“Helloooo!!” I yelled at the top of my lungs, scaring some reed warblers. “Anybody here?!”

I have been paddling downstream, along the shore, stopping at any sign of possible human presence. But if the people I have been chasing were really here, and if they even went that way instead of up the river, they must have gone far enough to disappear in the afternoon mists.

Or, I thought grimly, they just drowned. The river might have been sluggish, but it was deep, and broad and the shores were overgrown to the point where it would be next to impossible to get back on land.

The moment I had that thought, I saw a corpse in the distance, bobbing on the waves. I sped up, paddling like mad in its direction, and barely managed to drop, anchor, and stop before I passed it.

To my relief, it was not a human body, but a dead hyena. I examined it and frowned. This one was likely drowned, as it had no wounds from my spear, or otter teeth, or from being run over with my raft. It could not be one of my kills, which led to one possibility.

The humans whom I was trying to find were not done fighting back!

I was at a loss for what to do. There was no sign of them getting to shore anywhere. Nor were they visible on the water, as far as I could see. If they were swimming, I should have caught up to them long ago, my raft being much faster. If they landed somehow, and I sailed past them, they would be again at the mercy of the hyenas or another local nasty. If they went towards the river delta, they would disappear into the labyrinth of channels, small islands, and shrub-covered marshes stretching toward the horizon, and it would be impossible for me to find them, or for them to find me.

I kept shouting but got no response from the shore. At least no human response, but plenty of bird cries of various pitches, and a loud, uncomfortably leonine moan that I was sure emerged from the throat of something I would not like to encounter.

That made my choice for me. I decided to sail to the throat of the funnel where the river spread, and search for them there. As much as it pained me to admit it, I was not willing to risk my life going any further. My tiny craft with a makeshift sail and one functional paddle would not be good enough to get back out of that watery maze, against the twisting currents. Even now, my only hope was that the wind would not change and allow me to return to my camp. If the wind was against me, and paddling upstream was not a realistic option, I would have to walk back on foot, and in this land of monsters, this was not a survivable option.

It was almost sunrise when I finally gave up on my search. I sailed into the funnel as far as I dared, meandering around small islands and clumps of half-submerged willows that made their best impression of mangroves. I was certain that the river must be falling into a sea. In the distance, I saw it spread into a wide bay, flanked by white, rocky cliffs.

At last, I knew that this Earth was not a copy of mine. In my world, the Baltic Sea was much further away, and certainly not banked with stony cliffs. In this world, it looked more as if some unseen force slammed the Cliffs of Dover into the mouth of the Dnieper River leaving only a gap a few kilometers wide, and the water, unable to pass into the sea easily enough, spread sideways forming all kinds of marshland known to science. The right-side bank, where I landed, had a slightly higher elevation, so it was covered in thick woodland. The left-side bank, being lower, looked like a patchwork of swamps, broken by the heads of incongruously dry and sandy hills, grassy meadows, and further towards the bay, outcrops of gray and white rock.

The sight reminded me again what wild in the word wilderness stands for. I spent my young years camping in local woods, but these were carefully designed polite affairs with nature, not that different from inner city parks. This world was just chaos, an explosion of geography and rapacious green growth that obscured the horizon.

In other words, it was a wild mess where one could easily hide a battleship, let alone a couple of human swimmers or trekkers. I could not possibly find them, so I had to help them find me.

I considered my options. How should I make my presence known? Shouting did not seem to work. I hadn't heard anyone respond before my throat got too sore to utter more than a croak. Instead, I started banging the oar against the raft to make noise. The problem was, however, that the sound carried all too well over the water and thus became a directionless echo. It would let them know I existed but not to where I was.

The sun was setting down, bathing the river in an orange glow.

That gave me an idea. If I started a big fire that could, hopefully, burn through the night, it would be visible from many kilometers away, being the only bright spot on the horizon. And during the day, the rising smoke would be an obvious sign of human presence.

Meandering around the delta, I found two islands that suited my purpose perfectly. One was a sandy patch covered in dune grass. Another, a few hundred paces away, was as big as a mall parking lot, and covered in dry, sickly-looking willows. Willows, I knew from experience, made perfect kindling.

