Surviving Bear Island

by Paul Greci

  The morning was gone, the sun already starting its descent. And high clouds from the south were reaching over the cove, promising rain.

  Grasping the fish at the base of their tails, I carried them two at a time into the forest where I’d picked out a spot for my shelter.

  Two small trees had fallen, one on top of the other, making an X. The crown of the bottom tree rested in the crook of a standing tree. The second tree rested crosswise on the first. The middle of the X was about as tall as me.

  I covered the space between the fallen trees from where they crossed down to their root wads with branches and boughs, a distance of about seven feet.

  I wanted to keep working on my shelter, but the clouds were really piling up so I switched to collecting firewood. Then I hauled rocks from the creek—enough for two fire rings in front of the shelter—and got a fire going.

  Again I was able to push myself even though I’d eaten almost nothing the past few days—like the day I’d killed the deer. I had some food coming, so my mind pushed my starved body and my body responded, like the energy came from a bottomless well when I knew I had food coming.

  Mind power. Push. Push. Push.

  And this time I hadn’t even hurt myself with my spear. The lump on the side of my head was gone. The wound under my jaw was still sore, but it’d stopped leaking pink fluid. And the swan bite was a memory. Just a thin, raised line below my ear lobe.

  I put the eggs from three salmon in the bowl with water, along with a couple of thick salmon steaks. The rest of the cut fish, along with the other five, I moved from outside to inside.

  I ended up eating three bowls of fish and broth. My stomach bulged like I’d swallowed a volleyball. I guess that was because I was so freaking skinny.

  If only it could be like this all the time. Not the skinny part, but having warm food, a simple shelter, and a fire.

  If only that creek always had fish in it, and the forest was full of berries year-round.

  But it wasn’t like that. Life cycled. Seasons changed. I felt like I belonged, but at the same time knew that I was just passing through.

  Some animals lived in one area their whole lives, not the salmon and not the bears. When the fish weren’t running, the bears had to find food somewhere else, just like me. And in the winter, they hibernated.

  I guess I’d either get lucky and be rescued, or not. But the one thing I had control over was trying to stay alive. I mean, what if I gave up and someone found me the day after I died?

  And even if I died out here, I’d rather live as many days as I could. It was my life, and if I had to choose between two weeks or three, or ten days or twelve, I’d take the bigger number every time, even if I was starving or hurt and in pain. I bet my mom would’ve taken another day or even another hour if she’d had the chance. And my dad, maybe he’d reached the Sentinels, a boat had come and this very minute they were motoring up the coast searching for me. And if I just gave up, they’d find me dead instead of alive.

  In the morning, one of my fires still had some coals, which was good because I only had four matches left, and I didn’t know how long the lighter would last. And I still hadn’t tried starting a fire with the flint.

  I rekindled the fire, and added larger pieces of wood until the flames were knee high. Then I grabbed the bowl and jogged to the creek. The tide was way out.

  Some branches, barely waving, caught my eye. I peered across the creek into the forest, blinked my eyes and squinted.

  Bear. Was it a bear? It was something. I’d felt something.

  Something watching me.

  My stomach tightened. My heart thumped. Bear. Bear. Bear.

  “Hey bear,” I called. “I know you’re over there.”

  I glanced over my shoulder several times as I beat it back to my shelter.

  I’m sick of this crap. Not only do I have to worry about having enough to eat, I’ve got to worry about being eaten.

  Instead of wishing things were different, put your energy into the current situation.

  “Shut up! Just shut up!” I tried to block my dad’s voice from my mind, even though deep down I knew his words rang true.

  But sometimes you didn’t want to hear the truth. You just wanted someone to swoop down and take care of you. Someone to step in and make it all right. Someone you trusted who’d say, “You’ll be okay, just come with me.” Or, “You just relax, you’ve done a great job. I’ll take it from here.”

  I knew I had to take care of myself. That no one was going to do anything for me. And when it comes right down to it, you have to rely on yourself. You’ve got to live with yourself and the choices you make.

