"I'm starving!" Donkey shouted. "Boogers, what does this haggis stuff taste like, anyway?"

"I don't know," the cook replied, "but we'll find out soon!"

---

 

31. Haggis And The Volcano
 

"So you didn't tell anybody about the map of the island? Not even Her Manliness."

"No," Wiggy said. "But after I hid the big map, I put the map of the island back. Somebody else can find it. You can find it if you want."

"It would be handy," I said. I looked at the walkie-talkie. "I wish I could tell them about it now. It would help with the search."

"Yeah," Wiggy agreed. "But one thing I *do* know from the map is that the island really is surrounded by a coral reef. The only way to land is through the cove."
 

We completed our circuit around the island, but didn't see anyone, not even the Amazon search teams. Occasionally there'd be messages on the walkie-talkie, but nothing really important. Mirina suggested we keep their use to a minimum to conserve batteries.

Wiggy had been rowing pretty steadily, but by the time we got three-quarters of the way round the island, the sun dipped low in the sky. Wiggy started pulling harder. We didn't want to be out there in the dark.

"I underestimated," Wiggy told me, looking a little fearful. "I didn't take into account how far out we'd have to go to avoid the coral reef."

We reached the mouth of the cove as the sun was about to drop below the horizon. All the other girls were already in the camp. Ding-Dong and Cakey were waiting for us on the dock.

"You had us worried, girls!" Ding-Dong said.

"What did you do?" Cakey asked, half-joking. "Try to row to Hawaii?"

"No, just to Bora-Bora," Wiggy quipped, which set Ding-Dong off singing, Bora Bora, Bora Bora, it's an island in the ocean...
 

In spite of the heat, two fires were burning under two huge pots. Boogers had been busy. "One's for the haggis," she explained, pointing to one of the wildly boiling pots, "and the other's for the tubers."

"Tubers?" I repeated.

"Potatoes and turnips," she explained. "I found the directions for the haggis dinner. There's two things missing, though: cock-a-leekie soup and whisky."

Cakey stuck her tongue out in a gesture of disgust. "I won't miss them," she said.

Boogers was drenched with sweat from standing near the fires. "Whoo!" she cried as she mopped her face with a cloth. "Whatever we eat tomorrow, it's got to be something COLD!"

Just then, the darkness fell. It was instantly night. "Oh, my God!" Donkey shouted. "Who turned out the lights?"

It was something we had to get used to: once the sun set, it became dark instantly. There wasn't any fadeout; it was as though a switch had been thrown.

"We have to keep this in mind, girls," Mirina said. "We have to make sure everyone can reach camp before the sun sets. No one wants to be caught out in the dark."

"So did anybody find anything?" I asked.

"We're going to have dinner first, then each team will report," Mirina said. "Everyone needs full attention, and we'll be more relaxed if we've eaten."

"And I'm starving!" Donkey shouted. "Boogers, what does this haggis stuff taste like, anyway?"

"I don't know," the cook replied, "but we'll find out soon!"

Everyone joined in the remaining preparations. First, we had to fish out the little haggis sacks from the boiling water. We each took turns, because it was an infernally hot job, dipping strainers and sieves into the pot. The heat of the fire had a brutal intensity against our bare, sunburnt legs, and the steam up above threatened to parboil our faces.

We repeated the hellish fishing process with the tubers, separating the turnips from the potatoes.

Then came the hand-burning work of peeling the potatoes and turnips.

"Ouch!" I cried. "Boogers, how come you didn't peel them first, before you boiled them?"

"They have more flavor when you cook them in skins," she explained, blushing.

"We could feed these peels to the cute little piggies," Ding-Dong said.

"What piggies?" I asked.

"We'll talk about it later," she said, smiling at me and glancing at the Manley One.

The peeled tubers got tossed back into two empty pots where Boogers mashed them, mixing butter into the turnips and butter and milk into the potatoes.

"Anyone who likes milk ought to take a drink now," Boogers said. "It's warm already, so it's not going to stay good for long."

"I guess anyone who likes butter ought to take a bite now, too, huh?" Cakey joked.

"Anyone who likes butter thrown at their heads and mashed into their hair should speak up now," Boogers threatened, hefting the huge yellow chunk and looking directly at Cakey.

Cakey wisely didn't answer, but I could see she wanted to.

When at last it was time to serve up the plates, we were all ravenous. Each plate got a generous serving of turnips and potatoes. Then Boogers sliced open the little sacks that haggis comes in, and dumped the contents onto the plates.

"Woof!" Knickers cried in disappointment, holding her nose. "It smells like liver! Is it liver? Oh, God, it smells like liver!"

"I guess there's liver in it," Boogers admitted. "But liver's good for you."

"I like liver," I said, but my visceral memory gave a twinge. My mind shot back to the last time I had liver: those horrible, gray gobbets that Ida prepared. I shivered at the memory.

"If you like it, why did you shudder?" Knickers challenged.

"Come on, everybody," Boogers pleaded. "I've been working hard for hours. I've burnt myself everywhere and boiled myself alive. Give it a chance, please!"

