There came a moment when waiting didn’t make sense anymore. I think we all felt it at the same time. Mel called a meeting. She had our attention. We were jumpy, uncertain, restless.
“Listen,” she said, “until we contain the enemy, we have two options. Live with him, always on guard, always paranoid. Or get off the island.”
We responded to this pronouncement with silence. I think most of us still believed rescuers would come. I think most of us couldn’t believe they hadn’t come already.
“It’s up to us to rescue ourselves. We can’t afford to wait any longer.”
“You’re being hasty,” Rish replied. “There are people looking for us right this second. My father has access to an entire fleet of ships. I know he’ll find us. He just needs more time.”
“I’m sure all our parents are looking,” Mel replied. “But that doesn’t mean they’ll find us. There are thousands of uninhabited islands in this world, and we seem to be on one of them.”
“Mel’s right,” I said. “We need to be self-sufficient.”
She nodded at me appreciatively. “Right. There’s a big difference between waiting and doing.”
Rittika frowned, but the rest of our classmates were willing to listen.
“We need to start by tapping into our creativity,” Mel continued. “I want to show you guys an exercise my father once showed me. He wanted me to understand that sometimes all the tools you need are right in front of you.”
Mel told us to spread out and find a little plot of ground. Each of us was to study a space the size of one cubic foot.
“What are we looking for?” Betty asked.
“We don’t know. That’s the point. Just find a little piece of ground that speaks to you.”
We did as instructed, dispersing and claiming little plots within camp.
“Now look down,” Mel said. “What do you see? Not much, right? But there’s more here than you realize.”
Mel had us cordon off our plots with sticks and vines. She told us to kneel down and study the area carefully. “Memorize every single thing you see. Every bug, plant, animal, blade of grass. Everything. Your plot might look small, but you’ll be astounded by its biodiversity.”
We obliged, compliant if bewildered. That lasted about five minutes before Avery rubbed her neck and complained, “Why are we doing this again? It’s boring.”
“Don’t let that fool you!” Mel said. “Boredom can be useful. Galileo made one of his most important discoveries while bored out of his mind. He was in church, watching a chandelier swaying above him. He started measuring the sways with his pulse. He realized that time can be measured that way—by the swinging of a pendulum. We still use this principle today.”
Avery looked unimpressed. “How old was he? Galileo? Thirty, at least. A lot older than us.”
“He was twenty. Listen, we’re not too young to do important things. In fact, being young is a bonus. Young minds aren’t constrained like old ones. Mozart composed some of his best work in his teens. Chopin, too.”
Avery didn’t appear moved by what Mel was saying, but I was. We might not be prodigies, but we had potential. And so did this island. We just had to open our eyes a little wider.
I left to get a pen and pad out of the supplies tent, then returned to my plot. I began to write down everything I could find in my cubic foot. I didn’t know what to call most of the specimens—the purple-shelled beetle, the nubby-leafed plant, or the white butterfly that briefly flitted through—so I sketched and numbered each one. I was startled when I reached fifty and still wasn’t done. I wouldn’t have guessed so much life was crammed into so small a world.
Pablo, whose plot was nearby, saluted me playfully when I showed him what I’d written.
“What if something crawls into my space?” Betty asked. “A lizard just visited.”
“He counts, too,” Mel replied. “Notice how the plots are not static. They are constantly changing, full of surprises.”
Rittika groaned in annoyance. She and Anne Marie were the only ones not participating. Anne Marie was lingering at the edge of camp, gazing into the jungle. Rittika was sunbathing on the ground in her underwear. After a while, she flipped onto her stomach and unsnapped her bra.
Ignoring her, Mel reminded us to be observant. When she stopped in front of my patch, I felt the dim of her shadow. “Look, Sam has already found fifty species. I bet she’ll find a hundred if she looks hard enough. A hundred creatures—that’s a whole universe of life.”
“I still don’t get the point of this,” Avery muttered.
“The island, you could say, is our factory, our workshop. We have to understand all of the resources available here. If we know what we have to work with, we can devise a way home.”
I looked around to see how the others were faring. Ming seemed to be enjoying herself, nose pressed to the ground, fingers busily searching. Betty was looking at my paper and pen, perhaps deciding whether to get her own. Anne Marie was still staring off into the jungle. Chester and Pablo, not surprisingly, were sneaking peaks at Rittika.
Mel continued to monitor us. She had piled her hair atop her head in a messy bun, stuck through with a twig. She wielded a long branch like a pointing stick. For a time, everyone was quiet. Then Ming mentioned that a tiny yellow frog had hopped into her plot.
Mel turned on her heels and dashed over to her. “Don’t touch it,” she warned.
