untraversable wilderness, though the sun’s glare off the lakes makes this a
hard job. This relatively small island was his new home, and he accepted
that.
*
In the eight days since his “stranding,” he had moved far inside
his own head. He had the clothes on his body, a life jacket, a small fixedblade bushcraft knife on his waist, a map of the area, and a Copenhagen
Snuff tin. There was nothing to talk to, so his mouth had no need to
open, other than for drinking and eating. His lips were cockled shut
with fatigue and a negative mentality. Nothing in his mind could make
him smile now. His mouth, a warm, dark, moist environment, void of
ventilation and fresh air, became an incubator for bacteria. His teeth
were coated in a slimey fuzz similar in texture to the skin of a wet peach.
Earlier in the week he scrubbed his teeth with dry moss, but now he let it
fester. He liked the flavor of eight days of morning-breath and vomit. It
masked the horrific taste of the grubs he had been surviving on for eight
days. They were the only bugs, the only protein he could find without
a hard, crunchy exoskeleton. They must have been larvae of some kind,
maturating under rocks and rotting trees. At first, he would pinch his
nose and chew on them, imagining a Snickers bar; at this point, he no
longer made the effort.
In the Copenhagen tin, he had kept fifty feet of fishing line and a
cellophane-wrapped nugget of Frito dust. That tin, along with the knife
on his hip was all he needed for survival. On his second solitary day, he
whittled a gorge hook out of a maple twig. Then, he tied it to his fishing
line and sat on a rock, which sloped vertically into a fairly large eddy of
slowly swirling water. George tossed the gorge hook with a soft grub
on it into the water and wrapped the line around his fingers. He jerked
and twitched the line until he got a bite. The line was tugged with such
violent force that the thin filament cut into the side of his finger like
piano wire. He couldn’t get the line out of his grasp quick enough, but
once he did, all fifty feet unraveled and streamed down into the water.
He cursed himself for not tying the line to a stick, frustrated as to why
didn’t he see there was a reason people use poles to fish. He didn’t expect
to catch the interest of a fish so large.
George had never used dip before, but he heard that it was
a strong appetite suppressant. He found himself craving the effect of
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