Chapter: Stranded Goods

The next day was packed with preparations. After all, our small tour group wanted to start making the seas of this world unsafe today rather than tomorrow.
Norman had been standing in the small galley of "Fräulein Akyoo" all morning and was busy boiling fruit, baking bread and curing meat, constantly humming the hits of "Bad Luck" to himself. Since the encounter with his idol Shuichi he was just floating there and a wide permanent grin had settled on his face.
Joe had meanwhile been ordered to bring Norman's supplies of drinking water, which he had stored in large wooden barrels next to his hut, onto the ship. When he finally managed, panting and panting, to roll the last barrel over the loading ramp and stow it below deck, Norman already had the next task ready for him.
"Joe, be a sweetheart and get my cookbook out of the hut. I can't remember how much sugar there is in the strawberry jam.I think I'm getting old ... ", he sighed and licked his sticky fingers.
It took a moment for Joe to have enough air to answer, but the disgruntled expression on his face already spoke volumes.
"Does that have to be? I think I lost my lungs somewhere on the way ... Bunny can do that."
The cook could only shake his head at so much laziness.
"Bunny is on the hunt with Buster, in case you forgot. You were too cowardly for that ... And if I don't add the sugar right away, I can throw all that stuff away, so get your bum up!" Norman and shooed Joe to his feet with a wave of his hand. He reluctantly surrendered to his fate and trotted over to the hut.
Somehow Joe couldn't help feeling that everyone thought he was a coward. And that's just because he didn't want to kill innocent little animals. Well, maybe that wasn't the only reason ...Sometimes he was even a little ashamed of himself when he acted like a little shit again, but there was nothing he could do about it. Somehow he had absolutely no qualities that made him a useful member of this group. Maybe he was just a burden to the others? But right now they probably really needed everyone.
When Joe entered the hut, he put these gloomy thoughts out of his head for the time being and went to look for the cookbook. For a hermit on a desert island, Norman had managed to amass a surprising amount of household effects. In one corner of the room there was a big box with all kinds of tools and on the opposite side there was actually an old diving bell. The sea had probably washed a lot on the beach in the past few months, and Norman had willingly taken possession of it.
Joe finally found what he was looking for on a self-made shelf.However, there were several books piled up there, none of which he could identify as a cookbook at first glance. Sighing, he picked up the whole pile and sat with it in a corner, where he began to leaf through the copies.
He quickly put the book aside, entitled "All About Fish". He really wasn't in the mood for fish-flavored jam. Then he discovered a large atlas which, although it did not offer a solution to the current problem, gave him a small stone from his heart when it came to navigation problems. He opened one of the cards and tried to imagine where they might be. Nothing else was recorded there except for the sea. This island really had to be a pretty remote place.
Suddenly Joe felt homesick. Was his parents worried about him? He hadn't even been able to say goodbye to them properly. Certainly the two would never have thought that he would move out of home before he was thirty.While he was wondering if he would see his sire again in this lifetime, his gaze fell on the book he was holding in his hands. He had leafed through it in his mind without paying any further attention to the content. Only now did he notice the squiggly writing on the yellowed paper. He turned the pages and discovered characters he had never seen before. The book seemed very old. The dark leather cover looked very battered and in some places a few pages already seemed to be missing. Long lists of all sorts of ingredients followed, but Joe quickly realized that these weren't normal cooking recipes.
"Toenails of the warthog? What kind of disgusting stuff is that supposed to be?" He gasped out in disgust and hastily turned to the next page. But that didn't make it any better. Rather stranger and scary. Was that some kind of voodoo book with curses and instructions on how to turn people into tail amphibians?But before he could delve further into the matter, a loud and slightly impatient sounding voice echoed in his ear.
"JOE !!! You damn tan! Because of you, my jam is over now. If you don't come over with the cookbook right away, I have to come over and tie a knot in your magic hat!" Yelled Norman, his head out the galley door had stuck and waved threateningly with a wooden spoon to which an indefinable mass was stuck, which in her previous life might have been jam.
Joe quickly pulled himself up and wrapped the mysterious book in a blanket and hid it under his mat. Then he grabbed the next best book and ran over to the ship with it. Fortunately for him, it was really the right cookbook because otherwise the chef would have made short work of him.
