Clinging to a sheer rock wall with my toes and the tips of my fingers, I reached up, stretching as far as I could, and grabbed the last bird egg. Slowly, since every sudden movement could send me plummeting down, I reached behind me, and put it in a basket strapped to my back.

I did not dare to look down. Even though the cliff under me was only maybe two stories high, a field of sharp, jagged rocks was underneath, making the breakwater surrounding the cliffs. Strange penguins swarmed around it, clacking their beaks.

No, calling these things penguins seemed inaccurate. They looked more like a transitional animal between a dinosaur and a cormorant. I haven't seen them eat anything except fish, but I assumed that if I fell down the chasm and shattered on the rocks, they would finish me off all the same. After all, protein is protein.

Meanwhile, me and Baba were monkeying along the rock wall, picking up eggs of some smaller, less dangerous-looking birds. At this point, both of us had our baskets full. More than enough for twenty meals of scrambled eggs. Or maybe omelets. I had barely ate any eggs for at previous three months, so I was salivating at the prospect. But Baba informed me that he planned to boil, and then smoke them all, so they would preserve better.

I had nothing against smoked eggs, they were delicious, but it did not mean I needed a two-month supply of them. Especially not if getting them meant risking my life.

"Excellent, Jack", said Baba."I think we are done here. Do you think you can climb up and then to the right? So that we can exit this place without disturbing the penguins below? They never attacked me, but I do not quite trust them."

I nodded in agreement and started moving sideways. My fingers hurt like hell, but I did not want to show my weakness. Baba, despite being much older than me and much heavier, made the climb look effortless as if he had been doing it every day since he was born.

The bastard.

I could not say if I've been more annoyed with him, or impressed with his skills. Still, every hour spent in his presence, taught me more than I learned on my own in a week. It started with making nets and better traps, then spearfishing. Stalking prey. Even tending to small wounds. He showed me what plants he found to be edible and which were definitely poisonous. I learned how to tan hides and make leather far superior to the mess I made out of the elk hide.

He even found a way to get grain out of wild grasses, a process he claimed to be quite inefficient, but one I could make infinitely more useful with my duplicators. Having grain, I could try to make flour, and with it bread, buns, tortillas, pancakes even, if I used eggs, the possibilities were endless and delicious!

Of course, as it could be expected, Baba dismissed them all. He believed that the duplicators I found were only a temporary trick that held me back from actually learning survival skills needed to prosper in this world. He saw my reliance on them as a weakness that could one day spell my doom, and as much as it chafed me to admit, I did not think he was entirely wrong.

When I described to him all my inventions, my house, my weapons, and everything accomplished, he dismissed it all, claiming a more rugged, less resource-dependent lifestyle would be superior. Of course, he meant one like his own.

So, as much as childish it felt, I wanted to take him down a peg. I exploded upwards, jumping from one crevice to another, to beat him to the top of the cliff. Mercifully, this particular part of the cliff was only about four stories high. I noticed with satisfaction that Baba was barely keeping up with my pace. He was a superior climber, just like he was superior at everything else, but he was still much heavier and laws of physics were on my side.

I reached a large crack that split the cliff, giving us a shorter route back to Baba's camp. Rather than squeeze through it and emerge on the other side, I climbed up as far as I could up the splitting walls of the crack, until they splayed too far apart for me to reach both for support. From that height, I could easily see the plains surrounding the entrance to the Baba cave, and the swampy, willow-covered brushland far away, where I landed and secured my raft. On a clear bright day, I expected to see its white, silken sail that should be clearly visible from there.

Wait.

I did a double-take.

What in hell?

Baba noticed my confusion. We both stared in shock at the empty, rectangular spot in the reeds where the raft used to be.

“Jack.” he asked calmly, “ where is your raft?”

Speechless, I pointed vaguely in the direction of the river, almost losing my balance and falling down the cliff. “... The last I checked… it was in there…”, I got a hold of myself, “it was tied securely with several lengths of nearly indestructible silk rope, to several sturdy trees!”

“Are you sure you tied it well?” he asked.

“Yes, I am sure! I even used the special marine knot you showed me!”

He shook his head grimly. “It must be the work of those damned water-dogs,” he said, “they chewed through the rope.”

