Stories for Challenge Read online

  Stories for Challenge

  Volume 11 of the Book Series

  Born in the Sea

  By Nick Niels Sanders

  Published by Exotica Indica

  Publication as of April 2021

  4

  October 4

  It was 7:30. The sun had been up for some time and the day was growing warm already, the sky a cloudless azure above the darker ocean below. In the clear light of the morning, residuals of the storm were visible in the form of driftwood all along Camp Beach, not just at waterline, but up the beach quite a ways, palm trees shorn of their skirts of dried fronds, one palm tree near the east end of the beach bowing to the north, nearly flattened onto the sand.

  Twelve intrepid souls ventured forth, clearing driftwood from their accustomed practice ground, making a pile that could later be moved near to the fire. The beach being adequately cleared, they lined up, their leader starting them with qi ‘gong exercises. For the first time, some wore hats woven from palm fronds, mostly pretty ragged and irregular, but their owners were quite proud of them.

  Roger announced the start of the form: “Starting position, arms at your sides. Exhale. Bounce the Ball. Strike palm. All in. All out. Grasp bird’s tail. Extend and push. Single whip. Strike past ear. White crane. Push to the Right. Push to the Left. Brush knee. Parry and Punch. False Close. Push. Carry tiger. Carry baby. Fist under elbow.

  “Good. Close up. You are all a bit rusty after yesterday. Let’s go back to starting position and do it again.” And they did. When they were done, he demonstrated the next two movements, “eye strike” and “repulse monkey.” He led them through it twice.

  They went back to carry tiger and moved forward from there several times. They did a few more of the qi ‘gong exercises, then broke for breakfast.

  As usual, Marcella was prepared to serve breakfast shortly after tai chi class ended. She served pancakes with pitchers of warm syrup from the seemingly never-ending supply that had been brought from the Fiji Queen. Everyone ate heartily in anticipation of a day of hard work.

  Marcella told Paul of their need for drinking water. Paul and James started arranging for enough men to make the trek to bring back plenty of water. There were other issues to be handled. As long as there were palm fronds and coconuts down all over the place, it seemed only reasonable to collect them – they could eat the coconuts and the palm fronds would either be mat-making materials or fire fuel. There was driftwood on the beach that really should be collected as firewood. Marcella’s kitchen would need work to restore it to order, and the punctured life raft should be brought close to the fire and cut up into manageable pieces so that it could act as smoke signal when the moment came. This was a lot of chores in a lot of directions. They were discussing priorities as Marcella made pancakes.

  Marcella, Maria and Julia held the kitchen to be highest priority, though everyone agreed that replenishing the water supply was high on the list. Roger suggested that they let each person choose among the tasks at hand and see how it went. After some discussion, everyone agreed to that.

  Val took Maria aside: “Maria, how could you sleep in that lean-to?”

  “Why? Was something wrong there?

  “Yes. There was a rock right in the middle of the floor.”

  “Oh, yes. I put that there as a marker. What did you do with it?”

  “We dug it out and put it aside. And filled in the hole.”

  “Do you remember where it was?”

  “Yes.”

  “I would appreciate it if you would help me locate it. That rock was a marker to show me where I buried my computer. I should dig it back up.”

  “Wow! OK. After breakfast.”

  James again spent part of breakfast in making a detailed examination of Jeanne’s back. One might have thought that a major storm would have produced some hiccough in her healing, but she was actually better after the storm than after playing hooky for a day.

  “Well, the treatments we are doing seem to be helping. We have recovered some of the lost ground from two days ago. Yesterday you had 20 active burns and a number of them had gotten worse over the day prior. Today, seven of the twenty are lightly healed and all have made progress. I estimate that most of the remaining thirteen will be healed tomorrow and the last few by day after tomorrow. But we must stay attentive to your treatment schedule and not wander off again today.”

  “Yes, Dr. James.”

  “I’ll make sure of it, sir.” Ralph offered also his assurance to this.

  James went to find Valerie. Ron continued sketching, almost casually, as if he had not spent the whole of the previous day protecting that very sketchbook from getting wet in the storm.

  Val and Maria had, in the meantime, gone to the lean-to to locate Maria’s computer. Val had little difficulty in placing the stone’s location, and helped Maria to dig. In a few moments, there was rubber under the sand. Val had been off by a little, but not much – one corner of the rubber package being rapidly identified, they swept the sand off of the rest of it, raised it from its hole, unwrapped it, and assured, as far as they could, that it was still OK. Filling in the resulting hole was the work of only a couple moments.

  “Thanks, Val. I wonder when I would have remembered if you hadn’t mentioned it.”

  “I’m just glad to find out you weren’t sleeping on that rock for the past week.”

  Having received an update and instruction from Dr. James, Val moved Jeanne to the north end of the Kitchen Tent and began her treatment, first with the sea water soaks, then with the application of honey. As usual, Jeanne took a short nap after the honey treatment, and Val stayed to watch over her, though it meant that they were late-comers in joining Shelly, Ron and Jim in collecting driftwood as fuel for their fire.