By the time it was getting dark and Bunny and Buster had finally returned from their hunting tour, Norman was still in a bad mood and didn’t speak to Joe, who was crouching depressed in a corner and staring into the air."What's the matter with him?", Bunny whispered to him and proudly held her first catch in front of his nose. It was a fat, brown and white piebald rabbit and Joe preferred not to imagine how she had killed it.
"I destroyed his jam ..." he muttered and pushed the dead animal out of his field of vision.
"Oh oh ... Mortal Sin!" Giggled Bunny.
"I've apologized to him a thousand times, but he just ignores me." Joe moaned and hung his head.
"Oh, he's cooling off again. I don't think Norman is very resentful," Bunny replied and patted Joe encouragingly on the shoulder.
"Hunting makes you really hungry. Will there be something to eat soon?", She added a little louder and a little later each of them was sitting over a bowl of delicious smelling stew.
"Where's Buster anyway?" Joe asked after a few moments of silence and looked around searchingly. The others turned their heads too, but nothing of the little mongrel was to be seen."Funny. He was still there earlier. Well, maybe the hunting spurred him on so much that he went on a voyage of discovery afterwards.", Bunny mused and then turned to her reference.
"He'll come back when he's hungry," Norman grumbled.
But it wasn't until Norman had already cleared the dishes and Joe had volunteered to do the dishes to work off part of his debt that Buster appeared in the clearing again. And he had taken prey.
"There you are again. What have you got there?", Asked Bunny and bent down to her dog to take the find from him. Buster willingly put it in her hands, then looked at her expectantly.
"Well, you can't eat that ..." said Joe, who had come closer and was now looking curiously over her shoulder. In fact, it wasn't a hunted animal, but an elongated piece of black cloth that was tied at the ends and looked like a kind of headband."Just a scrap of cloth. What a bust.", Joe grumbled, whereupon Buster growled insulted and began to pull on the boy's pant leg.
"Hey, don't be offended right away. Yes, you've done great. Good dog. Out !!", the attacked man moaned, but Buster persisted and dragged him further and further away from their storage area.
"I think he wants to show you something, Joe.", Bunny called and as if on cue the dog released Joe's pant leg from its clutches and sped off towards the beach. The two ran after him and only Norman remained in the clearing.
"If that's such a scrap, I'll get angry!" Joe gasped when they finally reached the beach. How good that Norman had put a couple of torches in the sand as a precaution, which in any case provided some light in the approaching darkness of the evening. Up close, they could hear Buster whimpering and ran to meet the noise. Bunny was with him first.
"And what did you want us here ...", she began, but then her gaze fell on something that was lying in the sand in front of her and made her gasp in shock.A boy lay there, completely motionless, his soaked clothes hanging in tatters on his body. His blue-black hair hung limply and despite his tan he looked unnaturally pale in this state. But what worried Bunny most was the gash on his right leg.
"Oh god, is he dead ??" whispered Joe, who had now joined the group and was peeking out from behind Bunny's back.
"I hope not ...", Bunny muttered, kneeling on the sand next to the boy. Then she carefully laid her head on his chest to check his heartbeat. A sigh of relief escaped her as she heard a faint beating.
"He's not dead, but he urgently needs help. He feels freezing. Quick, get Norman and bring bandages!" She instructed Joe, who immediately obeyed her request and ran back to camp.
It seemed to take forever until the two finally got back to the beach. Norman immediately began examining the boy.He felt it carefully and examined the injury more closely.
"Looks like a bite. But it must have been a pretty big animal ... We have to clean the wound and bandage it quickly so that it doesn't lose more blood.", He said and got the disinfectant from the first aid from Bunny Give box.
After bandaging the injured man, Norman picked him up and they started back together.
Back at Norman's hut, the cook put the strange boy in an open space close to the campfire.
"Do you think that's enough?" Bunny asked worriedly.
"Who knows how long he was in the water. He was lucky he didn't drown, but he's pretty hypothermic. Better get him a blanket.", Norman replied before putting a few more logs into the fire.
Bunny did as she was told and a little later she had wrapped the human icicle like a little baby in her woolen blanket.
"What happened