The Professor checked the raft the next morning. Something must have disturbed it in the night, he thought; the 'Skipper' bag was missing. A bit of investigation located it at the bottom of the lagoon; it must have fallen overboard, the Professor thought. There was really no way he'd be able to retrieve it himself, and he made a mental note to return with additional hands.

Aside from the man overboard, the raft looked to be in good order. No leaks. The other six sacks had been disturbed as well, though; they seemed to have been wedged closer together. The 'Ginger' sack was practically on top of the 'Mr. Howell' one. The 'Mary Ann' was in grave danger of being crushed by the 'Professor' surrogate, 'Mrs. Howell' was nearly inside the water cask, and the last-minute 'Gilligan' sack, lying flat in the middle of the raft, was almost certainly being stepped on by the others.

The Professor frowned. He was not entirely sure what he was seeing, and nothing was yet certain, but he was beginning to have a bad feeling about this raft.

OoOoOoO

"I still say it makes more sense if I take her out myself. I'm the lightest, so I can carry the most water."

"And I say that you're not going by yourself, so just forget it. That's an order. Who's the commanding officer around here, me or you?"

"Just yesterday you were turning yourself inside out trying to get me to go at all. So I'll go. What are we still arguing about? All I'm saying is that we should do it the smart way."

"And all I'm saying is that if you don't shut your mouth, I'll do it for you. Coconuts. Now. Get moving!"

Gilligan shrugged and turned to the indicated tree, ready to climb. The faded remains of a brownish-red handprint were still just visible on the tree trunk. Gilligan looked at the print with an odd, crooked half-smile, and he fitted his right hand against it. The Skipper's mouth twisted, and he pulled his knife out of his pocket.

"Move over," he said. "I'm getting rid of that."

"What for?" Gilligan pulled his hand away from the tree and wiggled his fingers. "I thought it was kind of smart. It worked, anyway."

"What worked?"

Gilligan rubbed his right hand over his left arm meditatively. "These. Marking a trail with handprints. It was actually sort of lucky he winged me when he did."

"I'd hardly call it 'lucky,'" the Skipper said. Images flashed across his mind like the devil's own movie theater. The gunshot. The splash as Gilligan had fallen into the water trough. The twisted pleasure on Kinkaid's face. And himself, standing helplessly—uselessly—behind a bamboo grille.

"Well, no, it'll never beat checkers as a way of spending an afternoon, but in the long run it made everything easier. I'd been trying to shake him with backwards footprints, or breaking branches in the wrong direction, but he was just too good at tracking. I couldn't fool him like that." He slapped his palm decisively against the tree. "But these he followed without thinking twice. Right where I wanted him to go."

"You really want to leave reminders of getting shot all over the trees?"

"It wasn't a big deal," he shrugged, touching his upper arm again. "A little messy, but messy was all; nothing serious. Anyway, I've banged myself up way worse than that plenty of times. You can barely see where it happened anymore."

"No scars or anything?"

"Just a little bit of one," Gilligan said, pushing up his sleeve to prove it. The graze had indeed healed cleanly, and he was obviously having no trouble using the arm. "See?"

"Yeah, you're good as new. That was pretty lucky, I guess," the Skipper said slowly. "That's the only nice thing about getting wounded, I guess… hurts like blazes, but if you give it a little time, it heals over until you can't really tell that anything was ever wrong. You'll always remember—it never really goes away completely—but it doesn't have to take up every waking minute anymore."

The Skipper studied the handprint again. It still made him sick to look at them, and he knew he would take the memories of just how they had gotten there to his grave. But if the bloody signposts really were an intentional part of what he had to admit was a fairly clever trap, Gilligan was right. They weren't something to be hidden. They signaled strength, not helplessness. That gunshot had only missed doing real damage by a hair's breadth and the grace of God, and instead of panicking, he had used it to both lull his pursuer into a false sense of security and lure him to his death. His 'little buddy' wasn't so little as all that, not anymore.

"Something else I remember hearing," the Skipper continued. "When a person breaks a bone, they have to set it back in place, and cover it all in plaster to let it heal. It can take months. And it's a real hassle. But once the bone's knitted, the medicos say that it's actually stronger in the place that was broken than it had been to begin with."

Gilligan looked at his scarred arm, then back to the Skipper, and it was obvious that—for once—he did not need the metaphor spelled out for him. But instead of answering the real question, he only rolled down his sleeve and grasped the trunk with hands and feet, starting upwards as nimbly as a monkey. "Right. Coconuts. Now. Better get moving," he said briskly.

"Is that all you have to say?" Exasperated, the Skipper put his hands on his hips and looked up into the tree.

"No, I guess not," Gilligan said thoughtfully, inching himself up a bit closer to the crown.

"Well? What is it, then?"

"Look out below," he said, and dropped a coconut, which missed the Skipper by a comfortable margin.

OoOoOoO

Mary Ann folded a blouse and placed it neatly in her suitcase, trying not to remember how many times she'd packed her bags… only to have to unpack them again. "I'm not even sure why I'm packing my clothes," she said aloud.

Ginger looked up from her own suitcases. "Why on earth would you say that?"

"Well, for one thing, that raft's so small you know that we're not going to be able to bring our luggage with us," Mary Ann said. "And for another, after all this time, I'm not sure I ever want to see these clothes ever again."

"I can't say I won't be glad to get a few new dresses," Ginger said. She flicked a rueful finger at the stenciled 'MINNOW' on her white sundress. "Especially dresses I don't have to make out of sailcloth and canvas."

Mary Ann laughed. "Oh, no—you definitely need to bring that one. You'll start a whole new fashion trend."