First, I unloaded my raft, clearing it of everything except for the oar and one spear. I rammed the gondolier’s pole into the sand, and tied the tent tarp to it, making a giant white flag that started to billow in the wind. The rest of my supplies, the food, the drinkable water, pine pitch torches and candles, spare spears, and bundles of rope, I piled underneath it. Once that was done, I took a chunk of pitch to use like a crayon and set to write a message on the flag.

I was suddenly stumped, not knowing what to write. All those days I was mulling in my head what to say to the first human being I would see, but now I had no idea. Finally, I wrote,

YOU ARE NOT ALONE. HELP IS CLOSE. GO UP THE RIVER. LOOK FOR THE LIGHT.

After some pause, I added, TRUST THE OTTERS THEY ARE FRIENDLY. Then I went to the other nearby island and made sure my guiding light would be as visible as possible.

I set the whole damn island on fire.

As expected, the dry willows burst into flames like fireworks. It took only a few minutes with the firebow and a few gentle blows on the smoldering kindling and the laws of thermodynamics did the rest. For once, I could see how fast a wildfire spreads. It consumed the entire Island in less than an hour, sending flames three stories high, and creating a column of smoke that could be seen from kilometers away.

And then I waited. And waited. And waited some more. I shouted and banged the oar against the raft. I even made a reed whistle to make a shrill noise that would carry further. And when the morning came, I took the raft and circled the area, keeping the smoldering island in sight.

Nobody came. Nobody shouted for help or made any noise at all.

Well, the ducks did.

The delta was chock-full of them, as well as countless species of waterfowl and long-beaked wading birds I could not name. Some looked vaguely familiar, some looked as if Mother Nature designed them while drunk. All made annoying clamor, which drowned my shouts in background noise.

“Shut up!” I screamed hoarsely at the noisy sky. “Im on a rescue mission, you damn pests!”

As could be expected, they kept their infernal quacking, and possibly even raised the pitch to mock me.

I spent the rest of the day circling the burning island, making noise, and occasionally trying to spear fish for dinner. My hunting spear was useless for that, with its broad-leafed blade, so I made a makeshift trident out of a willow branch. I wished I remembered to take my fishing rod! trying to stab a fish lurking in murky water was about as easy as hitting a dart bullseye in a dark room.

The few times I did catch something, I wish I missed it.

The fish of the delta were not the politely normal species I saw upriver, but weird prehistoric abominations who seemed undecided about what species of fish they were supposed to be, and if they really wanted to be fish in the first place. At least one looked like I caught it halfway evolving into a newt. Another two were catfish, but only on technicality, because they were covered in slimy, spiky, and warty armor that made me drop them back into the water without even trying to touch them, as they would undoubtedly be poisonous, venomous, and icky all over. Finally, I caught a big eel, or perhaps a sweetwater moray, if such things existed. It was almost normal looking, if not for a double row of teeth that made it look like a baby xenomorph. I was worried it could have been poisonous as well, but decided to risk it.

It was surprisingly delicious.

In the meantime, the big island burned to the ground, and now only a thin strip of smoke trailed from it. I knew It would soon no longer be a visible mark, except for someone already sailing by.

I made a decision then. I would move towards the bay, hopping from one island to another, and starting fires on them. if the survivors were further downstream, they would see me eventually. If not, I would reach the cliffs, climb on top of one, and set another fire on an elevated ground where it would be even more visible. If even that failed, I would paddle back along the path of burned-down islands, and along the opposite shore until I reached the willow-overgrown bend where I fought the pig.

If I still haven’t found anyone… then they were either dead or as good as dead.

I went back to the supplies cache to take two of the sweetwater jars. I reasoned that the survivors could do without them, but I was going into a saltwater bay where drinking water would be scarce.

Even though the sun was setting, I decided to move on. With every hour I dawdled, the chances of finding the others became lower and lower. If indeed they were still alive, or, in fact, if they existed at all. After all, the screams and the human footprints I supposedly found, could have been just hallucinations brought by my desperate imagination and loneliness.

I almost slapped myself for thinking that.

Hammer, nail, hammer, nail, focus on the problems you can solve. That was the mantra. Doubting my sanity would not solve anything. Worst case scenario, I wouldn't find anyone, but at least I would explore the seaside, where I could look for signs of civilization. And even if that search proved fruitless, then, at the very least I would get some salt that I desperately needed. And not just for food preservation. I did not know how badly a man can crave salt, until I had to live two months without it. I would gladly wrestle Logan the Wolverine for a salty cracker.

