CHAPTER 34 - REUNITED

 

PETER AWOKE FACEDOWN, with sand in his mouth and a bird on his head. When he spat out the sand, the bird squawked and fluttered into the air, landing a few yards away on the beach, disappointed at having lost its comfortable perch in Peter’s thick red hair.

Still spitting sand, Peter stood unsteadily and looked around him, blinking, almost blinded by the glare of the bright sun on the white sand. The beach, curving gently around a deepwater lagoon, stretched out several hundred yards in each direction; ahead of him, maybe fifty yards away, was a line of palm trees; beyond that, the land rose steeply, thick with green vegetation.

He looked at the bird, which was looking back at him.

“Can you tell me where I am?” Peter asked.

The bird said nothing.

“I didn’t think so,” said Peter.

He itched all over; he was hungry; his throat burned from swallowing seawater. He began trudging toward the trees. His plan was to climb into the hills, looking for a stream; there had to be water, he figured, with all this greenery.

But he was still weak from his ordeal at sea, and when he reached the palms, he decided to rest a bit. He sat beneath a tree, his back against its rough gray bark, and closed his eyes.

He opened them when he felt a shadow fall on his face.

“Hello, Peter,” said Molly.

“Molly!” said Peter, scrambling to his feet. “It’s you!”

This immediately struck Peter as an exceptionally stupid thing for him to have told Molly, but she didn’t seem to notice.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s me. Are you all right?”

“Yes,” said Peter, brushing some sand off his clothes. “I’m fine. And I…That is, you…I mean, you…” He stammered to a stop, his face red.

“What is it, Peter?”

“I mean, thank you, Molly. For saving me.”

Molly took a step forward and put her hand on Peter’s arm. This felt absolutely wonderful to Peter; he cast his eyes down, lest she see the effect she was having.

“Peter,” she said. “It’s I who should be thanking you. You helped me when I desperately needed help. You got the trunk off the ship. You risked your life for me. The least I could do was try to keep you from drowning. I’m only sorry I let you fall…”

“That wasn’t your fault!” said Peter. “I couldn’t hold on any longer.”

“After you fell,” she continued, “I began to descend, and fortunately the wind drove me onto this island, not far from here. I’ve been searching since then, hoping that you were…I mean, I was so worried, Peter, and when I saw you against the tree, I…”

Now it was Molly’s turn to cast her eyes downward.

After an awkward silence, Peter said: “Have you seen a stream? I’m awfully thirsty.”

“No stream, not yet,” said Molly. “But I think I’ve found water.”

“What do you mean?”

“On the beach, just a bit that way,” said Molly, pointing. “There’s a barrel; it looks like a water barrel from the Never Land.”

“The Never Land,” said Peter, suddenly remembering. “Do you think it was…I mean, James and them, do you think…”

Molly’s look was somber. “I don’t know, Peter,” she said. “All we can do is hope they’re all right. But for now we need to look after ourselves.”

“What d’you mean?”

“Well, for starters we should get that water barrel off the beach, before the tide takes it back out to sea. We’ll need it if we can’t find any other water. We’ll also need to find food, sooner or later. And most important, we need to look for the trunk.”

“Really?” said Peter. “You think it could have ended up on this island?”

“The barrel ended up here, didn’t it?”

“True,” said Peter.

“Let’s go get that barrel,” said Molly. “Then we’ll climb this hill and have a look ’round at what else is on this island.”

The barrel was heavy; it took all their strength to roll it up the beach. It was sealed with a thick cork stopper, which Peter managed, with considerable effort, to dislodge by banging it with a sharp piece of coral.

The water was warm and brackish, but they both drank greedily. Then, at Molly’s insistence, they dragged the barrel into a depression in the land, and covered it with fallen palm fronds. Then she made them back away from the hidden barrel, using fronds to sweep away their footprints.

“Why are we being so careful?” Peter asked. “There’s nobody here but us.”

“That’s true now,” said Molly. “But somebody may come, and I don’t want them taking our water.”

When she was satisfied that the barrel was hidden, she and Peter set off inland. They soon found themselves struggling up a steep mountainside, thick with vegetation—trees, vines, bushes bearing large, sweet-smelling yellow flowers.

Insects hummed around their ears; birds twittered and screeched in the tree canopy above them. At times the vegetation was so thick Peter couldn’t see Molly a few feet ahead of him; at times he couldn’t even see his feet. He wondered if there might be snakes—it certainly looked as though there might be snakes—but he did not voice this thought, as he didn’t want Molly, forging resolutely ahead, to think he was scared.

After about forty-five minutes of hard climbing, they emerged onto an open, rocky plateau, from which they could look back and see where they’d been. They were several hundred feet up now, looking down on the lagoon where Peter had come ashore; Peter could see the gouge in the sand they’d made when they dragged the water barrel up the beach.

To the far right-hand side a ridge jutted into the sea, separating Peter’s lagoon from another, shallower one, with a wide beach that…

What was that?

“Molly!” said Peter, pointing toward the far lagoon. “Look!”

Molly squinted, shading her eyes.

“It’s a boat!” she exclaimed. “A little boat, and…people! I see three…four…five of them!”

Peter strained to make out the distant, dark shapes on the white beach. “It looks like four smallish ones, and one biggish one!” he said. “Oh, Molly, d’you think it’s James and them?”

 

 

Molly studied the shapes some more.

“Yes,” she said, “it’s definitely them, and a crewman—I believe it’s your friend, the big one.”

“Alf!” said Peter, his heart soaring. Even Alf was alive! “Let’s go down to meet them!”

“Yes,” said Molly, suddenly serious. “And we had better hurry.”

Peter, hearing the change in her tone, looked at Molly, and saw alarm in her face.

“What is it?” he said.

“See for yourself,” she said, pointing off to the left.

Peter looked, and saw it instantly: a ship, heading straight toward the lagoon where he’d come ashore.

A black ship, flying the Jolly Roger.