Feral Chickens by C. McGee

Author:C. McGee [McGee, C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-78535-791-6
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
Published: 2018-08-30T16:00:00+00:00

Another six hours passed without incident and without thought, then my watch started beeping again. At first I didn’t even notice the alarm, so divorced was my mind from its immediate surroundings. After five minutes of incessant repetition, however, my attention was finally captured. Aware of the present once more, I took notice of the fact that the water had become a bit choppier.

Should I be concerned, I thought. Then I thought, Nah.

Proceeding in a cavalier fashion, I turned around, popped open the hatch, pulled out the bag-o-mongooses, and went about updating their anesthesia. One by one I took the little carnivores out of their sack, injected them with the sedative, marked them with a spot of orange paint (which I was dismayed to see was not the temporary spray I thought I had purchased—those poor mongooses were going to be marked for life), and then returned them to their bag. The rough water slowed the process a bit, but it still took less than twenty minutes to attend to the whole lot. The job complete, I turned around and went about placing the mongooses back in their compartment.

I had settled the bag of small, sedated mammals into the rear bulkhead but had not yet closed the hatch when I caught sight of something moving out of the corner of my eye. Shifting my gaze away from the open bulkhead and toward the movement, I quickly figured out what had drawn my attention: a wave. It was not a tremendously large wave, but it was big enough. Big enough to take down a kayak with an open bulkhead just begging to be filled with water.

“Fuck,” I said, as I began frantically messing with the hatch cover. Repeatedly I attempted to force it shut, and repeatedly I failed. The sides not properly aligned, the cover refused to snap into place. All it needed was a little finesse but I had no time for finesse. The arrival of the wave was imminent and brute force was the only timely course of action, or, at least, the only course of action that my frazzled brain could come up with. The cover still not shut, I felt the front of my boat begin to rise as it met the base of the wave. Putting in a last ditch effort, I lined up the cover as well as I could and then attempted to seal the gaps with my forearms. It was far from watertight, and I knew it, but it was the best that I could do. Certain that disaster was imminent, I closed my eyes and held my breath as the boat made its way up the incline. With every inch that the bow raised my anxiety increased. From face cheeks to butt cheeks everything that could be clinched, was clinched, until finally … nothing.

The kayak breached the crest of the wave, the nose plopped down onto the water on the other side, and all was calm. Both the hatch cover and my forearms had been sprayed with a few dots of water, but other than that nothing had happened.

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