  Like after Mom died and Dad disappeared inside himself, I felt so guilty for not going on that bike ride that I just disappeared too.

  I managed to get through school. But I still had to live with myself, just like I was now with the memory of my mistake that caused the kayak accident. It wasn’t an easy life, but it was my only life.

  I placed the bowl of water with a thick hunk of salmon in it on the smoothed-out bed of coals, then gathered wood.

  I covered my shelter with more and more boughs and it took on a rounded shape, like the Earth had burped a bough-bubble and I’d cut out an entrance for a door. Like it was a hatch leading underground. Between the two fire rings at the entrance, I stacked firewood and covered it with a layer of boughs.

  Just inside the shelter on the right I put a pile of throwing stones and behind the stones, more firewood. On the left side I stacked more firewood, leaving just enough space to lie down on the life vests.

  Then a storm blew in that night.

  CHAPTER 30

  COLD RAIN fell for three days. The woods turned soggy. Water everywhere. Wind came and went in gusts. The torn pieces of emergency blanket I’d managed to tack up over my sleeping area reflected some of the light and warmth from the fires and kept most of the rain off of me. The rest of the shelter was much drier than outside, but in time water found its way in through the boughs and dripped.

  My old friends RF and LF tried to cheer me up. They popped, sizzled, cracked and smoked in protest every time I put a piece of soggy wood on top of their coals.

  “Without us,” RF said, “you’d be screwed.”

  “That’s no joke,” LF added.

  “Yeah,” I said. “But without me, you wouldn’t even exist. You were just some random pieces of dead wood until I came along.”

  “Well, Master Fire-maker,” RF said. “You better conquer that flint. I saw your match supply. We don’t just spontaneously burst into flames.”

  LF agreed. “Learn how to use it before you need it.”

  Then they both just sat there, burning away, waiting for me to try.

  I pulled the flint out of the ziplock bag. At home, dad collected lint from the dryer and kept it in a plastic bag, and he’d bring some of it to the wall tent. The first time he showed me how a knife and a piece of flint could start a fire he’d rained sparks on a little nest of dryer lint. It caught and burned, the blue lint putting off a black smoke. I was maybe seven-years-old. He didn’t want me playing with a sharp knife so he gave me a thin piece of metal and I practiced making sparks. My sparks weren’t as big as his, and I couldn’t make as many of them, and my piece of dryer lint just sat there like it was covered with some kind of fire-proof layer. But I kept working at it and later that winter, I finally got some flames.

  Next, Dad showed me how a nest of crushed up birch bark and dried grass could be coaxed into burning.

  But out here, in this soggy piece of forest, nothing was dry. Nothing. I sighed and sat back.

  “Dude,” LF said. “I don’t think it works that way.”

  “Yeah,” said RF. “It’s not magic.”

  “Just pick it up and try,” LF said. “What else are you going to do during this storm?”

  “Okay,” I nodded. I pulled a piece of wood from the pile, grabbed my knife, sat cross legged right in front of LF, and started whittling
the thinnest shavings I could. The knife skipped on knots and often dug deeper than I wanted it to, but I kept at it, stopping only to stoke RF and LF.

  After I’d made a pretty sizeable pile, I set my knife down and cupped the shavings into my hands like I was making a snowball.

  Dryer lint, I thought. This ball of shavings looks nothing like a nest of dryer lint. I rose up on my knees, grabbed the flint and held it so the tip was touching the shavings. I took my knife and ran the blade down the flint and a large spark dropped off which was immediately swallowed by the shavings. I ran the knife up and down the flint creating a storm of sparks which all died quick deaths in the pile of shavings.

  I took a breath and rained more sparks down and saw a tiny bit of red and then one puff of smoke coming from the end of a very thin shaving, but then it was gone. The fatter shavings just sat there, spark proof.

  I set the flint down and swept the shavings into RF and they curled, then burst into flames. I could feel the heat building behind my eyes.

  “Poor baby,” RF said. “Couldn’t start a fire.”

  “He barely tried,” LF chimed in.

