by Will Hobbs
I had better come through this. That was the only way I could take the weight off them, and my mother too. My mother had thought I was old enough and mature enough to make the trip to Alaska by myself.
You’re a piece of work, I told myself. Good job, Galloway.
7
IN SIGHT OF THE CREEK, I found a hole in the base of a giant spruce and crawled in for the night. My belly was full of water and nothing else. It felt like a wild animal was gnawing on my insides. With all the cramping and the shivering, the shrieking of the wind and the howling of the wolves, I had a terrible night. All the while I kept thinking about fire, wishing I could make fire. Fire to keep me warm, fire to ward off bears, fire to make smoke to signal an airplane.
Everywhere, tree limbs were draped with white, wispy stuff that looked like Spanish moss. Old-man’s beard, Julia called it—some kind of lichens. Great firestarter, she said. Put a match to it and it would burst into flame. If only I had a match.
“Shoeless and clueless,” I muttered. I wasn’t even carrying a pocketknife. All I had on me, in one of the zipper pockets of my fleece vest, was a credit card in case I needed cash from an ATM. How useful.
When the light came up, I could see bears in the estuary. A mother grizzly ate grasses while her cubs wrestled. Not far away, two mostly-grown bears were playing or fighting, I couldn’t tell which.
From my hiding place I could see that the wolves, five gray and three black, were still on the whale carcass. There was a commotion of gulls overhead; the ravens and bald eagles waited close by. Far out on the water, a ferryboat was passing down the center of the strait.
I was just about to go onto the beach when I realized that the wolves were leaving the carcass and heading in my direction.
From the forest cover, peeking over a log, I watched them trot by in the rain—fluid, tireless, silent. They were even larger and more powerful looking than I would have guessed. Six of them passed, led by a magnificent black wolf that had to be the leader, the alpha male. A gray and a black lagged at the back of the pack. These two were more interested in play fighting than in keeping up. They stopped to nuzzle each other and to stand up on their hind legs and gnaw each other on the ears and necks.
There was something about the black one of this pair. It was a lot less streamlined than the others and somewhat bigger. It was blocky and long-haired, and looked like a Newfoundland dog.
No wonder it looks like one, I thought, it is one. It’s not a wolf, it’s a dog.
It was a male Newfoundland, a big “Newfie,” as my friend Derek referred to the breed. He had one; it was half as big as their kitchen.
This one had a bright red wound on one of its ears. It was tussling with the gray wolf, a female, who had expessive facial markings and dark tips on the guard hairs of her shoulders and spine. The underside of her body, the insides of her legs, and the underside of her tail were white.
Just before the wolf pack would have disappeared in the tall grass of the estuary, the leader turned around and surprised the dog. Playing with the gray female, the Newfie had his back turned when the alpha male attacked.
For a few seconds the two were a snarling whirlwind. The Newfoundland quickly retreated. He wasn’t nearly as agile as the wolf, or as powerful or aggressive. The leader drove him even farther away.
The gray wolf who’d been playing with the dog lay back her ears and howled. The dog, in return, barked at her.
All of a sudden came the sound of a motor. An airplane, and I wasn’t where I needed to be.
The wolves bolted into the tall grass with the dog in pursuit.
I ran onto the beach, no matter that I was tearing up my feet. The plane was already past the cove and all I got a look at was its tail. A few seconds, then the plane was gone.
I yelled myself hoarse in rage and frustration and fear that it wouldn’t come back.
From now until whenever, nothing—not rain, bears, or wolves—was going to keep me off this beach. I hastily improvised a big SOS out of driftwood.
The airplane did come back, only minutes after I’d assembled the message. I could hear it before I could see it; I had the life jacket off and ready to wave.
It was raining hard, which wasn’t going to help.
At the crucial moment, I was clear out in the open, waving my life jacket, jumping up and down, and screaming. The plane roared over the cove and the cape, then disappeared to the west.
Surely they’d seen me. Surely they were about to circle around for another look.
The airplane never came back.
Maybe the pilot had been distracted for a second. Or maybe they just couldn’t see me because everything I was wearing was dark blue and so was the life jacket. Through the rain, against a dark gravel beach, I just wasn’t visible enough, and neither was the driftwood SOS.
It had to have been a search plane. That’s what hurt the most. Exhausted, I finally went back to the forest to wring out my clothes. I tried to make fire by striking rocks together next to a bed of old-man’s beard. I made sparks, but that was it.
My father would have been able to make fire. By now he would have made himself a sharp stone knife, and with the knife he would have fashioned a bow drill and made fire with it. Then he would have made himself a spear, tipped with a deadly stone point, to defend himself against the bears.
But I had never learned flintknapping, and I couldn’t defend myself, and I wasn’t going to be able to make a knife and a bow drill and fire.
So quit thinking about fire, I told myself. The cold isn’t bad enough to kill you.
The rain was letting up. After a while, even the drizzle stopped. Where the creek left the tall grass and looped toward the beach, I went looking for fish and spied some trout. I tried to bash them with a stick. I threw stones at them. It was pointless. It was maddening.
