Secret Water Read online

  “That you, Bridget?” said Susan. “Are you all right?”

  “Very all right,” said Bridget. “I was only making sure you were there.”

  John was last into his tent. Standing outside he listened. Dimly, far away, he could hear the slow murmur of the sea on the sands on the other side of the island. … No. … that must be farther still, where the open sea came in beyond that other creek. He listened to the birds. Far away, as the dark closed down, he saw a bright line of lights on the mainland to the north. He half thought he ought to keep awake this first night. Just in case. But, after all, there was nothing against getting into his sleeping bag. He could lie awake in it, ready to jump up. Tomorrow they must explore the island. … Hullo. That was Titty whispering. “John.”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s about Nancy’s message. We never answered it.”

  “We couldn’t,” said John. “It’d be rather beastly to tell them we’ve started another adventure already, when they’re all by themselves without even the D’s.”

  “Whatever Nancy’s doing can’t be as good as this,” said Titty. “I wish they were here.”

  “So do I,” said John. “But we can’t help it. Good night.”

  “Good night.”

  An hour later John woke. The fire had gone out. The hurricane lantern was burning. He could see the light of it through the thin canvas of his tent. He remembered that he was in charge, in charge of a party of explorers marooned on a strange and desert island. He wriggled out of his sleeping bag, crept out and stood up outside, in the cool night. The camp was silent. The birds had quietened down. He heard an owl somewhere on the mainland. … If that was the mainland over there. He crawled back into his tent, wriggled into his sleeping bag, and, with the torch, looked at the blank map Daddy had made. There seemed to be water almost everywhere. He found his eyes closed and the torch still lit. How long had he been using the battery all for nothing? He put it out and was asleep once more.

  CHAPTER VI

  FIRST HINT OF SAVAGES

  BRIDGET STIRRED IN her sleeping bag.

  “Mummy,” she began, and suddenly remembered that Mummy was far away, and that she was really ship’s baby for the first time, sharing adventure with the others. She rolled over, sleeping bag and all. One side of the tent was pale with sunlight. She looked out through the open door. Wisps of white smoke were drifting past and there was a sharp smell of burning reeds. She wriggled out of her bag and crawled to the door. Smoke was pouring from the fire. A kettle hung in the smoke, and Susan was stooping beside the fire, poking sticks under the kettle. Flames licked up round the kettle and the smoke blew away. Titty and John were not to be seen, but Roger was hopping about at the edge of the little pond, first on one leg and then on the other, scrubbing himself with a towel and saying “Grrrrrr. Grrrrrr. … Jolly co … old.”

  “Well, you needn’t have gone right in,” she heard Susan say. “I only told you to get washed. There’s boiled water for your teeth in that mug.”

  “They’re chattering too fast to be brushed,” said Roger.

  “If they’re chattering as fast as that you won’t be able to eat any breakfast.”

  “Where’s John, and Titty?” asked Bridget.

  “Hullo, Bridgie. They’ve been up ages. They’ve gone off to get more wood. Hurry up now and get dressed. Breakfast’s nearly ready. Water in that bucket. And soap.”

  “Don’t forget to wash behind your ears,” said Roger.

  “Used they to say that to you?” said Bridget earnestly, and wondered why Roger grinned a little sheepishly and Susan laughed.

  Five minutes later Bridget, more or less washed and fully dressed, was explaining to Sinbad that he would have to wait till his soaked biscuits had cooled. Roger was watching the shadow of the meal-dial, with one eye on Susan, and a cleft stick with a “BREAKFAST” label all ready. Susan had opened a tin of condensed milk and mixed it with the right amount of water in a jug. Five plates heaped with cornflakes lay in a row. She had filled up the kettle with water and had begun to scramble seven eggs in the frying pan. She put the pan down for a moment.

  “Hold tight, Bridgie,” she said. “I’m just going to blow it.”

