It was 247 years ago when humans first came to the island Che’el. Their ancestors came from various islands of the Archipelago, and their descendants spread to many more, but as Che’el drifted, apart from the Archipelago, the humans upon it survived in ecological balance with their island and with the ocean.
As the first light rose over the water, Jun rubbed the sleep from his eyes and started gathering his tools. He peeked back into the shelter at his parents as they slept on, curled around his baby sister. She had been restless as of late, so their sleep came during what precious few moments of quiet they could find. Jun tried to sneak out, but he still heard stirring behind him as he left.
Jun walked towards the nearest portion of the edge, seeing faint forms doing the same at various points around the island. Jun’s family’s livelihood centered around foraging, and he had taken on responsibility for expeditions once he became a confident enough swimmer. Jun waded into the shallows of the ocean water as he approached the edge. Bracing himself, he stepped over it.
Jun’s breath caught in his chest as he plunged into the brisk water. He cracked open his eyes and peered at the blurry coral-encrusted surface in front of him. While the coral itself was not edible, it was inhabited by creatures that were. Jun spotted something moving and inched his hand further and further forward before suddenly reaching out to seize a crab.
Through the morning, Jun gathered various invertebrates and placed them on top of Che’el for safekeeping. The crabs and mollusks used the coral for shelter, but others such as amphipods, copepods, and isopods fed off Che’el itself, burrowing into the surface for sustenance. Life begets life, and though Jun sometimes forgot this fact, Che’el was alive.
Blinking the salt from his eyes, Jun’s vision slowly came into proper focus as he sat upon the edge, surveying his catch. He turned at the sound of a voice. “What’d you get so far?” a girl called out.
“Take a look for yourself,” Jun shouted back. His friend Lira scrambled over, her arms barely managing to contain her morning’s catch. She and Jun were both born on Che’el within a few days of each other around 13 years ago, and their families had both been foraging for as long as Jun could remember. They were both slender and hadn’t quite hit their final growth spurt yet. Besides that, they were as different as can be. Jun had curly hair, a sharp chin, and a round nose, while Lira had straight hair, a round chin, and a sharp nose.
They examined both piles, Lira tallying up the quality and quantity of their catches, while Jun eagerly and unsuccessfully scanned for any creature he hadn’t seen more. His disappointment distracted him enough to miss Lira’s smug look as she reclaimed her pile, now verified to be superior to his.
Jun came back to his shelter as his father Alcar was setting up new salt curing containers and harvesting the preserved meat from the oldest ones. He looked up as Jun approached and started laying out his catch. “Show me what you brought,” Alcar said.
“Nothing new,” Jun responded quietly. He started sorting animals based on whether they’d need to be eaten fresh or cured, and whether they were especially good to eat, or just good enough to be edible. Alcar glanced over occasionally, but Jun was fairly confident in his knowledge of the animals he brought back today. Ever since he was young enough to remember, Jun had watched over his dad’s shoulder as Alcar sorted through the various creatures he caught. Jun was never very interested in how they were prepared, preserved, or sold, but he would spout never ending questions about how each species lived, ate, and reproduced. Alcar always had an answer and was pleased to share, though Jun could never figure out how Alcar had learned so much. As far as Jun could tell, his dad never spent a minute outside work, family, and sleep.
At last, Alcar finished preparing and packing his things, and he went to Jun’s mother Elys. “We’ll head to the market,” he said as he placed a hand on her shoulder, “anything you need?”
Elys gave him a tight smile and shook her head as she cradled Jun’s baby sister Jora. “Just make sure we have enough to feed this one,” she said, sighing at Jora’s blissful sleeping face. Jun realized Alcar looked tired, but Elys looked worse; these days they hardly seemed to get any proper sleep at all. It was hard to imagine that he had been so difficult to care for, but maybe it just got harder to manage as his parents got older.
Jun and Alcar headed towards the center of Che’el to where the Midday Market took place. Every day at high noon, the many families of Che’el sent members to barter and trade. Alcar sold fresh and cured foraged meat. He and the other foragers lived along the edge of Che’el covering around half its circumference. At the market, they stayed together to coordinate pricing and maintain a market presence even as individual members left to make their own purchases. Jun turned to see Lira waving from next to her father Bors as they organized their wares.
Jun gave his dad a questioning look, and upon receiving a nod in reply, he went to get Lira to go explore the market. They picked their way around several dozen people standing or sitting by arrangements of all sorts of products. Craftsmen displayed tools made from keratin, ocean-shell, and on occasion, stone. Hunters, gatherers, and farmers sold fish meat, foraged meat, and various edible plants such as samphire and sea kale. Others grew stringy grasses and stout trees for use as building materials, evaporated sea water into salt for use in curing, or mixed soil from bird guano, dead plant material, and all sorts of other odds and ends.
Jun and Lira stopped first by the fishermen to trade scraps left from when Alcar had prepared the morning’s catch. Every foraging family had built up expertise on how to extract the edible portions from each type of organism they would encounter. For some, like crabs, this was relatively easy, as most of the flesh was fairly similar. However, for sea urchins or sea stars, only very particular portions were edible, but if identified correctly, they were the most delicious things Jun had ever tasted. While Jun was not the most prolific forager, his father made up for it with his knowledge of delicacies and deft hand at extracting them.