"No more criticism," Mirina declared. "Next critic will be tomorrow's cook!"

"You put that milk on your mush and you eat it! Baah!" Cakey muttered, imitating an old Little Rascals episode.

"Cakey, what did you say?" Mirina asked.

"I'm just agreeing with you," Cakey replied. Ding-Dong tilted her head down so her hair hid her laughing smile.
 

The response to the dinner was divided. Everyone was grateful to Boogers for having spent so much time and effort cooking, and the mashed potatoes were highly praised.

A few of the girls, myself included, liked the haggis. It was pretty unusual, and "highly flavored" as Ding-Dong put it. No one complained, at least verbally.

"Is there supposed to be some kind of sauce for this?" Knickers asked. Her face was a picture. She hated it. It was clear. But she was trying to be brave and eat it all. "My parents always told me to leave a clean plate," she told me later. "But, oh! I don't think they knew there was such a... such a... food-thing in the world when they said it!"

"Sauce?" Cakey began, smiling a wicked smile, but Ding-Dong gave her a cautionary look that silenced her.

"According to the recipe, the only sauce for haggis is whisky," Boogers said. "But we're too young, and there wasn't any anyway."

As far as I could tell, Graffy, Grooty, Ding-Dong, Boogers, and me liked the haggis. Mirina and Donkey ate it, but without enthusiasm or comment. Knickers and Wiggy ate it as though it was punishment. I couldn't tell whether Cakey liked it. She seemed to take it as a comic platform, making all sorts of goofy faces and elaborate mimes when Mirina wasn't looking. It was hard to not giggle.

Everyone thanked Boogers for her efforts, and then Mirina, after throwing some more wood on the fire, took the floor.

"Okay, girls," she said, once again clapping her hands for attention. "Before we talk about what we saw today, there are a couple of topics I want to cover.

"The first is, we didn't explore the whole island. We know that. But we don't know exactly how big the island is—"

"Sure we do," Cakey interrupted. "Wiggy and Marcie went around it. They know."

"You're right," Mirina admitted. "But we have to work out... we have to figure out how our... how our walking relates to their rowing. You know what I mean."

"It's too bad we don't have a map," Ding-Dong said.

"Yes, it's true," Mirina agreed. "It would be extremely helpful. I guess we'll have to make our own map. But not right now. The thing is, without a map, we won't know how much of the island we've covered until we've seen it all."

I glanced at Wiggy, but she just looked back at me, expressionless. She wasn't going to say anything, and *I* wasn't going to say anything. I wasn't going to test her. I didn't need to find out how serious she was about outing me.

"Okay," Mirina continued. "Nobody, including Wiggy and Marcie, saw any sign of the adults."

"Do you think there'd be some sign where they went ashore?" Knickers asked. "I mean, something Wiggy and Marcie would have seen?"

"I guess so, but I don't know," Mirina said. "The fact is, none of us have seen any sign of them yet. So we have to keep looking until there's no place left to look."

"What could have happened to them?" Cakey asked. "We know they all got into one of the rafts, but we don't know why. Why didn't they come here? And shouldn't they be looking for us?"

"There are many questions," Mirina said. "There's a lot that we don't know. We can talk about those things, but for right now, we need to talk about some facts. Some things we know. The next topic I want to discuss is the volcano."

"Yes, there's steam coming up in different places," Graffy said. "Do you think the volcano could blow?"

"No," said Mirina and Ding-Dong together.

"Why not?" Grooty asked.

"Because—" Mirina and Ding-Dong began together. Ding-Dong deferred to Her Manliness.

Mirina said, "They wouldn't have brought us to an island with a live volcano."

"But they landed us here in a storm," Graffy retorted. "They didn't mean to put us here."

"No," Mirina contradicted. "They did mean to put us here. This was our planned destination."

"Oh, right," Graffy said, remembering. Turning to Ding-Dong, she asked, "Where you going to say something else?"

"Yes. We're not in any danger from the volcano. And we can be sure we're not in any danger because of the steam."

"What kind of sense does that make?" Wiggy challenged.

"It makes sense because of pressure," Ding-Dong replied. "The steam is seeping up gently, in a floaty way. If the volcano was going to blow, the lava would be pushing up, and that create more pressure. More pressure would make the steam come out in jets, like from a tea kettle or stronger. As long as it's coming up gently, it means there's no danger. No pressure, no danger."

Wiggy was stunned into silence.

"That makes sense," Graffy acknowledged, and the other girls nodded.

"How did you figure that out?" I whispered to Ding-Dong, who was sitting next to me.

"It's all in Jules Verne," she replied, "Journey to the Center of the Earth."

"Oh, jeez!" I exclaimed softly. "Don't tell Wiggy! Tell her you figured it out on your own, or that you saw it on the Discovery Channel or something."

"Okay," she replied brightly, with a shrug. Then she raised her hand, as if we were in school.

"What is it, Ding-Dong?" Mirina asked.

"Can we talk about the piggies?" she asked.

"What piggies?" someone asked.

Mirina frowned. "For a couple of minutes," she said. "But seriously, make it brief. I still have two important points to cover."

