Episode 149: Survival Dream Team (4)
"Kyaaaaaaah!"
A woman's high, piercing scream snapped me out of sleep, and I bolted upright. For a heartbeat I panicked — this wasn't home — before I remembered we'd come to an uninhabited island and swung my gaze toward the source of the scream.
A whole crowd of camera crews had already swarmed in to film, and one spot among them had drawn more lenses than anywhere else. That was where the scream had come from. Geum Ba-ri stood there, startled half out of her skin, pointing at something.
She didn't look hurt, and nothing about it seemed dangerous, so I quietly made my way over.
"What's going on?"
"Eek! Ah. O-Oppa."
My approach gave her a little start of its own. Once she saw it was me, though, the tension left her face, and she pointed off to one side.
I followed her finger and understood at once why she'd screamed.
"…What is that doing here."
Sprawled on the ground was a cassowary — one of the largest birds alive, outsized only by the ostrich and the emu. For a second I mistook it for the cassowary we'd taken in at the zoo after the Australia trip; the resemblance was that strong. A closer look told me otherwise. It wasn't our bird. Obviously not. How would the one from our zoo even get here?
"Oppa. Is that bird dead?"
Seeing that I seemed to know a thing or two about cassowaries, Geum Ba-ri came closer and asked. Fair enough — the bird was sprawled out exactly like a corpse. It hung limp, without a scrap of strength in it, and even when she poked it, it didn't so much as twitch.
I shook my head and walked up to it.
"Cut the act."
Those half-lidded eyes were aimed straight at the pile of fruit heaped in the corner. Fish and cassava hadn't been enough; it had moved on to the fruit and still hadn't finished, and these were the leftovers. Plain as day, it was playing dead, waiting for an opening to snatch the fruit and bolt. Too many people around — it was betting someone would drop their guard.
I stepped right in and grabbed it by the nape.
"…"
"Playing dead won't save you, you rascal."
I took hold of the cassowary's neck and gave it a good shake. Only then did it give up. Feathers rustling, it rose and looked at me. The sheer regret written all over it made me laugh under my breath, and I held out one of the leftover fruits.
"Here — this is the good stuff!"
I tossed a piece. The bird snatched it clean out of the air as it arced down, pecked once, and gulped it whole. I could see the fruit sliding down its throat.
"Oppa, can I give it fruit too?"
Geum Ba-ri, who'd been right beside me, suddenly leaned in. In her hand was one of the same fruits I'd just fed the cassowary.
"Yeah, that's fine. Just don't set it on your open palm. The beak's pretty sharp — sharp enough to eat small rodents. Mice, even."
The mention of eating mice left her worried and thrilled in equal measure. She approached the cassowary, pinched the fruit by its stem, and dangled it in the air. The moment the bird understood the offering was meant for it, it hurried over and started pecking. Even holding nothing but the stem, Geum Ba-ri felt the force of it. She flinched and dropped the fruit.
"Whoa. Big as it is, it's insanely strong, too."
"Yeah. Out in the wild that thing sits near the very top of the food chain. If this island doesn't have carnivores like wolves, you can pretty much say it has no natural enemies. Those claws are wicked sharp — sharp enough to punch straight through a wooden plank."
At that, Geum Ba-ri took a small, uneasy step back.
I laughed lightly and stroked the cassowary's head. Up top it had something like a chicken's comb, firm enough that it felt good under the hand. While I was petting it, Geum Ba-ri found her nerve, came over, and stroked it too.
"We're not going to have something like this every single day while we're out here with you, right, Oppa?"
Still petting the cassowary, she glanced up at the woodpecker sprawled asleep against the ceiling of our shelter. A woodpecker on the first day, a cassowary today — a teasing little question about whether we were really going to add one animal a day. I had no answer for her. Saying no would have stung my conscience, and saying yes felt entirely too likely to come true. I didn't want to say it out loud.
"Huh? Hyung-nim. What animal is that now?"
"Suhwan. That's the same species as the one at your zoo, isn't it?"
"Eek! It's huge!"
One by one, the teammates who'd grown close overnight woke and drifted over. They crowded around the cassowary as if it were some rare spectacle and stared. The bird looked a little startled, but the moment each of them offered it a piece of fruit, it rubbed against them in delight.
"Oppa, can't we keep it? Just for the ten days?"