  Morning Activities

  Paul (wearing a very asymmetrical hat), James, Ralph and Roger chose to make the trip to the spring for drinking water. The pool of water had refilled itself, to no one’s surprise, and refilling their jugs with water was an easy chore – carrying them back was not so easy.

  The “lettuce” plants were in evidence everywhere along the upper part of Coral Beach and in the bog. By tomorrow, they would again have salad to harvest. The thicket of bushes along the creek, which was now flowing, were again a profusion of buds, as if these plants prepared themselves, then just waited for rain to spring into bloom.

  Eight large jugs of water arrived back at the Kitchen Tent. Marcella directed their disposition. That job accomplished, the four men could choose other tasks to undertake next.

  Marcella, Maria (wearing a hat that was mostly brim with almost no crown, irregular and with the fringes of the ends of palm fronds sticking out around the edge of the brim) and Julia (wondrous that anyone could actually wear anything as ugly and irregular as Maria’s hat) worked in the kitchen. The piles of cans had worked well as a windbreak, with the consequence that lots of food became pretty inaccessible. The three women pulled can after can out of the sand bank that had built up on the windward side of the windbreak. Most of the cans were fine, but some, closer to the wind and driving rain, were losing their labels. The women tried to re-store cans by type of content and to keep the ones that were losing their labels with the ones with the same contents. This proved to be a tedious task, taking them much longer than they had anticipated.

  Jim (wearing a woven hat that looked like someone had stepped on it), Ron, and Shelly, soon to be joined by Val and Jeanne (both wearing hats as ragged as those worn by Jim, Maria and Paul), collected the jetsam from the storm. They started with the driftwood they had piled up before tai chi that morning, taking one pile down and moving it to be a new pile, near the fire. They finished in
about half an hour. Jim and Ron wandered farther afield, continuing to bring driftwood to the pile by the fire. Val, Shelly and Jeanne shifted to collecting coconuts and palm fronds, making a pile of coconuts just outside of the kitchen, and a pile of palm fronds by where Mark continued whittling.

  Mark remained in the Kitchen Tent, breaking down palm fronds to be woven into mats for rebuilding. As the three women began to re-supply his pile of fronds, he exchanged pleasantries with them. They thought he was in the best mood they had seen him in during the entire time they had known him.

  When they had completed the water run, James, Paul and Roger went to look at the life raft that had been punctured by a palm frond during the storm. It proved to be almost intact. It would need to be cut it up both for transport and for use in smoke signaling.

  Roger fetched a knife from the kitchen and began to hack the deflated rubber raft into manageable pieces. In the meantime, James and Paul worked to dig the life raft out of the sand pile that had accumulated around and on it.

  It took time, but they managed to uncover the entire vessel, detach it from its moorings, recover the tent posts for re-use and move the mass of rubber to the nearly-exhausted pile by the fire.

  Ralph had gone to join Jeanne in finding and salvaging palm fronds and coconuts. Ralph had to admit that gathering fallen coconuts was a lot safer than climbing palm trees to fetch them, but it was not nearly so glamorous. The supply was generous, however, so he doubted whether he would have to climb another palm tree for as long as they remained on the island.

  Maria looked up from her work in the kitchen and checked the time. It was past time for everyone to be out of the sun. She called out to James, who was delivering an armload of rubber to the smoke-signal pile. Thanking her for the reminder, he encouraged Paul and Roger into the shade, found Val, Shelly, Ralph and Jeanne over the next few minutes and encouraged them also into the shade. As they were returning to the Kitchen Tent, Ron and Jim appeared with several large pieces of driftwood; they also joined the group in the shade of the Kitchen Tent.

  Mid-Day

  The castaways gathered, a few at a time, and began a work time in the shade. As they had agreed at breakfast, their intent was to spend the first hours of the morning doing things that required being out in the sun, then to retire during the time of maximum sunburn risk into the shade to make mats from which to construct more sleeping structures. Roger and Paul sat down first and began to weave, Roger watching Paul carefully and copying what he did with remarkable facility. They were soon joined by Val, Shelly, Jeanne and Ralph, and the mat-making began to move forward at a greater speed. James sat down to work, but was distracted by keeping a lookout for Ron and Jim, who also soon joined the working group, Ron preferring to help Mark, while Jim began also to weave.

  They had used twelve of the seventeen mats they already had the previous evening to make the lean-to for Jim and Ron. They would need twenty-four to make lean-tos for Paul and for Val and Shelly, plus another twelve for a replacement for one of the lean-tos made from a life raft so that they could mobilize it into service as a boat – and Val was beginning to talk about making a new structure for the infirmary because it was inconvenient to do Jeanne’s treatments in the Kitchen Tent. That implied that they would need somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 mats. With eight of them weaving, they would soon have enough mats to do all the projects.

  Notably absent from the weaving circle were Julia, Marcella and Maria, who were still involved in straightening up the kitchen, though Marcella was now beginning to fret a bit about what she was going to do for lunch. She had long since departed from the prepared menu she and Maria had worked out many days ago – but they had both known that the main purpose of that menu was to estimate food use, not to compel any particular sequence of meals. The fish and the “lettuce” had both served to extend their food supply, but it seemed unlikely either would play a role in today’s diet.