I followed the creek down to salt water. Julia had said that all the seaweed was edible. It was everywhere around my feet, attached to individual stones by holdfasts, as she called them.
I picked out a few of the brown ones that looked like transparent brown rubber gloves and a couple of the sea lettuce. The sea lettuce was a clump of green weed with transparent blades.
“They’re just algaes,” Julia had said, “brown or green algaes. Even the ribbon kelp and the bull kelp is edible. You pay good money for these in health food stores.”
I’d laughed along with the rest, but I wasn’t laughing now. I shouldn’t have waited this long.
They need to be rinsed, Julia had said. That’s what I did now, in the creek.
The brown one that looked like a rubber glove tasted like one. The sea lettuce went down easier.
It all came back up.
I waited until the cramps subsided, then tried again. Chewing very slowly, I ate one clump and waited. A second clump and a third stayed down. I wondered if it would help with the weakness and the dizziness.
I had a feeling that the airplane wasn’t coming back. Whatever search zone had been drawn on the map didn’t include where I was, or planes would have come in the first two days. The plane that had buzzed the beach had been somebody looking beyond the search zone.
But why were they so sure the search didn’t need to include Admiralty’s southern coast? I racked my brain trying to think from their point of view.
Suddenly I knew the answer. They had found the kayak.
They had found the kayak, maybe even the same day it happened, and nowhere near where I was. The currents had grabbed it, and the reversing tide had sent it back to where I’d started—on Baranof. The kayak could have floated all the way back to Cosmos Cove or even farther north.
They knew that I had spilled. Spilled into forty-degree water. They thought I had drowned close to camp.
Probably they had shut down the search within a day or two. One plane, the one that flew right over me, had kept looking. My mother was probably in it.
The weather wasn’t breaking up. It came on stronger than ever. I needed a shelter
on the beach. What choice did I have but to keep watch? I had to believe I was going to get another chance.
Barely above the high-tide line, I drew out a square and planted poles at the corners. The poles were branches I’d broken off, each with a forked top to receive cross members that I decked with cedar fronds.
It kept raining. I sat on a chunk of driftwood under my little shelter and waited for airplanes that never came.
8
FOR TWO MORE DAYS I shivered in the rain and waited for rescue. I lived on seaweed, the tops of fiddlehead ferns, the few berries I could find, and one small fish that fell out of the sky. It was a herring that had slipped the grasp of an eagle.
The weather almost never let up. The clouds wreathed the tall trees with shape-shifting tendrils and shrouds. It all looked primeval, like a lost world.
The wolves seemed to have left, but not the bears. Especially when the tide was low, they came onto the beach to dig clams, to crack mussels, and to scavenge on the whale carcass.
As the bears crossed the beach, they would stand on their hind legs to get a good look at me. Every time, I was sure they were about to charge. Some of them would woof at me, but they left me alone, even the mother brownie with the two cubs. They seemed to know I wasn’t a threat.
I was desperate to find something solid to eat. The mussel beds were exposed at low tide, and clams would have been easy to dig. Their siphon jets gave their exact location away.
The thing is, Julia had told us that eating wild shellfish around here was dicey. Every so often they were carrying some kind of microscopic bugs that caused PSP, paralytic shellfish poisoning. You could never tell for sure if they were good or not. You wouldn’t know until you felt a tingling around your lips and gums. By then it would be too late. Very shortly you would be paralyzed. Maybe you’d stop breathing. People died sometimes, she said, and there’s no antidote.
As weakened as I was, I was thinking about taking the risk.
On my way to the creek for fresh water I discovered that the ravens were eating the mussels. I saw one tear a mussel loose, fly up high, then drop it on the rocks in front of the treeline. The raven flew down, poked the mussel, flew up with it again, dropped it a second time. This time the shell must have cracked. I saw the raven gulp down its prize.
Sudden movement on my left caught my eye. I couldn’t believe it, but what I saw was all too real. From the back of the beach, for no good reason, a huge brown bear was rushing me, coming full speed. I was about to wheel around and run for the sea when I caught myself, remembering that running was the worst thing I could do.
With its ears back, the bear was pounding toward me, sand flying up all around. When it was all but on me, the bear stood up and roared. I crossed my arms in front of my face. Terror burned through me white hot and turned me to jelly.
The bear wheeled away, twenty yards maybe. It was the monster male, the first bear I’d seen on the island. He charged again, towered over me a second time, baring his teeth and flailing his claws. I was sure he was going to maul me.
For some reason he didn’t. He went away mad, roaring and threatening to come back and finish the job. After that, I was through with staying put. If that bear wanted me gone, I was out of there.
How long had I been on this island—five days? I was getting weaker all the time, and help was not on the way. The fishing boats weren’t going to come close enough to see me. Maybe it was too shallow, too rocky along the coast.
I had to start walking. There had to be a village, or some cabins or something, if I just kept walking.
I started east, picking my way very carefully on my stone-bruised feet, fear still buzzing in every nerve. The heavy animal musk, the stink of that bear’s gut washing over me, the horrible growling weren’t going to go away anytime soon. I wished I had a weapon.
