Survival Dream Team (3)
"You asked a woodpecker?"
My teammates stared at me, looks packed with disbelief and sheer exasperation. I shrugged.
"Bamboo's a grass, technically, but it looks enough like a tree. I figured a woodpecker might do a decent job of pecking it apart. You can see how that turned out."
I grinned and pointed at the dozens of stalks sprawled across the ground.
"……Let's just haul them in. It's not often we save both time and energy at once. I wouldn't call that a bad thing."
The others were still blinking in bewilderment when Kwon Seol-do let a quiet smile slip. That did it. They shook off their disbelief, smiled along with him, and all of us set to moving the bamboo together. In no time, dozens of stalks were stacked at the building site.
"This ought to be more than enough for a temporary shelter. Suhwan-hyung, could you pass my thanks along to the woodpecker?"
Kwon Seol-do looked the bamboo over with plain satisfaction, then turned his eyes to the bird. I relayed the thanks. Hearing them, the woodpecker—though no one had ever taught it how—lifted one wing in a return greeting.
"Oh……."
Kwon Seol-do made a sound of open admiration at the sight of that raised wing. A moment later he remembered he had work to do. He paced the site, already turning over how to raise the house.
Then the rest of us, myself included, fell in beside him and started building. We set posts in the ground for pillars and lashed vines to them to brace a roof. After that we stood finely split bamboo upright in a tight row, like the outer skin of an A-frame tent. Before long a fairly roomy house, shaped just like one, stood finished. From the outside it looked as if a single tap would send the whole thing tumbling, but the moment I laid a light hand on it I could feel how absurdly solid it was. Inside, we laid a floor of finely cut bamboo and heaped it thick with leaves until it was soft underfoot. Comfortable enough, at least, for a good night's sleep.
"Superpowers really are something. The woodpecker you called, Suhwan, and the house Seol-do built."
At Kim Son's admiration, Kwon Seol-do shrugged.
"It's a structure under my superpower's influence. It may look a little crude, but it'll be comfortable."
Sure of his own power, he looked as if the confidence had physically lifted his nose. Watching him, Geum Ba-ri clenched a fist and stepped forward.
"Then it's my turn, right? Son, mind making me a fishing rod?"
"Sure. I'll have one ready in a second."
Kim Son nodded and set to work with a soft rustle of movement. Leftover bamboo and vines from the house, plus the little hairpin she'd been wearing in her hair, became a single rod in an instant.
"Ta-da!"
She gave the finished rod a couple of experimental swishes, then handed it to Geum Ba-ri.
"Hehe! I'll bring back something delicious. Be right back!"
Rod in hand, Geum Ba-ri broke into a cheerful run toward the shore. We watched her go, laughing, and before we knew it Kim Son had produced three more rods. Together we set off after her.
"Ehehehe! I've always wanted to fish somewhere like this!"
By the time we caught up she was already standing in water a little past her knees, swinging the rod. She cast it this way and that a few times, then suddenly hauled back with everything she had.
"Looks like she's already got something."
Startled, we hurried over. Something had clearly taken the line. Geum Ba-ri was staggering this way and that, straining with all her might. We rushed in to help her pull. Whether it was because Kim Son had made it or not, the rod was remarkably solid, and it held against that tremendous force. At last the fish began to lose the tug-of-war, its strength ebbing, and the pull grew easier.
We wound the line tight around the bamboo and hauled, and there it was—a fish large enough to deserve the word. Bigger than my forearm, it thrashed on a hook bent from a hairpin.
The team reacted, each in their own way.
"Whoa! It's huge!"
"Ooh. Feasting on day one?"
"……Can something like this even be caught off a beach?"
"……."
Kim Son and Kwon Seol-do were simply delighted by the size. Ha In-du couldn't get past the fact that a fish that big had come out of water so close to shore. And then there was me, whose entire knowledge of fish began and ended with the kinds that showed up on a dinner table—mackerel, tuna, salmon.
Each of us having had our say, we carried the fish straight back to the sand. Geum Ba-ri, of course, insisted it still wasn't enough and stayed where she was to keep fishing.
"Seriously, how do you even catch something like this off a beach?"
"What does it matter, In-du? It's the superpower, obviously. Hehe. This is going to taste amazing."
We made our way back up the beach with the fish she'd caught, waited a little, and Geum Ba-ri returned—with a second fish identical to the first.
