The night passed uneventfully.
…
IN THE MORNING, Hunter led a party in search of wood. There was none to be found on No Name, so he set off with ten armed men toward the island nearest to the south. This island was, at least from a distance, similar to their own, and Hunter had no real expectation of finding wood.
But he felt obliged to search.
He beached his boat on the eastern shore, and set off with his party into the interior, moving through dense clumps of cactus that plucked and tore at his clothes. They reached high ground at mid-morning, and from there, made two discoveries.
First, they could clearly see the next island in the chain to the south. Thin gray trickles of smoke from a half-dozen fires drifted into the air; the island was obviously inhabited.
Of more immediate interest, they saw the roofs of a village, along the water on the western coast of the island. From where they stood, the buildings had the crude appearance of a Spanish outpost settlement.
Hunter led his men cautiously forward to the village. With muskets at the ready, they slipped from one clump of cactus to another. When they were very close, one of Hunter’s men discharged his musket prematurely; the sound of the report echoed, and was carried by the wind. Hunter swore, and watched for the village to panic.
But there was no activity, no sign of life.
After a short pause, he led his men down into the village. Almost immediately, he could tell the settlement was deserted. The houses were empty; Hunter entered the first but he found nothing save a Bible, printed in Spanish, and a couple of moth-eaten blankets thrown across rude, broken beds. Tarantulas scampered for cover in the darkness.
He went back into the street. His men moved stealthily into one house after another, only to emerge empty-handed, shaking their heads.
“Perhaps they were warned of our coming,” a seaman suggested.
Hunter shook his head. “Look at the bay.”
In the bay were four small dinghies, all moored in shoal water, rocking gently with the lapping waves. Fleeing villagers would certainly have escaped by water.
It made no sense to leave any boats behind.
“Look here,” said a crewman, standing on the beach. Hunter went over. He saw five long deep trenches in the sand, the marks of narrow boats, or perhaps canoes of some sort, pulled up from the beach. There were many footprints of naked feet. And some reddish stains.
“Is it blood?”
“I don’t know.”
There was a church, as rudely constructed as the other dwellings, at the north end of the town. Hunter and his men entered it. The interior was demolished, and all the walls were covered in blood. Some sort of slaughter had occurred here, but not recently. At least several days past. The stench of dried blood was sickening.
“What’s this?”
Hunter went over to a seaman, who was staring at a skin on the ground. It was leathery and scaly. “Looks like a crocodile.”
“Aye, but from where?”
“Not here,” Hunter said. “There are no crocs here.”
He picked it up. The animal had once been large, at least five feet. Few Caribbean crocs grew so large; those in the inland swamps of Jamaica were only three or four feet.
“Skinned some time past,” Hunter said. He examined it carefully. There were holes cut around the head, and a string of rawhide passed through, as if it were to be worn on a man’s shoulders.
“Damn me, look there, Captain.”
Hunter looked toward the next island to the south. The smoke fires, previously visible, had now disappeared. It was then that they heard the faint thumping of drums.
“We had best return to the boat,” Hunter said, and, in the afternoon light, his men moved quickly. It took the better part of an hour to return to their longboat, beached on the eastern shore. When they arrived, they found another one of the mysterious canoe-trenches in the sand.
And something else.
Near their boat, an area of sand had been patted smooth and ringed with small stones. In the center, five fingers of a hand protruded into the air.
“It’s a buried hand,” one of the seamen said. He reached forward and pulled it up by one finger.
The finger came away clean. The man was so startled he dropped it and stepped back. “God’s wounds!”
Hunter felt his heart pound. He looked at the seamen, who were cowering.
“Come now,” he said, and reached forward, to pluck up all the fingers, one after another. Each came away clean. He held them in his palm. The crew stared with horror.
“What’s it mean, Captain?”
He had no idea. He put them into his pocket. “Back to the galleon, and we’ll see,” he said.
…
IN THE EVENING firelight, he sat staring at the fingers. It was Lazue who had provided the answer they all sought.
“See the ends,” she said, pointing to the rough way the fingers had been cut from the palm. “That’s Caribee work, and no mistake.”
“Caribee,” Hunter repeated, astonished. The Carib Indians, once so warlike on many Caribbean islands, were now a kind of myth, a people lost in the past. All the Indians of the Caribbean had been exterminated by the Spanish in the first hundred years of their domination. A few peaceful Arawaks, living in poverty and filth, could be found in the interior regions of some remote islands. But the bloodthirsty Caribs had long since vanished.
Or so it was said.
“How do you know?” Hunter said.
“It is the ends,” Lazue repeated. “No metal made those cuts. They were made by stone blades.”
Hunter’s brain struggled to accept this new information.
“This must be a Donnish trick, to frighten us off,” he said. But even as he said it, he was unconvinced. Everything fit together - the tracks of the canoes, the crocodile skin with pierced rawhide thongs.
“The Caribee are cannibals,” Lazue said tonelessly. “But they leave the fingers, as a warning. It is their way.”
Enders came up. “Beg pardon, sir, but Miss Almont has not returned.”
“What?”
“She’s not returned, sir.”
“From where?”
“I let her go inland,” Enders said miserably, pointing toward the dark cactus, away from the glow of the fires around the ship. “She wanted to gather fruits and berries, seems she’s a vegetarian-”
“When did you let her go inland?”
“This afternoon, Captain.”
“And she’s not back yet?”
“I sent her with two seamen,” Enders said. “I never thought-”
He broke off.
In the darkness came the distant pounding of Indian drums.
Chapter 33
IN THE FIRST of the three longboats, Hunter listened to the gentle lapping of the water on the sides of the boats, and peered through the night at the approaching island. The drumbeats were louder, and they could see the faint flicker of fire, inland.
