After absorbing the diagram, I nodded at him before acting out the fact that I needed to go get dry clothes, wash and rinse anew. He seemed to understand, shrugging me off with surprisingly less annoyance as he retrieved his list. With our silent discussion over, I took up the walking stick and went off.
There was a slight breeze in the air, refreshing, welcome even. Though I didn’t have a thermometer with me, I guessed it must have been close to 25°C today. Or at least it would have been without the wind.
While this day was summer at its best, something told me it wouldn’t last. Not this far up North. My thoughts darkened as I felt a countdown start ticking away in the background. My imaginary clock was counting back the days until harsher weather returned to these shores. The problem was, I had no idea what the numbers were, so I wasn’t sure how long we really had.
On my way back to the beach, fresh clothes from the salvaged suitcase under my arm, I caught sight of a patch of berry bushes. As I moved closer to inspect them, I realised how I had no way of knowing whether these were poisonous or not. To me, they looked like big, juicy blueberries. I salivated at the sight. Had they been red, I would have absconded. But I couldn’t, for the life of me, remember ever hearing about purple ones that were toxic. But maybe I was wrong about that, I thought. Besides, how many berries does it take to kill an adult? One, a dozen, twenty?
My stomach, obviously sick of Kitkats, rumbled, goading me into trying them. I grabbed three and wolfed them down. Guess we’ll know how good they were in a couple of hours, I thought, wondering if I’d made a mistake.
Committing the bush’s location to memory, I continued on towards the beach. When I got there, I found Killian nodding off, his back leaning against a tree trunk. If the marked-up napkin covering his eyes was any indication, he was done doing the maths on our survival.
Moving closer to the waves, I took off my sneakers before adding my pants and shirt. I kept my underwear on—for my benefit or Killian’s, I didn’t know—and jogged into the foamy sea.
The sunlight reflected off the waters in a beautiful way, showing off a prismatic white light which, in turn, showered upon me. Although quite freezing, these waters got the job done in terms of washing off the encrusted dirt from my body. It didn’t take long for me to feel clean again. When I was done, I walked out of the surf and found the dry clothes I’d left on the beach.
My one regret was how there was no way for me to wash off the salt. A fine saltine sheet lingered on my skin as I shrugged on a stranger’s cargo pants and T-shirt. The khaki pants were a little wide around the hips, so I tucked the bottom of the beige shirt inside it.
A glance up towards the forest showed me that Killian hadn’t moved a muscle. Aside from the cold, I felt fine. No dizziness, no stomach ache; it looked like the berries were agreeing with me so far.
To test the state of my health further, I decided to stretch my legs a little and get my blood pumping. With sneakers back on my feet, I walked the shoreline, the mountain at my back. Beneath my tread, the sand soon became pebbles, and then those pebbles became rocks. When the rocks grew into boulders, I climbed up them. While the hike was hard on my injured leg, it felt invigorating. Frankly, it felt good to be doing something aside from sitting around.
Around a particularly large boulder, I found a small tide pool. Oval in shape, it had to be about three metres wide and six, maybe seven metres long, with a depth of nearly sixty centimetres. All in all, it was nothing exceptional… if you ignored the three fish happily swimming about in it.
“Well, hello, you guys,” I said, bending down to look at them with a critical eye. “I baptise thee Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner.” They certainly looked tastier than that dried up salmon Swedish Airline insisted on serving us mid-flight.
Still, I wondered at how I was going to catch them. Since there was no shop selling fishing gear close by, I’d have to make my own. Thankfully, in such a small tide pool, a good spear looked like it would do the job.
I looked about me but found nothing to make one. While there were rocks everywhere, there was no wood to be seen. Having no idea when the high-tide was due, I couldn’t chance going back to the crash site for more supplies. Looking at the walking stick I held in my hand, I weighed my available options. Ease of walking versus a good dinner… yeah, it was no choice at all.
Sharpening the bottom of the stick on a jagged rock was the easy part. Spearing the fish with it, not so much.
“Slippery buggers,” I muttered when I missed for the third time.
Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner had become frantic in the small pool. Feeling their impending doom, they zipped left and right at random, each going in a different direction to add to the confusion. In this low depth, their tails stirred up the silt, making the water murky. By attempt number ten, I had all but lost track of Breakfast and Dinner.
Turning all my attention on Lunch, I took a deep breath, narrowed my eyes on the little devil, relaxed my fingers, and—jabbed!
And missed… again. The black shadow had dodged my weapon at the last second.
“Âlâ piè!” I had thought this would be easy, but this was turning into a test of my patience and nerves. For some reason, the old tongue spoken by my grandmother and some village elders resurfaced. There weren’t many people left who spoke the Patois Valaisan anymore. I supposed in a generation or two, it would be all but forgotten. But at that moment, as I fought the wilderness one-on-one, it felt like a fitting language to use.
“L’ê môrô,” I tried cajoling him in the old tongue, as I readied my spear for another jab. “Vin avoui mè… fira onna promenâde,” I sing-songed. Come with me for a little walk. To my absolute lack of surprise, Lunch remained unimpressed with my sweet lies.
The sky had grown darker—though not quite night—when I finally returned to the beach. Killian was nowhere to be seen. I didn’t walk back to the camp alone: Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner came along, impaled on the tip of my makeshift spear.
And the good news didn’t end there. I felt fine. In fact, more than fine, if positively famished. I took that to mean that the berries weren’t poisonous, so I stopped by the bush on the way back to eat a couple more. After pushing some berries into my cargo pants pockets, I followed the footpath back to the broken tail.
I found my fellow passenger seated on a broken trunk, a half-eaten KitKat in his hand. If he’d been worried by my long absence, he didn’t let it show. Instead, his attention was focused on my three little friends. For just a moment, I swore he almost smiled.
While I cleaned the fish, he got a fire going. I wasn’t sure what these were, but they weren’t big. Some kind of mackerel, maybe? I’d done my fair share of trout fishing back home, but when it came to saltwater fish, I was out of my depth, so to speak. Well, fish was fish, and my method of preparing and cooking them seemed to work just as well on them. Once I’d emptied out the innards, I cooked them over the fire with my spear, the skin still on them.
Turns out, Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner were quite tasty. Their flavour was reminiscent of tuna, which worked wonders in terms of gelling with the taste of the blueberries. We’d have to check the pool again tomorrow, maybe look along the coast for other fish-traps if that one was empty. Who knows? There may also be other berry bushes somewhere else on the island.
The entire time I was eating, I couldn’t keep the smile off my face. On second thought, maybe this island wasn’t as barren and deserted as I’d first thought. There was life here too, which meant there was hope for us after all. That night, I fell into a deep sleep, filled with dreams of hope and prosperity for our future.