I stared at him incredulously. “What are you talking about?! That thing is stronger than Kevlar! I had a bear-sized wolverine chew at it all night and fail to even fray it. A strand thinner than my finger held a terror bird leashed. No way the otters could gnaw through it, let alone untie it. Even if they somehow chewed through the rope, It's not like you would eat the entire thing, it was all together at least fifty meters of silk cable. And how could otters steal the raft itself? They are animals, not pirates, as smart as they are, it's not like they boarded it and set sail to a far shore.”

“Calm down Jack. Let's get down and investigate it.”

We crossed the crack and sprinted down the slope, as fast as we dared without spilling the freshly gathered eggs or tumbling and breaking our necks. We unloaded our cargo by the cave and grabbed our spears.

I wanted to run down to the river, But Baba advised caution. We sneaked around the bushes, taking a roundabout route. Yet, no predator laid in ambush down there. No mysterious pirates were found.

Only the rectangular hole in the reeds, where my raft slammed into them carving a path, and what was left of my bonfire.

I ran into the water until I was submerged up to my armpits. As I crossed the line where the thickets turned to open water, I saw the white dot of my precious sail, far, far upriver. Whoever stole my raft, made the best use of the winds that forced their way through the gap of the bay and blew inland. I splashed and sputtered water, trying to chase them, without letting go of my spear.

I felt a hand grab me. “Camot of da water, fool, before you drown!” Baba hauled me to the shore, against my protestations. “What were you trying to do, swim after them? I agree you dey better swimmer than me, but you are not that good”.

“Don’t you get it?! People! It must be people! Someone not only stole the raft, but set sail, animals don’t do that.”

“Hold on, Jack, don go kolo on me. We must be rational ‘bout it..”

“Baba, I need to find these people before they disappear again! We need to rescue them!” I shook him, for a second forgetting that he was twice my size and could fold me in half with a backhand slap.

“Look at the ground, friend, seems like them people did a good job rescuing themselves. And they left you a message in some cipher. ”

I looked under my feet, at the splash of soggy ashes from my old bonfire. They were covered in writing, and small footprints. I read the words and then laughed at the absurdity of the situation.

“Its no cipher Baba, its Bukvy! The mysterious alphabet of the ancestral enemies of my people… Looks like they found me even in this strange alien universe!”

“What are you talking about Jack?” Baba was confused by my sudden burst of humor.

“The Russians! Russian pirates stole my raft! Weirder still, it was female Russian pirates, and apparently juvenile ones too!” I patted him on the shoulder. “You know many things I do not, Baba, but there is one skill that was hammered into my head when I was young, the ability to read Russian.”

I slowly decyphered the message drawn in the ash for his benefit.

HI SORRY TAKE YOUR BOAT

NEED SAVE SISTER AND FRIENDS

COULD NOT FIND YOU IN TIME

WE ARE ON SMALL ISLAND WHERE RIVER SPREAD BEGIN

PLS FIND US

NATASHA

We stared at one another for a few seconds. Me with a triumphant smile, Baba with a concerned, fatherly expression.

“Are you planning on doing something exceptionally foolish, Jack?” he finally asked.

“Yes. And you are doing it with me.”

“I’m telling you, Jack, it’s too big! You will flip the canoe!” Baba yelled, awkwardly placing himself next to a sack of supplies while trying to hold a makeshift mast upright. Meanwhile, I was balancing precariously with one foot on the canoe’s rib, and another pushing a boom to the mast, while I tried to tie a sealskin sail to it.

“Nonshenshe!” I mumbled, mouth full of leather thongs. “I Inshtalled biggah one on mah raft, and it shailed fantashtically.” With a final tug I managed to secure the giant sheet of sewn hides, and pulled at a rope to winch it up.

Just like my raft before, the canoe shot forward when the seemingly gentle breeze slammed into the sail, showing its true strength. I did not have time to be amazed by the incredible power inherent in the moving masses of air, since I lost my balance and nearly somersaulted overboard. Baba caught me by the neck of my shirt and pulled me back in, but the motion caused the canoe to pitch rightwise at a threatening angle, spilling some of our supplies.

We briefly stared at the bag of dry fish that now bobbed over the waves behind us, but when Baba wanted to pull down the sail and drift down to retrieve it, I stopped him.

“Come on, Baba, no time. We can always spear more fish, but we cannot spare more time.”

