Six
The food squares are no longer quite doing it for me. I feel sort of light-headed and floaty. Anaemic? Whatever it is, the need to procure a renewable food source here has officially become pressing.
I used a chunk of blue glass struck from a monolith, a solid piece from the wood I had gathered, and a length of cord to fashion a sort of fishing spear. When I tested it by stabbing it down into the earth, I found that the blade would dislodge sometimes, so I further fixed it in place with a thin ribbon of sticky wood from the fallen tree and another layer of cord. Stuck my fingers to the wood, and then nicked the palm of my hand trying to get unstuck again.
Waded out to sea with my spear in hand. The sudden cold of the water was biting, and brought up visceral sense-memories of my time in the raft. No sign of any kind of any kind of animal life until I was up to my waist in the waves.
There is a sort of fish. Black in colour, and reasonably plentiful. It is long and serpentine like an eel, and the largest of them have the rough dimensions of a human arm. There is much skill in catching them.
They were not afraid of my legs in the water, but each time I would try to strike down with my spear they would all swim away in a great shoal. I would follow them, strike again, and then the whole maddening cycle would repeat! I think I need to be careful doing this, as I could forget myself in the task and walk out to sea.
I caught one. It was one of the larger ones, and very slow. No doubt quite old.
I struck my spear down, and felt the blade enter its flesh with a soft, rubbery yielding. There was a moment of pure adrenaline, this sort of primal rush I don’t think I’ve ever felt before, but it crashed in seconds. The sensation of the spear handle jostling in my hand as it struggled formed a cold, guilty ache in the pit of my stomach. I lifted the spear, but the fish did not come with it.
The water around me turned a sort of purplish. The shoal scattered. Heart racing, I reached down into the water and grabbed the thing, and brought it seizing desperately above the water. Its head turned to face me. Blank, silvery eyes. Gasping mouth with hundreds and hundreds of little needle teeth. I gripped it, nails piercing its skin, my mouth forming breathless squeals of apology.
I finished it off with the spear, driving the point through its underside at the base of the head. There was a hard crunch, and then thing fell limp. I carried it back to camp slung over my shoulder.
All hunger dissipated as I laid it out across the bright yellow plastic and slit open its belly. Not just the hunger of the moment, but the hunger of all time. It sounds so strange, but the second the pearly lustre of its spilled organs caught my eye I felt as if I would never want to eat again.
I picked at the thing as if it would bite me, extricating one organ after another with pinching fingers. There were wrinkled greenish things, strange white membranes the colour of egg white, and ovaries filled with thousands of little yellow eggs. Once it was emptied completely it looked like… Well… A lot like something you might see in a fishmonger’s window. Ordinary. Touching it left a thin grease on my fingers, light and oily. The sensation of it made my mouth water. I was relieved that my hunger had not stayed gone for very long.
I removed the head with the sharp edge of my hand-axe, and used one of my larger glass slithers to divide the carcass into thick, meaty slices. The flesh had a pleasing pinkish-purplish sheen, like the colour of its blood in the water. The smell was mostly neutral, with a faint air of fishiness and a whiff of metal. Almost rusty.
I had no fire upon which to cook it, but the meat was so fresh that I had no concerns of getting ill. It had a pleasant taste; buttery and mildly sweet with a subtle oceanic undertone. The texture was chewy, with an underlying flaky structure. A very welcome change from the squares.
I had more meat than I could reasonably consume before it spoiled, especially since I had no way to shield it from the weathering of the air and the sun. Perhaps I could cure it? I would have no shortage of sea salt if only I could find a way of extracting it from the seawater. Food for thought.