Stranded (22 page)

The island bustled with spring like a young bride unpacking her honeymoon trousseau. Every breath Jake took was fresh with the scent of flowers and warm sunshine nursing tender green shoots. Wildlife teemed everywhere he went. Three days of exploring the awakening island brought him back to the cave with news he could hardly wait to share.

The evening sky, released from four months of monsoon cloud cover, sparkled in pinpricks of starlight. The cave door stood open and warmth flooded his chest that three people dear to him awaited his arrival. The red glow of coals highlighted their figures as they rushed to greet him. His heart caught at how their clothes hung on them like handouts two sizes too big from a refugee bin.

Crystal hugged him. Betty fetched him a cup of her seafood chowder. Eve scooted a chair out from under the table for him. He sat, inhaling the tangy aroma of the soup, the smell of charcoaled wood embedded in the cave walls, the odor of sweaty bodies subdued by the coolness of the cave. For the first time in three days, he felt at peace.

With a start, he realized the cave was home now. He’d been eager to escape its imprisonment, its monotony of month after month of monsoon dampness and incessant chatter from his roommates. The three days of freedom, however, proved the real prison. His ache for Ginny when he’d been alone day after day hollowed out his insides. Raw despair drove him back to the cave, thankful for his three companions. With them, he could forget the sharp blade of grief piercing his heart. He could go on living. With them, he had a purpose for his life. Save them. Protect them. Bring them back unharmed to civilization.

He sipped his soup while they reported on cultivating the Japanese garden during his absence. Ginny had been like that, needing to unburden herself of her news before she could listen to his.

Three bowls of soup later, his turn arrived. They gathered around him with faces expressing eagerness for his news now that theirs was depleted. “First thing I did,” he said, “was check out the stand of bamboo I used to build the outriggers. Unfortunately, the typhoons had destroyed it. I found three others with culms that might be the perfect size for a raft, but they’re still growing. It may be months before they’re the right height.”

Eve’s shoulders slumped. “So we sit around some more.”

She hadn’t complained once during the long wait for the monsoon to end—Jake had to give her credit for that. Still, restless tension had been evident every day in her voice, the way she chopped fruit, her solitary walks on the beach in spite of the driving rain. Whatever was supposed to have happened on the missed court date in August, clearly she hadn’t given up on it.

“No sitting around at all. I found mahogany stumps in the swamp—”

Eve’s head jerked up, and he hurried to finish before she could interrupt him. “The trees might have been cut by the Japanese soldiers, but there are enough stumps it could also mean loggers have been to the island. We need to start our shipwatch at the volcano top again and get the signal fire going.”

“Do the cuts look recent?” Eve frowned, but her voice had no edge to it. “Could loggers have come and gone without our knowing it?”

“No.” He emphasized the word. It would be just like her to insist they move to set up camp at the swamp. “Enough time has gone by that the bog almost covers the stumps. No one would have waded in there who didn’t want to be croc meat. But younger mahoganies are nearby. They might be worth a logging ship’s return.”

“I’ll start the shipwatch tomorrow.” Eve paused. “Unless you want to.”

Ah, now for the news he was truly excited about. “No, go ahead. I’m going to try my hand at catching a deer.” He grinned as their mouths fell open.

“Deer? Jake, you’re full of surprises.” Betty’s thin chest rose and fell with a half laugh. “You saw deer?”

“Not deer, but their scat at the pool. I suspect spring is pushing the wildlife into new territory and we’ll see animals we never guessed existed here.”

“Fresh venison.” Eve’s sigh bordered on a gleeful moan. “How will you catch it?”

“Since we don’t have suitable weapons for hunting, I’m doing it caveman style. I’m digging a pit.”

Crystal’s gasp swallowed half the air in the cave. “What if a tiger or something falls in instead?”

Betty huffed. “Crystal, you know tigers don’t live in the Philippines.”

Crystal snapped back. “I told you I’ve heard something when I gather fruit. Not a roar, but a yowl, sorta high and screechy like a cat.”

“Yes, and Eve told you she’s heard it too, that it’s some kind of monkey.” Betty scowled. “There are no big cats in the Philippines—no lions or tigers or leopards or cheetahs or anything like that.”