  She blew a piercing blast on her mate’s whistle, and Roger drove the “BREAKFAST” twig into the ground exactly in the shadow of the upright stick. “That’s two meals marked on the dial anyway,” he said.

  “Coming, coming,” sounded in the distance, and presently John and Titty, each with an armful of sticks, came into the camp.

  “I’ve put the breakfast peg in,” said Roger.

  “Good,” said John, and cut a notch in the flagstaff to mark the expedition’s second day.

  “The inland sea’s nearly dry,” said Titty. “We saw someone coming across in a horse and cart.”

  “The tide’s right out,” said John. “We’ve found why Daddy’s map makes Bridget Island look as if it was part of this. The line he’s drawn goes round outside the saltings. So it makes everything that’s joined at low water look like one.”

  “Our map’s going to show them separately,” said Titty. “We’re going to put in all the channels we can sail through when the tide’s up.”

  “We’re going to survey the dyke first,” said John. “Everything inside that’s always dry. And we’re going to make a good lot of copies of Daddy’s map, so that it won’t matter if we make a mess of them. We’ll keep Daddy’s own map in the camp, and mark in each bit as we do it. Titty’s going to do the explored bits in ink. Daddy’s done his blank map in pencil so that we can rub the lines out and our map’ll spread day by day till there are no unexplored parts left.”

  “Where do we begin?” asked Roger.

  “With breakfast,” said Susan.

  *

  “Morning!”

  Everybody jumped. The mixture of breakfast and plans had made them deaf and blind to everything else, and here, standing close above them, smiling down at them, was a tall man in corduroy breeches, muddy sea-boots and a rough tweed coat.

  “Good morning.”

  “Hostile or friendly?” whispered Roger, hoping Titty would hear him.

  The man held out a large bottle.

  “When your dad and mam were over to mine,”, he said, “I tell ’em there’s be milk to spare some days. This any good to you?”

  “Thank you very much,” said Susan. “We didn’t mean to bother you. We’ve brought lots of milk in tins. But this’ll be ever so much nicer. Would you like a cup of tea?”

  “I won’t say ‘No’,” said the man. “Up early this morning and over to the town. Just come back across the Wade.”

  “We saw your cart in the distance,” said Titty.

  “But isn’t it an island?” said Roger.

  “Not at low water it isn’t.”

  Susan had filled a mug and handed it up to him. She offered him the tin of lump sugar and his own bottle of milk. “You won’t like ours after the real milk,” she said.

  “Do you mean it’s really just part of the mainland?” said Roger. What was the good of an island, he was thinking, if people could get to it in carts?

  “Oh no. It’s an island all right. But when the tide’s out, there’s just one way you can get across if you follow the track over the mud. When the tide’s in you can’t get nowhere without no boat.”

  “That’s all right,” said Roger.

  The man emptied the mug down his throat. “If you keep to the dyke you’ll be all right,” he said. “But the saltings is treacherous. You might easy get in soft and not get out in a hurry. I’ve lost more’n one pair of boots myself. Friends of young Brading’s aren’t you? Well, if there’s anything I can do for you, let me know. But you’ll find it a dull place, I reckon. No life, if you know what I mean. Nobody about. Only you and them savages. And as for them savages …”

  “What savages?” asked Titty and Roger together.

  “Savages?” said Bridget.

  Susan stared. John opened his mout
h to speak but said nothing.

  “I tell your dad about ’em, and he say you’d deal with ’em all right.”

  “But what savages?” said Roger. “Where are they?”

  “Ain’t seen ’em for a few days,” said the man chuckling. “Not more’n one of ’em. But they might be back any day now. You’ll know ’em when you meet ’em. Well, so long.” He turned to go, and then, over his shoulder, he asked, “You ain’t got no dog? I meant to ask your dad.”

  “We’ve got a kitten,” said Bridget.

  “That’s all right,” said the man. “He won’t take to chasing buffaloes. … That’s what they called it. We had to make ’em send their dog away.” He waved his hand in a friendly manner and was gone, striding along the top of the dyke.

