Wendigo Island (ONC2024)

Entry 4: Poisoned Paradise

Day 5/ Marie

There is a rock overhang covering a magnificent cove just beside the ocean. It's as if a giant lumberjack cut a wedge into the side of the mountain. When the Sun's shining into the cutout, the space is the picture on a pamphlet for a tropical getaway.

However, when the sun rises over the mountain, the air becomes frigid. Shadows move in the darkness at the edge of the cove. A simple campfire keeps both away well enough.

Mitch spent the first two days lying on the beach and staring directly up at the Sun. Me and Maurice managed to drag him under the cove only after he'd been severely sunburned. Today, I watched him stare at a wedding ring for hours until he finally threw it into the ocean. He later told me he wished he hadn't, but he hasn't been thinking straight since the plane crashed. His wife was with child, and they had just been married, but they didn't make it.

Losing my brother has been rough, but I can't imagine what Mitch has been going through. To have just started a life with the one you love, to lose so much in one day. Somehow, he's been active today, though.

Me and Mitch were fishing with a bright piece of tape for bait (small bugs have proven somewhat scarce), and we actually caught something on the line!

As soon as the bobber went down Mitch pulled on the stick he called a fishing rod until I thought it would surely break. At last, he won the battle and a large fish sprang from the water with angelic grace and colorful fins that seemed like wings ready to take it to heaven. A bit of shiny metal flew from its mouth in an arc. Mitch's eyes twinkled with the reflection of the gem as he stumbled backward to catch it.

The fish, however, fell to the rock with a gross slap and started coughing. It was a rather unappetizing specimen, despite the soft curly fins of an angelfish. Its body was shaped more like that of a blob fish, with the big nose that makes them look almost human, except... they are supposed to live further in the ocean, and they are definitely not supposed to have colorful and frilly spinal fins.

Mitch held his wedding ring to the sun, laughing and crying at the small miracle.

"She came back," he said; and we all find a bit of hope in that now, but at the time, most eyes were on the fish.

A rather rotund man, not that I'm judging, named Dale slid to his knees at our feet, sweating and wheezing for air. He grabbed the fish by the tail as I shouted out, "wait!"

A boney spike protruded from the backfins and impaled his palm just above the wrist. He dropped the strange creature and Mitch kicked it back into the ocean. I ran to the tree line calling for Muarice. He noticed something was off immediately and dropped a log he'd been carring by himself.

I don't know if I need to record the medical practices, but I find it fascinating how he can do so much to save a life with so little on hand. Maurice started by tying a tournakit over the man's forearm. He had to assure the man(Dale) that he wasn't going to cut his arm off, since Dale must have known that is what tournakits are normally for.

Instead, Muarice cut the hole in Dale's palm wider and waited for the arm to go stiff from lack of blood. Then he removed the tournakit and let the blood flow back into the arm and drain out of the wound, bringing the poison with it. After about an hour he reapplied the tournakit and removed it again, just to be sure the poison had drained.

Muarice told me and Blain later that he did an old medical practice, "doctors don't practice treating snakebites like that anymore. That guy will end up too sick to live if he doesn't get water soon, and he'll be lucky if his arm makes it at all."

I asked him why he did it that way, then?

He said, "first aid assumes there will be second aid. A hospital would want you to drag him in for shots pronto and leave the limb alone, so the poison doesn't damage the arm and get infected, but I don't see a hospital around. I don't see any antivenom either. I should've just cut the damn hand off."

In more hopeful news, Blain came to me today after gathering wood to tell me that he found a temple. He said he could use an intelligent mind to help search the place. I told him that I'm a marine biologist and not some anthropologist or archaeologist, but I will go with him tomorrow. Maybe if we find this civilization, then we can eat bug soup and catch sick waves until we're rescued. Gonna have to make a surfboard, or I might go nuts before we starve.