Nightfall caught me about halfway towards the mouth of the bay flanked on both sides by craggy cliff walls. I left a string of burning islands behind me, they shone in the dark distance like a constellation of dim stars. The campfire I set on the final island was modest in comparison, only big enough to discourage mosquitoes, roast some crayfish for supper, and warm my weary bones. The dark waters of the bay before me looked even less inviting than the labyrinthine maze of the river delta. In the faint moonlight, I could see the waves and splashes made by things lurking under the surface.

Big things.

And not the otters I was accustomed to. I saw silhouettes of triangular fins and crescent-shaped tails. At least in one case, the distance between the fin and the tail was longer than my raft. Those could have been sharks, or maybe just harmless sturgeons, but I was not willing to sail into the night to check it. That was not the nicest thing to think about before sleep.

Morning came, and I had a rather rude and unpleasant awakening. I did not consider that being this close to the sea, the islands at the entry to the bay would be susceptible to tides. It was barely past sunrise when my island was submerged about a finger-width into the water, which smothered my fire and soaked me head to heels.

Worse still, the tide, together with the wind still blowing steadily inland, meant I had a hard time paddling further into the bay. The river current that pushed me forward the previous day was too sluggish to overcome the tide, and at best, the two forces stalemated, leaving me adrift. I managed to hop a few islands forward and ran out of strength. My muscles were killing me, and I still saw no sign of people.

I decided I needed to paddle to the shore instead. If the survivors went with the current this far, they surely did the same, rather than bravely swimming into the open bay. Even putting aside the mysterious giant fish lurking in it, this would be a dangerous thing to do, even for an experienced swimmer. Further into the bay, I could see waves rolling, and if I could see them from such a distance, then up-close they would be powerful enough to capsize my dinky little raft, not to mention drown a swimmer.

Getting to dry land was easier said than done though. The entire left, well, I suppose South-Western shore of the river was not really land, as much as it was the river simply turning into overgrown marshland that looked less sailable as I went westward until it vanished under impassable, mosquito-ridden growth. I could neither paddle through nor walk through it. At least I knew the survivors could not have possibly landed there, because they would likely still be stuck in the muck, up to the waist in silty water and rotten detritus.

After a few hours, I managed to paddle towards the western cliff. Or maybe a cliff was not the right word here, I was never good with geography. It was a tiny mountain range stuck between the sea and the marshlands, with the bay being the only opening for the river to fall into.

I managed to push the raft onto a grassy shore and moor it to a rock outcropping. Up close, the rocks made even less sense, to my limited understanding of natural processes. They were slate, though very light gray, and instead of being stacked in horizontal layers, they stuck out of the ground at an odd angle. It looked a bit as if some giants built a wall to separate the sea and the land, and the poorly designed wall fell inwards onto the marshes. The resulting mess looked eerily like collapsed human infrastructure, with countless nooks and caves, and weirdly angular stairways going in random directions. Even a few minutes into my explorations, I saw several natural shelters that would make for a better place to live than my painstakingly built hut. Yet, I knew I was not going to move here, so far away from my duplicators.

Regardless, I decided to pack a few nearly rectangular sheets of slate onto my raft. These, when duplicated, would make better building material than any bricks I could make.

The next challenge I faced was climbing up the rocky slope. The spilled slate looked deceptively like easily climbable stairways, but that was an illusion. The steps were often more than a meter tall, at odd angles, and most stairways led to nowhere, ending obruptly. Plus, of course, I was still lame. My leg did not hurt as much, but the thigh muscle was weak and the hip joint wobbly, giving me a drunk’s gait even on flat surfaces.

In the end, I devised the least dignified, but safe and relatively painless way to go up. Instead of relying on my bad leg, I used the spear to push myself up, then pushed my ass onto the next rock.

As usual, I underestimated the difficulty of the challenge and had to take several breaks so that the burning rage in my muscles would subside. But I did manage to reach the top before sunrise. Only looking down from it I realized that what looked like a mountain from below, must have been not twice as tall as the apartment building I used to live in. I could easily see my raft below.