"I really love the rod Son made. It sits perfectly in the hand, and the flex is incredible……."
"I'll make you an even better one later."
"Yes!"
Geum Ba-ri whooped and threw her arms around Kim Son. Already fast friends, the two of them bounced in place, fairly glowing with delight.
"Ba-ri. What kind of fish is this?"
"I'm not completely sure, but I think it's a longface emperor. My dad caught one on a trip overseas once and wouldn't shut up about it."
Answering Ha In-du, Geum Ba-ri hoisted the fish and flashed a thumbs-up with her free hand. She looked exactly like the cover of a fishing magazine. The rest of us snorted and burst out laughing, then crowded in around her.
"So now we have to clean these……."
The moment cleaning came up, every teammate turned and stared at me. Kwon Seol-do, Ha In-du, Kim Son, Geum Ba-ri—all of them.
"What? You want me to do it?"
"No……. That's not it. Are you all right with this?"
"With what?"
I had no idea what they meant. The next words cleared it up.
"You can understand what fish are saying too, can't you?"
"Oh, that. Yeah, I can, but it's fine. I can't actually talk to an animal I've already decided I'm going to eat. How did they put it? It's a mental thing, so the superpower reins itself in on instinct……. If it didn't, I'd have had a complete breakdown in front of a sashimi-house tank just walking down the street."
Even looking at the fish, still twitching, I couldn't make out a single thing it might have been trying to say.
"So it doesn't work on animals like pigs and cows either?"
"No, that's not it. How do I explain……. I don't think of a pig or a cow itself as an ingredient, if that makes sense. It only feels like food once it's been processed into meat. Fish are different, since people eat them raw as sashimi. Just look at MyTube. There are plenty of videos of someone slicing sashimi, and almost none of anyone butchering a pig or a cow. Right?"
"Ohh!"
Geum Ba-ri nodded as if that explained everything, and the others reacted much the same.
"Still, I'll clean these!"
"By yourself? Won't that be rough?"
"It's fine. My superpower makes me good at pretty much anything I do with my hands, so I'm really good at this too."
Kim Son dangled a fish from each hand and walked down to the water. She stunned them in the wash of the incoming waves so they couldn't thrash free, then drew out a small stone knife, split their bellies, and set to cleaning.
"She really is good at this……."
Good enough to draw an honest gasp. It looked like nothing more than a few brisk scrapes, but one pass stripped the scales clean, the next split the belly, and the last pulled every bit of the innards free. Once she'd finished both fish in short order, we decided to head straight back to the house.
"Oh—hold on a second."
We'd been wandering along, chatting about this and that, when Ha In-du's call brought us to a sudden stop.
"There's cassava here."
Cassava—a hardy staple in the same league as potatoes and sweet potatoes. The news that he'd found some brightened every face. It wasn't widely grown back home, but it turned up in so many processed foods that it was easy enough to come by.
We dug the tubers up on the spot with whatever sticks came to hand. Maybe because this was an uninhabited island almost no one ever set foot on, they were enormous—only a little smaller than the fish Geum Ba-ri had caught.
"We're feasting today!"
Far from going hungry on the first day, we were looking at a feast, and Kim Son threw her hands in the air and took off running for the house. The rest of us hurried after her.
"How about we roast this simply and turn in early? Once the sun's down, there won't be much we can do anyway."
We all nodded at Ha In-du's suggestion. The long trek that had eaten up our first day had left us tired, and the light was already fading fast.
We tossed fresh wood onto the fire, which had burned down a little, and roasted the cassava and the fish over it.
Cassava is poisonous unless it's cooked through, so we set it aside to eat later and started in on the fish first. Thanks to the chopsticks Kim Son had fashioned from thin twigs, and the bowls she'd made from long leaves nearby, we were able to eat neatly.
After that, once the cassava was soft all the way through, we ate that too. Then, one by one, we began setting up our beds and getting ready to sleep.
I didn't forget, in a brief lull in the filming, to call my family on the satellite phone. Soothing Soeun—who fussed that she wanted to see the woodpecker too—took some doing.
I managed to settle her somehow, traded good-nights with Noona, and then, like the others, crawled into the tent and lay down. The exhaustion of the journey and the exhaustion of splitting bamboo piled on top of each other, and I was asleep almost the moment I stretched out.
And that first night's sleep held until a scream, early the next morning, broke it.