I thought it over, then nodded. Living with us for ten days or so wasn't going to wipe the bird's memory of how to survive in the wild. It wasn't a chick that still needed a parent looking after it, so I didn't see much of a problem. When I asked the cassowary whether it wanted to stay with us for those ten days, it agreed readily enough. More than anything else, it seemed to like how easily it could get its claws on fruit.
"What a relief. I thought I heard a mouse last night, actually. If the cassowary's here, the mice will disappear too, right?"
The news that the cassowary would be staying put a deeply relieved look on Geum Ba-ri's face. From the way she described something mouse-like rustling past while she slept, the rodents seemed to be exactly why she wanted the bird around. No wonder she'd lit up when I mentioned it ate mice.
"Cassowary, we're counting on you!"
Kim Son and Geum Ba-ri offered it fruit with the air of people entrusting it with the pest problem. Somehow I got the feeling those two were going to look after the cassowary very well indeed.
We watched for a moment, then started moving, one after another. Munching the leftover fruit as we got up, we headed out at once to gather what we needed to survive — some searching for more fruit, others setting off to haul water. Everyone was hard at it.
Kwon Seol-do and I went to collect materials for a new shelter, and we took the woodpecker with us.
"I know it might be tough, but I'm counting on you again today."
"I'm a woodpecker!"
Declaring what it was, the bird took off in a flutter and started hammering at the base of a bamboo stalk. Maybe a single night in my company had already brushed it with my superpower — whatever the reason, it dropped bamboo at a ridiculous speed. Crack, snap, and the stalks came crashing down in a rush.
Having felled them in no time, the woodpecker flew back to my shoulder, landed, and puffed out its chest as if to ask how it had done. I gave it a bit of praise and a piece of fruit I'd set aside, then Kwon Seol-do and I hauled the bamboo to the building site.
Stalk after stalk — bamboo so tall you had to crane your neck to see the tops — until the pile stood about waist-high. It was grueling work.
"Do we really need this much bamboo?"
"I want to build it big and solid. Three stories or so?"
"You can do that with bamboo?"
"No reason it can't."
I nodded at the confidence on Kwon Seol-do's face and set straight in to help him build. The woodpecker included, of course.
"Hyung-nim. Could you dig holes here and here, about a handspan deep? If you can, make them exactly the diameter of this bamboo."
"Got it."
Using the charcoal left from a burned-out fire as a marker, he'd drawn on the wood, and I set the woodpecker to boring holes at those spots — just as he'd asked, the diameter of the bamboo and about a palm deep. Once we'd opened holes in several of the surrounding trees, Kwon Seol-do started fitting bamboo into them. Linking the stalks this way and that with the trees around us, he raised an open square with nothing in the middle.
"Shore this up a little more and lay a floor, and you've got a second story right there."
He trimmed several stalks on the spot and built the floor. Fitting, I supposed, for someone with a Construction Superpower — it might have looked flimsy at a glance, but the moment you laid a hand on it, you could feel how absurdly solid it was. After that he raised a third story in much the same way. The second floor, he said, would serve as a storeroom and changing room for the food and such; the third would be sleeping space.
"Hyung-nim, mind boring some holes here too? If we want to get up to the second and third floors without a fuss, stairs are the way to go."
Once the stairs went in, the three-story bamboo house was finished. Walls to break the wind, a roof to keep off the rain, even windows for light and air — it was a house in every sense of the word.
This really is something. To build all this with nothing but bamboo and vines… I couldn't help marveling. It was the kind of structure you'd only expect to see knocked together in an animation about someone living in the jungle, and here it stood, done in a flash.
The teammates drifting back from their own chores felt the same, of course. Every one of them gasped and started poking around the three-story house. And it wasn't only people touring the place. The cassowary that had followed us in wedged itself into a cozy corner of the first floor and settled there, while the woodpecker claimed a perch around the window frame.
Thanks to Kwon Seol-do and a house that satisfied everyone, we got to spend a thoroughly satisfying second day. Ha In-du and Geum Ba-ri had worked hard gathering food, so we ate as abundantly as we had on the first, and we could rest easy inside a snug shelter.
And because we'd stored so much food, we decided that tomorrow — our third day — all of us would head out to the sea together and take a holiday for once. With food to spare and a cozy house finished, we were already plotting, light of heart, how we meant to enjoy ourselves.