Late the next day, hobbling and weak and lightheaded, I came to an island-sprinkled bay that cut deep into the foot of Admiralty. The rain had stopped, but in its place fog had swallowed up the world. Only now and then, here and there, could I see anything. At one point I thought I was seeing rectangular shapes on the horizon line across the bay. Was my mind playing tricks on me?
I squinted. There really was something there. In the foreground, a pier. Behind it, a cluster of buildings, some large, one with two tall smokestacks.
A village, maybe a cannery…I didn’t care what it was.
Tears came to my eyes. “I’m going to make it,” I heard myself say.
As I stared, the fog erased the structures, every trace of them. I had to wonder. It might have been a product of the weakness, the dizziness. Maybe I’d imagined it.
No, I told myself, it was real. I had to believe that.
On my feet, such as they were, with my overall lack of strength, it was going to take a day to round the back of the bay and find out.
When I finally did see the place up close the following day, it was all of a sudden. One moment there was nothing in the fog but trees, rocks, seaweed, and the croaking of ravens. The next moment, the village, or factory, or whatever it was materialized right before my eyes.
I stood dumbstruck. I wanted to shout for joy, but no sound came out.
The longer I stared, the more I saw that something was wrong. My heart sank. There wasn’t a single boat by the pier or anywhere else for that matter, no smoke from the smokestacks, only traces of paint on the dull gray boards of building after building. I could make out the name TYEE written large across the front of one of them. Whatever this place was, it had been abandoned long ago.
No help, just ruins, just another obstacle. I was going to have to pass around the back of the pier through a welter of rusted machinery.
It occurred to me that in one of those buildings I might find some sort of map. Even if it was outdated, it would be a hundred times better than no map.
The floor of the first building was strewn with antique junk, all badly rusted: saw blades, screws and nails, outboard engine parts, and a hundred other hazards. I backed out, careful of every step I took. A rusty nail through my foot could finish me.
The next building was nearly engulfed by the forest. I stepped into a wide hallway with cubicles stacked four high on each side, beginning at waist height, on top of what looked like rows and rows of dresser drawers. The cubicles were about two feet wide, three feet high, and six feet deep. Ladders nailed to the wall down both sides of the hallway provided access.
The cubicles appeared to be some sort of storage bins. The first one I looked into was decorated with clippings from Chinese newspapers, badly yellowed over the years. Mice had pulled the stuffing out of a disgusting looking pillow.
They’re sleeping bunks, it suddenly came to me. This settlement must have been a cannery, and this building must have been the housing for Chinese workers, a hideous beehive of a dormitory.
A few minutes later I was walking on a concrete floor through the biggest of the buildings. The emptiness echoed with the shrill calls of hundreds of small nesting birds that flew among the high rafters. The broad floor was empty except for several large piles of fishing nets.
Out back, I stepped into a small house with almost all its windows intact. I guessed it was where the manager of the cannery used to live.
One room of the house had an old bedstand with the wreckage of a box spring on it. The walls were plastered with faded black-and-white covers of Life magazine. From the early fifties, I saw as I took a closer look.
A floorboard creaked as I stepped back. A second later, I thought I heard something out in the hall—quick footsteps, it sounded like. Someone was here, in this building!
I darted into the hall and raced to my right through a room with a fireplace and bookshelves, and ran out the back door, which was open. Running away, with several books clutched in one hand and a spear in the other, was a man like a walking mountain range, a giant of a man overgrown with gray hair. His clothing, a knee-length robe cinched loosely at the waist, was made of some sort of strange
fiber.
“Help!” I yelled just as loud as I possibly could.
Like a deer sometimes does, bounding away, the man held up for a second, stopped dead still, and looked back over his shoulder.
He looked startled, afraid. His eyes took me in quickly but avoided mine.
Under a pointy thatched hat, his hair was long and gray. His full gray beard reached halfway to his waist. Over his shoulder was slung some sort of carrying bag made of hide.
“Help me!” I shouted again.
No reply, except for the croak of a raven that suddenly flew from the trees.
My eyes went to the large black bird thrashing my direction. Suddenly it ruddered with its wedge-shaped tail and swooped right at me. Its dark eyes were looking into mine. I raised my forearm to ward it off, but it pulled up at the last second. I felt the rush of wind off its wings.
By the time my eyes found the man again, he was bounding away. Agile as a fleeing buck, he disappeared into the fog and the cedars, and the raven with him.
9
I SNAKED MY WAY THROUGH devil’s club to the spot where the man had disappeared. I looked for the slightest movement, listened for the faintest sound. Nothing. The forest had swallowed him up.
While it was still possible, I recalled every feature that I could. First off, he was big, real big: maybe six foot six, and stout as a tree trunk, but at the same time so well camouflaged he could be mistaken for native vegetation. A forest man, a wild man of the forest, that’s what my head was telling me I had seen. His eyes were light-colored, probably blue, in a face that was angular and chalky gray, like an outcrop of limestone. A scar angled from his forehead to his left cheekbone. The wild man’s long hair and even longer beard were so much like the lichens hanging from the nearby tree branches, they suggested that what was growing on him wasn’t only hair.