The Voyage of the Frog: Chapters 6–11

He moved gingerly down into the cabin, standing once more in the water, and picked up a plastic cup floating in the garbage near the sail.

It tasted slightly brackish, and of fiberglass, but was sweet to him anyway and did much to cheer him.

His left shoulder still hurt—somehow working the pump with his right arm had aggravated the left one as well—and his head still hurt from the boom injury, but it wasn’t that so much as just plain exhaustion.

The air was so still that the sail hung without even gentle luffing—he had never seen it this calm, without even the customary soft breeze which Owen had told him came when the evening cool met with the day heat and caused air movement

Then he went topside again and hoisted the jib, which hung as dead as the main.

Around him the evening came down, the sun seeming to hurl itself from the western sky into the distant sea, the ocean cooling the air with the sun gone—though still without wind—until he felt the chill and went below for his jacket.

But his eyes kept closing, and finally he leaned against the cabin wall, sitting in the cockpit, and dozed again, and would have slept except that after a few minutes it became uncomfortable.

There was a horrible scraping sound, like somebody dragging a claw down the whole length of the boat, a sharp rake or claw, dragging it from one end to the other, and with the sudden roar of the scraping—in the boat it seemed to be magnified—the hull took a jolt that rocked the Frog to the side.

Maybe it was some kind of dream or hallucination. People did that sometimes. Hallucinated. He had been half asleep and had imagined the whole thing. That had to be it.

Kneeling on the edge of the cockpit seat, he hung onto the lifeline with his right hand and leaned out so that he was hanging over the water about a foot and a half above the surface, and tried peering down the side of the hull in the moonlight.

A line, no, there were four or five of them—scratches or gouges that went for about three feet along the side of the boat, curving sideways and down into the water.

The water detonated, surged up at his face, and a shark’s gaping maw, teeth flashing in the moonlight, triangular-death-razor-sharp teeth, blew up and out of the darkness, slashed past his face in a ripping sideways motion, and savagely raked down the side of the hull, slamming against the side of the boat so hard that it knocked the Frog sideways.

He studied the moon again. It was low and over on the left side of the boat, so that the light reflected from the moon bounced off the left side of the hull and down into the water.

Knowledge was for times like this, David thought, rolling with the shark attacks. To have knowledge makes anything endurable.

The shark stayed near the boat for three more hours, hitting at more and more infrequent intervals, until the moon was straight over the mast and no light reflected from the hull.

He retrieved it, found some thin line tangled in a ball, and untangled enough to cut and tie ten feet to the handle of the bucket.

There were long, lateral raking bruises down the sides of his ribs, blue-black lines that didn’t hurt but looked as if they should.

Nothing had changed, really, but in just a few seconds he had gone from normal healthy thinking to being ravenously hungry and thirsty, his tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth, his stomach caving in toward his backbone—all without reason.

There was also a strange, cone-shaped, extremely fine mesh net—a foot across at the mouth and tapering to a point, and perhaps eight feet long—that made no sense to David at all.

Under the left couch bunk he found a deflated rubber dinghy and a plastic paddle, but there was no other survival gear, no flares or signaling devices, on the boat.

Just as evening came down he found a package wrapped tightly in a garbage sack, tied tightly so the water hadn’t seeped inside.

It was dated almost a year and a half before, written clearly in Owen’s small, precise handwriting, and it told of sailing for a day alone over the deep trench that ran between the mainland of California and the island of Santa Rosa.

Sailed four hours in strait between mnlnd. & island.
Wind NW at twenty knots. Beautiful sun.

David felt strange reading it, as if he were prying somehow, but yet he couldn’t stop reading it either.

A high gray wall of steel that was the side of an immense oil tanker rumbled toward him, a rolling white froth at its bow.

Maybe if he held the tiller over he could turn the Frog. . . .

All in one motion she’d be gone. And he’d be gone. Caught in the giant screws of the tanker, churned to pieces.

Something came then, some instinct. In horror he watched the mast skid lower and still lower until he knew he had to do something, anything.

Some water splashed over the front, but not more than a few gallons, and it sluiced quickly off the sides.

“Hey!” he cupped his hands around his mouth and bellowed as loudly as he could.

The stern was coming now, roaring past, and the turbulence caused by the tanker’s screws bounced the Frog this way and that, though not as severely as he expected.

The movement made the flame flicker but it didn’t go out.

Worse, he was probably sleeping up there, just sleeping and not paying any attention to where he was going. Miserable person.

And what about the radar operator? He must have seen the Frog on his radar scope, right there in front of the ship.

Sleep came slowly, fought against the last bit of anger and self-pity and finally won, and David closed his eyes.