Tracks of the Tiger (18 page)

Beck put the shell aside and turned his attention to the sea cucumber. Out of the sea it was even more like a large, leathery sausage. Beck slit it open with the glass knife, taking care as usual not to puncture the creature's intestines. Apart from anything else, they could give you a nasty rash. As with the fish back at the pool in the jungle, he could simply hook a finger around the rubbery tubes and pull them out. He spread the sea cucumber out with its mix of red, rubbery flesh and black slimy skin.

‘Not much to cook,' Peter said glumly, watching.

‘We don't need to cook this. We can just eat it raw. Sushi extreme!'

They ate in silence. The cucumber flesh was salty and rubbery and it felt like they were eating a bicycle's inner tube. The eggs looked disgusting, but went down in a couple of swallows. Fortunately, what they lacked in size and filling power they made up for in boosting energy. Beck felt a lot better and more alert with them inside him.

He looked sideways at Peter, who was gloomily munching on a mouthful of red sea-cucumber flesh. Beck could tell that his friend was pretty down in the dumps. Getting out of there had just become much harder if Peter couldn't walk properly. But Beck knew from experience that when the going got tough, Peter could keep going for ever. Even if it meant walking himself into an early grave. He had come close to doing just that back in the Sahara. But the urchin spines meant Peter was effectively disabled, and Beck suspected they were still hurting a lot more than his friend was going to admit.

Maintaining a positive spirit is a vital part of survival. It doesn't matter how sheltered you are, how much food or water you can find for yourself, if you don't also have the will to keep going, you are already dead. With Peter hurt and in this mood, Beck honestly wasn't sure where to go from here.

‘You're thinking about what to do, aren't you?' Peter asked.

‘Kind of.'

‘So what are the options?'

Beck sighed. ‘Option one – I carry you. Piggy-back.'

Peter forced a smile. ‘That would be fun. What's the heaviest weight you've carried long distance?'

‘Much less than you,' Beck admitted.

‘So what's option two?'

‘Well, I've built a couple of rafts before. Maybe I could do that now. We could paddle along the coast instead.' Beck looked up and down the beach. ‘That's if we could get the wood. But even if we did, I don't know what the currents are like. We could get swept out to sea.'

‘Beck,' Peter said patiently, and Beck could hear the pain hidden in his voice, ‘there's only one way you're going to cover a decent amount of ground, and that's if you leave me here.'

Beck hadn't even considered that option. ‘No. We stick together. That's imperative. We got into this together and we will get out of it together.'

‘This beach can't go on for ever!' Peter responded. ‘And we've already covered a lot of ground yesterday. I bet that in one day, two maximum, you'd find someone.
Then
you could come back. Meanwhile you leave me with food and water and . . . Well, I'll manage.'

‘We don't have two days' worth of food and water to leave with you. The only way is to pick it up as we go.'

‘Well, leave me with what we've got.'

‘I am not leaving you! OK. I'll carry you. That's decided.'

‘You'll collapse in half a day!'

‘Half a day's better than nothing—'

Beck held his tongue. He did not want to get into an argument. That could split them apart just as much as leaving Peter on his own.

Everything Peter said made sense, but Beck was still resolved that they would stay together. Whatever the outcome.

He hugged his knees and scowled out to sea so that he didn't have to look at his friend. And that was how he saw the fishing boat, moving slowly along the horizon.

Peter saw it at the same time.

‘A boat! Beck, that's a boat!'

Beck thought quickly. The boat was still a long way off. They could shout but they wouldn't be heard.

He looked at the remains of last night's fire. It was a charred pile of ashes and fragments. They hadn't yet got round to making a new one.

‘We need to make a signal fire, and quick!'

They scrambled to gather together more wood and leaves.

‘Everything,' Beck said. ‘Everything we've got – seat stuffing, the lot!'

It took a couple of minutes to pile everything together, but the boat hadn't moved much. It wasn't going fast. Beck tried to work out which way the crew were likely to be looking. Presumably their attention would be on their nets. They wouldn't be looking at the land.

He handed Peter the fire steel. ‘Get it going and pile on everything you can think of.'

Then he picked up the largest, longest branch that he could find and began to wave it unevenly and erratically back and forth, desperately trying to catch the fishermen's attention. Behind him he could hear the scraping of the fire steel and Peter's frantic muttering.

‘OK, it's going . . .'

Once again the sun-baked wood caught light very quickly. The air above the pile shimmered with the heat. In fact it burned too well. It had a crisp, clear flame and that was exactly what Beck didn't want.

‘It's not smoking! We need smoke!'

The edge of the swamp was only a short distance away. The day before, Beck had hoped he would never have to go near it again. Now he ran back to the edge and plunged without thinking into its reeking waters. Clutching the glass knife, he waded over to the nearest clump of reeds and sawed at their bases. The first reed toppled over into the water. He left it floating there and turned his attention to the second, then to the third. In his mind's eye the fishing boat had suddenly sprouted hydrofoils, or a powerful engine, and even now it was zooming away from the shore, leaving the boys behind . . .

He pulled the cut reeds together in a sodden armful and waded back to the beach. Back at the camp he broke the reeds over his knee, one by one, and dropped them on the fire.

