Free Seas of South Africa by Philip Roy Page B

there was a sticky streak of raspberry jam. I looked at the crew. They were standing apart from each other and staring at me. I wondered which one had taken it. Probably Seaweed. But they all looked guilty. “Never mind. I’ll cook some fresh ones. This is my crew. This is Hollie.” Hollie came over and sniffed Los, who bent down and touched him on the head. It wasn’t really a pat; it was more of a poke, to see if he was real. “This is Seaweed.” Seaweed completely ignored Los because he wasn’t carrying food. It was probably the height of rudeness in the seagull world to meet someone for the first time and not bring food. “And this is Little Laura. She just joined us last week.” Little Laura took a few steps sideways, until she was next to Hollie. She opened her mouth and made the little swallowing movements she always made just after she had eaten. She was definitely guilty.
    I made a double batch of pancakes, and Los ate the whole thing, drank four glasses of water, and a whole pot of tea! As soon as he finished one pancake, I put another one on his plate, and he gobbled it up as if it were his very first meal. I had never seen anyone eat like that before.
    â€œThis is really good!” he said. He never even slowed down. But after a while, his eyes began to droop. Still, he pushed himself to eat, as if he believed he wouldn’t get a chance to eat again for a long time. I had given him a sleeping bag to sit on, beside Hollie. But when I went into the stern to dig through the dry supplies for more powdered milk, and came back, he was lying sideways on the bag, curled up and fast asleep.
    I made another plate of pancakes for myself, and ate them as I watched Los sleep, and listened to him snore. I knew what it was like to be that exhausted. He would probably sleep for a long time. I wondered how long he had been flying before he crashed into the sea. And how he got into the air in the first place. Did he push his plane off a mountain? His crash reminded me of the story of Icarus, who flew too close to the sun with wings made of feathers and wax. When the sun melted the wax, Icarus plunged to his death in the sea. I wondered if that’s why Los had been shaking so much—he had just realized that his plane didn’t float, and he couldn’t swim. If we hadn’t been in the water nearby, he would have drowned. I knew that shaky feeling too, of being close to death. It wasn’t very nice.
    As I watched him sleeping on the floor, snoring like a goat, something about him unsettled me, though I didn’t know what it was. It was only after I stopped trying to figure it out that it came to me. It was his recklessness. He was obviously very smart, inventive, and good at building things. But he had come through the air in a machine that couldn’t stay aloft once it had run out of fuel. And he flew it over the sea, where he couldn’t land, and when he had no flotation devices, and couldn’t swim. Not only that, he had come without food or water. Had he given no thought to any of those things? Had he no help or advice from anyone? At first glance, he had looked so cool in his flying machine. In reality, it had been practically a suicide mission. Here, now, he was asleep on the floor of a vessel of someone he didn’t know at all.What if I were a pirate? There were lots of them around here. What if I killed him in his sleep? Why would he trust me so quickly? He was probably nineteen or twenty years old, but I had the feeling he might not live very long.

Chapter Eleven

    HE SLEPT THE REST of the day and night, snoring the whole time. When I brought a pillow out and put it under his head, he didn’t wake. The crew stepped around him as if he were a piece of driftwood we had carried in from the beach. Hollie sniffed him every time he went around him, trying to identify smells he had never smelled before. And Los did have a particular smell, like a spice or