Chapter Six
If I didn’t get to eat something substantial soon, I was going to eat one of the men on the island.
Maybe Oskar or the asshole who’s name I still didn’t know.
Ettore had rubbed my feet before we left the cabin, and Jin Woo had gotten up early to boil me water and brought it to me like it was coffee, so they were safe.
I tramped along the beach, scouring the rocks for mussels with one of the buckets in the crook of my elbow like it was a woven basket.
It was probably for the best that I hadn’t gone on the sheep hunt; my stomach’s growls would have scared away the half-feral sheep long before we were even close to catching them.
My eyes caught on a rock with a rather pronounced overhang.
I bent down and looked underneath and found a huge number of tiny mussels.
I jumped, hands above my head and everything.
Food! Finally food! Once I had finished wiggling my butt and trying and failing to moonwalk, I went to work putting mussels into my bucket.
By the time I was done, the giant bucket had about a four-inch layer of mussels on the bottom.
The sun shone down fairly strongly and at a slant, so I guessed it was probably around ten in the morning. There was some commotion in the distance; that was probably still the boys trying to trap a sheep. I would try to forage for some food before the guys returned for lunch.
When I was little, I had been obsessed with herbalism and trying to eat from the woods.
When I had come inside with my mouth stained green, I scared my parents enough that they put aside their differences to yell at me together.
They had made me promise that I wouldn’t eat anything that I had found outside.
Eight-year-old me had agreed, but only after saying that I had only eaten dandelion leaves, which weren’t poisonous at all.
(I neglected to tell them about the swelling I had from messing around with poison sumac.) So while, sure, being shipwrecked was awful, I was excited to try my foraging skills out again and be able to see how rusty I had gotten.
Before I moved farther inland, I stripped off my shoes and rolled up my pants, then waded shivering into the water. The day before, I was sure that I had seen some sort of seaweed in the ocean, but it had seemed that the seaweed was within reach only during low tide.
It seemed that I was right. Clinging onto some rock, only about a foot deep in the water, was some bladderwrack seaweed.
It was long and olive green in color with little oval pods at the ends of it.
I had always been disconcerted by the pods; I had called them gross more than once, but I had seen my godmother eat them.
I had smelled them being boiled and roasted, and I had even been offered some raw.
Here, I didn’t have the option to be picky.
Along with the mussels, the seaweed would make a good soup.
Now shivering, my toes numb but my mouth aching with a smile, I shoved my frozen feet into my shoes and dropped the seaweed in the bucket.
I could have gone right back to the cabin then, but the woods that ringed the island, separating the beach from the pasture, were calling for me—and who was I, icy toes and all, to ignore the call.
It looked like a typical Norwegian forest. Sparse pine and other conifers stood tall; the leaf litter was dotted with sapling sprouts and fallen logs.
Here, the life cycle of a tree was fully on display in front of me.
There were some rocks covered in lichen here and there and, importantly, mushrooms!
Some were two or three inches long with yellow stems and brownish caps with the interior of the caps looking like folded paper and a little hole or funnel at the top of the cap: funnel chanterelles.
Others looked like little clumps of creamy clouds, and the insides of their caps had little finger-like protrusions: bleik pigsopp, or hedgehog mushrooms!
There were some brown mushrooms that looked sort of similar to the chanterelles that I left well enough alone.
Western Norway was incredibly rainy; it rained as much as 300 days a year, perfect weather for mushrooms. The year my middle school’s opening had been delayed by catastrophic flooding, and I had stayed in Norway until mid-October, my godmother had taken me mushroom hunting almost every day that fall.
She had taught me which were poisonous and which were not, and while more than a decade had gone by since then, the knowledge hadn’t budged an inch in my mind.
With no more space in my bucket, I gathered some of the mushrooms into a pouch that I made out of the front of my shirt and practically skipped back to the cabin.
There was no one inside when I had arrived, and that was perfect for me.
I hauled water in the other bucket from the sheep trough, cleaned the mushrooms, seaweed, and mussels, sorting out the bad mussels, cutting off the not-so-fresh pieces of seaweed, and rubbing off any dirt and debris from the mushrooms.
Oskar’s pocketknife had stayed in his pocket when we had gone overboard, so I used it to cut the seaweed into strips and the mushrooms into chunks.
In the stone of the fireplace, there was a flimsy grate that was just wide enough to rest the cast-iron pan on.
Bemoaning the lack of olive oil and hoping that when we had the sheep, I could have some of its fat to cook with, I placed the mushroom chunks and seaweed strips in the pan.
Once they started to smell delicious and the mushrooms were turning golden brown, I poured as much water as I could into the pan.
When the water was boiling, I placed about half of the mussels in the water and let them cook until they were done.
Once the mussels were ready, I begrudgingly placed half of the mushrooms and seaweed and all of the cooked mussels into the bucket, which felt so wrong, but it wasn’t like we had bowls.
When the door swung open, the boys hurried into the cabin. They were a mess: their pants were covered in mud, they had dirt in their hair and on their faces, and the asshole had smudges of blood on his face, like he had a nosebleed and had hastily cleaned it up.
“Nope!” I exclaimed before any of them could sit down. “Take this,” I held out the water bucket and pointed out the door, “and go wash up, and do it quickly or the food will be cold.”
Ettore laughed and turned right around, with, funnily enough, the asshole, but Jin Woo and Oskar lingered.
“But it smells so good, naekkeo, and it is so cold outside. Couldn’t I just have a little while I warm up? I promise I won’t touch anything,” tried Jin Woo.
“No,” I said firmly, though I was tempted to cave when faced with his puppy eyes, “out.”
Then it was just Oskar and me in the cabin, and the silence hung heavy in the air.
