pointed outwards, and with the point on the end, it would be a lethal weapon.

  He picked the spear up and turned to head in the other direction, picking his way through the undergrowth down his side of the ridge. By the time he and Ju-Long reached the beach they would be on opposite sides of the island.

  Beck emerged onto the sand and quickly turned right, hurrying along until he estimated he was about half way to the island’s end. Ju-Long should be in a similar position on her side. He checked his watch again. There was a minute to go.

  He turned to face the jungle and drew in some slow breaths. In many places around the world, indigenous people would ask permission or blessing of the spirits for a hunt. And so he sent out a prayer to the forest of the island.

  Lord, thank you for providing us with this food. Help us to make a clean kill. Beck paused. “Amen!”

  And the silence gave the trees time to settle down and for quiet to return.

  Thirty seconds. He took a grip on the spear. Twenty seconds. Ten… Time. The hunt was on.

  Chapter 31

  “Okay!” Beck said, but not loudly. “Any pigs on this island better get out of our way because I’m coming through!”

  He began to walk forward, pushing back into the undergrowth, bumping the ground and trees with the shaft of the spear as he went.

  They didn’t want to set up a mighty racket that would spook every creature on the island. You never knew what you would get running into the trap then. But they made enough noise to make it clear that two largish mammals were coming through. Other animals would deal with it in different ways.

 

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