Navigating Early by Clare Vanderpool

fierce. After many months and many trials, he felt he had earned his name. And he wanted to hear it in his mother’s voice. It was time for the young voyager to go home.
    To be called by name. To be known. To be loved. He was almost home. Floating on the driftwood, his mind wandered back over the many adventures of his journey. Learning the ways of the sea. Meeting strange people in even stranger lands. Surviving storms and sharks and bugs. What adventures he had to tell. As his body and mind floated, aimless and adrift, he felt a shadow pass over his face. But even more, he felt eyes upon him.
    It was a ship with a group of men, blurred by his sun-drenched vision, staring at him from the deck. He squinted, and just as his eyesight cleared he was hoisted aboard. Who would believe it? He’d been saved by a rough and ragged band of men, scarred and maimed from many a sea skirmish, always at the ready to steal goods, treasure, or kegs of rum from any vessel within their scope.
    They plopped Pi’s exhausted body on a pile of ropes andcalled for a jug of rum. A woman, the Haggard and Homely Wench by name, came forward with the rum and a jigger. She appeared to be the only feminine presence on board but was treated with such ill temper and vulgarity by the men that she could do little to soften their rough edges.
    The wrinkled, weathered, and one-eyed captain stepped forward, giving the order to administer the spirits to loosen the young man’s tongue. One of the crew grabbed Pi by the hair and poured a jigger of rum down his throat to rouse him enough to talk. Pi sputtered and coughed out words of searching and wandering and home. When the pirates realized he had nothing of value for them to steal, no buried treasure to lead them to, they prepared to throw him back into the ocean, until he dared them to go ahead. He told them he’d been hunted by sharks and nearly eaten by giant insects. He’d been attacked by an angry tribe of parched natives and outrun a river of molten lava. And he’d stared a whale right in the eye. “Go ahead,” he dared them. “Throw me into the ocean.”
    The pirates looked at each other, puzzled. Who was this young man who could not only escape death time and time again, but could tell the tale of it with such delight?
    “Tell us about your travels,” the captain said. “We have been long at sea and want to hear more.”
    So night after night, he regaled them with stories of his travels and adventures, the Haggard and Homely Wench filling their mugs with ale and rum. They threw him back in the brig at sunrise, but each night the pirates drank their rum and let Pi’s stories take them to distant lands and exotic peoples.
    Sometimes the head pirate, Darius, would tell stories of his own. Stories that Pi was sure were greatly exaggerated. Heroic tales of finding buried treasure and sinking entire fleets. Darius told of winning the pale and homely servant maid in a game of dice with a powerful witch doctor in the South Seas. The witch doctor had put a curse on the girl so that she would always appear the way others told her she looked. That was why she was always referred to as the Haggard and Homely Wench.
    Pi convinced the captain that he needed a better name—a pirate name. Darius was too plain. He called him Darius the Dreadful to his face, but to the servant girl, the Haggard and Homely Wench, who brought Pi fresh water and fruit and whose real name was Pauline, he called him Darius the Disagreeable. The two laughed about it. Pi looked at the girl and, gently tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, he told her she had a pretty smile. And suddenly she did. After a time, Pauline wasn’t so haggard and homely after all. In fact, she had turned into a beautiful girl. But always Captain Darius would call her from the deck by her Haggard and Homely name, and her hair would turn haggard and her face would turn homely.
    Pauline told Pi of the words the witch doctor had said would break the