“Why?”
“Did you touch it? The frog?”
“No.”
“Let me see.”
Ming pointed at the animal at the corner of her plot. It was as bright as a jewel, no bigger than a quarter.
“That’s what I thought. A Phyllobates terribilis,” Mel said.
“Elementary, my dear Watson, a Phyllobates terribilis,” Rittika quipped, deepening her British accent.
Mel ignored her, continuing, “It’s also called a poison dart frog. My father brought one back from Colombia once. When he touched it, he always wore gloves. If you have contact with it, you could die.”
“I didn’t touch it,” Ming swore. All of us got up and gathered around Ming’s plot. Even Rittika put on her bra and came over.
“Why is it called a poison dart frog?” I asked.
“Good question, Rockwell. The indigenous people of South America use the poison on the tips of blow darts. For hunting.” Mel gazed at the frog admiringly. “It’s an astonishing animal.”
Astonishing or not, we kept our distance.
“Phyllobates terribilis come in a few colors—orange, green, white. But most are like this one: bright yellow, like gold,” Mel continued. “The color’s a warning sign to its enemies.”
“I was already paranoid about where to walk,” Ming said, bringing my mind back to the trapping pit. “Now it’s going to be even worse.”
We stood around Ming’s plot until the frog hopped away and disappeared into a thicket. When Ming exhaled and knelt beside her plot again, we followed suit, but warily.
I was still roused by Mel’s belief we could get ourselves off the island. But the poison dart frog had made me realize there might be more obstacles in our way, things we hadn’t even imagined.
“Keep an eye out,” Mel said. “He could be back.”
I wasn’t sure if she was talking about the frog or our enemy.
Later that same day, Mel and I notched off another mark in the tree. I had turned around to head back to Camp Summerbliss when she tugged my arm. “This way,” she said. “I want to show you something.” She put her finger to her lips. “Shh—don’t tell anyone.”
She led me deeper into the jungle. Following behind her, I saw that she was wearing her backpack. Beneath the riot of tangled tree limbs above, she found a small clearing on the jungle floor.
“Here’s good,” she said, stopping abruptly. She had a pensive, slightly disturbed look on her face. I watched her take off her backpack and sort through it. She took out a bamboo pole about a foot long. Holding the pole vertically, she shook it carefully and pulled out some moss from the top end. After she peered inside, she told me to have a look. There, sitting on a clump of moss at the bottom end of the hollow pole, was the little yellow frog. Mel quickly plugged the top end again so it couldn’t jump out.
“Oh my god. How did you get it? Why did you get it?” Even though the frog was trapped inside the cane, I couldn’t help panicking.
“I don’t want to do what I’m about to do, but I feel like I have to. Spears and swords might not be enough,” she said. She set the cane on the ground and searched nearby. It took her about a minute to find what she was looking for—a long, thin, straight twig. “Sorry, little guy,” she whispered, taking the pole again. I watched her remove the pad of moss from the top and slide the twig into the cane.
“What are you doing?”
“Hurting it,” she said simply.
“Why? Don’t do that!”
“I have to. It could be a matter of our survival.”
“Mel …”
“This little critter has enough poison in his body to kill ten people. Chances are,” she said grimly, maneuvering the stick, “we’ll need only enough for one.”
I was repulsed by what she was doing. The last thing I wanted to know was how she was doing it, but she told me anyway. “I stuck the stick in his throat and out the back of his body. He’s still alive, barely, and he’s sweating poison. That’s just what I need him to do.”
“Oh god, that’s revolting.”
“The poison’s white. Kind of frothy—like the foam on a cappuccino.”
“Mel!”
“Here, hold this,” she replied, handing me the cane. I held it as far away from my body as I could. She dug through her backpack again until she found a few syringes. “Thank you, Rittika,” she said. “For once you were a help rather than a pain in the ass.” She took the cane back and poked the stick inside until some of the poison stuck to the end. Then, ever so carefully, she scraped the poison into the syringes.
“Is that enough?” I asked her. There was only a drop or so in each one.
“Oh, yeah. It’s potent stuff. My dad said it’s stronger than cobra venom. If even a tiny bit enters the bloodstream, boom—you’re dead.”
She wrapped the syringes in several layers of leaves and put them back into her backpack.
“Where are you going to put that?” I asked.
“In the back of the supplies tent. I’ll show you where, just in case.”
We proceeded to dig a shallow grave for the frog. Covering up the bamboo cane with dirt, I wondered if we should say a prayer. But that would be ridiculous. After all, we’d never said one for Jeremiah, Warren, or the pilot. They hadn’t even gotten a burial.