Crystal’s lower lip shoved out. Jake took one of her hands in his. He wasn’t the only one feeling the effects of being cooped up for four months. “I’ll keep an ear out for your critter while I dig tomorrow. No telling what new animals we’ll encounter now that spring is here.”

Crystal’s glare stabbed all three of them. “It wasn’t a monkey.”

Jake squeezed her hand. One thing he’d learned in Nam was to never discount another person’s fear, no matter how illogical it seemed. He’d do well to apply it to this island too.

The game trail sloped from a densely timbered hillside to a shallow ravine dominated by a lone buttress tree. Jake stood under the tree where the path curved toward the waterfall pool. Perfect. The thick undergrowth molded the trail into a chute that would force his prey to walk straight into his trap. Trouble was, he needed to get it dug by the end of the day. Any longer, and his presence at nightfall would scare the deer into finding another way to the pool.

He marked out a rectangle roughly four by six feet, then used the pick to loosen the dirt, a shovel to heave it, and the axe to hack away roots. The topsoil was easy, barely an inch deep. Beneath it, the island’s volcanic rock was soft and porous, but difficult to work with because of the sharp cinders that scratched his skin. The damp material dried quickly in the heat and turned into dust that irritated his eyes and congested his lungs. Before long, his skin, hair, and clothes were black from the mixture of sweat and dirt. At least there were benefits—the dirt formed a second skin that thwarted the cloud of pesky insects hovering around him.

He paused only to hydrate and eat the fruit and fish he’d brought. When the pit was deep enough that his fingertips barely reached the top edge, he carved footholds on either side of the far corner to climb out. Rays from the sun, parked directly over the buttress tree, declared the day half gone. His arms and back ached, but there was no time to rest.

A mountain of excavated dirt blocked the path. He covered his nose and mouth with his shirt against the cloud of dust he’d raise, and flung shovelful after shovelful into the undergrowth. When the path was clear, he dragged branches to the pit and wove a framework across the hole. It had to be strong enough to hold a camouflage layer of dirt and leaves, but frail enough to collapse under an animal. The scat and hoof prints at the pool indicated the deer were small, perhaps no larger than a Great Dane, but lighter in weight. The victim would have to fall immediately, before it could gather its wits and leap across.

Dead leaves from the buttress tree covered the game trail, making his last task of disguising the pit easy. He stood at the top of the timbered incline and squinted down the path at his finished handiwork, half admiring it, half worried he’d miscalculated the correct dimensions. Would a deer fall in, only to escape with a simple bound? Or would the lingering scent of a human deter any deer from coming in the first place?

He awoke before sunrise, aglow with anticipation. He tied on his moccasins, remembering how as a young boy he’d rise at daybreak during duck hunting season to check the rural ponds. The thrill of imminent discovery had heightened every nerve ending as he crept up and over a pond’s dam, wary not to be spotted by his prey. He never knew what he’d encounter, a flock or empty water.

Was this morning too soon? Would he discover the trap empty, dismantled by a civet or other animal heavy enough to fall in but nimble enough to climb out? Questions lined up like dominoes that needed only to be tipped against each other to fall in a clatter.

He strapped the katana sword onto his back and, as an extra precaution, a bayonet onto each thigh. At the last second, he grabbed the axe. There was no leftover fruit on the table to eat, but his stomach was too jumpy to want it anyway. He left, paused long enough to drink at the stream, then sloshed uphill against the tumbling current.

Entering the rain forest was like crossing an invisible line after the wide, open space of beach and field and ocean. The rain forest was a cocoon of warm, humid air framed in by a wall of perpetual shadows. The only illumination was a haze of sunlight that slipped unbidden between the layers of leaves and down and around the columns of tree trunks. A cacophony of noise echoed from the high reaches of the canopy. This was a world alive, but in hiding. Jake’s nerves tingled on high alert.

He intersected the game trail and stepped with the light tread of a cat over the tamped earth. Halfway up the timbered incline that dipped on the other side to his pit, a bellow like a calf’s rose on the air. His heartbeat doubled. He’d caught his deer!