He nodded and curled around the mast, helping to hold it in place. The whole contraption held on leather thongs and silk rope, some prayer from Baba and creative cursing from me. It was not good engineering by any stretch, but it was the best we could come up with in the whole thirty minutes it took us to prepare for the trip. Aside from the mast and sail, we added a bundle of reeds and sticks to both sides, to give us better buoyancy and extra surface area, so that the canoe would not instantly flip in a sideways wind. We grabbed whatever weapons and supplies we could fit in it, and against Baba’s protestations and calls for sanity, immediately departed without further preparation.

We could not hope to catch the raft and its thieves the same day. The white sail disappeared in the distance, hidden by the everpresent misty haze hanging above the river. But as far as we knew, the river had no branches for many kilometers up, and there was no place to land the raft without it being clearly visible. Sooner or later we would catch up to them.

I looked back at Baba.

“What’s with the sour face? Ain’t you happy we will see human faces soon?” I asked.

“I am happy, provided we truly find them. I just don’ like… dis.'' He gestured vaguely at our jury-rigged craft.

“Why? This is your canoe after all. I just added a sail, that's all.”

“Oh, don’ mind the canoe itself. I paddled it up and down the river a thousand times. I just don’t trust it when it is powered by wind. What if it changes and flips us? We would surely drown!”

I stared at him.

“Are you saying you are afraid of water? You, a badass soldier?”I could not help but crack a tiny smirk.

“Not afraid,” he said, begrudgingly, “just… wary. If Allah wanted us to fly over the surface of the water, we would have hatched as ducks. This is unwise and dangerous, doubly so due to our shoddy and rushed design.”

“Shoddy? It's a fine bit of engineering, all things considered,” I patted the boom, which almost immediately fell out of alignment, and the sail started flapping like a panicked bird. Had to quickly tie it back together before the canoe wobbled itself apart.

“...ok, it's a bit shoddy, but all it needs to do is get us upriver without running us aground. We're not braving the Pacific here.”

It took us a few hours to reach the smattering of the isles that dotted the mouth of the delta. After some trial and error, we learned how to combine gentle angling of the boom with lots of paddle-work to circle the islands without capsizing our boat.

We haven’t seen any sign of humans, but we found plenty of life. Or rather, life found us. As we drew closer to the middle of the river, a pod of orcas burst out of the water behind us, spraying us with a wet mist. Baba immediately took both paddles and started clanking them together, right at the surface of the water, making godawful noise.

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“What are you doing? Don’t piss them off!”

“Trust me Jack, I encountered them many times. They are not aggressive but can crush our canoe all the same, out of curiosity, not malice. The noise scares them off!” he answered loudly, adding to the clamor.

“Did it occur to you that a canoe made of seal fur, out of all things, might, I dunno, attract the creatures that hunt seals?!” I yelled. He just stared at me, letting me take that point.

“Dat dey excellent point, Jack, let's discuss it once we safe and not in immediate danger!”

As it turned out, making all that clamor did chase them away. The killer whales passed us by, only rocking the canoe a little bit.

The first time I saw them, about a week earlier it was dark. I could barely make up more than the fins and the tips of their snouts. In full daylight though, I could appreciate how big they were.

The documentary shows I watched did not give them justice. The name killer whale was apt, for they were truly whale-sized, and would be easily able to kill us, or any other creature I encountered in this strange world.

Gently, without attracting their attention, we veered rightwise and away from the pod. Then we saw what the orcas were after. Their hunt had flushed out several sturgeons, each one as big as a crocodile. The panicking fish swarmed closer to the tiny islets and shallows, almost crawling through knee-deep water and the reeds to get away from their pursuers.

“Shame we don't have time to hunt. We could spear one of them down.” I said to Baba. “One fish that size could feed us for a month!”

Baba shook his head. “It's not that easy, Jack, I tried. They have scales as hard as rock. You have to spear them right in the gills or the belly to puncture them at all, and you can imagine how difficult that would be.”

“Besides,” he added, “they are too big to even haul away. I managed to kill one, once. But it was a pain to drag it to shore, and scavengers swarmed all over it immediately.”

“Were any of them sharks?" I asked.

“No, why?” he answered, confused.

“Oh, I just read it in a book once,” I said, “t’was about this guy who caught a giant fish, bigger than he could haul off, only to have sharks eat it away. It was called The Old Man and the Sea. That would make your story The Old Man and the River.”