‘Eeuw!' Peter choked with disgust and waved his hand in front of his face. The reeds had soaked up the filth of the swamp and now they were releasing it into the air. But they were also sending up billows of thick smoke, a signal that surely even the world's most short-sighted fisherman couldn't miss.

Could he?

Beck couldn't make out details through the glare of sun on sea. Was the boat a little nearer? It was a typical fishing boat that you would see all along this coast – long, thin and slender, with a pointed bow and a sun shelter at the stern.

Were the crew looking towards him?

‘Come on! We really need to catch their attention! Can you stand up and help me?'

‘I'll damn well try,' said Peter, staggering to his feet.

His good foot was flat on the ground and the other just balanced on the tips of his toes. He stooped, a little crooked, and his face winced in pain.

‘Hold your arms up in a Y-shape – like you're dancing “YMCA” but you've forgotten the last three letters.'

Peter obliged. ‘What's that do?'

‘It's the international signal for distress. It means,
Come and help me!
'

Peter kept his arms up and turned towards the boat. ‘I didn't know that. I hope they read the same book you did.'

Beck picked up the branch he had been waving earlier and held it to the fire. The end caught quickly and the fire spread to the leaves. He waved it from side to side again – now a burning brand.

And then he saw that the boat was turning towards them.

‘Twenty miles,' Peter said, waking Beck from his slumber.

Miles and miles of beach were chugging slowly past. Beck had been fighting to keep his eyes open but everything was against him. The soft throb of the engine. The rocking of the boat. Above all, the fact that they were
safe
. He didn't have to keep his eyes open for poisonous insects or a source of water. He didn't have to plan ahead for their next meal or where they were going to spend the night . . . His body had firmly informed his mind, which had been fully keyed up for the last three days, that it was OK to shut down, right now, thank you.

And so it took a moment to realize Peter was saying anything.

‘What about it?'

‘Twenty miles of beach, I think they're saying.' Peter sat next to Beck, in the shade of the boat's roof. His hurt leg was stretched out in front of him. He gave a nod to the boat's crew of three. They were grinning, friendly Malay men, all wearing hats like lampshades to keep the sun off. One of them was at the rudder; the other two were in the bow repairing a net. Precise movements of their hands made order out of a random, tangled mass of rope.

‘They speak Portuguese, which is sort of like Spanish, and I sort of speak Spanish, so we can sort of communicate. And I think they're saying the beach goes on for twenty miles.'

Beck whistled softly to himself. This entire stretch of coast was a thin bar of sand between the swamp and the sea. Sometimes the swamp broke through the barrier and came all the way to the sea. It would have meant that even if the boys had walked this far, they would have had to get through yet more swamp on their own.

‘We would have made it,' Beck said quietly. He cocked an eye at Peter. ‘Even if I had been carrying you.'

‘Yeah, I know,' Peter said agreeably. ‘But aren't you glad you didn't have to?'

‘I remember my dad telling me about keeping going. He used to say,
He who sticks it out is he who wins
. It always sounded so clunky, but it always made me smile and think of him. And the weird thing is that he was right, Pete.'

Peter patted Beck's shoulder. It was at times like these that he knew Beck still missed his dad a lot.

‘You know, Pete, I feel my parents are around me the most when I am struggling the most.'

Peter replied gently, ‘That's because the rest of the time you're too busy living. And that's how it should be, buddy. They are always with you and I reckon they are pretty proud of you at the moment too.'

‘Thanks, Pete,' Beck replied. ‘Well, together we just kept putting one foot in front of the other, didn't we?'

Peter pulled a face. ‘I'm not sure I could even do that – but only because, you know, one foot is basically a giant pin cushion at the moment.'

The fishermen were used to urchins. It went with the job. They had done a good job of washing and bandaging Peter's hurt foot – no more peeing by anyone, he was glad to see – and they had even managed to get a couple of spines out. Peter pointed out that still left a couple of hundred spines in. This was an exaggeration, but he certainly wouldn't be walking anywhere for a while.

Beck grinned. ‘Well, you could,' he said.

‘Or crawl.'

‘And you would, Pete, knowing you.' Beck grinned. He loved Peter's blind determination.

And like Peter, the boat kept going for another three hours, all the way back to port.

‘Port' was a town by the beach. There was no kind of harbour, just dozens more fishing boats pulled up on the sand. The beach was black with nets spread out to dry, and the smell of fish was everywhere.

Beck and one of the fishermen made a cradle with their arms and carried Peter up to where the local police chief was waiting for them. The fishermen had radioed ahead. This man spoke English.

‘Peter Grey and Beck Granger? You come this way.'

He led them to the police station, which was a wood and bamboo house under the trees at the edge of the beach. There was no glass in the windows – you just closed the shutters if you wanted to keep the wind out – and a wide veranda gave a good view of the beach. The chief could sit there with a drink and the radio on, and survey his realm. Beck gathered this wasn't a high-crime area. It was a typical building for an area that was used to typhoons or tsunamis. Brick buildings fell down and hurt people and cost a lot of money to rebuild. Wooden ones like this could be put straight back up.