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Authors: Dan Gutman

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BOOK: Getting Air
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CHAPTER 15:
Food and Shelter

Amazingly, it didn’t take long to get used to the fact that Henry and I were walking around in women’s clothing. Eighty-year-old women’s clothing. Eighty-year-old
dead
women’s clothing. Within five minutes, nobody was paying any attention to what I was wearing.

We had more important things to worry about. Julia needed a new splint for her leg, and we all pitched in to make her one. Also, the rain just about knocked our fire out. It was a smoldering mess of soggy ashes. If a plane flew overhead, it wouldn’t spot us.

Julia wasn’t concerned. She got down on the ground and poked and prodded until she found an ember that still had some life in it. She added a little tinder and blew on the ember until a few sparks leaped out. The next thing we knew, the fire was blazing again.

When we first crashed, everybody treated my sister like a little kid who needed to be protected. But after seeing the way she started the fire and helped us get water—despite her broken leg—it felt like Julia was the one who was protecting
us
.

“What do you suggest we do now, sweetie?” Mrs. Herschel asked her.

“After that rain,” Julia said, “I think we need a shelter.”

“You mean we should build a lean-to or something?” asked Arcadia.

“Not exactly,” Julia said, limping over to the plane. “Most of the shelter is already here.”

She was right, as usual. The rounded shell of the front of the plane was mostly intact, and it was waterproof. All we had to do was empty it of the first-class seats and we could sleep in there.

The opening was in the back, where the front half of the plane had separated from the rest. There was that gaping hole there, big enough to walk through. It would be a drag to be sleeping in the plane and have a friendly bear or moose or something decide to join us for the night.

It wasn’t hard to construct a big leafy door to cover the hole. Me and Henry made a basic four-sided frame from thick branches, using vines to tie it together. Julia, Mrs. Herschel, and Arcadia pulled down a bunch of long, thinner branches from the surrounding trees and crisscrossed them the same way you would weave together a piece of cloth from threads. Mrs. Herschel showed them how to do it, because she had spent her whole lifetime sewing.

Once our door was fairly solid, we stuffed thinner branches with leaves through any holes we could see through. Finally, we lifted the whole panel up and leaned it against the plane to cover the hole. There was a real feeling of accomplishment when we were done.

While the girls were weaving the inside of the door, Henry found a tool kit in the cockpit. He and I used it to remove everything we could from the inside of the plane. It wasn’t hard to unscrew the seats. We hauled six of them outside and arranged them in a big circle around the fire. That made enough room on the floor of the plane for all six of us to sleep.

Six
of us. I had almost forgotten about David. It had been hours since he stormed out in a huff. David could be a real pain, but he was still my friend and I cared about him. I hoped he was able to drink some water during the downpour.

“Where do you think David is?” I asked Henry.

“He probably killed a bear and he’s walking around in a bearskin coat,” Henry said. “I’m sure he’ll come cruising back here any minute, gloating and telling us about the cool adventure he had.”

It took about an hour to strip most of the stuff out of the plane. When we were done, the place looked pretty good. It wasn’t a Holiday Inn or anything, but it was home.

“Not a bad shelter,” Julia said. “Not bad at all.”

“Boy,” Henry said, “we sure are lucky this plane happened to crash here. That made building the shelter a lot easier.”

“Very funny,” I said, flopping into one of the seats around the fire. Henry took the seat next to me, and one by one the girls came over too. I was glad they joined us. I was exhausted, but I didn’t want to lie around and rest while the others were working.

“Remember when you said people can survive a month without food?” Arcadia asked Julia.

“Yeah.”

“How is that possible?” Arcadia asked. “I mean, my stomach is growling right now, and it’s only been a day or so since we crashed.”

“Mine too,” Henry said. “You think Domino’s delivers out here?”

I had almost forgotten about food. I guess my stomach somehow figured out it wasn’t going to get anything to eat, so it just closed up shop. But as soon as Arcadia brought it up, the hunger pangs returned. I could really go for Chinese, or Italian.

“If you don’t eat,” Julia explained, “your digestive system starts to use the nutrients you have in storage. First it devours carbohydrates, then fats. After that, it will get proteins from muscles and tendons.”

“Are you suggesting that the body starts
eating
itself?” Henry said.

“I guess you could say that,” Julia agreed.

“All those in favor of looking for food, raise your hand,” I said.

All five hands went up. Julia added some wood to the fire, we got up, adjusted our dresses, and went shopping for groceries.

Julia said she’d been on the lookout for food when we were searching for water and didn’t see any, so we should try the opposite direction. We followed behind her in single file.

