“This way,” said Louie, when Noah looked at him questioningly.
Twenty-six hens, the rooster, and the three of them on the boat.
But Louie was wrong: when he starts the motor and the old machinery begins to hum, the hens jump in the water. They make it back to the island as best they can, those that jumped in right away. The others stay, the ones that didn’t dare, forced to remain once the land is too far away. They pace back and forth in the boat, squawking anxiously, wide-eyed, brushing up against the kids who look at them and wonder if these ones, too, won’t eventually make a run for it.
But gradually they calm down, lie down next to each other under the foredeck, where Louie spread some old hay from the chicken coop. They don’t like it, and they still squawk from time to time just to make their point. The rooster is there, too; Louie wishes that one had jumped overboard, too.
So now it’s eighteen hens and the three of them on the sea.
“Too bad for them,” says Noah, facing their island as it shrinks slowly from their field of vision.
The boat doesn’t go fast but they’re pleased all the same. Louie is holding the tiller, it seems so easy but he can’t keep the boat going straight, it zigzags this way and that like a drunken boat, What are you doing? says Perrine. Louie gets annoyed: “I’m trying!”
After a few minutes have gone by, he understands that he mustn’t try to keep an absolutely straight line, mustn’t keep adjusting their heading in order to go east, it makes it worse. They are moving slowly, the motor sometimes acts as if it is out of breath, spluttering, and yet they do seem to be gliding effortlessly over the water, the air on their faces red with sun and excitement. Noah bursts out laughing, drags one hand in the water, making bubbles and foam, he splashes Perrine and she cries out. Louie says nothing, his back to the island that is gradually fading behind them. Sometimes he closes his eyes for two or three seconds, and only opens them again when a sort of dizziness comes over him, he makes sure they are still heading in the right direction, the one he chose when they left, he prays there will be some sort of landmark on the sea sooner or later—another island, a mountain, a concrete pillar—something he can follow without worrying about drifting off course: then he’d be sure and could breathe easy at last. But nothing appears and he dreads the moment when their island will be gone for good, with no new country, no coast or cliff appearing on the other side. The nakedness of the ocean terrifies him. Water as far as the eye can see, not a root to cling to, no grass to look at, a fathomless desert, a liquid abyss. Oddly, this vastness oppresses him. Only their tiny boat, between earth and sky, is an acceptable refuge.
And yet so frail.
Noah would like to try, too, to drive the boat, as he puts it. Louie lets him but stays right by his side. And explains: you have to keep looking at the horizon, relentlessly, stare at a spot in the distance and not let go, otherwise the boat will go around in circles.
“A spot?” says Noah, astonished. “But there’s nothing there.”
“There is, you have to find something.”
“Can I use a cloud?”
“No, clouds move.”
After only a few minutes, Louie has to adjust the course his little brother has taken. You’re going too far to the right. Noah starts to get up, abandons the tiller.
“Here, you can do it.”
“You’re stopping already?”
“I feel sick.”
He crawls over to Perrine, and Louie hears him say again, I feel sick. And then Noah leans overboard and throws up, into the ocean. Perrine reaches for a rag in one of the big bags they filled for the journey. Then Noah sits back down and closes his eyes.
“No, don’t do that,” says Perrine, shaking him; she’s the one who always gets carsick. “Look straight ahead otherwise it will start all over again.”
“I’m sick,” whines Noah.
“You’ll get used to it. Remember how when we go on vacation, I’m like that in the beginning, and then after a while it gets better.”
The boat chugs along for hours. Noah eventually fell asleep and Perrine put a sheet over his face so he wouldn’t get sunburned. She and Louie have tied kerchiefs on their heads, they can feel the heat burning their skin. Of course it would have been better if they could have hung some sort of awning over the boat, but they didn’t have time, obsessed by the thought that they had to leave the island as quickly as possible; they simply didn’t think. Now they’re sorry—even though Louie knows what a struggle it would have been to build some sort of solid shelter, fastened onto nothing, and the first gust of wind would have blown it away, so he pushes up the rag on his brow, convinced he has become some sort of pirate.
The first alarm comes after four or five hours: the motor begins to cough. Already, thinks Louie. He shouts:
“More fuel!”
Perrine hands him the fuel can. They don’t switch off the burning motor, they’re too afraid it won’t start again. And it’s absolutely vital not to spill any fuel.
“Can it catch fire?” says Noah worriedly, awake now.
“Yes,” says Louie.
“Oh no.”
They immediately continue on their way, relieved the boat is again moving forward as steadily as an old workhorse. In the can there is a little bit of gas left. Until tomorrow, thinks Louie. After that, we’ll have to row.
Shortly before nightfall he lowers the anchor. Perrine opens a bag and takes out eggs and pancakes, and potatoes to the brim, their eyes are shining. She also brought the shriveled little early apples from the apple tree at the top of the island, the one that hasn’t yielded anything decent in years; but she took them all the same, Noah went with her, carrying the ladder, she already knew what she wanted. She chops the apples in little pieces to give them to the hens with some grass she cut, hastily, she’s not sure that fowl eat grass, actually, but if they’re hungry, they’ll give it a go.
Once they’ve peeled their eggs, she takes the shells and crushes them and mixes them with the apples. She has seen Madie do this in winter when the hens didn’t have much to eat. Perrine puts half the mix aside, for the next day. She wonders if the hens will go on laying, on the boat. And whether they’ll have to leave them their fresh eggs for food.
After they’ve eaten they curl up in their blankets, their eyes closing already with exhaustion. Around them, millions of stars cast their light in reflections upon the sea, like lanterns on a holiday; there are so many that they can’t see the black water below them, stars embroidering a tapestry of tiny suns, and with their heads back they gaze at the echo above them, they play at searching on the water for the constellations they’ve found above them in the sky, which tremble and blink while they point to them, exclaiming, sorry they don’t know them better, fascinated by the glow, the sparkle. When Noah leans over to splash the water with both hands, the world clouds and furrows, the stars blur. It takes a long time for the sea to recover its smooth surface, for the ripples to vanish—no matter, they look at the sky again, motionless despite the trails of satellites. Perrine recognized the Little Dipper and, slightly higher up, the North Star. They fall asleep too soon, fatigue gets the better of them. And if they wake during the night, when the clucking of a dreaming hen disturbs them, they are instantly reassured, lulled by the lights of a world watching over them.
The next day the difficulties start. Since dawn, when the raw light on the ocean woke them and they started the motor, Louie has been watching the fuel level. For a start he lowered the throttle so it would last longer; at around noon he poured the final drops of fuel into the tank. Now, after spluttering and hiccupping for a few minutes, the motor stalls, stops, no more sound, nothing.