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34.
Now everything was changed. He was no longer alone in the world.
A thousand times, he relived the moment of finding that footprint. He dreamed less about Alex Kirk’s lost past, and more about his own hope for touching another human soul. His emotions were in high kilter, running the gamut from fear through joy. What if they were cannibals? What if they weren’t even really human? He paused at that thought, in the act of building a small boat, and wiped his brow. The more he thought about it, the more he realized he must be careful.
Some things he could not help. For example, he kept a fire going as he hollowed out a log in the safety of his sky-island. The tree he’d chosen for this purpose had been struck by lightning and lay folded over. It had a long, slender trunk of which about twenty feet were usable. The trunk was about three feet wide, and he estimated he could squeeze in there if he managed to hollow it out. Because it was folded over from where it had fallen over, it was up off the ground and he could get a fire under it. The trunk had begun to dry out, particularly with wind constantly blowing around it, so it took readily to the fire.
Alex worked on the boat throughout the daylight hours, using a row of small fires elevated on stones to get each flame’s optimum point of heat focused on the underbelly of the trunk. As the wood charred, he used a stone chipper to chop away at the resulting charcoal. The charcoal itself would be useful in future fires, and he wasted nothing but stored it in a black pile with the rest of his charcoal in a dry bin behind the hut.
As always, he wished he had the steel tools, particularly power tools, he remembered the real Alex as having had. They had it all, those ancient people, he thought, and why did they have to blow it? Sweating, dirty, covered with wood chips and smeared black, he chipped out his boat inch by inch.
The result, after five or six days of relentless labor, was a misshapen, blackened hulk of lumber. In one place, he’d burned a hole right through the hull. He fixed that as best he could by chopping out a plank from the outer rings of a nearby tree, wedging it in so that the wider surface was on the outside bottom of the boat. He cemented this in place with liberal amounts of very sticky tree sap from a stand of pines. He had no nails, not even the tools to make holes for pegs, though he could have shaped dowels with some ease from saplings. Truth was, he didn’t want to take a year to make this thing.
While he labored, he lived on rainwater and eggs and an occasional roast fowl. He felt his body emaciating as he worked on all day and lay awake half the night worrying and scheming. In great part, he worried about being alone in the open ocean in this vessel he was making.
He had no idea as yet where to look for this woman and her people. Every evening, he’d step to the edge of his cliff and look out over the sea in the direction where she’d gone.
One night, he thought he spotted a light far away. It was just a wink of a light, but it persisted. Of course, it could have been a reflection of moonlight or starlight on the water; but, he reasoned, the Earth was turning, spinning fast, and in five minutes such a reflection should have stopped shining his way. This little wavering point of light—like a star fallen to earth, the tiniest of stars—winked on and on for a long time. Most likely a fire someplace, he thought. Where?
As he stood on the edge of the cliff, he reflected on other nights when he had done this, looking blindly at nothing in particular. Evenings, when he was tired from the day’s hunting and building, and when a warm dinner of broiled hen wrapped in vegetables filled his gut, he would sit by the red embers of his fire. He’d made a guardedly secure home for himself high up in the cliffs. In his memory, he would explore a long-vanished world and remember the warm touch of Maryan Shurey and the comforting presence of other humans who had inhabited picturesque little Beacham township in upstate New York. It caused him piercing anguish to know he would live and die without ever having experienced the touch of another human being, or a comforting voice, or a friendly word. The memories of long-ago Alex’s life were his only real treasure.
He stared down at the white breakers thundering on the beach rocks 300 feet below. A disturbed wind drove whitecaps across the sea and made tree crowns rustle in the forest. He held one hand up to shield his eyes from the grit and bits of leaf sailing around him in the brisk, fragrant sea wind.
He stared across the wide bay with its rippling tidal waters. He contemplated the dark forests waving back and forth under a full moon. There was no shipwreck for him to visit on a raft to collect supplies. There would never be a passing ship.
Now he stared eagerly, with some trepidation, at the tiny red ember that signaled intelligent life. The fire was probably on some island. He triangulated as best he could using the far cape to his right and the slope coming down into the sea about two miles away. It looked as though wherever that fire was burning, it was two miles offshore. Not a good place to go in shark-infested waters, except in desperation.
It also occurred to him: was someone signaling? To him? Or to others?
He told himself: What do I have to lose? A life lived alone, when I have a 50-50 chance of either being eaten or meeting other human beings I can share my life with?
With that resolved in his mind, he went peacefully to sleep and awoke at midmorning the next day, well-rested and eager to finish his boat.
It took another day or two of scraping, and he added more pine sap to the wound in the hull. Even if it leaked, which he was sure it eventually would, the whole thing was buoyant enough to keep him afloat. Two miles each way, one time—that was all he would ask of this little sailboat.
He’d spent hours contemplating how to build a sail with the materials he had at hand. It occurred to him that his own body would serve as a primitive obstruction that the wind might ram against without any ability to tack or guide. He remembered ancient images of windsurfing. Many ways to skin this cat, if one were inventive enough. It would be simpler to do that than to try and embed some sort of mast in the hull. In the end, he fashioned a primitive sort of windsail using a twenty foot upright, and a sturdy enough sail woven together of reeds and vines. His sail looked more like a basket on a frame, but he figured it would take him the two miles and back.
Getting the boat down off the cliff without shattering it was a great ordeal leading to bruised ankles and knees as well as torn elbows and bloody hands. At one point, guiding it down from a higher boulder to a lower, he slipped and landed oddly so that his elbow smashed into his chin, rattling his teeth so that he was afraid he’d loosened one or two, but he only ended up with a sore jaw and a cut tongue. Cursing, swearing, he lowered the two hundred pound vessel down until it landed in the beach sand with a healthy resounding sound. The only damage was to the foot-square plate covering the hole he’d burned in the hull, and he had to reglue the whole thing. He warmed his pitch with a torch, until the resin sizzled and blackened. To this he added handfuls of fresh pinesap until the whole mess fused, holding the plate tightly enough. He made a floor of thick deciduous tree bark and laid that down to cover the hole, so that he would not accidentally step on it and push it out, thereby sinking himself. As a final precaution, he made himself a kind of life preserver that he resolved to tow behind, just a block of wood with some good handholds carved in it, and vines attached for more grips.
All the while, of course, he had to be on the lookout for his arch enemies the rippers. They appeared to be busy with a herd of wild oxen a mile up the beach, and were avoiding him for the moment.
All the better, he thought, looking up longingly toward the peace and security of his sky-island before pushing his boat down toward the incoming tide.
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