  “Shut up. Both of you,” I said. “I spent a couple hours making those shavings.”

  “And you just quit?” RF said. “You have four matches left. Some or all of those might be duds.”

  “I don’t care,” I said. “If I can’t do it, I can’t do it. You can’t say I didn’t try.”

  “You call that trying?” LF said. “When you first tried to catch a salmon and didn’t, did you just give up?”

  “Okay,” I said softly. “I get it. I’m not stupid.”

  The smoke, I thought. The smoke came from a very thin shaving. I grabbed another piece of firewood, rose up on my knees and leaned forward so one end of the wood pressed against my stomach and the other end was on the ground like I was a little kid playing airplane with my dad, the piece of wood replacing his feet.

  I picked up my knife and ran it along the wood, working the rough bark off one side in thick pieces. Then I started running the knife at an angle to the flat surface I’d created, letting the blade barely connect with the wood.

  “Thin,” I said to my knife. “Make them thin. Ultra thin. See-through thin.”

  But the knife kept wanting to go deeper and deeper, like it was preprogrammed to do so, but I wanted it shallow, to barely touch the surface and to do it at an angle, to catch a raised spot and run with it. Long, thin, curly shavings, like confetti, that’s what I was after.

  After what seemed like forever, I sat back to take a rest. To stretch my hands which had started cramping up.

  LF popped once, then said, “Pretty good start, but you’ll need more.”

  I separated the thin, curly shavings from the thick, flat ones, and stared at a mound smaller than a golf ball.

  The rain continued to fall. I put more wood on RF and LF and then lay down on the life vests. Making fire-making materials was work. Hard work.

  Dryer lint, I thought. As close to dryer lint as possible. I thought about the four matches and hoped they weren’t all duds. The thin shavings would catch with a match but with the flint, I just didn’t know. I mean, if it took hours to make the shavings and they didn’t work, then what? What would I do?

  I kneeled in front of the tiny pile of shavings and threw shower after shower of sparks onto them. I saw a little red glow and then smoke. I rained more sparks and saw more red dots and more smoke. I stopped and blew gently on the shavings, the red glow increased but no flames shot up. I rained more sparks down, got more red glows, blew again, but still no flame.

  I pushed the shavings into RF and they immediately burst into flame.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’m closer than I was.” But the problem gnawed at my brain like a starving beaver with worn-out teeth working the base of a birch tree.

  The rain let up on the fourth day. Worry over food and firewood consumed my thoughts. I had enough wood for a couple of days if I rationed it, and one fish. I’d kept working at the flint and so far all I could get was red glow and smoke. I thought maybe there was some step I was missing. If only I could see it in my mind. I’d asked dad, hoping his voice would boom out the answer but had been met with silence. RF and LF hadn’t been much help either. You’d think they’d know since they’re fires but all they did was tell me to shut up and keep trying.

  At the shore my stomach clenched when I saw the continuous white blanket in the high country. Snow had fallen and accumulated up there while it had rained at sea level. And the snow line was lower than I’d seen it. I hoped it wouldn’t get any lower, but I knew winter was closing in. I could feel it in the stillness, like the snow had put a lid on the island. The hammer was coming down.

  I scanned the swelled creek for fish all up and down the tidal part but came up empty, so I headed upstream into the forest.

  A splash made my heart jump. I saw the black rump disappearing ahead of me. But I kept going upstream. Bear or no bear, I needed fish.

  I rounded a few bends, yelling “hey bear,” then I saw what I was hoping to see. Fish. Their noses were white. And there were white splotches at the bases of their fins. Kind of sick-looking, but they were still alive. I counted—eleven fish. I wanted them all. I pulled cold air through my nose and felt a chill crawl up my spine.

  The pool was about ten feet across, six feet long, with a four-foot waterfall spilling into it. I choked up on the spear and slipped into the water opposite the waterfall, trying to create as little disturbance as possible.

  The school of fish moved upstream toward the waterfall.

  I took two more steps. Still out of reach. I needed another foot or two to get a good shot.

