The Voyage of the Frog by Gary Paulsen

Author:Gary Paulsen
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
Published: 2014-10-16T21:00:00+00:00

THE VOYAGE OF THE FROG

And beneath the title, in smaller letters:

Being the Compleat Log of the Good Boat Frog

Owen had kept a log — all this time he had kept a log and David had not known of it. It was getting dark now, but David opened the cover and held the first page up to the fading light. It was dated almost a year and a half before, written clearly in Owen’s small, precise handwriting, and it told of sailing for a day alone over the deep trench that ran between the mainland of California and the island of Santa Rosa. There had been whales feeding on plankton and he had tried pulling his plankton cone net but with only partial success. Not enough to try a plankton burger, but enough for a taste.

Plankton.

That was the cone net under the forward bunk with the fishing line. It was a plankton net. David knew about plankton from biology — they were also called krill: millions of tiny, some almost microscopic, shrimp-like animals that filled the oceans of the world. He had seen pictures of them taken through a magnifying lens. They looked like watery bugs. Many creatures fed on them, including blue whales, the largest of all animals, with mouths like huge strainers filled with a mesh called baleen; the whales would take in massive gulps of sea water and krill, strain out the water and swallow the krill.

But he hadn’t thought people could eat them. Plankton were so small. You couldn’t clean them in any way, would just have to eat the whole thing. Tiny little legs and shells and all.

Which would be kind of like eating bugs …

He’d have to think about that one for a while. He was hungry, but he wasn’t up for eating bugs yet. There were seven cans of food. It would be hard to get his mind past the little legs and shells and feelers and actually swallow a mouthful of krill. Of course there was the hunger, and his stomach was definitely moving toward his backbone, but still … bugs, he thought. Actually eating bugs.

Then there was the rod and reel. He could eat fish. The ocean was full of fish. All he had to do was catch a fish and cook it and eat it.

He tried to read more, but the light was almost all gone now; a soft darkness was coming over the sea and the boat and his thoughts. He had found three small, fat candles and a flashlight with dead batteries. There were some matches in a ziplock plastic bag, and he lit one of the candles and put it on a small saucer on the table and sat on the couch — bumping down on the hard plywood because the cushions were still wet up topside — to look more at the log.

There were not entries for every day, only those days Owen had been on the boat. Most, virtually all, of the entries were just notations

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