Gone to the Woods by Gary Paulsen

Author:Gary Paulsen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)

SHARKS

The routine remained the same until the boy had in the end accepted that it would probably go on forever. Steel tray of food in the morning—powdered eggs, creamed corn, and white bread—followed by, if there was time and he didn’t mind, a conversation with Ruben while he used the alcohol-cotton swabs to dab at his sores, and then a day reading comic books and thinking about what Ruben had told him of the Philippine Islands. Until later in the day when he got another steel tray of food—very often fried liver, instant dry mashed potatoes, two more slices of white bread without butter, some absolutely god-awful desiccated string beans mixed with watery kidney beans, and a candy bar for dessert from the men who wanted to meet his mother. Twice Ruben brought him a can of pork patties cold in lard and a second can—the cans were colored olive-drab—with something called a pound cake for snacks. He was so fat-starved he actually enjoyed the pork and lard cold, and the pound cake tasted truly good. Sweet. And oddly fresh considering that both these cans were from leftover army rations.

The boy had accepted that the situation would last forever, or for however long it took to get to Manila, and on the tenth or eleventh day—he could not be sure of the time—Ruben came rushing into the cell and said: “Come quick. A plane is coming down.”

Which made no sense at all and the boy asked, “What plane?”

Ruben ignored the question. “Come quick. I must help. Please follow and find your mother so she can look after you.”

The boy did not need a second invitation and he ran out after Ruben, wearing shorts and an old T-shirt. They virtually loped through what seemed like endless white steel tunnels and up a metal ladder-stairway and through a side door until they were suddenly out in the open on the side deck of the ship.

Initially it was so bright and blinding that it was almost as bad as when he was first introduced to the cell. He closed his eyes, wiped the sudden light-tears away, opened them, closed again, and finally got them to stay open.

All he saw was blue.

He had never seen the ocean before, had no real idea of what it would be like, and all he saw, all he could think, was the word “blue.” It was as if he and Ruben and the ship, his whole world, was at the bottom of a startling bright blue bowl that reached into the sky.

Blue.

And calm. Like it had been laid down with a ruler. The ship had stopped and the boy saw that they were lowering a large lifeboat down the side on ropes until it floated free. There were men in the lifeboat and they started an engine in the middle of the boat and other men were unfolding a portable stairway that went down the outside of the ship. Just as the boy looked toward the bow and

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