Free My Name Is Not Angelica by Scott O’Dell

to reach a level place. From here I could see the cliff at Mary Point rising straight up from the shore.
    At the top of the cliff, which was the color offresh blood, was a grove of palm trees. In their midst were huts, thatched with palm leaves. People moved about among the trees.
    This was the camp of the runaways. This was the camp that Konje ruled. I imagined I saw him. And toward dusk as a big fire started and people began to sing, I imagined that I heard his booming voice rise up above all the other voices, up and up to the stars.

19

    Night was coming fast. Higher up lay another ridge of coral. Between it and where I stood was a small valley. You could throw a stone from one side to the other. Trees were growing there that would give me shelter from the hot land wind that had begun to blow.
    In the darkness, I made my way through clumps of cactus to the bottom and spread my mat among the trees. The big drum at Mary Point had started to talk, but the rattling leaves and the shrieks that came from the caves drowned out all of the words.
    The wind died during the night. The sun rose in a cloudless sky. I was amazed to find that I was surrounded by fruit trees. Long ago, it seemed, when heavy rains fell, water had collected in the meadow and made soil where birdborne seeds could grow.
    I jumped to my feet and looked about at my little kingdom. I counted two coconut trees withclusters of nuts hanging from them, a banana tree with a bunch of green, finger-length bananas, and a breadfruit tree bearing six shriveled fruit. There was enough fruit to last for a month.
    Against the far side of the valley, on a flat place in the coral, I found African writings, symbols of the Aminas tribe. My idea about the fruit trees being planted by nature could be wrong. Runaway slaves might have lived here years ago and planted them.
    Water I had worried about. I could gather wood to build a fire to boil seawater, but I had nothing to collect the steam and let it form into water I could drink.
    I needn't have worried. Organ cactus and Turk's head cactus grew everywhere on the slopes around the meadow. After the spines were cut off or burned off and the cactus split open, there was water hidden away in the pulp. You would chew it and the water would seep out. Although it tasted like cooked feathers, still it quenched your thirst.
    A thought took my breath away. As I looked around at the fruit trees and the cactus, I saw that I would have enough to live on for weeks. With the fish I caught there would be more than enough.
    I could not go to Mary Point, or so Konje had told me over and over, because they suffered from lack of food. If I lived on fruit and cactus and dried the fish I caught and saved it, I could go to MaryPoint. I would have enough food for myself, and for someone else. I would not be a burden on the camp.
    That morning I set the fish trap in a pool where the tide flowed in and out and baited it with a sea cucumber. Before noon I had more than a hundred small fish in the trap. They were the length of a finger and if you held one up to the light you could see clear through it. For a meal you had to cook three dozen of them, but they were as good as anything that came from the sea.
    I spread the pot fish out on a ledge to dry and covered them with strips of cactus to keep the gulls away, as we did at Hawks Nest. Then I set the trap again, this time in a different place, at the mouth of a cave.
    I went into the cave, thinking that it might be a good place to hide if anyone came looking for me.
    The opening was narrow for a short distance, then it spread out into a wide room, round in shape, with straight walls. The roof was round also and barely high enough to walk under. In the center of the roof a jagged hole let in a little of the sun so that the room was streaked with moving shadows.
    I heard faint sounds, like someone sighing. It was air going through the hole over my head. When the wind blew hard, the sighs could become the