Survival Dream Team (5)
Early that morning, the whole forest's worth of birdsong woke us, and we put together a simple breakfast. We roasted cassava over what was left of the fire and finished with fruit. There was fish set out to dry, but it needed careful grilling, and none of us felt like the trouble.
"Come on, let's go play!"
Kim Son, already dreaming of a lazy day by the sea, had produced a wide-brimmed picnic hat from who knew where, and she looked ready to take off at a sprint.
"All right. Let's go."
We smiled and headed straight for the beach, meaning to take care of lunch out there as well, loaded down with food and a long branch we'd kindled from the campfire.
When we came out onto the long white sweep of sand, the water so clear you could see straight to the bottom, a fresh, bracing feeling washed over me. At the sight of it, the trio—barely a year apart in age—broke into a run. Kim Son, Geum Ba-ri, and Kwon Seol-do dropped what they'd carried and plunged straight into the sea.
They hit the water with a splash, and whatever had them so delighted, they burst out laughing and started flinging water at one another. Ha In-du and I waded in after them and joined the fight, and it ended with Kwon Seol-do—who'd been horsing around and spraying everyone in sight—taking a concentrated barrage from the other four.
"Ah, I'm dying... I think salt's about to start coming out of my mouth."
"Good for you. Go eat some cassava. Bet it'd taste nice and salty."
"Then why don't you dip yours in seawater?"
I watched Geum Ba-ri and Kwon Seol-do bicker the way only people the same age can, then turned my attention to Kim Son.
She was sitting on the sand, fidgeting with something. Curious, I went over and found her building a little sandcastle, splashing seawater over the sand, packing it, and working it with her hands until it began to take shape.
"Seol-do oppa!"
After stacking sand this way and that for a while, she suddenly called for him. He'd been squabbling with Geum Ba-ri, but he went to her at once. That guy was plainly more interested in Kim Son than in Geum Ba-ri.
Anyway, once he'd answered the summons, he traded a few words with her and joined the construction. With thin twigs and grass fetched from somewhere or other, he raised a frame, and Kim Son finished it in sand. That was how the castle started going up. I had to wonder whether those two were really twenty-five and twenty-six. What they were doing out here on the beach wasn't all that different from the way So-eun played.
Ha In-du and I shared a small laugh and went over to Geum Ba-ri, figuring that since her playmate had up and vanished, we'd keep her company instead. But whether Kwon Seol-do had left or not, she didn't seem to care. Her hands were in the water.
"What are you doing?"
"Just a second...! Hnn—ngh!"
She'd been bracing underwater, and then she hauled herself up with everything she had.
"Got iiiiiit!"
Clutched in her hands was a huge flatfish—flounder or halibut, I couldn't tell. Its broad body thrashed, and the thing was enormous.
"...A Fishing superpower really is something. How do you even catch one of those in a place like this?"
Ha In-du's admiration beside me puffed her right up, and she headed back up the beach with the big fish.
By the time we got there, a sandcastle nearly waist-high was already standing. She'd only been wrestling that flounder underwater, and they'd piled it up this far.
"Oh, you made it this big already?"
"Then this is the flounder bin!"
"Kyaa! Unniiii!"
"What are you doing!"
Geum Ba-ri hurled the flounder straight into the castle, and I took a moment to enjoy Kim Son and Kwon Seol-do screaming in despair. I watched the two of them, once they were done wailing, get their revenge on her, then slipped into the sea myself, thinking I'd loosen up with a light swim.
Cutting through the cool, clear water felt wonderfully refreshing. Muscles gone stiff from hauling wood and roaming around in search of food finally started to unwind as I swam. And as I drifted on the surface, I saw Ha In-du ambling past nearby.
"Hyung-nim, what are you doing?"
"There are some clams. Thought I'd dig them up. Oh, there's a lobster here too."
True to a man with a Detection superpower, he turned up clams and lobsters with ridiculous ease even when he looked like he was only wandering. A few steps, a bend, and up came a clam; a few more steps, another bend, and up came a lobster.
"Ba-ri catches a flounder, and In-du hyung-nim comes back with clams and lobster..."