Baba laughed, wagging his finger at me. ‘Hey, I'm not old, I'm middle-aged.”

“The silver in your beard suggests otherwise…”

“Oh no, no no, no,” he shook his head. “A man is not old until he is a grandfather or at least over fifty. And I'm barely forty nine! Can't say if I'm a grandfather yet, for without me around, my older son surely got into all kinds of trouble. Hopefully, not that kind of trouble that leads to being a father too early!”

“How old is he?” I was not sure If I wanted to ask him about family. It was a sore spot for both of us, separated from kids and wives we would never see again. On the other hand, this seemed like the perfect moment. Our spirits were high, from the excitement and hope of finding fellow humans.

“My older son, Ibi, that is, Ibrahim, ‘cause he is man now, not a little boy, like he insists, is fourteen.”

“Let me guess. He is taller than you expected, dumber than you wanted him to be, has more pimples that should be biologically possible, and a ridiculous wisp of a mustache?”

“Yes. As if you knew him personally. Then again, weren’t we all like that?” Baba laid back on the supply bags, and relaxed for the first time since we departed.

“True, true. Though In my case, I was spared the teen mustache. Mother Nature kept my face hairless until I was a grown man, and then, in a span of nary a year, forced me to grow fur all over. I have kept the beard since, because I met my future wife not long after, and she liked it.”

Baba scratched his impressive chin ornament. “My people believe that a beard is an outward sign of wisdom and maturity in a man.” Scratching further, he found remains of a dry fish in his facial hair and tossed the crumbs overboard. “But as far as I know the only wisdom that comes with having a beard is that you save on the razors.”

I scratched the wild scruff that covered my face, and the thinning bristle on my head. ”Well, there ain’t no barbers around here, so I guess we are both destined to be looking very wise and mature in the foreseeable future.”

I gently steered us rightwise, aiming to pass the atoll of tiny islets and sail towards the big, burned-out island closer to the middle of the river’s spread.

“You said your older son? Meaning you have more kids?” I asked.

“Yes,” he nodded enthusiastically. “Two daughters, Aisha and Fatima, and a younger son, Abu. And another child in the making, before I died and found myself here.”

He saw my surprised face.

“You Oybos and your prude ways! Children are the gift of Allah, to be cherished. The more the better! And,” he added smirking, “my wife is very, very pretty…”

“You got me beat on numbers here, Baba. I’ve got two boys, Staś and Michaś, and both are still small enough to ride on my shoulder.”

“Stahsh and Mikhash?” he tried to pronounce their names, but could not squeeze a slithering, rustling Slavic sound through his reverberating Nigerian accent. “Why are your folks’ names so difficult, Jahtzeeck?”

“Don’t even try to say it Baba, you sound like you are sneezing. They’re basically Stan and Mike.”

“And your wife?” he asked.

“Anna.”

“Huh. So you do have names that do not sound like a bag full of crickets. Anna? So, Hannah, a fine, proper name.” he nodded appreciatively.

“Yeah, a fine, proper name, ‘cause she is a fine, proper woman. Smart. And beautiful too. Not sure why he chose me then,” I pointed at my scruffy, unassuming self, who at the best of times could be described as passably average.

“Ah, God gave women an infinite capacity for pity and compassion towards us. Wives in particular, especially when they are mothers as well. I cannot guess why they put up with us!”

I measured him, silent for a while.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but you are not how I imagined a Muslim man, let alone an African Muslim.” I said.

“And you are not how I imagined a Pole, mostly because I never imagined any. All I knew about your folk is that the Christian Pope was one of yours, and that you eat pierogies, but for the life of mine I cannot say what those are.”

“Dumplings, Baba. Pierogies are a wonderful type of dumplings.” I stretched lazily in the canoe, daydreaming. “Some are filled with ground meat, others with cheese, or even fruit!”

“Oh, we have those! Dan wakes dey similar. Good chop. But we put boiled eggs in ‘em!”

I swallowed the saliva that my imagination pushed to the surface. “Let’s stop that Baba. This daydreaming will only make us homesick, especially since all we have to eat is dried herring, dried bream, and for variety, some dried perch.”

