Survival Dream Team (6)
"Hey. What'll it take to get you to leave?"
I asked it while staring at the wild boar, which hadn't so much as twitched. I couldn't shake the thought that if this hulking thing decided it didn't like something and gave the place a casual shove, even a house Kwon Seol-do had built would be hard-pressed to come through in one piece.
"Something tasty. Lots of it."
True to its kind—wild boars being one of the chief culprits behind crop damage even back in Korea—the creature answered my question by demanding food. I remembered the cassowary and the woodpecker telling it there was nothing here for it and to get lost. It had clearly come all this way looking for a meal. We'd been roasting all sorts of food, and the sweet smell of fruit was hanging in the air; of course it had followed its nose.
"Nnngh..."
Faced with a demand like that, I had no choice but to stop and think. Feed it just to send it on its way, and it was obvious the thing would be back. So I laid the problem out for the team and asked what they thought we ought to do.
The looks I got in return suggested they couldn't believe I was asking something so obvious.
"Oppa, can't we just put it to work too? You eat, you work!"
They had the track record to back it up. They'd already set the cassowary to catching rats and insects, and put the woodpecker on construction support. The idea was to feed it, then work it for more than it ate.
"Hmm. That actually sounds pretty good. We've already found some enormous cassava and things like that, but they were buried too deep to dig up. A wild boar ought to be able to root them out just fine."
Even Ha In-du was going along with it. I'd expected a man who'd run into wild boars in the mountains now and then to be wary, but his reaction was the complete opposite.
Talked into it by the team, I brought down a portion of the food we'd been storing on the second floor. "A portion" was relative. We'd stockpiled so much that even a portion came to an enormous amount.
"Something tasty!"
The moment I set the food down in front of the boar, it lit up and lunged, then started wolfing everything down. Huge cassava roots, every kind of fruit—it crunched through them without leaving so much as a single seed, the wet crack of its chewing filling the air.
"Whoa, it really can eat. Is that why the crop damage gets so bad?"
It ate so hard, and in such quantity, that even Kim Son couldn't help marveling.
Once its belly was good and full, the boar found a shady, cool corner on the first floor and flopped down right there, looking for all the world as if it meant to settle in for good. The sheer nerve of it left me shaking my head, but the plan was to feed it and work it for all it was worth, so I decided to let it slide.
We turned our attention away from the boar, and as the light outside dimmed we had our dinner and turned in for the night.
"Hrrk— hrruung— honk!"
"...What is that noise."
I opened my eyes to the bizarre sound. Through the window the sky was flushed red, as if the sun were only just about to rise. I headed straight downstairs to track the noise to its source.
"What kind of snoring even is..."
The source was the wild boar that had joined us the night before. Every time it drew a breath, a grotesque grrrk rolled through the house. And I wasn't the only one the sound had dragged out of sleep. One by one, the rest of the team woke as well, from the earliest hours of the morning.
"Wow. I did not come all the way out here expecting to hear my dad's snoring."
While Geum Ba-ri volunteered that bit of TMI, I got food ready for the woodpecker and the cassowary.
"Suhwan. It might rain today."
"...What? Out of nowhere?"
I was still portioning out the feed when Ha In-du came over and told me rain was on the way. I looked up at the sudden claim, but the sky didn't particularly feel like rain to me.
"A red sky in the morning is a warning that the weather's about to turn."
Looking up again at his words, I had to admit the sky seemed redder than usual. While I was staring at it, Kwon Seol-do came over.
"In-du hyungnim. You're saying it's going to rain today?"
"Yeah. Morning glow means bad weather."
At that, Kwon Seol-do started looking the place over from every angle. Then he said the house needed a little more reinforcing and asked for help. They'd prepared for a bit of rain, he explained, but they hadn't accounted for rain driven by a strong wind.
In the end, Kim Son and Geum Ba-ri took charge of meals and bringing in fresh food, and the three of us men decided to reinforce the house. The women took the cassowary, which would scout for fruit and double as a pack animal, while we brought the woodpecker and the wild boar along.
"All right. You ate your share yesterday, so you've got to work for it, yeah?"
"More tasty stuff!"
"Sure. Work hard and I'll give you something tasty."
The boar seemed pleased by that. It pawed at the ground and threw itself into the job. The woodpecker snapped off bamboo stalks, we bundled them together and hitched them to the boar, and it hauled the load off with powerful strides. It was heavy enough that we would have needed several trips, but the boar treated it like nothing, plowing a path through the forest as it headed for the house.