  Marcella found that Maria and Julia had piled up several cans of Spam; this could be diced and fried with rice and some of the canned peas and that would make a wonderful lunch. And so she started to cook rice. She found three cans of peas and set them aside to open and add once she had her stir-fry under way.

  Meantime, Julia and Maria continued to work at digging the canned food out of the windbreak and arranging it so that it would be available for cooking. Finally, it seemed that they had actually rescued most of the cans from the wind break. They finished just as Marcella was announcing lunch.

  Having completed one mat, Val called Jeanne off to the back of the Kitchen Tent for a treatment. Since this was just sea water soaks, it only took about 20 minutes, and Jeanne did not nap after; they were done in time to return to mat weaving briefly before Marcella announced lunch.

  With a sense of satisfaction, the castaways gathered around the kitchen for lunch, then sat in various places in the Kitchen Tent to discuss the progress of the day. Ron and Mark were proud of the pile of prepared palm fronds. Paul had counted the completed mats and noted that there were 26 completed and eight in various stages of construction. They also congratulated themselves on a most constructive and productive morning.

  Lunch time was a time to rest and recuperate as well as a time to eat. Marcella received many compliments on her Spam fried rice with peas; again there was some debate about what herbs she might have included in the dish, a conversation to which Marcella did not contribute, and the exact combination remained a mystery.

  As they finished their lunches, they gravitated back to what they had been doing before lunch, except for the three ladies of the kitchen; Marcella went to weave mats while Maria, Julia and Shelly went to the kitchen to clean up. Maria quickly dropped out and went to weave, as Julia and Shelly clearly had the clean-up process well under control without her.

  Maria and Marcella had now replaced Shelly as weavers – and both replacements were considerably faster than the one they replaced. When the pile of prepared fronds was sufficient to get them to a total of 50 mats, Ron stopped preparing fronds and began weaving. Eventually, the kitchen was clean and Shelly and Julia joined the weavers.

  At 2:00, Val took Jeanne aside again for another application of sea water soaks to her back. Maria counted the mats and found that there were now 42 of them and the pile was continuing to grow. The supply of prepared fronds was shrinking, but there were still many to go. She turned to her husband and commented, “James, I think you should detail two of us to work on weaving together the mats that will be needed for the sleeping structures. I think we are close to having as many mats as we could possibly use.”

  “Thank you. Good idea. Paul and Ron will work on one shelter; Roger and I will work on the other. The four of us will leave partially completed mats behind, so someone might complete them for us. When Val returns, we need to start planning for the infirmary shelter. I think she is planning something a little different from what we had, but I haven’t heard any real plans yet.”

  Everyone agreed, and the jobs were split. By 2:30, the mats were made and ready to set up. Val and Jeanne returned from Jeanne’s treatment. Jeanne and Ralph conferred briefly and announced that they would like to have a palm lean-to and relinquish their life raft to the general welfare. Val asked to confer with Dr. James about the infirmary tent.

  Paul chose a new location for his lean-to, close to the front wall on Bathing Beach. Ron and Paul went to set up Paul’s new lean-to.

  Val asked that a lean-to for her and Shelly be delayed until they could participate in placing it and setting it up. Roger enlisted the assistance of Maria to create a third set of mats for Val and Shelly. Julia, Shelly and Marcella continued to work on weaving more mats; after taking away 24 for the two shelters they had already made and 12 more for the one Roger and Maria were working on, they had a pile of 10 in front of them, and a number of partially completed ones left by those going off to do other tasks.

  Jeanne and Ralph took Jim to help take down their life raft and instal
l palm mats in its place. Jeanne and Ralph were content to remain in the same location – after taking down the life raft, it was small work to set up the new shelter. The feeling of the space was totally different – somehow the life raft had been dark, and the fact that it had had the sides pointing down into the space below it had made the area seem more confined; Ralph and Jeanne were both very pleased with the change, and wished they had done it long before. They tied the life raft to a palm tree and returned to the Kitchen Tent, where they rejoined the mat weaving.

  James and Val looked around. The area where the previous infirmary lean-tos had been was less than ideal. After a short walk into the palm grove, Val came to a place that met her needs. She wanted an awning like the Kitchen Tent, somewhat lower on the south side and higher on the north, but high enough that she could walk under it from any direction. She paced off a size; James guessed it would take about 25 mats to make an adequate awning. They returned to the Kitchen Tent to find that Roger and Maria were nearly finished assembling the shelter mat for Val and Shelly. The four of them set off to relocate sleeping quarters for Val and Shelly; James rejoined the weaving crew. They needed ten more mats. In a few minutes, Jeanne, Ralph and Jim rejoined them and began weaving. A few minutes later, Paul and Ron returned. James indicated to them the size of shelter required for the infirmary, and they set to work to assemble the mats. It was a race to see if the weavers could create enough mats before the assemblers would need them – and they did! James added the last needed mat to the pile just as Ron was reaching for the last one. James set Paul to work looking for all of the tent posts and ropes he could find, and replaced him working on assembly. The others continued to weave hats or to make mats to sit on in the Kitchen Tent while awaiting the completion of the cover for the infirmary.