  “Gosh!” said Roger.

  “Savages!” said Titty.

  Bridget moved a little closer to Susan.

  “Well that settles it,” said John.

  “Settles what?” said Roger.

  “What we do this morning. You heard what he said about savages. The first thing we’ve got to do is to make sure the island’s clear of them. We’ll do the survey at the same time.”

  “Let’s start,” said Roger.

  But there was a good deal to be done first, while Susan was washing up and Titty and Roger were doing the wiping and Bridget was keeping Sinbad from licking the cleaned plates. “He’s trying to help, really,” she said, but Susan thought he’d be more use if he didn’t. John, putting a piece of paper on the top of Daddy’s blank map and then holding it up to the light was making a careful tracing. “We want about a dozen of them,” he said. “We’re sure to spoil a good many. And we ought each to have one to put down anything we discover.” Then, for the purpose of the survey, he made on a larger scale a copy of the big blob that on Daddy’s map showed the island on which they had landed. In the corner of it he made a copy of the compass rose that Daddy had drawn, using the parallel rulers to make sure it was pointing in the same direction. North, South, East and West were easy to mark, and then with a pair of dividers, he cut each half circle in half, and marked North-East, South-East, North-West and South-West. There really was some use in some of the things they taught at school. Then the quarter circles had to be cut in half in the same way, to get North-North-East, East-North-East and the rest of them.

  Then, when the washing up was finished, Roger was sent off to plant one of the bamboo surveying poles at the corner of the dyke to the south of the camp, while John and Titty went off with the map, the compass, a note-book and another bamboo to the corner north of the camp, where the dyke turned sharply eastwards near the mouth of Goblin Creek. Titty planted the post, and John took a bearing from one post to the other, which was easily seen with Roger standing beside it.

  “This bit of dyke’s about north by east. It’ll do for a base line. Now for the kraal.” He turned and faced inland towards the clump of small trees and the farm chimneys. “South-east. Got the parallel rulers.”

  Kneeling on the ground, he ruled a line between the two posts, and then ruled another across the middle of the island from the dot on the map that marked the northern post.

  “It’s somewhere on that line,” he said. “Come on. Now we’ll take a bearing of it from the other post.”

  The two surveyors hurried along the dyke to join Roger, who was getting a little tired of holding up his post, because he had not been able to drive it far enough in to make it stand by itself.

  John jammed it in, and then, compass in hand, looked across at the distant chimney of the farmhouse. “Bit south of east,” he said.

  “Let me try,” said Roger, put the compass on the ground for steadiness and straddled above it. “Jolly nearly east-south-east.”

  Titty tried. “It looks to me just between the two.”

  John looked carefully across the compass at the farm, agreed.

  “All right,” he said. “We’ll call it east by south. Now let’s try.” He made a mark on the compass rose halfway between east and east-south-east, and putting one edge of the rulers on the centre of the rose and on this mark, he used the other edge to draw a line east by south through the dot that marked the position of the southern post.

  “It’s all right,”, he said. “Look.”

  TAKING BEARINGS

  ROUGH MAP WITH BEARINGS

  The two lines crossed each other just about in the middle of the blob where Daddy had put a little square to make the farm.

  “Well, that’s the kraal done anyway,” he said.

  They went back to the camp and showed Susan what they had done.

  “It’s going to take an awful long time to map each island,” said Susan.

  “We needn’t do it all like that,” said John.

  “How are you going to do the marshes?”

  “Put them in afterwards,” said John. “But we’ve got to get the solid land done first. We’ll go along the dyke right round the island, taking a bearing wherever it turns a corner. It’s sure to be all dry land inside it.”

  “Any savages,” said Roger, “are bound to be on the dry.”

  “Have you seen any?” asked Bridget.

  “Not yet,” said Roger.

  “Ready to start?” asked John. “We’ll each take a bamboo.”

  “I’d better make some more copies of the blank map first,” said Titty.

