I didn’t know if she noticed what I had been doing or if she was just waking up. I quickly moved my hand away so that I wouldn’t offend her. I cared quite a bit for these girls and didn’t want to hurt them for anything in the world.
“OK ladies, time to get up.” I said as I nudged them awake. “We need to look around and see if we can find out what’s on this island. This looks like a fairly good spot for a shelter, but we need to gather some materials and look for water and food. Mandy, you can start looking for something to eat. Andrea, go down to the beach and see if anything has washed up from the boat. We need to salvage anything that we can. Jessie, you start gathering some wood for a fire. Liana and I will go see if we can find a clean source of water. Lets all meet back here about noon. Has anybody got any questions?”
“I don’t know if there will be much dry wood around here, but I have do have a lighter with me. I will see if I can get a fire going. Where do you want me to build it coach?” Jessie asked.
“Please, I’m not your coach anymore. Just call me Brian, especially since it looks like we may be here for a while. As far as I know, Mike didn’t tell anyone that we were changing locations or where we would be going. In any case, it may be several more days before anyone notices that we are missing and starts looking. I will try to do whatever I can to make us all comfortable, but calling me coach doesn’t help. After all, we are all going to have to work together to get through this. I want you all to think about our situation. I would appreciate any ideas that you might come up with. For starters, I think you should build the fire over by those rocks. There should be some smaller ones to surround the fire with and we can use the larger ones to sit on. Is there anything else that you can think of? If not, let’s get started.”
Liana and I started uphill toward the highest point in sight. We arrived on top of what turned out to be a very tall hill and what we saw took our breath away. We were on a fairly large island, but we could see basically all of it from our vantage point.
“Do you realize how lucky we got last night?” I asked Liana
“What do you mean?” she replied, still looking inland.
“There is a reef all the way around this island. That storm last night had the water level up around here. If it hadn’t, we could have died trying to get across that reef.” I told her.
“Oh Brian, I’m so scared.” she said with a shudder. |