Samu says he’d reached a point beyond fear. He gave up hoping they’d be found. And that, strangely, made him not as scared. He wasn’t afraid to die anymore. He no longer cried. He just sat there in stunned silence with nothing to say. He once demonstrated his sea stare for me, relaxing his face, letting his eyes go soft. It was haunting and fascinating, the human version of a computer in sleep mode, and I could picture him in the little boat in that state, hour upon hour, waiting for nothing.
Samu was not frightened, but he was aware of the closeness of death. The depth of hunger was such that few have ever experienced it. He thought about it. You would, too. Finally he mentioned it: All three of them could die, or one could die so that two could live.
And the one who was going to die was already selected. “Samu says to me, ‘What would you do if I kill Etueni?’ ” says Filo. “I told him, ‘I don’t know.’ I told him, ‘Nothing.’ Samu said to me, ‘If I kill him, are you going to eat him with me?’ I said, ‘No.’ ” Over the course of a couple of days, in quiet, private conversations, when Etueni was asleep, Samu mentioned it several times. “He said, ‘I want to do it,’ ” says Filo. “He was going to do it. He kept on talking about it.” When I asked Samu to confirm that he had indeed considered killing Etueni, he simply smiled and gave me one of his enigmatic eyebrow raises. Ultimately, though, Samu decided he could not do it. He said he couldn’t because he was scared of God.
And so they prepared to die. They stopped bailing. It was too much effort. Etueni got sick. He vomited repeatedly, but little came out. “Just yellow stuff,” he says. But he did it in the boat; he was too weak to lift himself up and vomit over the side. “Samu got mad,” says Etueni. “He punched me in the face.” He points to his left cheek. “I said sorry, but he punched me again.”
It stopped raining. They drank seawater. “We all quit,” says Etueni. “Like it makes no difference if we die or live.” They were all lying about in the bottom of the boat in the most weakened possible state, covered by the tarp, close to death.
This story is phenomenal. You must read the whole thing.
