Loe raamatut: «The Island of Lost Horses»

Great Abaco

If things are going to make any sense at all then I need to backtrack a little and explain how I came to be on Great Abaco Island.

Mom and I had arrived, like we always do, in the wake of a bloom. A bloom is the name for a herd of jellyfish. That is what Mom does – she tracks jellyfish and studies their breeding patterns.

I was nine years old when Mom yanked me out of school and straight into the middle of nowhere. She’s been dragging me around on the Phaedra with her for three years now, back and forth around the islands so that a map of the Bahamas has been seared into my brain.

Jellyfish, by the way, are totally brainless. I’m not being mean just because they are taking up what should be my bedroom – it’s the truth. Mom says they cope perfectly well without a brain. She says that Nature, unlike people, is non-judgemental about such matters. But I think Nature needs to take a good hard look at itself because it has invented some really stupid stuff. Did you know that a jellyfish’s mouth and bottom is the same hole? Eughh!

Even without brains, jellies can get together and bloom, and when they do we follow them. Our boat, the Phaedra, is real pretty. She’s painted all white with her name written in swirly blue letters above the waterline so that it seems to dance on the waves.

The Phaedra was designed as a lobster trawler, so she can only do 12 knots an hour. Which is OK since the jellyfish blooms that we chase never move faster than two knots.

Some of the islands that the jellies lead us to are really small, not much more than a reef and a few trees. Others are huge with big hotels and water parks, and at Christmas time when the tourists come they turn into Disneylands.

This was the very first time we had been to Great Abaco. It’s a remote jungle island, a long way from the mainland of Nassau, and we had charted our course to arrive at the island’s marina at Marsh Harbour so we could take a mooring for the night and buy supplies and refuel.

That first evening, instead of cooking onboard in our tiny kitchen, we went ashore and Mom treated us to dinner at Wally’s. It’s the local scuba divers’ hangout: a bright pink two-storey place, run-down but in a nice way. We sat on the balcony and I had a conch burger, which I always order, and fries and key lime pie. I was halfway through my dessert, when I asked Mom about moving back to Florida.

The funny thing is, when we left Florida Mom had me totally convinced about how much fun our lives would be. It would be an adventure. I’d be skipping out on school and travelling the high seas – like a pirate or something.

Trust me – it is not like that at all.

For starters, I still do school. Only now I am a creepy home-schooler. I do correspondence classes and workbooks and talk to my tutors over the internet.

“I have no friends here,” I told Mom as I ate my pie.

When I left school everyone made this huge fuss about how much they would miss me and stay in touch. Especially Kristen, making a big show of how we would be Best Friends Forever. Forever, it turns out, was a couple of months and then the emails and Skype just stopped.

“Well maybe you need to make more of an effort,” Mom countered.

This was what she always said. But she couldn’t say it was my fault about the horses.

In Florida we had a stables just down the road. I would park up my bike there after school on the way home and feed the horses over the fence. I had been begging Mom for lessons since I was really little and right before we left she had promised I could start.

“You did,” I said. “You promised.”

Mom sighed. “Sometimes things don’t work out the way we want…”

The thing is I have this whole plan where I become an amazing rider and go to the Olympics. Mom knows this because it is all I talk about.

“I am running out of time,” I told her. “Meredith Michaels-Beerbaum had already won her first Grand Prix by the time she was my age. How am I supposed to train for the Olympics when I’m stuck on a boat?”

Mom reached over with her spoon and helped herself to a chunk out of my key lime pie.

“Why don’t you train for the swim team instead?” she offered.

“Mom! You’re not taking me seriously,” I said. “I want to go back to Florida.”

“No.”

“You can’t just say no. I am a US citizen and I have rights.”

“You have the right to remain silent,” my mother said.

“How about if I lived with Dad? I could visit you in the school holidays…”

“Beatriz!” I cannot even mention Dad without her getting mad. “I have told you to drop it, OK? That’s not an option. You live with me. End of discussion.”

***

The following morning we set off at dawn, chugging out of the marina and heading South along the shoreline of Cherokee Sound where the tangerine, mint and lemon-sherbet-coloured beach cottages dotted the shore. By the time we reached the end of the Sound, the cottages with their bright colours and pretty gardens had disappeared and the coastline had become colourless and windswept. The white sand beaches were deserted, and instead of manicured flowerbeds there were nothing but tangles of sea grape, mangroves and cabbage trees.

