Chapter 3 Whimsical Tales (Continued)
A pair of canvasbacks swooped abruptly into the little cove, set their wings in unison, glided down softly in a semi-circle and, with resistant, expanded wings, landed with a flutter—disturbing for an instant the flowing water in front of me. As the pair fled towards deeper water, wary of my presence, Uncle Ernest sat down next to me on the grass. “Were you frightened up there under that plane, Unk?”
“Yeah, Moose, I sure was,” he answered, pulling with pleasure a long draw on his drink. But, you know, it wasn’t that bad at first because I just stretched out and enjoyed the view. Porpoises were frolicking below about forty miles out, and about eighty miles out I watched a pod of blue whales feeding on the gulf stream plankton as they rose to the surface to blow out their breath. After a while, though, I started to get really cold; the steel I was lying on started to hurt my body, and the pounding of the plane’s engine started to give me a nasty headache.”
“Geez, Unk, how did you get down from there?"
“I did the only thing I could do. I started rapping on the bottom of that plane with my penknife so they’d let me in the cockpit with them. They heard me, threw me a rope ladder, and I climbed up and sat down between them with my teeth chattering to beat the band from the cold.
“The lady pilot, whose name it turned out was Em, said she was amused that I would do something so dangerous, but Freddy, her copilot, was not too pleased. He didn’t bother me at all though, because I liked Em at first sight and that was all that mattered. Despite her getup she was sure pretty, with her light hair, freckles, and bright smile. I swear it just about knocked me dead every time she flashed it. We got along fine, but then everything went wrong. Fog so thick that we couldn’t see the end of the wings drifted into us. A loon and later a large gull spattered into us, besmearing and cracking the windshield.
“But the worst thing of all was that we had no idea where we were headed, because when Freddy threw me the rope ladder the compass somehow went out with it. Scared? You bet I was, but I didn’t panic the way Freddy did. He started yelling and pulling his hair out. Strapping his parachute on and screaming, he flung open the door and prepared to jump. When I grabbed him he kicked me in the gut and leaped out. But do you know, Moose, that throughout it all, Em kept her composure. ‘These things happen,’ she said, reassuring me. ‘We’ll get out of this somehow, Ernie.’
“She was right, too, because the fog cleared somewhat and Em steered the plane towards an island off to the left. She guided that machine in perfectly, landing on a fairly level area near the beach. We leapt out, hugged each other, and kissed the ground, but we were in the middle of nowhere, marooned on an uninhabited island, somewhere in the vast Atlantic. [To be continued Friday]
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