“What should we be looking for, sweetie?” Mrs. Herschel asked as we walked through the woods.

“Oh, lots of stuff in nature is edible,” Julia replied, pulling up a tall piece of grass and sticking it in her mouth. “Nuts, dandelions, flowers. Just about half of all plant species are edible.”

“What about the other half?” I asked.

“They’ll kill you,” Julia replied.

“That’s comforting,” Henry said.

“How about acorns?” Mrs. Herschel asked, picking one off the ground. “Can I eat this?”

“Only in an emergency,” Julia said. “They have tannic acid, and you’ll get a stomach ache if you eat too many.”

“Ix-nay on the acorns,” Henry said.

Julia stopped beside an evergreen tree and pulled off a pinecone.

“Pine is great,” she said, pulling apart the cone and popping something in her mouth. “You can eat the seeds. The needles are a good source of ascorbic acid. And the inner bark is soft and chewy.

“Yeah, I ate a bookcase made from pine once,” Henry said. “It was delicious.”

“Very funny,” Julia said. “You can chew pine resin too, just like gum.”

“Only a real sap would do that,” Henry said.

“Ugh, I’m not eating something that grew up out of the dirt,” Arcadia said.

“Ever eat a potato?” Julia asked.

I was just about hungry enough to eat a tree. But a few yards past the pine tree Arcadia spotted something that looked a lot more appetizing.

“Berries!” she shouted.

Sure enough, there was a bush with purple berries sprouting all over it. We ran over and started to pick them off.

“Wait a minute!” Mrs. Herschel said. “What if these are poisonous?”

We all looked at Julia.

“We should do an edibility test,” she said, “but just about all purple, blue, or black berries are edible. The poisonous ones are usually green, yellow, or white.”

“How do you know so much?” Henry asked her.

“There are these things called books,” Julia replied. “You might want to read one sometime.”

“Ooh,
zing
!” Henry said, grabbing his chest like he’d been hit by an arrow.

“What’s an edibility test?” Mrs. Herschel asked.

Julia took a couple of the berries off the bush and sniffed them. Then she rubbed them against the inside of her wrist.

“If it’s poisonous,” she said, “it might cause a reaction.”

There was no rash or anything, so Julia rubbed the berries against her lips. They still seemed okay, so she put them in her mouth and held them on her tongue for a few seconds. Then she chewed slowly.

“Seems okay,” she said.

Arcadia and Mrs. Herschel and I began to strip berries off the bush and stuff them into our mouths in bunches. They weren’t all that sweet, but they were food. Berry juice was running down my chin because I was stuffing my face faster than I could swallow. At some point I noticed that Henry wasn’t eating and I asked him why.

“I have my own personal edibility test,” he said.

“What’s that?” Julia asked.

“If the four of you drop dead,” Henry said, “the berries are probably poisonous.”

None of us dropped dead, and Henry could only restrain himself for a minute or two longer before he was grabbing for berries and stuffing them into his mouth just like the rest of us.

Julia advised us to take it easy. Our stomachs weren’t used to being full. We could always come back for more. Besides, it was starting to get dark out and she didn’t want to risk getting lost. We grabbed handfuls and stuffed them in a plastic bag to bring back to the campsite for later.

As we walked back, I actually felt
good
for the first time since the crash. I may have looked ridiculous wearing some old lady’s clothes, but I was warm and dry. I’d had something to drink and there was food in my belly. My cuts were healing. My muscles weren’t too sore anymore. More than anything else, I was in good company.

Then, about halfway back to camp, I heard a noise in the woods off to the right. It didn’t sound like a bird or some animal or the wind whistling between the trees. It was somebody moaning.

As we got closer, I figured out who it was.

David.

CHAPTER 16:
A Darker Dark

All five of us heard the groans in the forest. Nobody needed to say a word. We rushed toward David as a group.

He was sitting on the ground, his back against a tree. His clothes were wet and filthy and his eyes were closed. He was a mess. My skateboard was on the ground next to him.

“David!” I shouted.

“Wake up!” Henry said, shaking him

David turned his head slightly and his eyelids slowly opened, like it was hard work to raise them. He looked at us and smiled a little.

“This is a dream, right, Zimmerman?” David said. “Or I’m hallucinating.”

“No, you’re not,” I told him.

“Then why are you wearing a dress?” he asked.

“It’s not a dress,” my sister told him. “It’s a pantsuit.”

“Whatever,” said David.

“It’s a long story,” Henry said. “What happened to you?”