Carefully, I approached the opposite end of the rocky hill. On its sea-facing side, it ended with an abrupt cliff, where the slate, undercut by the waves, fell off into the water. I backed off from the edge. The vertical spalls in the rock made it look like it could crack and fall off at any minute, adding to the rock debris below the waves.

The sight over the bay-side was a little bit less terrifying. The falling rocks had formed a breakwater along the bottom of the cliff, that in theory could be used to pass the mouth of the bay on foot and go around the cliff if one so desired.

I certainly did not desire to try, because, on closer inspection, the rocky beach was littered with creatures I hadn’t seen before. They looked as if someone crossed a penguin with a cormorant, slender flightless birds with long beaks, and flippers for wings. Only then did I realize that their size, compared to the apparent size of my raft as seen from this height, meant that even the smallest of them was easily my height.

The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

I had enough adventures with giant birds for a lifetime, so I was not keen on getting anywhere close to those 'penguins'. My conviction was further reinforced when I saw a giant dark shape lurking in the water near them. It swam past lazily, making them burst out of the water and hide on the jutting rocks. Whatever creature could easily scare the crap out of two meters tall penguins with swords for beaks, was scary enough for me to forgo any ideas of sea voyages for a time. I would need a bigger boat first.

The cliff that flanked the river delta on the opposite end was close enough that I could make out that it had a much wider and longer breakwater belt around it, and thus, a bigger beach. Things swarmed all over it. I could not see it clearly, but these were not vertical animals like the penguins, but giant gray and brown shapes that seemed to crawl in and out of the water. Seals maybe?

Still, no humans. I turned towards the land and scanned the horizon for anything that could suggest they landed somewhere in the marshes, or along the slope.

Nothing. No moving figures on land, no swimmers braving the waves, and no signs of smoke, not that I expected any. I did not lose hope yet, it was simply time for the next part of my plan.

Fire.

Of course, I quickly realized, there was no firewood on top of a seaside cliff, as predictably it was bereft of trees. All the available driftwood was about a hundred meters below me, among the penguins. But surprisingly, the rocks hid a source of fuel between the cracks. Lots, and lots of abandoned bird’s nests, that seemed to be woven out of grass and caked with dried guano.

I decided not to start a fire right away until I collected enough of the icky, uh…fuel to last the entire night. I was, after all, not going to prance around a treacherous rock in the dark, looking for more bird shit cakes.

Right before sundown, I had a heap of the vile stuff that reeked like manure and rancid fish oil. Despite its smell though, it was perfect for my purpose, being easily flammable. I did not have to work with the bow drill and tinder much, because even the smallest ember would find the dry grass and guano appetizing and burst into a flame.

I built a small bonfire right at the bay-side edge. The nests burnt with the weird blue and yellow flame, not unlike driftwood, and sent a streak of oily smoke upwards. The fire did not have to be big, as it would be easily visible from all directions and at great distances, especially after dark.

And then… nothing.

I waited and waited, and waited some more. I used the rest of the waning daylight to gather more nests for the fire. I shouted, banged rocks together, and blowed the shrill reed whistle I made earlier. Not that I thought sound would carry better than light, but I simply had no better idea of what to do. Bored, I decided to mess with the penguins by tossing pebbles at them from high up. I startled them, and they made godawful noise, that sounded like neither penguins or cormorants they resembled, but angry swans.

Having purged all my anger against giant birds out of the system, left me with nothing else to do, which was a state I hated. Whenever my hands were idle, my mind would start to wonder. It has been a long while since I heard the scream. Even if these people managed to escape the clutches of the hyenas and haven't drowned, they still could have died. This land was full of monsters and so was the river. Ironically the seaside, which I hoped could harbor some form of civilization, was full of predators and surrounded by treacherous swamps, sinkholes, inedible plants, and creepy, possibly venomous creatures. I only survived in this world because I happened to appear in this reality right next to a cornucopia of infinite food and supplies. I would have certainly died otherwise if not to predators, then simply due to food poisoning, exposure, and inevitable injuries. Anyone who didn't have duplicators on hand would have a lifespan measured in days.

Of course, I could not discount the possibility that these people were not castaways like me, but members of the local tribes native to this place. But if that was the case, what were they doing in the middle of untamed wilderness, facing against hyenas? Surely people who evolved to live in this place would have more common sense than to trek through dangerous forests.

