Chapter 4: The Lonely Sea
Lost at Sea
Chapter 4: The Lonely Sea
Admiral Biscuit
Fishing in the ocean was hard. In rivers and ponds, and even close to shore, the fish didn't have anywhere to go. Most of the best-tasting fish were close enough to the surface that they could be easily spotted by a gliding pegasus, and they generally weren't smart enough to see their doom coming from above.
Plus, it was easy enough to find birds that were fishing, and so even a pegasus who had little skill at finding fish on her own could just watch herons or cormorants and know where the fish were.
Out in the open ocean, there were no such clues. Cloud was aware that there were birds like albatrosses that flew far out into the ocean and ate the fish that they found there, but there weren't any of them around to watch, so she had to figure it out for herself.
It was something that seemed simple—she was over the ocean, and the ocean was full of fish—but it wasn't easy at all. Waves and shadows from clouds confused her, and if she did spot fish, she had no idea how big or how deep they were.
A fish that had seemed manageable from the clouds turned out to be some kind of enormous sunfish that could probably eat her if it had a mind to. Granted, catching one would solve all her food needs for a long time, but she was a smart enough mare to know not to pick on a fish that was bigger than her.
Other flashes in the water were false alarms. Reflections off of waves, strange things floating in the ocean that she had no name for, sharks and whales, strange glowing lights that turned out to be nothing when she got close to the water, or even fish that probably would have been catchable if they hadn't been swimming so deep. Cormorants and other seabirds could dive far below the surface to pick up a tasty fish; she wasn't much of a diver and couldn't manage more than a few ponylengths in, and by then the fish were long gone.
She did manage to find some seaweed that the storm had torn from the bottom, and while it wasn't very good at all, it was better than nothing.
Cloud knew to be careful eating it; it was saturated with saltwater and too much would make her sick. As a filly, she'd been swimming outside the harbor and seen a big thick mat of seagrass that looked really tasty—she'd been too young to know what drinking a lot of saltwater would do to her, and that life lesson had not been forgotten. She draped strands across her back and flew them up to her cloud, and let it dry off some in the sun before eating it. It didn't taste any better dried, but it didn't make her vomit, either.
• • •
She was on her cloud, gnawing at some more of the unappealing seaweed when she spotted the flying fish.
At first, she mistook them for a low-flying flock of silvery birds, and she almost ignored them completely, but she was already desperate for any diversion from her predicament, and as she watched them glide above the surface and then dive down again, she thought that maybe they were a heretofore unknown kind of seabird that had found something to eat.
As she descended, it quickly became obvious that they were in fact fish, and even better they were fish that would come to her.
There seemed to be an almost limitless number of them; as she got closer to the water, they were coming up in every direction, for reasons completely unknown to her.
Cloud wasn't about to let this unexpected gift go, and managed to nab a couple of them when they popped above the waves. They were quick and didn't stay up for very long, which made them really tricky to catch; they also didn't seem to view her as a threat, because they kept popping up even after she'd eaten a few of them.
On the few occasions she'd caught her own fish before, she'd never really paid much attention to what they did after she caught what she wanted, but this time she stayed on the edge of her cloud, studying how they behaved, in the hopes that that knowledge would bear fruit later. Maybe they only went flying certain times of the day, or when the waves were the right size, or when there were clouds above them.
She worked some bones out of her teeth with her tongue, spitting them off the edge of her cloud as she observed the ocean below her.
• • •
On her third and fourth day at sea, there were no fish to be found. She had to work on her cloud some—it was starting to break up, and before it totally dissipated she wanted to get some of the material from the edges to make herself a sunshade for the day and a windbreak for the night.
It was by no means a proper cloudhouse, but it would serve well enough, and it kept her hooves busy.
She kept a watchful eye on the ocean below, still hoping to see a sailing ship or—even better—land, but there was nothing.
Lots of sailorponies knew how to navigate using the stars. She was vaguely aware of the process; you needed to use a cross staff, astrolabe or octant to sight on known stars. In a pinch, just estimating a rough position by eyeball would work.
While Cloud had a nebulous knowledge of where stars appeared in the skies, it wasn't nearly enough to estimate her position, or even how her position was changing. She could have been drifting in any direction, at nearly any speed. For all she knew, the cloud blew one way during the day and then back again at night. There were no fixed landmarks below her, just the ever-shifting ocean.
• • •
By the end of the first week, days began to blur together. The sun came up and she climbed to the edge of her makeshift cloudhome—now alone over the vast ocean—and sat on the little outcropping she'd made her third day adrift. She'd spend the day looking below her for food, for land, for ships, for birds, for anything that was different.
She'd begun to learn to estimate sizes of fish from above, so when a school of tuna swam by below her, she ignored them. They were far too big for her to catch.
During the afternoon, she'd fly down and work some of the moisture rising off the ocean into small bits of cloud, to make up for what was still evaporating off her home and what she drank.
It was frighteningly lonely. She'd never been without contact with other ponies for so long. Even though she lived in her own cloudhouse, it didn't take much time to fly to somepony else's whenever she wanted to socialize. Besides work and all the gossip that went on there, she usually had dinners in the tavern after she was done with her day's weather duty.