He sighed. “I'm thankful to the Most Merciful God that we have enough food to eat, but I'm afraid if I eat any more fish, I will turn into one of them penguins.” He picked up a strip of dry herring, looking at it with such a scowl as if it was coated in rat poison.

Finally, after a lot of meandering filled with banter we found the biggest island, the one that I set on fire only a few days ago, and the one nearby, where I left the supplies and the spare sail.

The supplies were gone. And in their place was another message from the mysterious Russian girl, repeating more or less the same as the first one, but with a big helpful arrow pointing towards the direction she sailed.

There was one problem, the arrow pointed downriver, without suggesting whether they went towards the right shore or the left shore.

Initially, I assumed the big, snow-white sail would be visible from afar, regardless of where it was. But what if they pulled it down? They could have used it for a tent or for clothing. I was sure they could not have sailed back to the shores of the hyena-infested meadows, but the alternatives were hardly better. What if they sailed into the maze of the swampland? Or worse, towards the peat bog, where the terrorbirds lived?

A reasonable person would be looking for dry, elevated land, away from treacherous marshes. Somewhere where dry wood for the shelter and the fire would be abundant.

But I knew from personal experience that being stranded in this weird world made a person act irrationally, either paralyzed with fear or overconfident.

“So where are we going, Captain?” Baba asked with a shrug.

“I think we're going to check each of the bigger islands one after another until we're back to the bend where the river gets narrow. If you don’t find them there, we're going to my place. Wherever they went, I doubt they would land back in the hyena territory, not after what happened there.”

“Hopefully,” Baba said, “they didn't make the mistake and sailed into the marshland. We could not follow them there. The canoe would not survive it.”

“Then, I guess we will circle between my base and yours, until we stumble upon them. Worst case scenario if that won't work, we might try to climb this giant sandy hill in the hyena territory. We won’t find them there, but it’s the highest vantage point after the cliffs. We might spot them from above.”

“You think this is wise?”Baba asked. “The two of us, with our slings and iron-tipped spears should be able to fend off a hyena or two. But if the pack is as big as you think it is, I don't know….”

We spent the rest of the day slowly paddling from one tiny islet to another. It was not until sundown that we finally found a sign of the people we were looking for, though it was not the sign I ever wished to find. Not again.

A tiny, sandy shallow sparsely covered in soggy seaweed and silt, with the unmistakable parallel trenches carved by my raft being dragged ashore. In the middle of it was a sight that crushed my hopes. A crimson splash of blood dotted with used bandages and tampons made of grass fiber.

Baba looked at it, and his face hardened into a grim scowl of a professional soldier. He kneeled and examined the grisly scene. “Judgin’ from different prints, dey at least three people. At least one of them very badly injured. Dead from blood loss, I get.“ He gestured at the rusty splash. ”Someone lost a lot of blood here. More than a man can lose and still live, ‘less it was a giant man with lots of blood to spare. But the prints are small, dis dey women or young boys.”

“But they tried to save them. They clearly did. look at the bandages they made. Looks like they changed them many times. And they took the injured person with them.”

“Or,” Baba countered, “They left the corpse and your water dogs ate it?”

I turned to him abruptly, fists clenched. He saw the fury in my eyes, and knew he crossed the line.

For all the similarities, we were different men from different worlds. He was a professional soldier. Seasoned and accustomed to the sight of violent death. He was also deeply religious, and thus not as much concerned about the end of a life, as I was.

A non-believer and a self-professed coward, I had no training to fall back on, no courage honed on the battlefield, nor faith to support me in a moment like this. Only the naked fear and rage at the indifferent cruelty of nature, that dealt with us like it did with every living creature, killing us as if our lives did not matter.

“I am sorry Jack.” he said, “That was uncalled for, and cruel of me to say. Forgive an old fool. Let's keep our hope. God is Merciful, even if this place is not.”

I stared at him for a second, and slumped to the ground, defeated. “What do we do? I know this mad chase was my idea, but you’re the soldier. I don’t have the faintest idea how to do that search’and’rescue thing, I assumed you do…”

He scanned the horizon, drumming his fingers on the shaft of the spear, like he often did when focusing. “You’ll hate to hear it, but I think we need to split.”

“You cannot be serious! Haven’t you just lectured me, not a day ago, about the suicidal danger of looking for them alone?”