  My chest felt hollow, like it’d been scooped out with a big spoon. If I didn’t get these fish, I was history.

  I advanced on the fish, and sucked air as the creek filled my boots and tugged at my thighs. Raising the spear, I took aim and then thrust downward and forward, connecting on a large salmon just below the gills. I lifted the spear and discovered I had thrust the point through the gills and into the fish’s mouth.

  The fish flapped wildly. I swung the spear toward shore, the fish skimming across the water, and tossed it onto the forest floor. The fish was flopping and the spear was bouncing up and down. I climbed out of the creek, grabbed a rock and clubbed that fish until its eyes bulged. With my knife I slit the side of its mouth and popped the spear out. Then I checked the hook and re-entered the creek.

  The rest of the school had scattered, but there were still a bunch of fish in the small pool. I pierced another fish in the white belly tissue, swung it up into the forest next to the first fish, then searched again.

  The third fish I found behind me and dangerously close to leaving the pool as most of the other fish had already done. I drove the spear, catching the fish midway between head and tail, heaving it to shore all in one motion. In much the same way, I caught two more fish.

  I sat and twisted my boots off, and poured the water out. Then took my heelless socks off, wrung them out and put them back on my red, aching feet, followed by my boots.

  With icy hands, I gutted the fish, and ran a rope through their gills to carry them. Five fish, I was soaked. I shivered. Plus one at camp. I’d hoped for more. Could’ve used more. But six fish is better than none. I shivered again.

  CHAPTER 31

  THE NEXT day I made a drying rack, woven from thin, green alder branches. It was kind of bumpy, but I hoped it’d get the job done and keep me from having to always be looking for more alder.

  I knew the Sentinels couldn’t be far. My plan: dry some fish, then go.

  I took six sticks, whittled the ends into points, and using a rock for a hammer, drove them into the ground in a circle around RF, so the rack could sit just above the coals without burning up.

  I made a mess of filleting the first fish. I’d seen my dad fillet salmon, but he used a long knife with a thin blade, not a squat pocketknife.

  And he worked
at the kitchen counter or on a table outside, and wore these special gloves that helped him grip the fish. I was squatting over a pad of rounded rocks away from the fire, shivering in damp clothes and working barehanded.

  Hunks of orange flesh clung to the backbone and ribs of that first salmon, but I boiled it all up with the head, which actually worked out pretty good because I wanted to save all the dried fish for my trip.

  I cut the ragged fillets into thin strips and laid them on the rack, figuring the smaller the pieces the faster they’d dry.

  I spread out the coals and put the rack on the stakes. But the heat from RF was inconsistent. Sometimes it flared up, charring the fish, making it crispy. I gnawed on the stubborn pieces stuck to the rack, not letting anything go to waste.

  I just kept cutting and drying, cutting and drying, all day and all night. And I kept loading the bowl with fish bones and heads and bits of flesh. I’d boil it up on LF, drink the broth, and pick the bones clean. Get more water from the creek and do it again.

  “I’m sick of staring up at this rack,” RF said, popping in protest and sending a spray of ash onto the drying filets.

  “Get this bowl off my coals before I melt it down,” LF said, hissing as water from the bowl ran down the sides and onto the coals.

  “Just chill,” I said.

  “Chill?” RF said.

  “Dude,” said LF. “We’re fires. We don’t chill. You’re the one that’s gonna chill if you don’t master that flint.”

  I’d been working on the “flint problem” in my mind but hadn’t tried any of my ideas yet because I’d been working on the fish.

  The dried fish I stored in my dad’s raincoat, which I kept inside my shelter surrounded and covered with boughs. And every time I put more fish in there I’d think of my dad, and puzzle over how that raincoat appeared so close to Fish Camp. And how the bottom third of it was shredded. Had a bear shredded it or had it been dragged over sharp rocks by the surf? Where had it washed up? And what were the chances that an animal would drag it into the forest and leave it so close to Fish Camp? It was more than a coincidence, I thought.