Skull on.
Headlights on.
You can find me now, Heather thought. I’m ready.
I will make a hole in the night just for you.
Cold air was rising from the ground. Critters sang in the grass. Big moths flitted through the narrow columns of starlight.
Starlight from another time.
If only she could ride it backward to two days ago.
I will take us back and I will drive the car.
Or further back and Tom could do the Australia trip by himself.
Or further back and she could warn the world about 9/11 in crayon and there would be no war and her dad wouldn’t have had to go to Iraq.
Kate drove on. Heather let her go.
She walked through the nightscape, making evanescent art in the grass, like those artists her mother loved, Andy Goldsworthy and Liza Lou, her feet following her mother’s feet through the woods, carving ley lines in the pine needles of Goose Island and the bladygrass of Dutch Island, under the moon, under the dark moon who was always there, cherishing the votives and watching over the humans far, far down below.
Heather reached the southern shore of the island in an hour. She recognized the call of the shearwaters and found their burrows and reached into the holes and gathered a dozen eggs, which she wrapped in the shopping bag that Jacko had kept his .303 ammo in.
As she crossed one of the island roads, she saw something, something dead, just down the tarmac on the edge of the sheugh. It was a koala. It didn’t smell yet and the flies weren’t a black horde. She dragged it off the blacktop and cut off its head with the machete and disemboweled it and skinned it. She saved the liver and the heart and lungs. She made a bag with her T-shirt and transferred the eggs and ammo to that and put the koala parts in the shopping bag.
She walked home in her bra and jeans. The dirt had more give. It knew the rain was coming. It dreamed of becoming soil.
A single raindrop hit her arm.
She examined the sky.
It was a deep purple-black that soon was going to baptize and cleanse the earth.
Of course it would rain after they had gotten themselves a water source.
She approached the cave looking for signs of life but saw nothing. She had rehung moss over the cave entrance, and if you got real close you could see blue smoke from the fire making its way out of the mouth. But you’d need to get within twenty feet or so.
The cave would hide them from the humans, but she knew it wouldn’t fool the dogs. The dogs were only getting started. They’d begin at dawn on the beach and eventually they’d follow the trail all the way here.
She moved aside the moss and went inside the cave.
“I got food,” she said.
“What did you get?” Olivia asked.
She knew Olivia would never eat koala. “I don’t know—it had been hit by a car. Wombat, maybe? And eggs.”
The fire was going good. The eucalyptus twigs and leaves were so full of oil they were giving off a bright yellow flame that illuminated the entire cave. She added more branches, and within minutes they had a respectable blaze. They warmed themselves and enjoyed the light. It was better to cook on charcoal than flame but she couldn’t wait all night.
She cut up the koala meat and internal organs and kebabbed them with eucalypt sticks. She made a tripod out of other sticks and set the meat next to the fire. The eggs she cooked on the machete blade, one at a time, so as not to waste any of them. They’d been lucky with the timing. In a couple of weeks, the shearwater eggs would contain more than embryos, but for now, they looked and tasted just like chicken eggs. Olivia stacked the fried eggs on a thin flat stone while Owen turned the meat.
They ate with their hands.
The meat was oily and tough and gamy and sour. Every bite was unpleasant. But they were starving and they wolfed it down. The eggs were good. And they drank their fill of the water.
“This is the best water I’ve ever tasted,” Owen said.
Heather had a sudden comforting flash of memory of her brief time on the reservation with her grandmother. ?a’ak was the Makah word for “water.” Her grandmother pronounced it “wa’ak,” which was the way the Indigenous people said the word on Vancouver Island too. It was the only word in Makah she could remember. “Wa’ak,” she whispered to herself to see if it would bring magic.
She closed her eyes and whispered it again. “Wa’ak.”
No magic, but the fact that they had food and were still alive was wizardry enough.
Owen waved the pamphlet she’d taken from the prison. “You can have this back again. We didn’t need to burn it. It’s mostly photos of a really crappy-looking prison, but there is some info about the island.”