He shrugged apologetically. “Sorry, Jack, but you misunderstood me. I meant that you going alone, would be suicidal. Mean no insult, abi? But dis a fact Im better in the woods than you are.” he waved away my protestations. “You know dis true. So let's do it different way. You will scout the river, back and forth, between this island and your base. Before that, you unload me at the woodland shore, and I will search for them in the forest.”

“What if something attacks you? You’d be alone with nothing but a stick to defend yourself!” I pointed at his chert-tipped spear.

“What of it? I survived in dis place for over half of a year. I hid and ran from beasts, and I killed some. E be well, Jack. God shielded me from death for all these months, surely would support me when I'm on a mission to save innocents!”

“I just…” I stuttered, “...just don’t want to be all alone again. Selfish, I know, but I hate you to get eaten by some fucking sabertooth monster, and me going back to being all by myself!”

He laughed and clasped my shoulder with his bear-like paw.

“I cannot die yet, I haven’t taught you how to set fish traps, and your trident work needs refinement! Besides, It seems to me, you are warming up to the idea of accepting Allah as your God, and Muhammad as his holy Prophet. I would hate to die before you come around. There dey no one to teach you the Verses then!”

I scowled with fake indignation. “Leave my precious atheism alone, Baba. Your sad devotion to that ancient religion has not helped you change my mind even a little bit!”

“I find your lack of faith… interestingly challenging.” he mis-quoted back, grinning.

“Huh, never took you for a Star Wars fan. Doesn’t your faith forbid it? And how come you even saw it, between all that soldiering, prayer and selling mangos?”

“Papayas, Jack,” he corrected me. “I sold papayas. And you’d be surprised how close Quranic Islam is to the Light Side of the Force.” he said, crawling back onto the canoe, and grabbing my iron-headed spear.

“So you consider yourself a Jedi now?” I pushed our makeshift sailboat off the shallow, and vaulted onboard.

“Eh,” he made a so-so face. “Maybe philosophically, but I would never wear flowing robes in combat, nor pick up a sword to fight with, even a lightsaber.” He patted my spear that he just stolen. “Spear is a superior weapon for dis uncivilized place.”

We left it on that note and haven't exchanged any more words. When we reached the rightwise shore, Baba jumped off the raft and started towards the woods. It seemed eerily like releasing a tiger back into the wilderness. The moment he reached the edge of the bushes, it was as if some switch was flipped inside him. He transformed from the smiling, bearded, fatherly-looking teddy bear of a man into a dangerous stalking predator, moving with a soundless, leonine grace.

We haven't said any more goodbyes to each other.

There was no point.

He gave me a last nod, and merged with the bushes, his green-gray coat indistinguishable from the ocean of leafy darkness that swallowed him.

I had no doubt now that he would easily survive. It immediately reminded me of the sheer gulf of skill between us. He was a survivor by nature, I was a survivor by chance. Suddenly, the woods in front of me and the river behind me seemed darker, and far more sinister.

Living just a few days in the company of another human being made me lose all my ignorant confidence in my skills. Scowling in quiet desperation, I turned the canoe and paddled upstream. Even though I've had the wind to my back, it took me ages to reach my destination. The first sign that something was strange, was that the candle I left at the end of my jetty was lit, and joined by several others. And right next to it was the most beautiful sight, my raft! Her sail was gone, and it was dragged halfway onto the shore through the reeds.

Which meant the survivors had reached my camp!

I shot forward, paddling like a loon. I didn't even slow down reaching the fallen pine, just crashed into it at ramming speed. The canoe slipped sideways, spilling me into the water. I tore off the sail and used it to tie the canoe to the branches though I didn't care much if it sank or got washed away. I guess Baba would have to deal with it and make a new one.

I sprinted towards the shore, slipping and tripping in the gloom, and almost impaling myself on my own defensive spikes. The gate was unlocked, so I kicked it open and looked around. The camp was eerily quiet, save for the slithering shadows of my otters crowding around my hut, and growling quietly. Their eyes shone like nickels in the dark, which I used to see as menacing, but now considered cute. I pushed through their swarming horde, cuddling their heads, and fending off sloppy kisses.

There was a light shining under my hut's door!

"Hello! Oh my - " I yelled slamming the door open.

I did not finish, because all the air was pushed out of my lungs when someone stabbed a spear into my chest.