A pony wasn't meant to be alone like this, with nopony else to talk to or hug or nuzzle.
• • •
Her second week adrift, she came close to being a shark's dinner. She'd found a school of herring that was swimming close to the surface, close enough that she could dive down and catch them, holding her mouth open until she felt something cold and slippery wiggling around inside.
At first, she'd had to surface to spit all the seawater out, but with practice she'd learned how to force it through her teeth, keeping the fish trapped inside.
Herrings were fast, and they were aware of a pony in their midst, so when she'd cornered some of them who weren't as smart as all the rest, she tried to stay under and swallow one right after another, and she'd stayed down almost too long.
It had been a natural assumption that all the fish were fleeing her, when instead they were scared of a much bigger threat than a pegasus. And for a brief moment, she'd been in the very center of an open spot in the school, a spot which had opened solely because of the shark.
Cloud didn't know very much about sharks except that struggling in the water or eating before going swimming attracted them, and here in the deep ocean there was nopony else to warn her that it was coming. She couldn't hear it because the water muffled her hearing, and she couldn't smell it, and when she thought back on how close it had been she was sure that if she hadn't surfaced to get a breath of air, the rows of sharp teeth that had just brushed against her tail would have clamped down on a hind leg for sure.
It came up out of the water just behind her, and that was when she finally noticed it. It had had enough momentum to get her if she'd kept flying forward, but the shock of it scared her up, and she tumbled a bit as it got a lock of tail hair and then she was far above where a shark could jump, watching the water warily.
After that, she always watched for open spots in schools and avoided them, instead trying to get around to the front and catch the leaders before they figured out what was happening.
• • •
She napped in the afternoon, if she'd caught fish and if her cloud was holding together. And during the night, she only dozed, frequently waking up in order to scan the horizon for any kind of ponymade light, no matter how insignificant.
When the moon had gone through a full cycle, that was a time to both celebrate and mourn. Her life on shore seemed more and more distant to her, and sometimes struggled to remember how she'd filled her days back then.
Memories of being ashore and having her hooves on dirt felt more and more distant. It was like trying to remember being a filly—it was long ago, and didn't feel very real to her anymore. Her life was raw fish when she could catch them, constantly patching up her windblown cloudshack, and scanning the horizon. It was sucking on cloud tufts to get the moisture out and guessing where she might be and wondering if a string of whitecaps was a sign of shallow water or just the ocean taunting her.
• • •
She'd been adrift for over two moons when she saw icebergs for the first time. It was hard to resolve objects over the ocean, especially if they were near the horizon. They could be distant clouds or distant land or just an optical illusion. Waves and refraction fooled her constantly.
The shape resolved into something that had edges too sharp to be a cloud, and her hopes began to rise. Sometimes mountains went all the way to the sea.
She wanted to fly off her cloud and right to it, but stopped herself before she could. It could be a really tall mountain, and if the conditions were just right, it might be more than a day's flying distance away, and then what would she do?
It hadn't been there the day before, and now it was, so she was obviously drifting towards it. She could afford to be patient: she'd survived this long, and another day wasn't going to kill her.
Cloud kept looking at it as the day went by, trying to estimate if it had gotten any closer. She scraped a bit of cloud off her roof and made a sort of height-stick—if she sat in the right place, she could judge if it was getting bigger, and therefore closer.
At first, she couldn't really tell. Her head might not be in the same place that it was before, and any movement could be caused by her cloud bumping up and down on the gentle thermals that rose off the ocean.
By midday, she was sure. She was closer to it.
She spent the rest of the day watching as it grew. Even though she should have, she didn't watch for schools of fish below her; instead, she imagined trotting around on the dirt. Eating fresh grass, right from the ground. Rolling on it.
There were islands that stood all by themselves in the oceans. She knew that from reading books about sailors, and from talking to other ponies.
Cloud also knew that some of them were small, and isolated, and not a good place to be shipwrecked. But even if it was just a little island, it would be better than a cloud.
Maybe there would be pools of water on it, and she could take a bath. Her coat was permanently encrusted with salt and clumped up in some places that she couldn't easily groom.
As the sun set, it stood out in sharp relief, and instead of napping, she stayed awake, watching it from her cloud, willing it to get closer. She studied it for any signs of artificial light, of life.
There was enough moonlight for her to see it glowing like a ghost and she started to wonder if phantom islands existed.
Everypony knew that there were ghost ships that sailed the ocean forever trying to get back to their home port. So why not an island? She'd heard that some islands were actually volcanoes and that sometimes they blew themselves to smithereens and maybe the ghost of the island drifted around trying to find the spot where it had been.
If she'd been on land and somepony had told her that, she probably would have thought they were being silly, but out here all by herself it was conceivable.
Cloud didn't realize it was an iceberg until it drifted right under her cloud. She'd thought that the moonlight or the waves were playing tricks with her, and fooling her into thinking it was closer than it really was.
She couldn't deny it when it suddenly went from being in front of her to being under her. It was only then that she noticed the waves breaking along the edge.
