Chapter 7b: Depths (Beach, Afternoon of the Second Day)
The bird hunters brought back a half dozen or so waterfowl from the estuary; ducks, geese, and something like a red coot which would probably be inedible. Sam plucked them. He discarded the longer quills onto the sand, but he'd tied his jacket into a bag to hold the down.
Mac tried not to look at the growing pile of featherless corpses. He would have thought it enough to put anyone off eating meat.
He'd chipped and ground a crude stone adz and was trying to fit a haft to it. The grass cords he'd twisted didn't bind tightly enough. After a few swings the head started to wobble. He had a roll of duct tape in his pocket, but that wasn't a long-term solution.
With a sharp shard of stone Sam skinned the birds, and scraped the skins. He discarded the coot's skin on the sand between them. It had been haggled into strips. The rest of the offal was thrown to the gulls, so it seemed an odd gesture. A few minutes later the pieces came together.
"Thanks, Sam. The skin will shrink as it dries. We may need something tougher for the Mark II version, but I think you solved the problem."
Sam ducked his head. Mac thought he was smiling. Maybe not. Maybe he thought his father was patronizing him. Sometimes he'd bristle at comments Mac never meant to be offensive. Mac's opinion mattered to the independent young man. That . . . was frightening.
Had his grandfather left the family because he was frightened? Maybe the boy Mac had been cared too much. Maybe walking away was easier than watching their companionship fall apart.
He didn't believe that. Not of Harry.
He'd acted as if he did. When Michelle got too close, when anyone did, he'd destroy their relationship himself.
That wasn't an option any more. Sam had trusted Mac with a tentative respect. If that changed, if Sam decided he didn't want a belated father after all . . . Mac was still stuck with trying to get him to eat more vegetables and go to bed before dawn.
Very frightening. Mac set the adz head aside for the bindings to dry. He stared out at the waves, deciding what to do next.
The wind scattered the plucked feathers. He hadn't seen wood suitable for a bow yet. He could make blow-pipes for the bird hunters from hollowed reeds, that would be accurate farther than thrown stones. Large predators would find the castaways sooner or later. Maybe an atl-atl . . . .
Mac sorted through his pile of materials. Once he'd chosen a suitable stick, he opened the Swiss Army knife and began to whittle.
Sam began stripping the barbules from a discarded feather. When the shaft cracked he tossed the mutilated feather aside and picked up another.
"You don't think we're going to get home."
Mac stopped whittling. Hard questions. One of the drawbacks of fatherhood. Harry had always answered his questions, or given him the tools to find his own answers. He went back to his carving.
"The stars are different here."
He stated the basic fact, while trying to figure out how to explain it convincingly. He didn't have to. Sam let the feather drop and spoke slowly, concentrating on the puzzle he'd set.
"If the stars changed, we're a long way from Earth. Or a long time."
"We must have been . . . stored somehow. We feel like only a day went past, but it must have been longer."
Logic and science said this was the truth. The world they came from was lost. Roller blades, hockey rinks, Mt. Palomar. Phoenix Labs. The boy he was a Big Brother to. His souvenir hockey stick. The graveyard where his parents were buried, and his grandmother, and Harry. The dig he'd signed up for this summer.
His homes succumbed to disaster so often, he should be used to moving on. But moving on from the whole world?
Mac didn't have time to think about it. People were depending on him.
"And we didn't even get an in-flight meal!" Sam joked.
He'd picked up another feather, but his hands were shaking. It slipped out of his fingers and the wind sent it past Mac.
"Don't say that to anyone else, all right? People need to work things out in their own time."
"Yeah, I know. But I'm not the only one who's going to figure it out. You've got some smart friends. For someone who doesn't listen to grunge rock."
Mac laughed, the way he was supposed to.
"They're good people," he agreed. "We're going to be okay, you know. We can deal with this."
The short-term goals were food and shelter. That was do-able. Hard work to begin with, but they'd get the hang of it. They needed to find a more permanent site, maybe look for plants or animals that could be domesticated.
He'd lost Mike when she depended on him. That party of Phoenix executives had been slaughtered one by one on the wilderness hike he led. He'd lost . . . too many. It was time to get ready for anything this world could throw at them. He wasn't going to lose anyone else.