This was the Great Abaco wilderness reserve. The whole southernmost end of the island was uninhabited, cloaked in jungles of Caribbean pine, snakewood and pigeon berry. From the bow of the boat the jungle seemed to sit like a black cloud across the land as we moved by.

“We’re going to anchor here.” Mom throttled back the engine.

“Where is here?” I asked, peering out suspiciously at the desolate shoreline.

Mom kept her eyes down on the scanner as she steered the Phaedra.

“Shipwreck Bay,” she said.

She handed me the map, her eyes still glued to the scanner and I could see now why she was steering so carefully. There was a hidden reef at the entrance to the bay, so close to the surface that it was almost impossible to navigate your way through.

I went to the side of the Phaedra and stared down into the water. It kept changing colour as we passed over the reef, turning dark indigo where the water was deepest. I could see shadows moving beneath the waves. Reef sharks, big ones by the look of it. And then another shadow, deeper down below, which looked like the outline of a ship. I lay down on the deck of the Phaedra and hung my head over the side so that I could get a better look, staring down into the dark water. It was a ship all right. As we motored over it I could make out the shape of the mast.

“Bee?” Mom called out to me. “Go drop the anchor for me, will you?”

Mom kept the engines of the Phaedra running as she turned into the wind and I ran downstairs, going through our room and into the jellyfish quarters to engage the anchor winch. I pressed down hard on the button and the motor began to grind, unravelling the chain link and lowering the anchor into the sea. I watched it unravel until the marker hit twelve metres and stopped. The anchor had struck the seabed.

By the time I got back up on deck Mom had already started work. She had her laptop out and various sea charts were spread over the kitchen table.

“What are you doing today, Bee?” she asked me.

Sometimes when Mom is working, I stay onboard and lie on the deck and read books. I am brown as a berry from all that reading. Mom says it’s our Spanish blood – we tan easy. She is dark like me with the same black hair, except mine is long, hers is short.

The problem with staying onboard is that Mom says she doesn’t like to see “idle hands”. There is always a list of chores that she is keen to dish out to me.

“I’m going ashore,” I said.

“Have you done your school work?” She didn’t look up at me.

“Yes.” I lied. I had a Spanish vocab test on Friday and I hadn’t studied for it, but I could do that later. Being home-schooled, you can kind of keep your own timetable.

I stood on the deck of The Phaedra and looked at the island. I didn’t need to take the Zodiac. It was only forty metres to shore and I could swim that far easy.

Mom wasn’t totally joking when she said about me making the swim team. If I trained I could probably go to the Olympics. I can swim like a fish. Maybe better than some fishes. So Mom never worries about me.

I stepped out of my shorts and pulled off my T-shirt and stood on the edge of the boat in my bikini, staring down at the deep blue water. Then I raised my hands above my head and I dived.

The water was cooler than I expected. It shocked me and left me gasping a little as I broke the surface and began to swim for shore. Every ten or so strokes I raised my head right up to see how much further I had to swim. As I got nearer to the island, the jungle loomed dark and silent on the horizon. I was in mid-stroke when there was a violent eruption from the treetops. A flock of scarlet parrots suddenly took flight, flapping their lime-green wings, cawing and complaining loudly.

I stopped and trod water, listening to their cries echo through the bay. I couldn’t see what had spooked them. I shielded my eyes with my hand against the glare of the sun on the water and peered out into the jungle. There! A shadow flickering through the trees. I felt a shiver down the back of my neck. I hesitated, and then put my head down and started swimming again.

Shipwreck Bay was shaped like a horseshoe and I swam my way right into the middle of the curve. In both directions white sand stretched on for about a hundred metres or so. My plan was to walk along the beach to the next bay and then all the way to the headland, which I figured would take about two hours – I would be back in time for dinner.

I set off, enjoying how my reef boots made alien footprints in the sand – with circles like octopus suckers on the soles and no toes. The parrots had gone silent, but I kept an eye on the trees all the same.

As I rounded the rocks to the next bay, I could see that my plan of walking to the headland wasn’t going to work out. The bay ahead was sandy, the same as the one where we’d moored the Phaedra, but at the southern end there was a cliff-face that jutted all the way into the sea, too sheer to climb. If I wanted to keep going then I needed to turn inland.