Even though it wasn't the island she'd hoped for, she flew down to it anyways, landing on a flat spot near the top. She licked the ice until it gave her a crushing headache, and when she'd recovered, she chipped a big chunk off and carried it up to her house, knocking a little bowl into the edge of the cloud for it to sit.
Depending on how fast it melted, she'd have a small bowl of fresh water for a couple of days.
• • •
The next morning, there was a whole field of icebergs under her. She flew down to one that had a small pool of meltwater on it and used it to rinse the salt out of her coat.
The day after that, they were all gone.
Whether they'd moved on or she had, she wasn't sure.
The night after the icebergs, the ocean was glowing again. That had been a surprise the first time she'd seen it, and she'd flown down to investigate, but found nothing of interest.
This time was different, though. There was movement that she hadn't seen before, and she finally went down to get a closer look.
She skimmed across the top of the water, constantly looking up to check where her cloud was—if she lost it, she would die. It was that simple.
They were fish that glowed. She could see them clearly, even after she rubbed her eyes to make sure that she wasn't imagining it. And they were close to the surface; she could see them sometimes rise up into a wave, and that meant that they were catchable.
Cloud was still wary of sharks, so instead of diving, she flew through the waves that had the glowing fish inside them, catching only the ones that were closest to the crest.
Those fish tasted different than all the others she'd eaten, and it was a welcome change.
As tempting as it was, she didn't gorge herself on them; after she'd eaten a dozen, she flew back to her house before it could drift too far away, and curled up to sleep.
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Well, Cloud's definitely making progress. Now comes the question of whether she remembers what to do should she hit land again. Isolation does sanity no favors, even more so for ponies than humans.
That said, I do like the idea of ghost islands.
With the isolation and the though life condition, it is no wonder her perception of time seem off. She is going to be a really weird pony when she finally make landfall.
Awww!
Now, survival is one thing. But sanity, that's another...
I really, really like the atmosphere you're creating here... were it a movie, there'd be long, slow camera pans of golden sunlight glinting on waves and of gorgeous sunsets and cirrus clouds glowing in the starlight, complete with muted ethereal music. Then there'd be action scenes like with hunting the flying fish and the shark and everything would be tied together with timelapse sequences of white clouds racing over the wet desert under an azure sky. A cloudwrecked pegasus offers incredible imaging opportunities.
...
images.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fevewebnet.com%2FoceanQuestAdventures_S30126%2Fassets%2Fgallery%2FDrink%2520an%2520Iceberg%2FIceberg%2520Newfoundladn%2520Sunset%2520.JPG&f=1
images.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F4.bp.blogspot.com%2F-3Wnou9cOmyM%2FV_DnZHPNzsI%2FAAAAAAAADKE%2FIOZyg4u9faYQd9c39zj_XaMSK0E5SBZjwCLcB%2Fs1600%2F1-Greenland_Iceberg_Icefjord_Glacier_DSC01786.jpg&f=1
...
And I love the idea of ghostly ex-volcanic islands.
...
She's swallowing them whole?
Herrings are not small fish. Well, the Baltic herring is small-ish, at 5.5-7 inches in length, but the Atlantic herring is around 18 inches, and weighs in the neighborhood of 1.5 pounds, and the Pacific herring is not much smaller than the Atlantic herring.
Of course Equestrian herrings could be a different size.
Either way, I don't imagine that one would want to eat the whole fish. Who knows what the contents of their guts would do to you? Might mess up your gut fauna, perhaps make you very ill. Pegasi aren't pelicans. They might adapt to such a diet, but that sort of adaptation might take a while, and have a few unpleasant interludes. And in a survival situation, being laid up sick for a few days could be very bad.
8513832
As Monarch said, grass and rocks are the stuff you land on.
Agreed. I think ponies might be a more social species than we are.
I wonder if that's actually a thing in mythology?
8513859
Yeah, if she makes it back to land she's going to have some difficulty adjusting, that's for sure.
8513887
8513929
That might be the biggest thing.
8514584
Thank you!
It's not quite the same thing, but here's a marvelous timelapse of a month at sea for a container ship (and a few harbor stops).
Maybe there are ghost islands out there.
8517196
From what I found, one fishery study showed that 22% of Atlantic herring in a particular school were under 17cm (6.7 inches) in length. I don't know what that would work out to in terms of weight, but I'd guess if an 18 inch one is 1.5 pounds, a 7 inch is probably roughly a half pound or maybe less. That's assuming that Equestrian herrings are the same size as IRL herrings.
I don't know how many bad effects there might be, either short term or long term. Obviously, it could upset her digestive system, but she hasn't really got a whole lot of choice. Maybe if she can get them up to the cloud, she could try and eat around the guts and bones. I've heard about people eating whole raw fish without any serious ill effects, but I don't know anyone personally who has done that.
And while this is hardly proof, it looks like this horse is eating whole fish.
For those two lines, I was briefly hearing Silver Glow writing in her diary again.
The great white shark cried with tears in his eyes: "Pick on somebody your own size!"
8521121
For those two lines, I was briefly hearing Silver Glow writing in her diary again.
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