Adrift on St. John by Rebecca Hale Page A

Hannah’s staying at the eco-resort.”
    The narrow tip of Fred’s long dragonlike tail swished back and forth, a wordless critique of how long it had taken me to finally make the connection.

10
Maho Bay
    Alden Edwards sat at a short wooden desk in a rustic cabin nestled in the woods on the hillside above Maho Bay.
    The floor of the cabin, like that of the other semipermanent structures spread out across the eco-resort, was mounted on stilts made out of thick rounded posts, elevating it fifteen feet or so above the forest floor.
    Alden often felt as if he lived in a tree house. It was a boyhood fantasy he had been acting out for almost thirty years.
    An abundance of wildlife frequented the open area beneath the cabin. Throughout the day, the jungle of leaves and underbrush rustled with activity. Hermit crabs moseyed past with their slow shell-dragging crawl, tree frogs hopped happily about, and geckos skittered in sporadic stop-and-go sprints.
    Several members of the last category ventured up the support posts and sneaked in through openings in the cabin floor’s wooden slats. Once inside, the tiny creatures skimmed fearlessly across the walls, comically pumping their front legs in mock push-ups whenever he glanced up from his desk to watch them.
    Then, of course, there was the occasional mongoosemeandering blindly through the leaves, clumsily oblivious to the noisy ruckus it created.
    More than once, Alden had leaned out over the edge of his front porch to check an overenthusiastic rummaging on the ground below, just to make sure the campgrounds hadn’t been invaded by a large bear that had somehow managed to migrate to the tropics.
    Brought in by the Danish in the 1700s, the island’s now-entrenched mongoose species had been meant to help dampen the mice population inundating the sugarcane fields. Unfortunately, the brown rodentlike beasts hunted primarily during the daytime hours when the mice were tucked in their dens, fast asleep. Three hundred years later, both species continued to thrive in peaceful coexistence.
    Overlaying all the crustacean, lizard, and mongoose activity that surrounded the cabin, there was the steady din of insects, ceaselessly chittering and chattering through the trees. These multitudes operated in their own separate kingdom, remaining mostly out of sight as they constructed elaborate nests that hung down from tree limbs and dug intricate underground bunkers that tunneled through the volcanic earth.
    Of all the creature sounds Alden had come to know and love, it was that of the insects he found most endearing. Their soothing, buzzing hum calmed his nerves each night and sang him off to sleep.
    This fanciful lifestyle was not without its spoilers. While the vast majority of the bug population had no interest in the eco-resort’s human residents, the jungled forest was home to a certain species of biting gnats that posed a constant nuisance. The screens that covered the cabin’s windows were no impediment to these nasty pests.
    Alden kept a can of bug repellent within arm’s reach, and the burnt-out stubs of a half dozen citronella candles filled the counters near his desk. A tattered flyswatter hung from a nail in the door frame, a weapon of last resort.
    Alden hated to be the cause of any living being’s destruction, but he had long since assuaged his conscience when it came to the island’s infamous no-see-ums.
    He scratched absentmindedly at the top of his knobby left knee, brushing a piece of fuzz tickling his skin. Beneath the wooden desk, two of the outlawed insects hung in the air, scheming as they swooped to avoid his large calloused hand.
    Alden didn’t know it yet, but a rash of small red welts had begun to rise on his hairy shin. The line of microscopic bite marks spread from the soft flesh beneath his ankle all the way up to his knee.
    As his hand returned to the desktop, the tiny gnats circled his leg, proudly surveying their work. They weren’t called “no-see-ums” for