"Castaway Couture," Ginger said. "You're right; it could be the next big thing."

"Why not? When we get back, fashions will be completely different from when we left… everything will be completely different from when we left."

Ginger put an arm around her friend. "Not the important things," she said quietly. "We'll need a few new dresses, and maybe a little time to readjust. But we're going to be all right. Just as soon as we get back… we're going to be all right."

"If we get back," Mary Ann said, saying it for the first time.

"We will," Ginger said fiercely. "We're going to get on that raft, and it's going to take us home, Mary Ann. We've made it through everything else—storms and cannibals and enough coconut to last a lifetime. We survived everything this island could throw at us and we made it through unscathed."

"Did we?" Kinkaid's name was not spoken. It didn't have to be.

"Well…" Ginger bit her lip, conceding the point. "No, maybe not. Not yet. But not yet isn't the same as not ever. And though the night is dark and chill, though for a time we may seem to lose our way for lack of a guiding star, we will stand united and await the morning sun."

Mary Ann recognized the 'film quote' cadence of that last bit, if not the quote itself. Trying not to sound too ironic, she asked, "What movie was that from?"

"The Monster That Devoured Cleveland," Ginger said. "I've been reciting that line to myself ever since the storm. Whenever it all started to get to me."

There were worse mantras a person could have, Mary Ann thought. Possibly not many worse movies had ever been made, but the sentiment was fitting enough. "I'm almost afraid to hope for the morning sun to get here," she admitted. "We've been disappointed so many times."

"I'm afraid not to hope for it," Ginger said. "Even if it does mean getting my heart broken over and over when things go wrong… I can't let myself just accept that this is how things are going to be, forever, and that I can't change it. That scares me."

"I know what you mean," said Mary Ann. She glanced back at her half-filled suitcase. "Let's go check with the Professor as to how much we can carry with us," she said. "No sense in having to pack more than one last time!"

OoOoOoO

Down at the lagoon, the Professor was supervising the retrieval of the 'Skipper.' The flesh and blood Skipper had pulled the raft back to the shallows so that his surrogate could be repositioned. Meanwhile, Gilligan, wryly accommodating even as he made it perfectly obvious that he thought the others were being ridiculous, had taken a deep dive, to where, some unspecified number of fathoms down, (how many feet were in a fathom, anyway?) the 'Skipper' sack had mysteriously fallen. He tied a rope firmly around the sack of stones, and had then had swum back to the beach with the other end of the rope.

As they hauled the sack back to a depth where they could retrieve it, the Professor examined the raft again. Still no sign of leaks, but even without the 'Skipper' aboard, there was no doubt that the sacks were crowded together more tightly than he thought he remembered. But then again, that could easily have been a result of being towed to shore in a less-than-gentle manner. Not so easily dismissed was the fact that the raft was riding lower in the water than it had been. And that was with only six aboard.

"We're going to have to remove some of the supplies," he said, as the Skipper picked up the sack and waded towards him.

The Skipper dumped his surrogate back into the bow, and, ominously, the raft settled another couple of inches deep. "What do you mean, Professor? I thought you'd figured this thing out to the ounce."

"I did," said the Professor, as Gilligan splashed out to join them and see what all the commotion was about. "However, I seem to have miscalculated. You can see for yourself that the vessel is dangerously overweight."

The two men flicked an involuntary glance at Gilligan, who was not usually one to pass up so golden a straight line as that, but Gilligan was inspecting the raft with the blandest of expressions.

"As you can see, I'll need to recalculate. In the meantime, let's try removing some of the provisions and see if we can't rebalance the craft."

"The water's the heaviest, but it's also the most important," the Skipper commented, lifting out a box of coconuts. "A person can go for a good couple of days without food so long as he's got enough water."

"Not much good about days with no food," Gilligan told the bag of dried pineapple he was carrying back to shore, clearly enough that his companions could easily overhear him; quietly enough that they could pretend they hadn't. The other two opted for the latter choice.

They had removed about two-thirds of the food by the time the raft was rebalanced. It wasn't an encouraging development, but the Skipper gamely pushed the raft back out towards the deeper waters, paying out the line as it floated away, then waded back to the beach, tied the line to a handy log, and sat down.

Gilligan helped himself to a ring of the jettisoned dried pineapple and took a bite. He did not say, 'I told you so.' He did not say it quite loudly. Reaching back into the bag, he took out two more rings and handed one to each of the other men.

"Perhaps what we need is a second raft," the Professor said, toying with the fruit rather than eating it. "We'll get onboard the raft just as planned, and drag a smaller container behind us containing our supplies."

The Skipper nodded, because he didn't really want to think about it right now. Attaching multiple rafts together like the world's oddest choo-choo train was probably not feasible. But he didn't want to admit that seven people were not going to fit on the raft they had, either.

"We can remove the canopy, as well. It will make for a less comfortable voyage, but it will give us a few extra pounds," the Professor continued.

Great. Seven people, squashed cheek-to-jowl in a rubber raft with no food, and now no shade, either, thought the Skipper. This isn't a rescue, it's a suicide pact. He glanced at his first mate, still mock-casually eating pineapple. "We'll give that a try in the morning," he said firmly, and turned to Gilligan. "And quit eating the provisions! We're going to have to reload those onto the raft tomorrow, and we can't very well do that if you've hogged them all!"

"Mmrph-mrr," Gilligan mumbled, his mouth full, and retied the top of the only slightly lighter bag. "I mean, yes, sir. First thing in the morning."

Which was all very well and good, except for the fact that first thing in the morning, the raft wasn't there anymore.