We'd come out to play, and still the two of them were this good at scrounging up a meal. I was impressed enough to wonder whether I ought to be contributing something myself. Then I glanced at Kim Son and Kwon Seol-do, still raising their sandcastle on the beach, and decided there was no real need. More to the point—how were they building the thing taller than a person?
In any case, floating along at my leisure, I could hardly have asked for a better heaven. I was past being able to tell whether we'd come to film a survival show built on a castaway premise, or simply arrived at a healing resort.
Then, while I was drifting with the current, something bonked me on the head. It didn't feel like a reef. It was firm, and yet somehow soft and pillowy.
"What."
I sat up at the impact, and there it was: a single dugong, enormous. A cow that lived in the sea. A dugong big enough to deserve the name sea cow had collided with me as I floated.
"Aigoo! Dugong's dying!"
"...What? Are you an insurance scammer, not a dugong?"
The creature started milking the bump for all it was worth. The two of us had been floating when we collided—what was there to be hurt by? My head wasn't an awl. Of course, it may only have been teasing, because it dropped the act almost at once, came over, and sneakily rubbed against me.
I'd heard a dugong's greatest enemy in shallow water was boats, and sure enough its body was covered in scars like cuts, traces where a propeller had sliced the skin. Feeling sorry for it, I stroked it gently, and the creature decided it liked that and clung on even harder. It was bigger than I was, so of course I staggered.
"Hey. Hold still."
I was trying to calm the clinging thing when I saw the film crew sprinting toward us from far off. I'd been floating around and run into not some ordinary sea creature but a dugong; there was no way they were going to let that go unfilmed. Naturally, our teammates, puzzled by the crew's dash, came over one by one as well, and none of them could hide their wonder at the huge animal.
"Eek!"
Gentle as it was, the dugong was also timid, and it startled. More than a dozen people rushing in at once—it would have been stranger if it hadn't. I sent part of the crew back and tore up some nearby seaweed to feed the frightened creature. The way it slurped the seaweed down was quite something to watch.
"Oppa, what is this?"
"A dugong. The animal mermaids were based on. People mistook this thing for a mermaid."
At that the team let out a chorus of oohs, touching the dugong lightly or pulling up seaweed to feed it, sharing a brief moment of rapport. A dugong lives by wandering from place to place rather than settling in one spot, and so, before long, the creature left us. We watched for a while as it glided away beneath the clear water, then slowly made our way back to shore.
"Being with you, oppa, we really do meet an animal every single day."
"I didn't expect to see a dugong either."
"Hehe, what kind of animal do you think we'll see tomorrow?"
Geum Ba-ri and Kim Son looked as if they were already looking forward to meeting something new. A woodpecker on the first day, a cassowary on the second, a dugong on the third. What would tomorrow bring? That was the hope.
But their hopes were fulfilled almost at once. When we got back to camp, an animal we hadn't seen before had planted itself there.
"Get lost! I've got nothing for you!"
"Taktak! Beat it!"
And it was squared off against the cassowary, woodpecker perched on top.
"O-oppa...! A w-wild boar!"
The animal facing the two of them was a wild boar. Not quite on the scale of the dugong we'd just seen, but still a boar of tremendous size, locked in a standoff with the cassowary and looking ready to charge at any moment.
"Don't move. Boars are sensitive to sound, so don't shout either."
Ha In-du, having spotted it, sent Kim Son, Geum Ba-ri, and Kwon Seol-do back behind him. A wild ginseng digger who ranged deep into the mountains would know how to handle a boar. But the important thing was that I was here.
The moment the boar started to move, as if it meant to charge the cassowary, I shouted the magic word.
Stop!
"Squeee!"
Frozen in the very posture of its charge, the boar toppled to the ground with a thud. A small ripple of laughter rose behind me at the undignified fall. I went up to it, meaning to drive it off, and tried to lift it.
"Nnnghhh!"
But the boar was every bit as heavy as it was huge, and it didn't so much as budge. I could hoist Hanmu if I had to, but that only worked because he cooperated. Forcing this massive creature to move—it seemed to weigh nearly as much as Hanmu—was out of the question.
In the end, I had no choice but to negotiate. Chase it off however I liked, nothing said it wouldn't come back, so I had to make the thing leave on its own.