At the top of the hill, he halted. The hoots and clamor from the canopy were absent. The deer’s plaintive call echoed in a dome of silent treetops. Nothing moved. The dried leaves on the game trail, the green brush on either side of it, the huge buttress tree—none of them fluttered or waved or rustled. Everything was as still as a painted canvas. The back of his neck prickled.

Silly to be spooked. He wasn’t in Nam. No sniper held him in his sights.

He resisted the urge to slip out the katana sword and strode to the pit to stand at its edge. The framework had imploded. Branches and broken sticks and dry leaves lay scattered across the black soil of the hole. Below him, huddled against the wall, a small, dark brown deer with antlers knelt on one front leg, the other leg extended at an awkward angle. Foam dripped from its mouth, and its chest shuddered in gasps between its wails.

Jake leaned closer. Those cries weren’t from pain. They were from fear.

An angry, high-pitched yowl pierced the air. Jake’s nerves flashed lightning hot. Every hair on his body stood on end. Before he could straighten, something heavy thudded onto his back. Needles dug into his shoulders and buttocks.

He ducked his head as the weight of his attacker impelled him headfirst into the pit.

Years of wrestling clicked an automatic response. Jake tucked his head into a wrestler’s forward kip and somersaulted to land with a whop on his back on top of his attacker. A stunned yowl from beneath him morphed into a shriek. Jake shot feet and hands in a spread-eagle to the pit walls and pressed his weight down hard onto the writhing lump. Whatever kind of animal it was, there would be no win for Jake if it gained its feet.

The needle-sharp claws embedded in Jake’s shoulder blades and buttocks dug deeper as he bore down. He clenched his jaws against the white-hot pain sparking behind his eyelids and pushed harder. The animal’s breath was hot on the back of his neck, but its teeth made no contact. The sword handle must have caught the animal’s open mouth and was pinning its jaws open. The harder Jake pressed down on the animal, the closer he would bring his neck to its teeth. He’d have to ease up.

The bellowing deer, its injured leg caught under Jake’s shoulder, lunged at Jake’s head. He jerked his face to the other side and felt an antler shear skin from the back of his neck. Before the deer could pull away, Jake whipped his head back around and imprisoned the prong against the katana handle. Now there was the double impediment of sword handle and antler protecting his neck. The animal pinned beneath him shrieked and struggled harder.

Jake gasped in a lungful of air to exert more pressure on top of the animal. His arms and legs trembled with the effort. The deer’s frantic lunges to free its antler were loosening the pressure of Jake’s head
against its prong. And the animal beneath him was squirming closer to escape.

Help me! I can’t leave the women to die!

The animal gave a sudden shove against Jake’s back. He felt its hips wriggle free. The end of a long, ropy tail lashed the wall from side to side.

The air whooshed from Jake’s lungs. A cat—he was fighting some kind of big cat!

He gasped a lungful of air, stoked by the identity of his attacker. This was no mere scrap with an animal he could chase away. Only one of them would get out of this alive.

The hard lump of the cat’s head had slid down to Jake’s shoulders. His neck was no longer a target. With relief, he released the deer’s prong.

The cat wriggled lower. Its breathing was rapid, grasping for air. But still its body inched downward. It would be out from under Jake long before he could suffocate it.

He would have to take a risk. His legs were shaking so badly they’d soon be useless.

In one swift movement, he let go of the wall, grabbed a bayonet from each thigh, and aimed their steel tips on either side of him into the cat’s ribs.

The animal screamed. Its claws dug deeper into Jake’s flesh, driving
a shriek from his own lungs. He squeezed his eyes shut against the searing flames and locked his mind onto a single goal. Find the vital organs.

Over and over he plunged the thin blades into the cat, tilting first to one side, then to the other, to expose its ribs to the bayonets. Blood soaked his hands. The raging cat wriggled lower and lower. Any minute its imprisoned jaws would reach the end of the katana sheath and be free to sink into the small of Jake’s back.

He jammed the blades higher into the cat’s rib cage. Why wasn’t he hitting its heart? Its lungs?