“I was hungry,” David explained, “so hungry. And there was nothing. I ate a bunch of acorns and got sick to my stomach. So I sat down here to rest. I guess I fell asleep. That’s when the snake came.”

“Snake?” Mrs. Herschel asked. “What snake?”

David pointed to his left and we saw it. About four feet away was a nasty-looking black snake. It had a whitish belly with black markings.

“Eeek!” Arcadia screamed.

“Relax,” David said. “It’s dead. Lucky I had Zimmerman’s board.”

Next to my skateboard on the ground was the snake’s head. David had chopped it off. There were snake guts stuck to the side of the board. It was gross.

Julia poured some water into David’s mouth and Arcadia fed him some berries.

“You’ll be okay,” Arcadia said. “You’re just dehydrated.”

“It looks like a rat snake,” Julia said, picking the thing up. “It’s the largest snake found in Canada.”

“How do you know?” Henry asked.

“I read an article in
National Geographic Kids
,” she replied.

“There’s one more thing,” David told us. “Before I could nail him with the board, he sort of…bit me.”

“What!?”

“On the leg,” David said. “He got me pretty good.”

We rolled up David’s pants leg and found puncture marks above his left ankle.

“When did it happen?” Julia asked urgently.

“Not long ago,” David said. “Fifteen minutes I think, maybe half an hour. I lost track of time.”

I didn’t know a whole lot about snakes, but I remembered hearing about some species whose venom is so powerful it could kill a man in minutes. David could die. Maybe he knew it. For the first time, I noticed his eyes were watery.

“I’m sorry,” David said, trying not to cry.

“What for?” I asked.

“I shouldn’t have left you guys,” he said. “I was a jerk. This was my own fault.”

“Forget it,” Arcadia said. “You’re going to be okay.”

“I saw a James Bond movie once,” Henry said. “This girl got bitten by a snake or a sea urchin or something and James Bond sucked the venom out of her foot.”

I didn’t really want to suck on David’s foot, but I would if it would save his life.

“Sucking out venom isn’t a good idea,” Julia told us. “If you get it in your mouth, it can enter your bloodstream.”

“So what do we do?” I asked. “He could die any minute!”

“Calm down,” Julia told me. “There are thousands of species of snakes, and almost all of them are harmless. Hardly anybody ever dies from snakebite.”

There was some swelling around the bite mark, but David didn’t feel weakness or numbness in his leg. Julia concluded that the bite wasn’t poisonous. But to be on the safe side, she said we should immobilize David’s leg and keep it lower than his heart. She squeezed the skin around the wound to push any venom out. Arcadia got some vines and tied them around David’s leg a couple of inches above and below the bite to slow the spread of any poison. Then she cleaned the puncture marks with water and wrapped a few big leaves around as a homemade bandage.

The water and berries were already making David feel better. Henry and I helped him to his feet. Julia grabbed the longer piece of the snake.

“Souvenir?” I asked her.

“No,” she replied. “Dinner.”

David was able to walk back to the campsite. He seemed a lot quieter than he ever did before. I think what had happened threw a scare into him. He realized how lucky he was that we found him.

“Nice,” he said when we reached camp and saw the airplane seats arranged in a circle around the fire. “I like what you’ve done to the place.”

He didn’t even put up a fight when Mrs. Herschel took off his clothes and gave him a dress to put on. We parked David in one of the seats around the fire to rest. Julia found a rock with a sharp edge, and she used it to skin and gut the snake.

“Are you really going to eat that thing?” Arcadia asked. “It’s gross!”

“I’ll take your share if you don’t want it,” Julia said.

I didn’t exactly want to eat snake, but I wanted to eat
something
. Beggars can’t be choosers, as they say. I found a long stick and gave it to Julia. She stuck the sharp end into the fire briefly to harden it, then she cut a piece of snake off and put it on the end of the stick. She held it over the fire, turning it like she was toasting a marshmallow.

“Who wants the first piece?” she asked, blowing on it to cool it off.

Nobody volunteered, so Julia shrugged and popped the snake into her mouth. We all looked at her, half expecting her to throw up, or keel over, or something.

“Tastes like chicken,” she said, putting another piece on the end of the stick.

That was good enough for me. I got the next piece, and it not only tasted like chicken, it tasted like the best chicken I had ever eaten. Julia roasted pieces for Henry, David, and Mrs. Herschel. When he got his piece, David said, “He bit me, so I’m biting him back.”

In the end, even Arcadia decided to have a piece of the snake, grimacing the whole time she chewed it. After that, it was gone. You don’t get a whole lot of meat out of a snake.

