River Odyssey (6 page)

Sitting on the hull drinking my tea and eating an orange, I dangled my feet over the edge and watched as the sun began to pierce the water below. Suddenly, I got a fright. I shouldn’t have, really, it was just a wreck beneath us, but it was such a spooky wreck, with open ribs reaching up towards us. The sub looked like a baby dolphin waiting to be grabbed by a giant squid!

I was already kind of jumpy because of the buck. Now, this ship’s skeleton looked like it had trapped our anchor on purpose and was trying to grab us. Was it just a coincidence we had stopped directly above it? I knew that Ziegfried would probably just laugh at that, but a chill swept over me and I had to calm myself. Get a grip, I told myself. It was just a coincidence. Like it or not, I had to go down there and free the anchor or we weren’t going anywhere.

The problem with letting yourself become afraid of something is that your fear can run away with you. I long ago learned how important it is to face your fears right away and not let them build up until you are too afraid to do anything. There is nothing to be afraid of but fear itself. That’s what Ziegfried always said. Fear is explainable, just like everything else.

I finished my orange, took a few deep breaths and jumped off the sub. We were in only thirty feet of water. That was nothing. I could dive to a hundred feet and hold my breath underwater for over two minutes. This dive was nothing, and yet, something about the way the old ship was lying on the bottom spooked me. And it was harder to hold your breath when you were spooked.

Her rib cage looked like a trap ready to snap shut. Each waterlogged rib was tall and curved inward, like a gloomy statue bending over and staring down at you. Swimming down between them I saw the anchor tangled up in the ship’s belly, exactly in the middle of the ribs.

It took only fifteen seconds to reach the bottom. The little anchor had wedged itself into a crack in the ship’s wooden spine and the rope had twisted up awkwardly on a couple of timbers. I pulled the rope free first, or thought I did, then reached down and tugged at the anchor. It was stuck. Bringing my feet down to balance against the spine, I took hold of the anchor with both hands and prepared to pull harder. Suddenly, something hit me on the back, knocked the air out of my lungs and pinned me down against the spine. It didn’t take long to realize what had happened. One of the timbers had collapsed. It hurt my back but I was okay. I didn’t panic. That was the important thing. But the timber also fell onto the rope, and the rope was wrapped around my leg. When I tried to free myself from underneath the timber, the rope held me back. I started to feel my lack of air. I pulled hard on my leg, but it wouldn’t budge!
That’s
when I panicked. I tugged once, tugged twice, then pulled my leg free, but not before the timber cut my skin and filled my knee with splinters. As I swam to the surface I saw that my leg was bleeding.

I broke the surface and gasped for air. My leg was stinging and burning. I climbed onto the sub to take a look. There was a gash about three inches long just above my knee. It wasn’t deep. I could clean it and bandage it. But the splinters were a different story. Instead of thin, sharp slivers of wood, they were thick, dull chunks that had become embedded in my skin like rocks. And they hurt! I’d have to pick them out with tweezers and put peroxide on my leg so it wouldn’t get infected. But first, I had to swim back down and free the anchor. I had no intention of becoming another wreck on Anticosti Island.

It took a while to calm down. I
hated
panicking, even a little. It was the worst feeling in the world. When you panicked, you lost control of your ability to think. You were just trying to survive. But you didn’t make good decisions. It was okay in a situation like that, where all I had to do was pull my leg free. Without panicking maybe I wouldn’t have pulled hard enough to free myself and might have drowned. So, maybe it had saved my life. But there were times when I would have drowned if I had panicked, because I really needed to think straight. As Ziegfried always said, the sea doesn’t care if you are sincere. If you make a critical mistake, the sea will drown you. It won’t take long either.

I breathed deeply and went down again. This time, I kept an eye on the timbers the whole time, never turning my back on them, and still another one fell! Boy, did I ever get the feeling this old wreck was trying to trap me!

The anchor came free with a good hard tug. Looking up, I saw the timbers reaching for the sub like the limbs of a sea monster and suddenly I remembered Sheba’s dream. Was
that
a coincidence? Sheba said there was no such thing as a coincidence. But what else would you call it?

Standing on the hull, I pulled the anchor. The sun was up and the day was clear. Anticosti Island looked different now in the daylight. It was beautiful. It looked like a peaceful giant asleep in a friendly river mouth. How different from the night. It bothered me that I had let myself get spooked. On the other hand, I didn’t know why I ever doubted Sheba in the first place; the island was obviously haunted by ghosts. And it was guarded by gigantic deer.

OKAY. TWO BAD
things had happened and we weren’t even on the river yet. Was something trying to tell me to turn around and go back home? Sheba said that something terrible would happen but that I would be all right. Well, I guessed it had happened.
Two
terrible things had happened. This voyage was a lot more trouble than I thought it would be. Was it worth it?

It was my fault though, I had to admit. We had been caught by the navy because I sailed too closely behind the freighter. I got trapped by the wreck because I had thrown the anchor carelessly in my hurry to see the ghost. If I had done just what I was supposed to do—sail to Montreal— instead of looking at other things and procrastinating, probably nothing bad would have happened. Probably. On the other hand, I was an explorer by nature. I had to explore things. I couldn’t help it.

I was so desperately tired and needed to sleep, but had to clean my wounds first. The waterlogged wood was like mud. The splinters didn’t come out in neat pieces so I had to scrape them out, which hurt a lot and made them bleed. Then, the peroxide hurt even more. I spent two hours cleaning the wounds, feeling sleepier all the time. When I finished, I laid my head down on my cot for just a second. We were still on the surface and the hatch was wide open. I only intended to rest for a second.

