Footprints

 

I just finished The Happy Isles of Oceania by Paul Theroux. Published in 1992, the book recounts the author’s 18-month journey paddling among the islands of the South Pacific in a kayak. Full disclosure, apart from an essay here or there, this is the first piece of travel writing of Theroux’s that I have read. I am much more familiar with his novels. I enjoyed the book but thought that it was a bit long. Additionally, curmudgeon that he apparently is, Theroux often has unflattering things to say about Polynesian culture.

Theroux’s book inspired the short story that follows:

Footprints by James C. Clar © 2026

By the three-hundredth day, the man stopped counting. Fever burned through him in waves. Malaria. That, or the wound on his shin; a deep gash he’d earned hacking open a coconut a week earlier. The flesh around it had turned black. Even he knew enough to realize that seawater only made it worse.

He lay beneath the shelter he’d fabricated from the wreckage of his kayak and inventoried his medical kit; a rusty pair of scissors and one damp roll of gauze. Out past the lagoon, the surf hammered the reef, relentlessly. Day and night, it was as if the island itself were respiring.

“Jesus,” he muttered, pressing trembling hands over his ears. “Just stop!”

Sixteen months earlier he had been paddling among the motus of the southern Cook Islands, tiny emeralds scattered haphazardly across water blue enough to hurt your eyes. A longtime dream fulfilled. Until. The wind rose without warning. One violent gust drove the kayak broadside into the coral. The reef ripped the hull open like it had been made of papier-mâché. He barely made it to shore alive.

The island was small, an oblong strip of sand and jungle no more than a mile long. It had been beautiful for, maybe, an hour. Then it wasn’t. At times, rain came in diluvial sheets, drumming on the thin canvas roof until he thought he would lose his mind. Clear nights were even worse. The stars spilled across the sky in infinite numbers making him dizzy. He felt he might fall upward and lose himself in a spangled abyss of hideous immensity.

At first, he worked furiously to survive. Fishing. Gathering coconuts and breadfruit. Building fires. To keep himself sane, he invented routines. Each morning he’d walk the beach collecting debris washed ashore by the current, the detritus of civilization: plastic bottles, flip-flops, tires and, once, a child’s plastic dump truck.

Sometimes, ships passed far offshore. He would sprint into the surf screaming and waving burning palm fronds. The freighters moved silently beyond the horizon. In time, he stopped trying.

Now, he was almost too weak to stand. Near dusk, shaking with fever, he crawled from his shelter. He could smell the ozone in the air. Another storm was coming. He struggled to his feet and froze. Just ahead, footprints. They traced a line along the sand near the water’s edge.

He staggered closer to the surf and, with nearly superhuman effort, followed the prints around the island. No boats, no fires, no people. By the time he made it back to his shelter, he was drenched in sweat and approaching delirium. Then, a thought came to him. He approached a footprint and stepped … perfect match. The man collapsed face-first onto the sand.

***

Forty minutes later, the fishermen returned. Their outrigger had attempted a landing once already that afternoon but, seeing signs of habitation, they moved on in search of another beach where they might ride out the storm. Polynesian custom respected privacy. It would have been rude to intrude uninvited where another man lived.  But now, the weather was turning savage and there was nowhere else to land.

 As they came ashore, one of the fishermen pointed. A body lay on the beach. “Palangi,” he said. A foreigner. The rain began falling in steady drops.

One of the younger fishermen smiled grimly. “A hundred years ago,” he remarked while pretending to smack his lips, “this might have ended differently.”

They placed the stranger in the canvas from his ruined kayak and dragged him further ashore. 

“Tomorrow,” said the elder of the crew, “if the storm lets us, we’ll bury him above the tide line and salvage what supplies we can find.”  The storm was already erasing their footprints.

Born into a culture that valued familial obligation and connection above all else, none of them could understand why a man would choose to live all alone like that.

“Only a Palangi,” they commented to one another more than once. To them, a life like that must have already been a living death.

The End