The Dragon Raft Read online

  “So what did you do?” I said.

  “Took off for the vineyards. Picked some grapes for a couple of days. But somebody reckoned I was too young and dobbed me in to the police.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “They took me home. But I reckon I’d made my point. Things were better after that.”

  “Maybe that’s what’ll happen with me,” I said. “Maybe things will get better.”

  “It’s a hell of a way to make a point,” Jim said.

  There was a sudden crack as the mast broke completely. It had snapped off at the base. It fell overboard but the crosspiece was still attached to the raft by one of the ropes.

  “Hell,” Jim said. “Pull it in quick. We’ll need some sort of sail. We’ve got to be able to steer a bit.”

  Together we managed to haul the crosspiece back onto the raft. The mast itself had disappeared. There was still a fragment of tarpaulin attached to the crosspiece.”

  “Look, you steer as best you can,” Jim said. “I’ll try to get some sort of a sail rigged up. We are only going to get one chance of landing on The Pages. If we miss, we’ll be straight out in the Southern Ocean. We can’t just drift. We’ve got to control our course.”

  Jim grabbed the crosspiece and rope and dragged them over to the cabin. I sat with the almost useless rudder. Jim seemed to have taken control of the situation. I felt a bit annoyed—it was my raft, and it was me who’d rescued Jim. But I also felt a bit relieved, the guy was a yachtie. I reckoned he had a lot more experience than I did. I watched as he fixed the crosspiece to one side of the cabin, tying it there with rope. He kicked in one of the windows so that he could tie the rope round and round. The streamer of tarpaulin flapped, but there wasn’t very much of it. Jim took off his life jacket, took off his shirt and put the life jacket back on. He managed to tie the shirt to the new mast with the string from his waterproof torch. The shirt ballooned out, tugging at the mast. I took off my waterproof jacket and threw it to Jim who fixed it to the mast as well. With all three bits of “sail” tugging at the mast, I could feel the rudder start to respond. I could steer the raft—only slightly, but I could steer it.

  Jim stood, hanging onto the side of the cabin, looking ahead. After about five minutes he yelled. “There it is, the South Page lighthouse. Steer a little bit to port.”

  “Port?” I yelled back.

  “Left, a few degrees to the left.”

  I shifted course slightly. For the next ten minutes I steered as Jim directed. And then I could see it myself: a low rocky island with a little automatic lighthouse sticking up like a thumb.

  “I can see it,” I yelled.

  There was a clunk as one of the ropes holding a drum broke. The drum itself didn’t break free—it still had one rope round it—but it started clunking and banging. It was only a matter of time until the second rope broke.

  I was almost hypnotised by the vision of South Page. I steered straight for it. I was aware of the emptiness beyond. The island was really little more than an exposed rock—but it appeared to be inhabited.

  “There’s something on the rock,” I said. “Seals or something.”

  “Sea lions,” Jim said. “It’s a well known sea lion colony.”

  “Yikes. Will they mind us?”

  “Not if we don’t annoy them. We just stay real clear of them, especially their pups if they’ve got any. Actually it’s a protected area. We’re not meant to land.”

  “We don’t have any choice,” I said.

  “We don’t,” Jim said.

  * * * * * * *

  We hit South Page on a rocky ledge that shattered a few more planks. Jim and I scrambled ashore. About a hundred metres to our right the sea lions grunted and coughed. They were big, huge, bigger than ordinary seals. A few were bigger still. I reckon they were the males. Some large sea birds took off, circled round and landed. I was holding the mooring rope. Jim said, “Hold onto her, Wal.” I’ll rescue our clobber. He scrambled back onto the raft and cut his shirt and my Jacket from the mast. When he was back on land I said, “What do we do with the raft now?”

  “She’s too heavy to drag ashore. I reckon you’ve got to let her go.”

  “The rocks will smash her up completely. She’ll float away.”

  “Can’t be helped.”

  I threw the mooring rope back onto the remains of The Dragon Raft. The waves pounded her against the rocks.

  “Let’s go up to the lighthouse,” Jim said.

  “We walked the short distance to the light. In some places there were small plants growing in the cracks in the rocks. Some of them looked like spinach, some of them were that stuff called pigface. Crabs scuttled away.

  “Well we won’t starve,” Jim said. “Crabs, pigface, all sorts of seaweed. Bet there’s mussels down by the waterline. Fresh water might be a problem though.”

