Footprints in the Sand

This short story is part of a collection of mystery stories, entitled SEVEN TALL TALES, all the stories by the same author, that has been published and is now available on Amazon

FOOTPRINTS IN THE SAND
A short story
(2186 words)
By
Michael Noonan





For five years he had been alone on the island, and in all that time he hadn’t seen another human being. Before the shipwreck, which had brought him to that state, he had always been a sociable and outgoing man, most fully alive only amidst the busy hubbub of society. And so he had been forced, by a trick of fate, to learn the grim arts of solitude and introspection from anew.
The wreck of the ship was still visible, just over a mile from the shore, to the west of the island, on the fatal rocks on which it had foundered. When the tide receded to its furthest point from the shore he found that he was able to clamber onto the skewed deck of the ship and search a number of its cabins that then lay above the waterline. During these perilous excursions he had managed to retrieve many useful objects from the ship that aided his existence on the island. He retrieved knifes, spoons and forks, cups and plates, two pans, a magnifying glass, a length of rope, a saw, a hammer, an axe, a chisel, a shovel, a box of nails and various items of clothing. He also took from the ship, a rifle, two pistols, a packet of lead balls, and a small barrel of gunpowder, which he managed to dry off in the relentless tropical heat of the island.
Despite all those frenetic activities on his part, during the initial years a deep and fathomless melancholy had descended on him, almost at times paralysing his will. His dreams were troubled, and in his despair and hopelessness he often thought of suicide, as the one solution to his wretched condition.
It was only over recent years and months that his spirit had begun to rise from out those depths of ennui and depression. At last he had come to accept the cruel inevitability of circumstances, and the harsh and unpalatable truth that the island had become the concrete and circumscribed limit of his world. This alone was real, while his wife, his children, his friends, his colleagues, and his nation, were but ghosts and memories for his dreams to play with. Though anger and bitterness would from time to time torment him, he had on the whole come to terms with his lot. He would die here.
Yet the island had its compensations. It was lush and well vegetated. The air was so warm and dry he could sleep out in the open, or in the shade, as snugly as he had slept in his own bed in England. And there was always the warm lapping sea, in which he could bathe and swim to his heart’s content.
The truth was he had begun, almost against his own will, to find some real contentment and joy within the tight constrictions of his new life. He enjoyed foraging for food; picking wild fruit and berries from the bushes, climbing trees to cut down coconuts – hunting and laying traps for animals, and casting nets for fish. He would gut the fish and then boil them in pans of water, heated by fires of wood and kindling. Fires which he could now expertly start by focusing, with his magnifying glass, the rays of the powerful tropical Sun onto piles of dry leaves and grass. The animals he would skin and then roast on makeshift spits. And the various pools and springs on the island meant that there was no shortage of fresh water, to drink, to use for cooking and to wash with. He enjoyed building and extending his shelter, and fashioning and improvising its furnishings with the various tools which had managed to salvage from the old ship.
Indeed only when he worked did he feel any kind of happiness. When there was nothing to occupy him, doubts, fears, bitterness and even despair, would gradually creep upon him.
With each year the hope of escaping from the island had weakened its hold on him, until now he recognised it for the illusion that it was. For when there is no basis for a hope, it is a counterfeit currency.
He was the sole survivor of the catastrophe. Three other men had managed to swim ashore along with him, despite the battering waves and deadly currents which had swept the other mariners to their deaths. But of those, one was so clearly weakened by the ordeal that he had died only a matter of days later. While the other two, unable to bear the idea of having to live on such a remote and solitary spit of land, had tried to escape from the island only a few weeks after landing upon it.
From some motley material at hand and torn planking that had drifted ashore from the wrecked ship, they had fashioned a rickety, gimcrack raft, with a pole and some rags of old clothing for a sail. They had whittled a pair of facsimile oars. They tied a cask, which had also drifted ashore from the vessel - filled with water, drawn from a clear spring in the interior of the island - onto the uncertain deck, along with some hasty provisions. Then with much shrieking and hoopla, they launched the fragile vessel onto the waters, during an ebb tide. To the one who remained on the island their confidence seemed strained and synthetic, and entirely misplaced. And several miles from the island the raft was caught in a violent tropical squall, keeled over and broke apart. The two wretched mariners, having survived one shipwreck, were tossed into the foaming waters. That disastrous venture had effectively inhibited him from ever using, or even contemplating the use of such a means to escape the island.
The nearest inhabitable land was far too great a distance away; and he lacked the navigational skills to guide him there. The waters beyond were infested with sharks and pulled by dangerous currents. Thus, his chances of surviving in such a perilous environment were minuscule.
A few days later he saw the corpses of the two men, along with the wreckage of their craft, washed up on a beach.
He dragged the bodies off the beach. He took the shovel from his shelter and dug two graves for the men. He placed the bodies into the pits, and then shovelled the soil over them. From some of the splintered timbers of their doomed craft he fashioned two wooden crosses and planted a cross at the head of each grave. He clasped his hands together, bowed his head, mumbled some old prayers he had remembered, and felt that he had done his duty.
Instead of the chimera of escape he had placed all his hopes on some vessel landing, or at least passing by so close to the island, that he could alert the crew or passengers of his presence, by waving a cloth on a pole. But during his five solitary years upon the island he had barely seen half a dozen ships, and those at so great a distance that they appeared as tiny shadows that edged the sky. They could not possibly see or hear him, however much he might dementedly wave and shout. And so they had sailed by, without an inkling that they had left a fellow human behind – stranded and isolated – who they could have rescued and brought back to civilisation.