The cat’s hind claws embedded in Jake’s buttocks slipped free and raked down the backs of his thighs. Fire streaked from his rump to his knees. He screamed, for a moment loosening his hold on the bayonets.

This was it. With a last surge of strength, he thrust the two bayonet blades deeper into the cat. In his mind, he inched their tips together. Inched them through heart and lung. Inched them to touch in a kiss of death.

The cat coughed a raspy gag. Its fangs pinched Jake’s spine as they slid clear of the katana sheath. Jake stiffened, waiting for the teeth to crunch down. His fingers gripped the bayonets, buried them deeper into the cat’s heaving sides. If he died, the cat died with him.

The cat’s hind legs slackened. Dropped. Its body shuddered.

Jake held his breath. Waited to make sure. His feet slid numbly down the wall. His legs collapsed against coarse fur. The cat didn’t move. Still, Jake couldn’t let go of the bayonets.

Above him, the rectangle of sky and buttress tree branches flickered with light and shadow. Bird calls and monkey hoots echoed from the canopy. The scent of blossoms and green leaves drifted down from the underbrush. The jungle had resumed its life.

He inhaled a slow, shuddering breath and turned his face toward the deer. Its head lolled near Jake’s. A whisper of air wheezed from its throat. It no longer stood on its hind haunches but had slumped flat to the floor.

He unlocked his grip on the bayonet handles finger by finger. His hands dropped
to the cinder floor like dead geese onto a duck pond. He grunted, raised his left arm, and rolled off the cat, away from the deer.

The cat rolled with him.

Jake’s heart slammed into his ribs. He grabbed the katana sword from its sheath, only to knock his fist into the wall crowding his head. The sword clattered to the floor. To fetch it, he had no choice but to keep rolling, putting the cat on top of him.

The thought of fangs sinking into his neck sent his adrenaline pumping. He whipped onto his side far enough to snatch up the sword and spun back. But instead of facing the cat, he rolled onto its body. Pain spiked to a new peak as the cat’s claws once again jabbed into his shoulder blades.

His head swam. The cat was dead, but its claws still held him captive. He inhaled diaphragm-crunching breaths and rolled to his side. Gritting his teeth, flinching with each prod of the sword, he pried the claws free.

Pain rode over him like an armored tank. He lay flat on his stomach and breathed heavy swallows of air until his head stopped reeling. Blood trickled down his sides from the wounds in his shoulder blades. The furrows raked down his thighs by the cat’s hind claws throbbed. The palms of his hands stung with scratches from pressing them against the wall’s sharp cinders. The gouge in his neck from the deer’s prong burned like someone held a smoldering rod to it.

But he was alive.

Thank You.
He closed his eyes and let his trembling body, alive against all odds, be his prayer. Slowly, his breath steadied. His head cleared. Strength seeped into his bones and sinews.

He rose to his hands and knees and opened his eyes to gaze at his assailant. It was a cat, all right—a leopard. Its coat was patterned in darkly outlined ovals, the largest running along the spine and graduating into smaller ovals as they descended toward the belly. Stunned, he recognized the animal from pictures in his travel catalogues. It was a clouded leopard, native to Southeast Asia, but certainly not to the Philippines. How had it gotten to this island?

Flies swooped in on the carcass like bombers on an air raid. No way—this prize was his! He removed the bayonets and lifted the cat to the edge of the pit and shoved it out. He wasn’t leaving the deer behind either. He put it out of its misery with the axe. Boosting it out proved another matter. Its weight had to be three times that of the cat. The strain of heaving it out sent fresh blood flowing from his shoulder wounds. He sat with his back against the wall to shield his injuries from the flies, and put his head down. When the dizziness left, he retrieved his weapons and climbed out of the pit.

Around him, the jungle sang. The island hailed him. Victorious conqueror, give glory to your God! He swatted flies and laughed. It was good to be alive. Good to feel joy in his heart. Good to be God’s beloved.

He reassembled his weapons, draped the cat around his neck, and grabbed the deer’s antlers to drag it behind him. He staggered forward, an entourage of flies attending him.

Now to see if the victory included making it all the way back to the cave.