His cheeks were flushed, and he had rolled up his sleeves to reveal his forearms. He looked so alive, so present, that I had to grip his pocket knife hard to stop myself from going over to him and touching him and feeling the strong beat of his heart.
“Did you go mushroom hunting?”
I nodded in response.
“Did you catch a sheep?” I asked.
“No, but we will tomorrow.”
There was another long pause, so thick that I could almost touch it.
“Thank you for gathering lunch. I am quite hungry,” He finally said.
I could feel myself softening to him. When I was little, I loved how he always thanked me when I did something for him and apologized when he felt he had done something wrong.
Maybe that was why his disappearance without an explanation had hurt so badly.
Everything had been wrong, and he had been so unlike who I knew him to be.
Now, it felt like things were falling back into place.
“You are more than welcome. Now,” I gestured to the door with my chin.
***
“Mina, this is delicious,” Jin Woo exclaimed as he ate his mussels and soup.
I had them all sit around the clean bucket that held the warm soup-stew.
I cooked the second batch of mussels as they ate, eating as I cooked.
It was pretty good for having no oil or spices.
They did say that hunger is the best spice.
“I’m glad you like it! I was worried with how few ingredients we had. Once we have sheep fat, anything that I cook will taste better.”
“Raise your hand if you vote that Mina is our designated cook!” Ettore said with his hand raised. Four other hands raised too, though Oskar didn’t look at me, busy as he was filling his mouth.
I didn’t mind cooking, but I didn’t want to give in that easily.
“I will consider it, if someone else cleans the cabin and the dishes, really cleans, not just runs some water over them, and someone else brings in firewood, and someone else sweeps the cabin.”
Asshole went to speak, probably to say something idiotic enough that it would force me to choke him out completely, but Oskar slapped a hand across his mouth.
“I’ll bring in the firewood and water,” he said, not removing his hand from the asshole's face, “and Bartosz will clean the dishes.”
So the asshole’s name was Bartosz.
“I’ll help with the kitchen clean-up, and I’ll tag along as you gather things in case you need help carrying stuff,” Jin Woo added.
I doubted I would find enough to need help, but Jin Woo was so earnest that I smiled and nodded at him.
“I guess I’ll keep the cabin clean,” Ettore sighed, but I could see his eyes flicking this way and that as if he had ideas for the arrangement of the space.
“So that’s settled!” I exclaimed happily.
I always felt better when I had a plan. In consulting, you would have this big task or problem to solve, and then you’d spend a week breaking it down to the smallest pieces and assigning jobs to everyone.
Now that everyone had a job, all seemed right with the world.
It also didn’t hurt that the guys had decided to strip off their shirts to rinse them in the water and hang them by the fire.
I was very happily taking in the scene of practically painted perfection, of Ettore’s lean chest, the strong planes of Jin Woo’s with enough muscle under the smooth silk of his skin that I wanted to take a bite out of him.
Oskar’s chest was scarred with a light dusting of auburn hair and rippling muscles.
I even sneaked a look at the asshole Bartosz’s chest, he wasn’t as muscular as Oskar or Jin Woo, but he had an Adonis's belt that was highlighted by his pants that sat slung low on his hips.
I filled the bucket again with the rest of the mussels, seaweed, and mushrooms, but before I could move back to the fire, an arm was around my waist, pulling me down. When I realized that I was sitting in Ettore’s lap, I looked up at him, trying not to smile.
“Hey!”
“Come rest, salvatrice, you’ve done more than enough for this afternoon.”
I melted back into his bare chest, trying not to nuzzle into him, though I didn’t think that he would mind.
“Don’t you want more food?”
“No, I got more than enough the first round, since I didn’t delay cleaning up as my love did.”
“I had to try to convince her to let me try some, it smelled so delicious!” Jin Woo said through a mouthful of seaweed.
Resting, I closed my eyes in bliss as Ettore absentmindedly traced patterns into my skin. I spoke without opening my eyes.
“So, tell me how the sheep hunt went.”
“It was a disaster,” I could feel Ettore’s words rumble in his chest, “we all tried grabbing them in different ways, and you wouldn’t believe how fast those little pieces of shit are.”
“Hmm,” I hummed.
“Honestly, the only one who got close to grabbing one was Bartosz.”
My eyes flew open and I sat up from Ettore’s lap.
“Bartosz? Really?”
The man in question was slouching in the corner, but I swore he was blushing. There was a subtle flush along his cheekbones.
“I played football in high school.” Bartosz almost sounded sheepish when he spoke, like it was embarrassing to bring up.
His playing was surprising, but not shocking.
He had the look of someone who perhaps used to work out but then decided that eating, exercising, and, honestly, moving from his computer were costing him precious time.
Also known as someone with an almost high-fashion model physique, gaunt and mildly sickly looking.
I wasn’t entirely against the look.
“So,” I said, tearing my eyes away from Bartosz, “what’s the plan for tomorrow?”
Oskar answered me, surprisingly.
“There’s a boulder on the far side of the pasture; we are going to use it to corner a sheep.
We are going to shoot to grab two so that they can keep each other warm if we don’t eat them right away.
We were planning on going out again this afternoon, but I don’t see there being any rush now that we are warm and full.
Might as well save some energy before we go out again. ”
I nodded my head, closing my eyes and leaning back against Ettore.
“I might take a nap, a food coma is hitting.”
“Dormire, piccola salvatrice,” Ettore whispered in my ear as I drifted off to sleep.
***
I half woke up some time later. I was still mostly asleep, raised voices coming in out of my perception as I dozed.
“It’s—bad for her, I–”
“We don’t think—”
“Isn’t one of us, but—”
As I drifted back into a real deep sleep, I couldn’t help but wonder what had gotten them all so worked up.