It was twilight when I woke. Hollie was sitting beneath the open portal chewing on a rope. He wagged his tail and came over when I lifted my head. I reached down and scratched his fur. He was the best dog in the world. I had always wanted a dog growing up and never had one. I found Hollie in a drifting dory one day. Someone had put a rope around his neck, tied it to a stone and thrown him off a wharf in the fog. How horrible can people be? But he landed in a dory, it drifted free, or someone
set
it free, and I found him. Nobody had wanted him. Nobody had cared about him. He was an orphan.

“But you’re a sailor now, aren’t you?”

His little tail beat against the floor.

“Where’s Seaweed?”

He looked up the portal towards the sky, growing dark now.

“Yup. Probably eating something on the beach. Time to go. He’ll find us.”

I started the engine and turned west, into the current. My leg was swollen around the area where I had scraped the splinters out and it was sore. I wrapped a bandage around it and opened it every few hours to pour peroxide on it, the way my grandmother had taught me. That was really painful. But better a painful leg than to have drowned.

Jacques Cartier never had trouble on Anticosti Island, according to Sheba’s book. He never lost a single member of his crew either, at least not at sea. That was kind of hard to believe when you think that shipwrecks were common then and a sailor’s life so dangerous. If airplane crashes today were as common as shipwrecks back then, no one would ever fly.

Sailors died of accidents on board the ships too, and disease, and yet Cartier never lost a single crew member in all of his voyages. He must have been pretty smart. He must have been very determined too. Hmmm. I decided to stop whining. It was true: I never wanted to go to Montreal in the first place, but I had
agreed
to go. And so, I figured I’d better smarten up and try a little harder to make this trip successful. Either go, or don’t go, I thought to myself, but don’t keep belly-aching about it.

That’s what I was thinking when it started to rain.

At first, the rain fell gently. The air was warm and the rain was light. Hollie and I stood in the portal in the dark. I stood on the ladder and leaned against the open hatch. Hollie rested against my chest and arms, his front paws on the hatch. Seaweed finally joined us and sat on the bow in front of us as the sub plowed through the water, splaying waves perfectly even on both sides. It was a windless night and the rain came down straight and sprinkled Hollie’s face and made him blink. But soon it started to rain harder, and since we wanted to stay in the portal, I went in and grabbed an umbrella. Usually it was too windy for an umbrella but tonight it was still and it was nice to stand in the portal and listen to the rain falling and smell the river and smell the mustiness of Hollie’s fur. Hollie smelled like an old wool blanket when he was wet.

And then it started to rain harder.

The rain came straight down and it poured! Seaweed hopped onto the hatch, squeezed behind us, then dropped inside. The rain beat down so hard on the umbrella it made me laugh. Hollie looked worried but I assured him it was okay.

“We’re in a submarine, Hollie. This is the safest place in the world.”

I thought maybe after fifteen minutes or so the rain would lighten up but it didn’t. Half an hour later it was still flooding down. The air was so wet it was almost hard to breathe. We could have climbed inside but it was so interesting. Sheets of water fell off the umbrella and some of it splashed inside the sub but I didn’t care. It would just collect into the drain and the sump pumps would remove it. The submarine really was designed for water, inside and out.

And then I thought I heard the radar beep.

I wasn’t sure at first; the rain was so loud. But the beep of the radar had a piercing tone that travelled through the sound of rushing water. I shut the hatch and we went inside. It wasn’t a strong signal. It was there one moment, gone the next, then back again. That happens sometimes when an object is riding a wave, submerges then comes back up. It could have been a metal barrel or a container. But there were no waves tonight. The signal was only five miles away and didn’t appear to be moving. I wondered why I hadn’t heard the radar until now. Since it wasn’t far out of our way I decided to investigate.

I had never seen such rain. It never let up, not for a minute. Half a mile from the signal I couldn’t see any evidence of a light. Still none at quarter of a mile. Whatever it was, it wasn’t very big or well lit. As we closed in on it, I slowed to ten knots, then five, then cut the engine and climbed the portal with the umbrella and tried to see through the rain as we drifted closer. There was something there; I just needed to get a little closer … a little closer … Oh! We hit something! I heard someone yelling. Then I heard two people yelling. They were speaking French. I turned on our floodlights and scanned the water. I saw a long sea kayak. There was a man and woman in it. She looked frightened and he looked angry. We had struck the kayak but weren’t going very fast and I was pretty sure it just bounced off the hull. I couldn’t understand what they were yelling because it was in French, so, I pulled on the harness, climbed out and went halfway down the railing.

“Are you all right?” I yelled.

“Non!”

“What are you doing out here?”

They were dressed well enough for the weather but carrying only a flimsy light. They must have had some metal somewhere that was showing up unevenly on radar.

“Nous sommes perdus!”
cried the girl. “We’re lost!”

“We’re
not
lost!” yelled the guy. “We are just caught in the rain.”

“We’ve been lost all day!” cried the girl. “We’re exhausted!”

“Nous ne sommes pas perdus!”
said the guy. “I know where we are.”

“Do you want to come inside and dry out?”

“C’est un sous-marin?
”

“What?”

“Is that a submarine?”

“Yes.”

“Oh! Is it safe?”

I felt like saying it was a heck of a lot safer than where they were right now. “Yes, it’s safe, but it’ll be a little crowded. Come in slowly and don’t scare my seagull, okay? You’ll have to sit on the floor.”

“
D’accord.
But we must first cover our kayak so it doesn’t fill with water. Can we tie it to your submarine?”

“Okay.”

I grabbed some rope, tied one end to a handle on the portal and tossed the other to the guy. The girl climbed up first. As she passed me she said,
“Merci beaucoup!
I am Marie. He is Jacques. We were lost all day. I was really afraid.”

“You’re welcome. I’m Alfred. Please don’t touch any switches inside, okay?”