Island of the Lost by Joan Druett Read Free Book Online Page A

huge bluebottle blowflies that obstinately burrowed into clothing and blankets, leaving clumps of writhing maggots in their path. These were
Calliphora quadrimaculata
, a sturdily built fly with metallic coloring, that can grow as long as an inch and pollutes everything it touches, because the female has to feed on decomposing organic matter—such as sea lion dung—for the proteins necessary to mature her eggs.
    Once the smoke from the fire had sent these insects whirling off in confused clouds, Raynal and Harry directed their attentions to the carcass the hunting party had brought in. Raynal—mistakenly, as the reproductive organs had evidently been discarded with the rest of the entrails when the three hunters had butchered it—estimated it to be from a young female seal, as it weighed about one hundred pounds. Harry hung a quarter from the branch of a tree, and after lighting a fire underneath, Raynal kept it revolving so that it was well roasted by the time the others returned from the wreck.
    The salvagers were tired but elated, because they had managed to retrieve the ship’s compass, some more sails, and a number of empty bottles, in addition to the pot and chests. The sight of the black meat carved off the roast sobered them somewhat, however, and the first taste was not reassuring, either, being revoltinglycoarse and oily. If the meat from a one-year-old was so disgusting to eat, what would it be like when they were forced to kill whatever old sea lions they could find? As Raynal meditated, it was an ominous prospect.
    This dubious banquet eaten, they overhauled the chests. Raynal’s gun was covered with rust, so he applied himself to cleaning and oiling it while the others took out instruments and clothes, and set them out to dry. Happily, the gunpowder had not gotten wet, being sealed in a tin. Miraculously, too, not only was the chronometer safe in its padded box but it hadn’t stopped, so they now knew the exact time of day. “The other instruments,” Raynal wrote, “were our sextant, a metal barometer, and a Fahrenheit thermometer.” Everything else—books, charts, the small stock of spare clothing—was sodden with seawater. They got it all dried out and stowed in the reerected tent before dark, luckily, because that night the rain came back to make life as miserable as it had been before the sun had come out.
    That second night in the tent was very rough, Raynal writing that “on our hard, wet planks, we tasted but a fitful slumber, disturbed by constant nightmares.” In the morning the men rose “with stiffened limbs, feverish, and more fatigued than before we went to sleep.” It made them all the more determined to build a weatherproof cabin as soon as humanly possible, and so straight after breakfast they went out in search of a suitable site.
    This was by no means easy, the coastal forest being “very dense, in fact almost impenetrable,” as Raynal described. Because of the constant howling winds, the tree trunks were “twisted in the most fantastic fashion.” Every attempt to growupright was doomed—no sooner had a tree trunk straightened, than “comes the buffeting wind again, and beaten down anew, it bows, and writhes, and humiliates itself, to shoot aloft once more for a foot or so, until soon it falls back vanquished, and is bent towards the ground. Sometimes these trees,” he poetically meditated, “being wholly unsuccessful in their attempts to rise, crawl, as it were, along the earth, disappearing every now and then under hillocks of verdant turf, while the portions visible are coated with mosses of every description.”
    Because he was feeling a little stronger, Raynal went with the others to the mouth of the little brook that rippled near the tent and emptied into the sea nearly opposite the wreck of the
Grafton
. The beach there was reasonably level, so the men cleared a place to draw up the