  “Somebody ought to look after the camp,” said Susan, “if there really are people about.”

  There was a moment’s debate, and then it was decided that the main body of surveyors would follow the dyke north-about round the island and that Bridget, Sinbad and Titty would go the other way, not hurrying and giving Titty time to make some copies of the map before they started. With the whole island flat and open between the two parties, it was felt that prowling savages, if there were any, would stand a poor chance of not being seen.

  “If we see any savages near the camp,” said Bridget, “we’ll…”

  “Blow the mate’s whistle for us,” said Roger.

  “We won’t,” said Bridget. “We’ll send Sinbad at them like a tiger.”

  “His claws are pretty sharp,” said Roger. “But he’ll probably only purr at them.”

  “There won’t be anybody,” said Bridget. “Or will there?”

  “There can’t be anyone at this end of the island,” said John, “or we’d have seen them already. Do let’s get started.”

  The surveying party, with bamboo poles, compass, drawing board and instruments, was on its way.

  CHAPTER VII

  HOOFMARKS IN THE MUD

  TITTY FORGOT ABOUT savages while, one after another, she made a dozen copies of the blank map. It was not difficult, but it needed careful doing, and she enjoyed doing it, and, as usual when she had a pencil in her hand, could think of nothing else. But when eleven of those copies were piled in John’s tent, with his barometer for a paperweight, and she had taken the twelfth and had set out with Bridget and Sinbad to follow the dyke along the southern side of the island, she remembered the savages once more. Bridget, who had been keeping a look out, had not forgotten them for a moment.

  They had left the camp and were moving along the dyke very slowly at first, because Sinbad was not a quick explorer. He trotted this way and that in the short grass, wrinkling his nose and sniffing at things, and then going back and sniffing again. The only way to get him to come on was to walk backwards in front of him. “We’ll have to carry him if we’re going to get anywhere,” Titty said at last and hove him up in her arms.

  That was better. The Able-seaman and the ship’s baby were able to get going at human instead of kitten speed. They stopped now and then, and Bridget took the kitten for a minute or two while Titty, who found she could do quite well without surveying poles or the compass, dotted in the line of the dyke on the blank map, and with little scrabblings of her pencil showed the marshy saltings between the dyke and the channel that joined Goblin Creek to the inland sea. The tide was still too low to let
her see the water in the channel, but she could see where it was and dotted it in, to be marked properly when they were able to sail through it in the Wizard.

  “No savages yet?” said Bridget, when they had moved on and Titty, with the kitten on her shoulder, was looking across the island through the telescope.

  “No,” said Titty.

  “Where have the others got to by now?”

  “There’s somebody. Right away on the other side. They’ve got on jolly fast.”

  “May I look?”

  Titty handed over the telescope. It had not been easy to use it with the ship’s kitten thinking he would like to get down and do some more exploring on his own. Bridget put the telescope to her eye, and pushed it in and pulled it out.

  “It’s all blurry,” she said. “I can see better without it.”

  Far away on the skyline on the other side of the island small figures were moving, figures so small that it was hard to tell who was who.

  “If we wanted help, they’re too far to come,” said Bridget, looking at Titty’s face to see how she took this bit of news.

  “We shan’t want help,” said Titty. “Not three of us.” But she lowered her voice a little and looked warily round. Not a savage was in sight.

  They went on. Below the dyke the saltings were narrowing. Wide mudflats stretched beyond them, divided by a ribbon of water. On the landward side they could see the farm, sheltering among its trees, green meadowland and grazing cattle.

  “Well, there are plenty of buffaloes,” said Titty.

  “But no savages,” said Bridget. “Couldn’t we let Sinbad explore for a bit?”

  For some time now Sinbad had been more difficult to hold. He was down in a moment, crawling through the grass, pretending to pounce on a dry bit of reed that was lifted by the wind, and then shaking a paw almost angrily after stepping in the damp mud of the footpath.