While Alcar’s scrap bits of shell and flesh were inedible, they were still useful to bait the fishermen’s hooks. The fishermen gave Jun and Lira each a small stone in exchange and sent them on their way. Stone did not naturally occur on Che’el, so whatever divers were able to bring up from shallow waters was treasured. If larger pieces were shaped just right, they could be used as particularly durable tools themselves, but if not, they were used to chip away and shape keratin and ocean-shell into more standard tools. Smaller stones, either found as such or broken off from larger ones, had little inherent use, so they found use as currency with value approximately assigned based on weight. Jun added this pebble to the larger stones his father had given him and continued on.
Next they went to trade stones for handfuls of samphire and sea kale and to pay to fill a waterskin at one of the freshwater ponds. The pondkeeper tried to sell Jun salt from her evaporation pond, but Jun refused. Alcar was loath to pay for salt when he could maintain his supply by scraping off what dried on the surface near the edge. Jun accompanied Lira as she purchased a new fish-leather waterskin for her family, then they started to head back. As they passed by a diver’s selection, Jun’s eye was caught by a small cowrie shell with a mottled purple and golden pattern unlike any he’d seen. He still had most of the stones his father had given him, plus the pebble from the fisherman, so maybe he could treat himself this time.
The diver put on a warm smile as Jun approached. “Ah young Jun, here to buy anything, or just to chew my ear off with questions as usual?”
“Well, that depends,” Jun said as he glanced over the rest of the items. He knew what he wanted, but there was no need to make that clear. “Maybe I will if you can answer all of my questions.”
The diver sighed. “I always do, it’s just a matter of you believing in the answers.”
Jun grinned and started deciding on the first specimen to quiz the diver on. He always started with a few questions about things he had asked about in the past to make sure the diver wasn’t just making up new things each time. This time, he asked about how big bear paw clams could grow, what sea stars ate, and how fast longspine sea urchins could roll to escape danger. As the diver answered, Lira started to open her mouth, ready to challenge him with a question of her own. Before she could speak, Jun pointed to the purple cowrie shell and asked, “Why is this purple? How do they make that color?”
The diver chuckled. “How, I do not know. My guess for why is that it gives people like me something pretty to look at down there, and it gives people like you something pretty to take home from people like me. So what do you say?”
Jun looked at Lira, and she shrugged her shoulders. He finally traded the pebble for the shell, thanked the diver, and joined Lira in walking back towards their fathers. Lira glanced over as he turned the shell over in his hands over and over and snorted. “I don’t know why you’re so fascinated by those.”
Jun looked up, slightly startled, as if just noticing she was there. “It’s purple, I don’t have any that are this color yet.” He tucked it into a pocket. “You won’t tell my Dad will you?”
“Of course not, dummy,” she said as she reached over and ruffled his hair.
Jun flinched away, then pulled the shell out to look at it again. “Every time I see a new one, it just makes me wonder how many types there could be that I’ve never seen. And If there are so many types of shells, there must be just as many types of fish and crabs and everything else!”
“So why don’t you collect those too?”
Jun wrinkled his nose in mock annoyance, then giggled with her as they handed over their purchases and extra stones to Alcar and Bors. Before they could be assigned another task, Jun and Lira ran off to join several other kids who had finished or escaped helping parents at the market, and the group spent the afternoon chasing each other around the island in loosely defined games. As the sun began to approach the horizon, the group dispersed and Jun headed back towards his family’s shelter. Upon reaching home, he found his mother busy feeding Jora, so he ate with his father until Alcar went to take a turn with the baby. Elys came over and sat next to Jun. “I haven’t seen you all day, what have you been up to?”
Jun scooted closer and animatedly described who he played with, what they played, and who he felt was the most liberal with following the games’ rules. His mom listened patiently, and as he finished, asked “and what about at the market? Did you see anything fun there?”
Jun pulled out the purple cowrie shell and handed it to her. She turned it over admiringly and handed it back. “Very nice, but I’m guessing Dad doesn’t know?” Jun shook his head, and she continued, “well we can keep it that way at least until you get a chance to trade away some of your shells to the other kids so we can thin out your collection a bit.”
Jun nodded, and she laughed as she stood up. “I have to take care of Jora, but I’ll see you in the morning,” she said, starting to see Jun’s face drop. “Don’t worry, she won’t be so difficult forever.”
Jun nodded and wished her good night. By this point, the sky was fully dark, and Jun started preparing to sleep. Once he laid down, he found a bare spot on Che’el, closed his eyes, and pressed his ear to the surface. After a few deep breaths, he heard it. Dadum. He stayed still and continued to breathe. Eight, nine, then ten deep breaths later, there it was again. Dadum. No matter how fascinated Jun was with the rest of the ocean’s life, nothing matched his curiosity and wonder for Che’el. Every night, he fell asleep to a reminder that he owed the ground he walked upon and the food he ate to an enormous creature he knew so little about.