  “How long do reckon we’ll have to stay here?” I said. I’d been concentrating on getting to The Pages so much, I hadn’t really thought about what we’d do when we arrived. We were safe from the waves, but we still weren’t rescued.

  “Someone’ll come looking,” Jim said. “There must be an air-sea search for me going on by now. The guys on the yacht will have made sure of that. Or a boat will come past and we’ll wave our shirts at it. In the meantime, we just sit tight.”

  We sat down with our backs resting against the automatic light. It felt a bit like sitting on the end of the causeway at home.

  “Tell me more about when you ran away from home,” I said.

  “I’ve told you,” Jim said. “I picked grapes for a couple of days until someone dobbed me in.”

  “How old were you?”

  “A bit older than you—not much.”

  “Why did you run away?” I said.

  “The usual.”

  “Trouble with your parents?” I said.

  “How did you guess?”

  For a while we were both silent. There was still a strong wind blowing, but in the shelter of the lighthouse we were quite warm. The sun was shining, the waves weren’t nearly as wild as they had been in the night. One of the sea lions started grunting. It grunted for about a minute and then stopped.

  I said, “When the police took you home, were your parents angry?”

  “Angry, relieved, remorseful, apologetic... they were just about everything. They were a bit confused. I was a bit confused myself. But it got us talking to one another. As I say, things got a bit better. Not a lot better, but a bit. What do you think your parents will say?”

  For a while I didn’t answer. Then I said, “Dad’ll be angry. Mum will be relieved I’m still alive and real anxious about Dad being angry. I don’t think anything will change.”

  “Well, things might change,” Jim said. “Things just might. But if there is to be change, it’ll probably be because you make it happen.”

  “We’ve got to be rescued first,” I said.

  “Look over there,” Jim said and pointed into the sky.

  I watched the black dot for a few seconds. “Bird,” I said.

  “Well your eyes are probably better than mine,” Jim said. “I thought it might be a chopper.”

  “Nup. Bird.”

  * * * * * * *

  Half an hour later the chopper arrived from the direction we weren’t watching. Suddenly it was right overhead, making a hell of a racket. The sea lions hurled themselves into the water and disappeared. The chopper didn’t land. They winched a guy down to us. He was a bit amazed to find two drowned rats, he’d only been looking for Jim. But there was room in the chopper for both of us. I went up first—twisting slowly on the end of the steel cable, the wind whistling around my ears. In the chopper they gave me hot chocolate to drink out of a thermos and wrapped me in a silver space blanket.

  From the chopper’s windows I could see clear to the south, to the great expanse of the Southern Ocean. I watched the long ragged lines of waves. They were big, deep water swells, bigger by far than the stuff I’d bee
n battling in the Gulf and Backstairs Passage. They looked like they would travel round and round the bottom of the world, never stopping. I looked at the southern horizon and knew there was nothing but ocean all the way to the Antarctic pack ice. The guy operating the winch, nodded towards the Southern Ocean and yelled above the roar of the rotors, “Lucky you weren’t down there, mate. We’d never have found you.”

  I took a sip of the hot chocolate drink and yelled back. “One day,” I yelled. “One day I’m going all the way to the pack ice.”

  “You’ll need a better boat than that,” he yelled, pointing down to where the remains of the raft were being pounded against the rocks.

  “I’ll build a better boat,” I said. “Me and my mate Billy, we’ll build her.”

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Rory Barnes was born in London in 1946, but was immediately transported to Africa where he learned to walk and talk in a mud hut in a tribal village (the normal childhood for the children of anthropologists). By the time he was ten his family had moved to Sydney and he has lived in Australia ever since. He studied Philosophy at Monash University where he met Damien Broderick. Over the years these two have written seven or eight novels together; the latest joint-production being Human’s Burden, published by Borgo Press. By himself Rory has written another seven novels for both adults and teenagers. He can claim the usual list of writers’ other jobs: teacher, farm-hand, journalist, builder’s labourer, book reviewer, publisher’s reader, lecturer etc. etc. He once delivered a baby. Once, when hitch-hiking, he was given a lift in a hearse. On another occasion he walked from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea without getting shot. These days he lives in Adelaide with his wife, Annie, who has a proper job. His website is at:

  http://www.rorybarnes.fatcow.com

  Table of Contents

  COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

  DEDICATION

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR