Filed To Story: Wild Dark Shore Book PDF Free by Charlotte McConaghy
“You were just a shape,” she admits. “Tangled in driftwood and kelp. I didn’t think you’d be alive.”
I don’t know how to thank her, how to convey the enormity of my gratitude.
“Come on,” she says before I can try. She leads Orly and me to a wooden hut on stilts in the water. It’s a boatshed, with a single rumpled mattress in one corner, a kitchenette with a sink, kettle, and fridge, and a bookshelf bursting with paperbacks. Fen has a row of shells and knickknacks on the windowsill above her bed, the only sign a teenage girl lives here. This all sits alongside three inflatable motorboats, bobbing gently against the timber floorboards. It is cold in this shack, and it feels exposed, and looking at the space makes me feel a little depressed for her.
“Could I use one of these to get back to the mainland?” I ask, gesturing to the boats.
The kids look at each other and burst out laughing.
My hope curls into embarrassment. “Yeah, yeah, what then, what are you showing me?”
“I have an idea,” Fen says. “If you’re, if you want, I mean.”
“Okay.”
“Dad told you where your boat is?” she asks.
I nod.
“I might be able to use the Zodiac to reach it. Then radio an SOS.”
Turns out I didn’t need to ask at all.
The problem is the current. I’ve heard it from each of them separately: the Drift is perilous. There’s no swimming against it, there’s barely swimming with it. It dumps you ferociously onto sharp-toothed rocks. If Fen can manage to steer the Zodiac into a calm pocket of water protected by the hull of the wrecked boat, she might be able to climb onto the deck, find the bridge and check the radio, all without getting wet. But if the current steers her too far to the left or right, even by millimeters, she will shoot past the wreck and into the rocks.
The big thing, she says, is not to tell Dom.
“No,” I say. “No way.”
But she says, “I know this ocean, trust me,” with such confidence, and because the selfish, ugly part of me wants to, I do.
She looks at Orly next, the weakest link. We can both see him itching to race for home, worried about his sister but also happy to be part of this. “Can we count on you?” she asks him.
Orly extends his hand and they shake. “You can.”
We climb into the Zodiac. I don’t want to be in this flimsy boat, or any boat, but despite their clear independence I don’t think I should let them attempt any of this without adult supervision. Orly and I will go with Fen to the southern bay and watch from land.
Fen starts the motor and steers us out of the shed. The sea opens up before us.
I train my eyes skyward. If I think about how close the water is, if I imagine how easy it would be to tip over, I stop being able to breathe. I focus on my bum on the rubber, my feet in the boat, my hands tight about the rope rail.
We zoom along the island’s coast, cresting waves with big leaps
and landing so hard we are thrown up off our seats and slammed back down on our tailbones. I scream with each one. It
hurts. Sea spray drenches us and I realize too late it’s drier to sit at the back. Orly can’t stop laughing at my screams.
In a calmer moment I look up at the island, taking it in. It is dramatic, mist shrouded.
“That’s a blue-eyed shag,” Orly says, pointing out a flash of black passing over our heads. “They’re endemic to Shearwater.”
Along the shoreline are huge stretches of white, and Fen steers closer so I can see that they are in fact enormous penguin colonies, thousands and thousands of birds in swarming masses. “Royals,” Orly says, or, “kings.” “There are rockhoppers around here too but not as many.”
I think of the life these kids are living, surrounded by such beauty, by so much wildness. This place is a dream. Do they think it’s normal? Even my home among the trees was still nothing like this. The animals I shared a stretch of forest with were shy and elusive; if I ever saw them, it was as they ran from me. I’m not even sure I knew places like this island still existed. That a place so
alive could survive our colonizing.
On the tail of this thought I spot large metal shapes in among the penguins, rising up above them, red with rust. There is a bad feeling in me as I look at them.
“What are those?”
Both the kids go silent.
Then Fen says, “The sealers who came here. When they’d clubbed all the seals they could find, they’d stuff the penguins into those barrels-“
“Alive,” Orly adds.
“-to boil all their oils out.”
Oh god.
“And they’re still just sitting there?”
“I don’t think anyone knows whose job it would be to remove them, so they say they’re historical artifacts.”
I look at the barrels and at the thousands upon thousands of
penguins surrounding them. As before, the image is like an intrusion into my mind, I see the men again, climbing out of their wooden boats and wading through those masses, lifting the little creatures into the barrels and ignoring their screams. I am glad when we’ve passed this particular stretch of coast.
“We see them too,” Orly says to me, and I look at him and realize he sees not only the penguins and the men but me, he sees far too much of me.
The bay is deceptively calm. Yen’s boat appears as we round some rocks and enter the mouth. It is confronting, to see it so broken, and I find it hard not to go back again to that storm and that swell. He tried to make a Mayday call but the only station close enough to hear us was here, on Shearwater, and nobody answered. I know now it’s because the radio had been destroyed and most of the island’s occupants had already gone. But we didn’t know, he wasted so much time trying to get through and the waves were so big.
“It’s okay,” Fen tells me softly.
“Sorry.” I swallow. “I didn’t realize it would be so hard to see.”
She steers us closer, then idles the engine and lets us bob in the waves. I can see a change in the color of the water, which must be the Drift. I can see the rocks. I can’t see a way to avoid either. I realize we are not getting that radio.