On the other hand, they did manage to kill at least one hyena. I wished I had more sense and checked how they did it. If I found a bullet hole or even an arrow sticking out of the animal I would have much more optimism about their chances. But intellectual honesty demanded that I should focus on the direst scenario, that they were stranded here just like I was, had no real weaponry to speak of, and needed urgent help.

Unlucky, the only help available around here was Yours Truly, lame-legged, terrified, half-insane, malnourished middle-aged man on a dinky little raft. The whole rescue operation seemed half-baked now. Trying to find people lost in this place was harder than finding a needle in a haystack because a needle would be unlikely to be eaten by local fauna before I found it.

And even if I did find them, what then? My raft was too small to take more than one extra person, maybe two, and even with that, sailing upstream back to my camp would require favorable winds which I could not guarantee. Even sailing back to the island where I left the supplies would be hard. It was quite possible that in this mad chase I have stranded myself away from my camp and the only means of survival. What an ironic fate to be marooned in another world like fucking Robinson Crusoe only to maroon myself even worse by my own actions.

I was about to lose hope, and half wished I had a big bottle of vodka with me to drown my sorrows.

And then, gazing across the bay, I saw the most beautiful sight.

A bright orange glow of another campfire just like mine.

For a few seconds, I just stood there, mouth agape, unable to believe my own eyes. I started shouting, I do not remember what, probably raw vowels of childlike happiness of seeing the sign of another person. I screamed. I blew my whistle. I danced and waved my arms around, almost falling down the cliff in the process, even though the other person could not have seen me in the dark.

I blew the fire brighter and added more fuel.

Whoever it was on the other end of the cliff did the same, their dot of light grew larger. I could not hear them shouting anything and had to assume they hadn't heard me either. The constant murmur of the waves crashing against the breakwater drowned every other sound.

But they did see my fire. I had to use that to send a message. I did not know any fancy way to send fire signals but I knew one thing very well from my childhood in the Scouts.

The goddamned Morse Code.

I took my shirt off and used it as a screen, blocking the light of the fire and showing it again to create a signal. It was unlikely the human on the opposite end of the bay understood Morse Code but they would surely understand I was trying to communicate something.

I had to clear and focus my mind to recall the dots and dashes that stood for different letters, but I started with something that would be most likely to be known to a stranger.

“SOS”

Save Our Souls.

The universal signal for help. I kept signaling it over and over. Minutes passed. Finally, right when I was starting to think that the other fire was just a hallucination, they started sending a response. A response that immediately confused me.

“NO GO AWAY”

“WHY” I signaled. Maybe I was misreading their signals, maybe they were not very good at using Morse, or maybe this was just a trick of the light?

“NO SOS GO AWAY DEMON”

I was stumped. What the hell was that supposed to mean? Was the person on the other end insane? They then kept repeating go away demon, over and over again. But why? Who in the right mind would refuse help in this hellhole?

“YOU MISTAKEN I AM HUMAN I WANT HELP YOU WE MUST MEET”

There was a pause. They took a long time to respond.

“NO THIS IS LIE DEMONS LIE BE GONE IN ALLAH NAME”

I shouted in frustration. Of all the possibilities, the one human I found in this damned place turned out to be a loon, and a religious one at that. Them being likely Muslim, made things even more awkward. I had some limited experience arguing with Catholics, but I knew very little about Islam. How do I convince them I'm not a demon, let alone a demon from religion I didn't know?

I was running out of fuel, and could not signal for much longer anyway. Dealing with crazy, I decided to employ crazy logic myself.

“NOT DEMON DEMONS DO NOT USE MORSE CODE ONLY HUMANS CAN”

Of course, my interlocutor was not buying it, but at least they responded immediately.

I had them hooked.

“DEVIL SPEAK MANY TONGUE NOT FOOL ME BE GONE NO MORE TORMENT I SUBMIT TO ALLAH ONLY”

Alrighty then. I laughed a mirthless laugh. I was a dirty old atheist all my life, and knew next to nothing about theology, let alone any hypothetical relationship between devils and the Morse Code in Islamic lore. I needed another angle, as long as they were still willing to talk to me. Had they just decided to quit and extinguish their fire, it would be all in vain. Finding survivors here was a near-impossible task, let alone finding someone who did not want to be found.