As I pushed my way through black mangroves and waist-high marsh grass, the ground became squelchy underfoot. I hadn’t gone far when I noticed an itching on my ankle and I looked down and saw this big, black leech stuck to my leg just above the rim of my reef boot.

If you ever need to pull a leech off, the thing you mustn’t do is panic. If you rip them off, they will vomit into the wound and cause an infection. You need to use your fingernail to detach the sucker and ease the leech off.

I tried to use my fingernails, but I kept getting grossed out and pulling my hand away. I had finally got up the nerve to do it when the leech got so full and plump that it just plopped off of its own accord. I stomped down on it and felt sick as I watched my own blood oozing back out.

After that, every blade of grass against my shin made me jump. I kept imagining shiny black leeches attaching themselves to my flesh, looking for a warm pulse to plunge their teeth into.

As I got closer to the jungle the parrots started up again. They were shrieking from the tops of the Caribbean pines. Look out! their cries seemed to say. Dangerous, dangerous!

And then, another sound. Louder than the cries of the parrots. A crashing and crunching, the sound of something moving through the scrubby undergrowth beneath the pines.

I stood very still and listened hard. Whatever was in there, it was big and it was coming my way, moving fast.

From the sounds it made as it thundered towards me, I figured it had to be a wild boar! They live in the jungles on most islands in the Bahamas and the islanders hunt them for meat. If you’re hunting them, you have to make sure your aim is good because you don’t want to wound them and make them angry. Boars can attack. They’ve got these long tusks that can kill you on the spot.

I looked around me for a tree to shimmy up, but it was all snakewood and pigeon berry, too spindly to take my weight. My heart was hammering at my chest. The boar must be close now, but there was nowhere to run. I scrambled around, trying to find a stick, something big and solid. The crashing was deafening, so near…

And then she appeared in the clearing in front of me.

It hurt me afterwards to think that the first time I ever saw her my reaction was to shrink back in fear. But like I said, I thought she was a boar. The last thing you ever expect to see in the jungle is a horse.

She had this stark white face, pale as bone, with these blue eyes staring out like sapphires set into china. Above her wild blue eyes her forelock was tangled with burrs and bits of twig so that it resembled those religious paintings of Jesus with a crown of thorns, and along her neck the mane had become so matted and tangled it had turned into dreadlocks.

Strange brown markings covered her ears, as if she was wearing a hat, and there were more brown splotches over her withers, chest and rump. The effect was like camouflage so that she blended into the trees and this made her white face appear even more ghoulish, as if it just floated there all on its own with those weird blue eyes. She was like some voodoo queen who had taken on animal form.

She didn’t turn and run at the sight of me. It was as if she expected to find me there in the middle of the jungle.

She stood there for a minute, her nostrils flared, taking in my scent on the air. And then she took a step forward, moving towards me. I stepped backwards. I mean, I wasn’t scared. It was just that she was nothing like those horses down the road back home in Florida. I had never seen a horse like this before. The way she held her head up high, imperious and proud, as if she owned the jungle.

The horse stretched out her neck, lowering her white face towards me and I held my ground. I could feel her warm, misty breath on my skin. She was no ghost. She was flesh and blood like me. Slowly, I raised my hand so that the tips of my fingers brushed against the velvet of her muzzle and that was when I felt it. I know it made no sense but right there and then I knew that it was real and powerful and true. That this bold, beautiful arrogant creature was somehow mine.

And then the stupid parrots ruined everything. I don’t know what startled them but suddenly the trees around us shook as they took flight, screeching.

I put out a hand to grasp her mane but it was too late. She surged forward, cutting so close to me that I could have almost flung my arms around her as she swept by, taking the path back the way I had just come through the mangroves.

Her legs were invisible beneath the thick waves of marsh grass, so that as she cantered away from me with her tail sweeping in her wake she looked like a ship ploughing through rough ocean, rising and cresting with each canter stride. And then she was free of the grass and galloping along the beach. I could see her pale limbs gathering up beneath her and plunging deep down into the sand. She held her head high as she ran and didn’t look back. Her hoofbeats pounded out a rhythm as she rounded the curve at the other end of the cove. And then she was gone.