Longshot. Part 19

'Well- pamphlets, I suppose. Thin paperbacks, perhaps.'

'The travel agency wanted them glossy,' I explained, 'and also useful.'

'They must have taken a lot of work,' Mackie observed, turning the pages of Ice and looking at ill.u.s.trations.

'There's a good deal of repet.i.tion in them, to be honest,' I said. 'I mean, quite a lot of survival techniques are the same wherever you find yourself.'

'Such as what?' Perkin asked, faintly belligerent as usual.

'Lighting fires, finding water, making a shelter. Things like that.'

'The books are fascinating,' Mackie said, now looking at Sea, 'but how often do people get marooned on desert islands these days?'

I smiled. 'Not often. It's just the idea of survival that people like. There are schools where people on holiday go for survival courses. Actually the most lethal place to be is up a British mountainside in the wrong clothes in a cold mist. A fair number of people each year don't survive that.'

'Could you?' Perkin asked.

'Yes, but I wouldn't be up there in the wrong clothes in the first place.'

'Survival begins before you set out,' Tremayne said, reading the first page of Jungle: he looked up, amused, quoting, ' "Survival is a frame of mind." '

'Yes.'

'I have it,' he said.

'Indeed you do.'

All three of them went on reading the books with obvious interest, dipping into the various sections at random, flicking over pages and stopping to read more: vindicating, I thought, the travel agency's contention that the back-to-nature essentials of staying alive held irresistible attractions for ultra-cosseted sophisticates, just as long as they never had to put them into practice in bitter earnest.

Gareth erupted into the peaceful scene like a rehearsing poltergeist.

'What are you all so busy with?' he demanded, and then spotted the books. 'Boy, oh boy. They've come!'

He grabbed up Return from the Wilderness and plunged in, and I sat drinking wine and wondering if I would ever see four people reading Long Way Home.

'This is pretty earthy stuff,' Mackie said after a while, laying her book down. 'Skinning and de-gutting animals, ugh.'

'You'd do it if you were starving,' Tremayne told her.

'I'd do it for you,' Gareth said.

'So would I,' said Perkin.

'Then I'll arrange not to get stranded anywhere without you both.' She was teasing, affectionate. 'And I'll stay in camp and grind the corn.' She put a hand to her mouth in mock dismay. 'Dear heaven, may feminists forgive me.'

'It's pretty boring about all these jabs,' Gareth complained, not being interested in gender typing.

' "Better the jabs than the diseases", it says here,' Tremayne said.

'Oh well, then.'

'And you've had teta.n.u.s jabs already.'

'I guess so,' Gareth agreed. He looked at me. 'Have you had all these jabs?'

'Afraid so.'

'Teta.n.u.s?'

'Especially.'

'There's an awful lot about first aid,' he said, turning pages. ' "How to stop wounds bleeding- pressure points," A whole map of arteries. "How to deal with poisons- swallow charcoal"!' He looked up. 'Do you mean it?'

'Sure,' I said. 'Sc.r.a.pe it into water and drink it The carbon helps take some sorts of poison harmlessly through the gut, if you're lucky.'

'Good G.o.d,' Tremayne said.

His younger son went on reading. 'It says here you can drink urine if you distil it.'

'Gareth!' Mackie said, disgusted.

'Well, that's what it says. "Urine is sterile and cannot cause diseases. Boil it and condense the steam which will then be pure distilled water, perfectly safe to drink." '

'John, really!' Mackie protested.

'It's true,' I said, smiling. 'Lack of water is a terrible killer. If you've a fire but no water, you now know what to do.'

'I couldn't.'

'Survival is a frame of mind,' Tremayne repeated. 'You never know what you can do until you have to.'

Perkin asked me, 'Have you ever drunk it?'

'Distilled water?'

'You know what I mean.'

I nodded. 'Yes, I have. To test it for the books. And I've distilled all sorts of other things too. Filthy jungle water. Wet mud. Sea water, particularly. If the starter liquid is watery and not fermenting, the steam is pure

'H2O. And when sea water boils dry you have salt left, which is useful,'

'What if the starter liquid is fermenting?' Gareth asked.

'The steam is alcohol.'

'Oh yes, I'm supposed to have learned that in school.'

'Gin and tonic in the wilderness?' Tremayne suggested.