Yet after spending those five barren years upon the island, and after becoming slowly and grudgingly resigned to his fate, a most baffling and curious incident occurred.
For one morning, after suffering a bout of fever and delirium, and a restless sleep, he groggily emerged from his shelter, made his way down towards the nearest beach and saw there a line of footprints, which stretched and curved into the far distance. It was with an almost physical shock, and an audible gasp of alarm, that he viewed those mysterious tracks. Fear, trepidation and panic flooded his mind, and he grasped the trunk of a tree as if to gain some comfort from its physical presence. When at length his nerves had settled a little, he set off, with determined step, to follow the tracks and the enigmatic creature that had made them. He clasped a knife in his hand, for fear that the intruder was of a hostile disposition. He followed the tracks all along the beach to where they eventually petered out in the dunes and grassy mounds that circumscribed the slender cove. He then searched all the other beaches and inlets around the island. He searched each hidden nook, each secluded spot. But to no avail. The creature was not to be seen. Likewise he could find no ship or boat; no visible means by which that as yet unseen person could have arrived on that godforsaken island.
After anxious, nervous hours, spent upon that desperate and futile chase, he sat down in a grassy glade so as to recuperate his strength and calm his ragged nerves. Though he could rest his weary body for a while he couldn’t calm his restless, unsettled mind.
Who was this strange creature, he asked himself? Where was he hidden? How had he managed to reach the island? And why? The questions ran through his restless mind, till his head ached. Though the questions he taxed himself with, he couldn’t answer, except by vague and feverish speculations. Yet they stuck fast, like limpets, to his harried consciousness. All the while he nervously shifted his position and glanced over his shoulder with suspicious alarm.
This was clearly no Man Friday, come to break the spell of his solitude: but was, or so the wretched man surmised, an alien and hostile spirit.
It was an inexplicable, intolerable situation. He had lost in a matter of minutes that feeling of relative equanimity and peace of mind that it had taken him years of pain and loneliness to develop. He was suddenly the prey of dark apprehensions, beyond his power to control. Fearful anxieties, severe muscular tension and acute nervousness, now constantly assailed him. He had been robbed of all his contentment and repose.
And what was worse, he now even feared his former ease and contentment, lest they would rob him of his suspicion, his awareness, his sharpened self-consciousness, on which he felt his survival now depended. Unless he was constantly on his guard, he could be taken at any time.
One thing he knew to be certain. He would find no peace of mind until he confronted that intruder in his domain. And perhaps indeed, not until he had killed him. And even after such a hopeful eventuality there was no guarantee that his former ease and serenity would return to him. For if one individual could come across that wretched and isolated island, flung out as it was in the midst of a vast and desolate ocean, what would stop another from doing the same?
That very isolation and solitariness he had once so hated and detested, he looked back upon now with regretful sadness, as at a lost or stolen treasure, irretrievably gone.

At length he wearily pulled himself to his feet, and his fears overcoming even the leaden lethargy of his body, he began to search the island once again. He sheathed the knife and took in his hands a grim, improvised spear he used for hunting. With careful, wary steps, he made his way. He travelled the circumference of the island, then made his way into its wild, tangled, verdurous interior, all the while his eyes and ears alert for any sign of his elusive, treacherous adversary. His body was as tensed as a coiled watch spring.
Yet by the evening, beaten down with fatigue, and weary in spirits, he settled down in the clearing of a wood and took some fitful rest. On the distant beach the incoming tide washed away the transient footprints.
He did not realise it at the time, but he had created within himself those torments that had stolen his equanimity and would soon destroy him. From then on his nerves were frayed by the rustle of foliage and the sigh of the wind. Each unobtrusive sound now carried the threat of danger and menace.
Yet what he also did not realise, in his wretched and nerve-shot state, was that the very night before, while the Sun was sinking beneath the waves of the ocean, he had, at the height of his delirium, got up from his bed, left his shelter, and made his way down to the beach. He had walked across it, as an unconscious somnambulist, before stumbling back to his shelter and falling into his bed again; without leaving a trace of that strange sojourn in his memory. He himself had made those tracks he now believed another had formed.
He alone was the source of those prints that had caused him so much terror and apprehension. He was the only individual on the island, and would die, in fear of another.