Thanks to the boar, reinforcing the house went far more smoothly than I'd expected. The goal was a massive barrier against the coming wind and rain, and even raising that heavy, oversized wall, the boar was an enormous help. It dug out the ground where the barrier would stand, and once we'd built the wall lying flat, it was the boar that heaved it upright.
"Eat plenty!"
With a space made to keep out the wind and rain, we piled food high for the boar and the woodpecker, who'd worked so hard. The two of them decided the labor had been well worth it and filled their bellies in short order. Right about the time they finished off the food, Kim Son, Geum Ba-ri, and the cassowary porter came back.
"Suhwan oppa. You said your superpower works on plants too, right?"
"That's right. Why?"
"Ta-da!"
Freshly returned, Kim Son asked me about my superpower and immediately pulled a piece of fruit from the bag strapped onto the cassowary. It was a pineapple—the sort of thing you'd see any day at a grocery store, and something we hadn't found even once out here. This one was bigger than most people's heads. The rest of the haul was the same story: a heap of fruit, every piece larger than usual.
"We barely caught any fish, though. Maybe the weather really is turning. The waves were pretty high, so fishing was hard, and there just weren't many fish to begin with."
"It's fine. We've already got plenty stored."
I told the apologetic Geum Ba-ri not to worry, and we passed the time at an easy pace, chatting about this and that over a meal.
"Hey, this just occurred to me. Don't our names fit our superpowers a little too well?"
"How so?"
"My name is Son, and if you write my surname in Chinese characters it means gold. Put them together and you get geumson—a golden hand, what we call someone incredible with their hands—and sure enough I've got a handicraft superpower. Bari unni might as well be a dageumbari, the grouper, so of course she's great at fishing... Seol-do oppa is Kwon Seol, which sounds just like geonseol, construction. In-du oppa sounds like 'find' in English, so he searches. And Suhwan oppa is... a shinsu? A divine beast?"
It was the kind of theory that managed to be both oddly plausible and completely absurd, and we burst out laughing.
We kept trading stories and letting the time slip by, until a soft plip— plip— reached our ears.
"It's raining!"
I looked out the window. Raindrops were falling one by one, darkening the ground around the house. For a brief moment the first rain on the uninhabited island felt almost poetic—and then the drops grew fat and multiplied. This was no gentle hiss of rain. It slammed down hard enough to roar, so fiercely that from somewhere far off we could hear the splintering crack of trees breaking.
"...Seol-do. The house is going to be all right, right?"
"Ah, don't you worry! I built the whole thing with care. Not a single drop of rain is getting in."
Thanks to Kwon Seol-do's confidence, we were able to rest easy even as a frightening rain came down.
But the rain truly would not stop. It poured and poured, as if a waterfall had taken up residence in the sky, falling without a moment's pause. It was still raining the next morning, and it was still raining that evening.
Of course, even rain that refused to quit wasn't much of a problem. The house was built so solidly that a hard wind didn't so much as shake it, and we'd stockpiled enough food to laze around for days on end. There was just one problem. The animals.
The wind and rain were so fierce that creatures which had been hiding wherever they could began flocking to our house, the one place that actually kept the rain off. The first to arrive was a bird-of-paradise. It was a gorgeous bird, as if someone had fastened a multicolored feather duster to its tail, and it came in soaked to the bone, struggling through the air before setting about drying its feathers.
"Oppa, what kind of bird is that?"
"A bird-of-paradise, I think. I only glanced at them before we came, so I can't be completely sure."
"There are birds like that? There really are a ridiculous number of animals out here."
"You know the one. A while back, somebody was trying to identify a bird from a picture that looked like they'd drawn it in Paint. Black background, a blue shape that sort of looked like it was smiling."
"Oh! That!"
At my words Kim Son clapped and nodded as if she knew it at once.
"That bird's a kind of bird-of-paradise too. It looks a little different from this one, though."
"Whoa!"
She looked even more delighted at that, and with my help she coaxed the bird-of-paradise onto her hand and started playing with it.
But the bird-of-paradise was nowhere near the last animal to show up. Besides the woodpecker and the cassowary we already had, tiny kingfishers small enough to fit in one palm arrived as well. Even tree kangaroos turned up—creatures you could fairly call cousins of the kangaroo. Instead of hopping, they climbed and walked along the branches, and they were cute enough to be proud of it.
"So cuuuute!"
Soaked through as they were, the little things still had charm to spare, and Kim Son, Geum Ba-ri, and Kwon Seol-do lost their minds, scooping them up in a frenzy of excitement. After that still more animals arrived, and our house became a shelter for a whole crowd of them—the kind of shelter where a tree kangaroo lay sprawled across the wild boar's back, and kingfishers pattered busily back and forth over that soft, living cushion.