"Okay," Ding-Dong said. "When Cakey and Knickers and me were exploring, we heard all this noise. At first we thought it was wild monkeys or rats or something, but all of a sudden we found a whole bunch of tiny pigs! Piglets!"

The girls erupted in chatter.

"Like in Winnie-The-Pooh?"

"Like in Lord of the Flies?"

"How little?"

"Were they babies? How big were they?"

"No, they aren't babies!" Ding-Dong replied. "Well, some of them are babies, but they're all so SO cute! The littlest ones are like this—" She held her hands to show about eight inches of length "—and the biggest ones are like this—" She moved her hands to about fourteen inches. "I think they would make great pets! They scurry around like puppies, and they make the cutest little oinks and squealy noises!"

Wiggy burst into derisive laughter. The other girls threw questions at Ding-Dong in a flurry of excitement and happiness. I couldn't share either Wiggy's scorn or the other girls' enthusiasm. Little piglets? Pets? Had they forgotten our situation? That we needed to be rescued? That we had so many unanswered questions?

Wiggy wasn't talking. She shook her head and looked out to sea. I knew she was nervous and frightened, perhaps more than any of the other girls, and that was why she was getting to be so mean and irritable.

I sighed and looked into the mouth of the cave. If I squinted and tipped my head just the right way, I could see the end of the table and the black plastic tube hanging off the back of it. That was where Wiggy had found the maps. The map of the island, the map we all needed, was hidden in there now. I had to think of a way to tell someone, or to make someone else find it.

I never liked secrets. They make me uncomfortable. Of course, I have a secret of my own, but I wish I didn't. I wish I could be just like the other girls here, laughing and giggling over the piglets... not having to worry about being found out... not being the odd man out.

"Marcie," Mirina said in a low voice. Then just a wee bit louder, "Marcie?"

I nearly jumped out of my skin. While I was lost in my musings, Mirina had come over and crouched down in front of me on hands and knees. The other girls were still giggling around Ding-Dong, who described in great detail the antics of the wild piglets. Mirina continued, "What are you looking at, Marcie?"

"I, um, the table..." I said.

"What about the table?"

"Do you see that black thing on the back of it?" I felt like such a scum for lying to her, but at least she'd have the map. "I just noticed... there's like a black shadow, and I was wondering what it was."

Mirina's eyes focused like twin lasers on the map tube. I suddenly remembered what sharp eyes she has. Her mouth fell slightly open. "Oh, my G— that looks like a—" She gave me a quick pat on the leg. "Marcie, you're a genius!"

The next moment she was on her feet, running. I got up and ran after, and a few moments later the other girls followed suit.

Mirina was fast, and by the time I reached her, she was already pulling the map out of the tube. "It's a map!" she said. "Hey, quit blocking the light! It's a map of— a map of an island... oh, please let it..." across the top was written the name MUKTAPHALA "It is! Oh, my God! It's Muktaphala! This is a map of our island!"

Amidst the cries of amazement and celebration came Cakey's question. "How in the world did you find it, Mirina? Has that black tube been there all along?"

"Of course!" Mirina replied. "It had to be. I guess none of us had a reason to look behind the table, so none of us saw the tube. All these days, and nobody noticed. Then Marcie happened to be looking this way. She saw it and wondered what it was. And now, we have a map of the island! We can figure out what we've seen and... and... make better plans! This could help us find the adults and use the island better, until we're rescued!"

"That's great," Wiggy commented. "Good find, Marcie." She smiled at me in a smug we've got a secret smile, and for the first time I really wanted to smack her.

"Thanks, Wiggy," I replied drily. Cakey and Ding-Dong noticed the undercurrent, and their eyes darted back and forth between Wiggy and me, but they didn't say anything. We walked back to the fire. Mirina studied the map as she walked.

"We'll have to look this over in the morning, when it's light," she said. "But at this point..." — her eyes rapidly scanned the map — "I'm guessing that we've only seen a third of the island. Over here is where Knickers and the others were blocked by the volcano, and this is where me, Graffy and Grooty reached the other shore. There's another path here that we haven't seen..."

The girls crowded around her. Wiggy and I were too short to see through.

"Nice save," Wiggy said to me. "I felt bad about hiding it."

"Yeah!" I replied. "From now on, no more secrets!"

She froze for a minute, then looked me in the eyes. "We both have secrets, Marcie. You and me. Mirina, too. But it's important that nobody knows. Just we three."

I shivered for a moment.

Wiggy frowned at me. "Marcie, you don't think I'm being mean or weird do you?"

"No," I said, but I wasn't sure if I meant it. "I just hate secrets."

Wiggy shrugged and smiled, and in that moment I saw the old Wiggy. I smiled back, and she gave me a hug.

After the hug, as she let go, I said to her, "Wiggy! Are you going to tell me Mirina's secret?"

© 2008 by Kaleigh Way

[OTHER STORIES]

---

Thanks to Gabi for answering my many haggis-related questions,
to Annette for help with tropical islands,
and a belated thanks to Geoff for clarifying some nautical terms.
Any errors are of course my own.