It was a leopard that had inflicted on Demure the wounds that now disfigured her. She was savaged just after she'd made landfall by raft, naked and hungry, on the pebbly beach of the northern coast. The attack happened after she staggered towards the forest from the shore where her raft had carried her. She was too exhausted to find somewhere completely safe. She was shivering in the chill wind and solely focused on the need to find somewhere to rest. It is, of course, when most distracted by weariness and cold that a person is most vulnerable. And so it was with Demure. It was almost as soon as she'd slumped down on a patch of grass by the forest edge that without warning a leopard pounced on her and grabbed her arm between its jaws.
Demure had always been a resourceful woman. Her immediate instinct was to fight back and this she did with a sharp flint-tipped spear that the Raft People used to hunt tuna and dolphin. She thrust it swiftly upwards with her free hand and felt the familiar resistance of living flesh as it stabbed into the leopard's flank. The animal's response was a startled growl. It immediately scurried back into the forest from whence it had come with the flint-tip still embedded in its neck. Nevertheless, considerable damage had been done in that brief violent encounter. Demure collapsed on her side under the forest's shadows while blood seeped out from across the left side of her body where the leopard had bitten and scratched her. She had only just landed on the shore and already she was at mortal risk of slow death.
Demure would almost certainly have died had she not been discovered by chance a day or so later. Her saviours were women from a Cave Dwellers' village in the nearby caves in the mountainside. They were scavenging along the shore for flotsam that the village could eat or otherwise employ. As was the case when Glade first encountered the Cave Dwellers, the women were initially more shocked by Demure's nakedness than by the sight of the wounds she had suffered. Demure was in no position to care what they thought. She'd lost a great deal of blood. She could no longer see through her left eye. Only a persistent stabbing pain prevented her from sinking into eternal oblivion. All the while she clasped a flint knife as her only means of protecting herself from any other predators, but her grip was so tight that as much blood dripped from her palm as it did from the wounds inflicted by the leopard.
It was several days until Demure was fully conscious of her situation. After this, she was cared for by the village shaman who instructed her in the traditions of the Cave Dwellers. She had to accept that she would have to remain fully clothed irrespective of how warm it was. She began the slow and essential steps towards learning yet another new language and adapting to a new set of customs. It was soon obvious that this wasn't a tribe where Demure was likely to flourish. Modesty, moral probity and a strict observance to tradition were attributes of to the Cave Dwellers that were impervious to Demure's skills in scheming and taking advantage of people's weaknesses.
But, as Demure told Glade, she was a changed woman. All she wanted now was to be reunited with her lover.
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Demure's arrival on the northern shores was more than a year after the time Glade had arrived and been adopted by the Red Haired People. This wasn't because she'd been drifting by raft for that much longer, but because she'd originally made landfall somewhere else entirely. Her passage to the pebbly shore was rather shorter than that which washed Glade ashore. In fact, the shore from which she'd sailed was much nearer and could be seen on a clear day across the blue waters of the Great Sea.
When the two lovers' rafts drifted apart on the restless waves, the two women's immediate fortunes were much the same. Like Glade, several days passed by in which Demure increasingly lost faith in her ability to survive. She rediscovered a faith in the gods of her tribe, but they served her no better than the spirits of Glade's forest when the dark storms rained down on her. As she drifted over the waves, Demure only survived because, like Glade, she'd tied herself to the slats of the raft. And Demure likewise eventually drifted onto a sandy beach after many days of being aimlessly buffeted about by the elements.
Unlike Glade however, Demure's salvation wasn't facilitated by human intervention. There was nobody to help her. She had to untie herself from the raft when she was able. She pulled it away from the waves that battered the sand so that she wouldn't be dragged out again by the receding tide. She then collapsed weak and helpless on the sand, but glad to be alive. And she stayed so for all the day, into the night and through the following day. If a leopard or other predator had wandered about this sandy beach then she would never have survived.
It was only later when Demure recovered sufficiently to wander beyond the shore that she discovered that she had no need to worry about predators. In fact, there was no large game at all. There were no giraffes, elephants or lions. Dense forest spilled to the edge of the sand. There were many birds and small animals in the trees. Demure's eyes were well trained to spot the tell-tale trail of large animals that had passed through the woodland and there was nothing to be seen at all.
