Trash griffins. Nesting in her boat.
“Really, guys?” Inga sat back on the bench seat and looked down at the tarp-covered bundle of gear at her feet. Every now and then, it lurched as something moved inside.
Did they bear live young or lay eggs? She realized that she didn’t know. Her brother Eren and his mate Lucy had a pair nest in their boat a couple of years ago, but she couldn’t remember if he had mentioned anything about that part.
If they hatched out of eggs, they had already hatched, because she had definitely noticed moving lumps of fluff in her glimpse under the tarp.
Something hissed at her. Something else squeaked.
“Aww, come on, you guys. You’re in my boat.”
She opened the cooler and got out a plastic bag of sandwiches. After taking one for herself, she tore another in half, tore the half in half again, and laid the pieces down on the planks in the bottom of the boat that were keeping the gear, and the griffins, out of the puddles of bilge water. Then she pulled her feet up and nibbled on the edge of her sandwich while she waited.
After a few long moments, a small head, covered in white and gray-brown fur with small ears and an incongruous seagull’s beak, emerged long enough to snap up a quarter sandwich and vanish quickly back inside.
Inga wrapped her arms around her knees on the bench seat and ate some more of her sandwich while she watched the tarp roil from movement beneath it and heard squeaking and growls.
“I hope everybody’s in there,” she said. “Because if Mom or Dad got left behind, I’m not going back to pick anyone up.”
She got her answer a minute later when a different trash griffin (she didn’t get a clear look at this one, but she thought it might have been part raccoon) scuttled out for the other piece of sandwich and then scurried just as quickly back in.
Inga laughed. She was pulling apart the rest of the half sandwich when a drop of rain struck her cheek.
Startled, she looked up and saw that the dark clouds had rolled in shockingly fast while she was distracted.
Inga dropped the sandwich, to the delight of the trash griffins, and scrambled to the back of the skiff. She reached to start the engine, then picked up a paddle instead.
The rocky lagoon wouldn’t have been her first choice of place to wait out a storm, but she didn’t think she was going to get another option. Waves were starting to slam into the rock towers and shower her with spray. Inga used the paddle to maneuver the boat as far back in the pool as she could get, against the sheltering rocks. Holding tight to the boat’s mooring rope, Ingaclimbed out and tied it to the sturdiest-looking clump of brush she could find.
Rain was starting to fall in earnest now. Inga pulled a rain slicker over her sweater. The rocks came right down to the water here, so there was nowhere to pull the boat out; it would have to ride out the storm. She figured the hassle of unloading it would be less trouble than retrieving her gear from the bottom of the cove in the very real possibility that the boat sank or was overturned in the storm.
“Go for a ride up the coast, she said,” Inga muttered to herself as she hauled the cooler and emergency gear up the rocks and found places to stow it where it wasn’t likely to blow away. “It’ll be fun, she said.”
She didn’t particularly want to bother the griffins, not least because she’d rather not get clawed or bitten, but the skiff was starting to bob up and down alarmingly, and the rain was coming down harder. As Inga was working up the nerve to pull back the edge of the tarp, a gray and white shape abruptly scuttled out with a ball of light gray and brown fluff clamped in its beak. Inga withdrew to give them space, clutching the slicker around herself, and watched the griffins, over the course of the next few minutes, relocate four small fluffy babies to a crack in the rocks about halfway up one of the rock towers. She wished she dared pull out her phone to take pictures, but it was safely stored in the waterproof cooler.
“Adorable,” she murmured, and then a wave dashed into the cove, showering her with salt spray and nearly flipping the boat. She retreated to the rock jumble where she had stashed her gear. There was a second tarp in the emergency supplies, still folded and encased in plastic, and she used to it to make herself a crude shelter.
The next couple of hours were unpleasant. Rain thundered down in brief, choking squalls, interspersed with chill drizzle;wind tore at her makeshift shelter and blew up the edge so many times that she ended up encasing herself in the tarp like a miserable, soaked burrito.
“Go for a ride up the coast, Inga, it’ll be fun ...”
About halfway through the ordeal, she felt something move around her feet and looked down to discover that the entire trash griffin family had relocated under the edge of her tarp. The parents were huddled around the chicks, and they all looked as wet and disgruntled as she felt.
“Sorry, guys,” Inga told them. “I’m having as many regrets as you are, believe me.”
When the storm finally blew itself out, it happened with a suddenness that was almost shocking. In a few minutes, it went from pouring rain to still air with shafts of sunlight piercing the clouds. Inga hesitantly pulled back the flap of her tarp burrito, alert for a fresh blast of rain to come tearing in on the heels of the old one. But the weather remained still, with only a light breeze. Inga unwrapped herself, leaving the tarp draped over the rocks to shelter the griffins. The wind flapped her slicker and stirred the bedraggled hair around her face as she climbed to a higher point on the rocks to look around.
The storm was marching inland, a curtain of gray not too far away from her. Out to sea, the heavy cloud cover had begun to break up, and sunlight stabbed down from the sky in discreet shafts to pierce the rolling water. The air was fresh and clean and smelled wonderful. For a few moments, Inga was too charmed with the view to look closer, down the rocks to the cove at her feet.
When she looked down at last, she made a dreadful discovery.
The Dingboat was gone.
INGA
“Oh, no, no,”Inga muttered.
She scrambled down the slick rocks, using her hands and knees when her feet slipped. The clump of brush where she had anchored the boat had torn away. There was no rope, no boat—and no debris, which likely meant it was either on the bottom of the cove or floating out to sea.