It was completely dark now. There was no visible moon in the sky. The only light was our crackling fire.

When were we going to get
rescued
? I wondered as I poked at the fire with a stick. People were out there in the woods looking for us, I tried to convince myself. It was only a matter of time.

The sky was a different dark, a darker dark from any dark I had ever seen. And I knew why. We were so far from any city. Bright lights make it hard to see the night sky. So does pollution from cars and factories. There were no cars or factories or cities where we were. It was perfectly dark.

“This is the life,” Henry said, leaning his seat back. “I’m not even sure I want to be rescued.”

“I do,” I said. “I miss skateboarding.”

I don’t think I had
ever
gone so long without skating. I wondered how long you have to stop before you forget all your tricks. It occurred to me that if we never got rescued, I would never skate again. That would be horrible.

There was an opening in the trees over our heads, and we could see the stars. Each of us leaned back our seats to look. It was calming, peaceful.

“Do you think there’s anybody out there?” Julia asked. “I mean, life?”

“Maybe somebody’s out there looking at Earth right now,” Henry said, “and wondering if there’s life
here
.”

“Could be,” said Mrs. Herschel.

“Where do you think it ends?” I asked. “Outer space, I mean.”

“It goes on forever,” David said.

“It’s got to end somewhere,” Henry said.

“Why?” David replied. “Maybe it’s infinite.”

I was afraid David and Henry were going to get into another religious argument. But the sky was just so beautiful, I don’t think either of them wanted to debate how it started or where it was going.

“Do you think they’re looking for us?” Julia asked.

“Sure they are,” said Arcadia.

“They should have found us by now,” Henry said.

“They’re coming,” Mrs. Herschel said. “We just need to be patient. Can you see the North Star? It’s also called Polaris.”

The sky was just a big mass of twinkling stars to me. I couldn’t identify anything. Mrs. Herschel helped us find the Big Dipper, and told us to line up the two stars at the far edge of the dipper and extend the line to the North Star.

“The Big Dipper rotates around Polaris like an hour hand on a clock,” she explained.

“I see it,” Julia said.

So did I. Mrs. Herschel showed us where Venus was, and told us the Milky Way is made up of a hundred billion stars.

“When we look at a star that’s a million light years from Earth,” she told us, “we’re actually looking at light that left that star a million years ago.”

“Wow,” we all said.

“So does that mean light leaving a star today might not reach Earth for a million years?” asked Henry.

“That’s right,” Mrs. Herschel said.

“Wow.”

“How do you know so much about astronomy?” David asked.

“It runs in my family,” Mrs. Herschel said. “My great-great-great-grandfather was an astronomer.”

“Really?” Arcadia said.

“Indeed,” Mrs. Herschel replied. “William Herschel. He was quite famous in his day.”

None of us had ever heard of William Herschel, and Mrs. Herschel seemed a little disappointed.

“In fact, he discovered one of the planets,” she said.

“You’re kidding me!” said David.

“Not at all,” Mrs. Herschel insisted.

“Which one?” Henry asked. “Venus? Jupiter?”

“Uranus.”

Well, it took about five minutes for the rest of us to stop giggling. Mrs. Herschel rolled her eyes, like she’d been through this many times before.

But what did she expect? Uranus! It’s the funniest planet, easy. It may be the funniest word in the English language. All you have to do is say it and people crack up.

“It’s not that bloody funny,” Mrs. Herschel said while we were doubled over.

“I can’t believe it,” Henry said. “Your great-great-great-grandfather discovered Uranus.” He had fallen off his seat and was rolling around on the ground, holding his sides.

Scientists have proven that it’s impossible to say the word “Uranus” in any group of people without at least a few of them snickering.
Any
word that sounds like “anus” is funny. A couple of years ago Burger King had a sandwich they called the “Angus,” and everyone at my school insisted on calling it the “anus burger.” That’s probably why Burger King pulled it off the market.

“I always thought that naming the planet Uranus was the greatest practical joke in history,” Henry said, “and here I am, sitting next to a lady who’s related to the guy who actually did it.”

“Oh, no,” Mrs. Herschel said. “William Herschel discovered Uranus, but he didn’t name it. He wanted to name it in honor of King George. But some German bloke dubbed it Uranus, and it somehow stuck.”

“What does Uranus really mean, anyway?” Arcadia asked, trying to be serious.

“The ancient Greeks had a god of the sky,” Mrs. Herschel said. “It was called Ouranos.”

Ouranos?

Well, the five of us didn’t stop laughing for another five minutes.

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