Demure was reluctant to leave the coast as she would then lose her point of reference, so she decided to walk along the sandy beach until she stumbled across a human settlement. She knew from experience that villages were most often within sight of the sea. She pushed her raft out of sight so that she could use it again if the natives were hostile and she needed it to get away. Then she strode along the sand breaking her journey only to forage for fruit and other victuals in the nearby forest and to spear fish in the clear blue water of the sea. She walked for a whole day and found nothing. She rested in the shelter of a rock where she roasted the vegetables and fish. She walked through the following day and the next. And still she encountered no villages and found no evidence of any. As she wandered she noticed that the sun which once rose on her left side was now rising on her right. At first she assumed it was because the shoreline jutted out to sea and that she would soon walk into a bay that would curve round and adjust her orientation.
Then one afternoon she was astonished to see that the beach along which she was walking was the very one on which she had arrived. The raft was where she had hidden it. The small clearing in the woods which had been her home for the first few days was exactly as it had been several days before. The land where she had been carried to across the Great Sea was surrounded on all sides by water. This concept puzzled Demure. She had never been aware before of the concept of an island.
Demure wandered to every part of the island in the seasons to come. There were routes across the island alongside the flowing streams to the hills at the interior. In all her travels she came across no sign that anyone had ever lived there. The largest animals she came across were some small hippopotami wallowing in a small inland lake. There were no other animals of considerable size. There were mice, rabbits, dwarf crocodiles, small birds, and many tortoises and turtles. There were animals to capture and eat, but no big game and no people. Demure was able to feast well on the animals, because they were oddly unafraid of her. She could walk right up to a large goose whose wings were too small for it to fly and catch it in her bare hands. She could twist its neck while the bird more bewildered than frightened contemplated its death in a seemingly philosophical manner.
At first, Demure thought she was in paradise. There were no predators and there was plenty to eat. She explored more and more of the island each day throughout the Summer and Autumn months. The Winter months, however, were no less cold than in the southern lands and Demure was obliged to piece together a crude covering from the fur she skinned off the small animals she trapped. Unfortunately Demure wasn't particularly good at stitching together the separate furs and what she wrapped round her shoulders and under which she shivered at night frequently fell apart at the seams. At night, she slept as well as she could under a blanket of fallen leaves and ferns while the snow fell down and she was painfully aware that she had nobody else's warm flesh to embrace.
Loneliness was what most troubled Demure. She missed her lover. During the long lonely hours, she contemplated her years together with Glade. She recalled how they supported one another on their directionless roving across the southern lands. She treasured the memory of their moments of passionate love, their deep speculations and their entertaining chats, the songs and chants they taught each other, and even the acrimonious arguments that Demure could now see were ones in which she was almost always the guilty rather than the aggrieved party.
Her thoughts focused also on the long distant shore that she could see across the Great Sea on a clear day. Although she didn't know it, the island wasn't very far from the tribal lands of the Cave Dwellers. All she needed was to sail on her raft on a day when the winds blew towards the shore and the sea was becalmed. Within a day or so she would drift to the shore where in the absence of anyone to tell her otherwise she increasingly came to believe that Glade would be waiting for her.
It was on one such perfect day that Demure pushed herself out on her raft and set off across the Great Sea. She badly underestimated the distance and difficulty of crossing the sea and was soon regretting her foolishness. However, she took enough food with her to survive and she did have some rudimentary skill at steering the raft. The extent of the shore ahead of her steadily grew larger and larger as the Sun set, the Moon filled the sky and then the Sun rose again. The shores eventually stretched so far in either direction that her main concern was more the difficulty of navigating past the rocks that were in her way than whether she would find land.
The raft drifted onto a pebbly beach. She was hungry and tired, but not as much so as she'd been when she drifted on the Great Sea a year earlier. The only plan she had was to find Glade, her lover, and this mission now seemed rather more difficult now she was ashore. But as Glade was to discover Demure's search almost came to an abrupt end before it had even begun.