I needed to show I was a human, and a pious one at that, but not overdo it.

“I PRAISE GOD TOO” I lied. The response was so furious they managed to misspell the message.

“NO YOU LIE LILEILIE LIE GONWAY” There was no exclamation mark at the end, but I felt there would be several if they knew how to signal one.

What now, genius? I asked myself. Any bright ideas to make that pious, and clearly disturbed person even more pissed? On the other hand, if they truly wanted me to go away, why did they keep responding? If I could only get to them, not just across the bay, but across the gulf of culture and religion! I knew nothing about them, and pretty much nothing about their faith…

Wait.

I maybe knew nothing about the Muslim faith itself, but I knew one quote by heart. It was from one of my favorite movies, the Thirteenth Warrior. There was a sentence that the movie showed to be of ritual significance to Muslims, and I hoped that the quote was correct and that I remembered it correctly as well because if not, it would likely end the conversation forever.

I took a moment to write it down on a piece of rock with a charred bird bone, then translate it to Morse, then memorize the dots and dashes. These were not the words I could afford to fumble with misspellings.

“I DECLARE THERE IS NO GOD BUT ALLAH AND MUHAMMAD IS HIS PROPHET”

I really hoped I did not screw it up. Was it Muhammad or Muhamad? Mohammad? Mahomed? Anyway, I hoped they would at least believe I’m a human, because an evil demon would not recite their declaration of faith.

Or, so I hoped.

They took a long, long time to respond. My fire was dying out, and I was torn between the need to look for more fuel, and the necessity to stare at the distant cliff, waiting for the dot of fire to start blinking again. When the response arrived, it was such a torrent of dots and dashes I missed the beginning of it, and had to scramble to make sense of the rest.

“PEACE BE UPON HIM MNYBE YOU NOT LIE COM…?... WILL FIND TRUTS IF YU LIE I KILL YOU I ACCEPT TORMEK FOR SIN I ACCEPT NOT DECEIT”

Bait. Hook. Aaaand gotcha.

If I read them right, they provisionally accepted my humanity, except they would kill me if I proved to be a deceitful demon. Can you kill demons anyway? I did not look especially demonic, if anything, I looked rather pitiful, even armed with a spear.

They said they accept torment, but not deceit, which made me think maybe they thought this place was Hell, where they are supposed to be tormented… but in a honest way? I had no idea if there was even Hell in Islam, but this was my best guess. And frankly, I could not say for sure they were wrong about us being in Hell. It was a physics-defying realm full of monsters, so maybe I was the crazy one, trying to make scientific sense out of the situation, and the believer was correct?

“I AM COMING STAY THERE” I signed, with my fire nearly dead, barely a collection of dim embers. They did see it anyway.

“AGREE COME”

I was ecstatic for about twenty seconds, until I realized that the route to my new friend was down a treacherous rocky slope, across a bay filled with dangerous twisting currents and mysterious sea monsters, then up another slope, and all of that in pitch-black darkness.

I blew at what was left of the embers and lit a torch of them. I cursed myself for only taking one torch with me up the hill, the rest was on the raft. I just hoped it would last me long enough. I was not keen on stumbling in the dark and breaking my neck.

Getting down with a spear in one hand and the torch in another was a unique challenge. I ended up sliding down on my butt most of the way, wishing I had put on several more pairs of pants to cushion my behind.

I barely managed to find the raft before the torch went out. I lit another and tied it to the prow so that it would light the way.

Even with it, visibility was still very poor. The night was dark, which benefited me when I was signaling with the bonfire, but on the open water, I lost all sense of direction, especially once both bonfires winked out. As I sailed into the night, I assumed that the cliff and the other survivor were somewhere on my eleven o’clock. Therefore, I thought, I needed to take a sharp turn to the right, to my three o’clock and then back into the delta, otherwise, the wind in my sail would be insufficient to overcome the current and I would be pushed into the open sea where death awaited. Of course, my calculations could have been completely wrong because I based them on a high school level of understanding of physics, and pitifully short experience with actual sailing. But fuck it, I had beaten worse odds when I fought the feathered dinosaur and won.

With only one measly torch to light the way, and a moonless, starless sky above me, it felt like I was sailing through interstellar space. The water was as black as the sky, and whatever was lurking below the surface, it was invisible.

I had a faint hope that the creatures of the sea would be uninterested in me, but I was soon proven wrong. Something bumped the bottom of my raft, making it spin. I frantically turned the rudder and pulled at the rope tied to the boom, but in my panic, I overcorrected, nearly capsizing the raft myself.

The only reason I did not flip the craft and fell over the board was that I hit another invisible creature, which reacted by buckling like a scared horse.

Desperate, I flipped the boom to point straight up so that the sail would be folded on itself, and hugged the mast. The things under the water kept bumping and slapping my tiny craft back and forth with such a force that most of my carefully stowed supplies were flung overboard and I nearly joined them.

Miraculously, despite the splashing and shaking my torch was not extinguished. Blinded by salty water, I felt another torch that almost rolled off the raft and hit me in the leg. I lit it, rose to my knees, and lifted the torch up to at least be able to see my assailants.

I saw a giant black fin, nearly half as long as I was tall, and for a terrifying second I thought, it must have been a giant shark, far greater than any shark ever ought to be.

Then, the creature surfaced and the black fin was joined by an equally giant black and white head that sprayed a small gazer of water out of its blowhole.

An orca.

A killer whale. I was relieved. Killer whales, despite their fearsome name, were not known to be especially aggressive towards humans. Which was not the same as saying I was safe in this situation, because the pod of orcas could easily flip or destroy my raft, simply by playing rough with it.

As I waved the torch around. I saw more black fins, and more black shapes pushing through the waves, like submarines made of muscle. They weren't hunting me but they were hunting something. I saw more commotion and splashes about thirty paces in front of me. I could not see what the orca had caught, but it seemed to be a giant creature, as well, and it fought back.

Maybe it was one of those scary penguins or one of those fish with crescent-shaped fins. One way or another, the orcas were not actively dangerous to me, while the things they hunted easily might have been, so in the grand scheme of things, I was glad to see the pod clearing my path.

The problem then, was of course that I had no idea where I was, except likely somewhere around halfway towards the other shore.

I pulled the sail up, hoping that the wind had not changed in the meantime, and was still blowing inland. After a tense half an hour or so, I found the proof that my course was more or less correct. I encountered a small sandbank covered in reeds and dune grass, with ripe bulrushes swaying in the wind. I threw an anchor on it to moor the raft and gathered as many cattails as I could pull out of the silt. Each one would only burn for a few minutes, making a poor torch, but still, it was better than being surrounded by darkness.

I examined what was left of my supplies. I had one jar of water, a single taffy bar, and most of my rope. The extra spears, hammers, and blankets were gone. I was down to one oar, and a damaged one at that, all of which meant that once I reached the other survivor, I would come pretty much empty-handed, and my chances of taking both of us back to my camp were rather diminished.

Just as I did the previous night, I set the small island on fire. The dry grass immediately burst into flames, illuminating the path in all directions. Looking around in its waning light confirmed my suspicions. I was more or less halfway to my destination, at the very edge of where the river fell into the bay. If I drifted any more portside, I would have missed the approachable shore completely and hit the rock debris of the breakwater, probably shattering my raft in the process and drowning. Or at the very least beaching among unknown creatures that could easily consider me a snack.

Desperate times call for desperate solutions. And in that case, the solution was advanced gymnastics. I splayed myself on the raft floor, holding the rudder with one foot, and leaning with my entire weight against the boom, while paddling frantically with both hands.

I fought to keep my raft strifeing eastward. Every once in a while, I would set a new bulrush on fire, to illuminate the way, and when it was about to go out, I would toss it forward, like a flare.

This briefly showed what was ahead, which unsurprisingly was just more of the same Inky black water. The progress was glacially slow, but finally, my prow slammed into a wall of reeds and plowed so far into it, that it beached itself securely with no need for an anchor. I dropped one anyway.

I crawled onto dry land, holding my dying torch in hand. Before it went off, I found a dead, rotten willow log, and tore it apart for kindling. Within minutes I had a new bonfire, and in its light, I saw I was only maybe a hundred paces away from the bottom of the rocky slope, which meant my fire was clearly visible to anyone on top of it.

The question was then, where was the other survivor?