Wild Man Island

by Will Hobbs

  The air was cold, but I was dressed in all my layers, and the pitch in the torch burned hot and kept me warm enough.

  I walked around blue pools on smooth white flowstone terraces made of calcite, the mineral that forms from water percolating through limestone. Standing back from the pools was a forest of stalagmites ranging in size from baseball bats to the columns of a Roman ruin.

  I entered a room bigger than the atrium inside the Hilton Hotel in Grand Junction. It was just as high and a lot wider. From the ceiling high above hung enormous white mineral chandeliers. The walls were encrusted with draperies of flowing stone, fragile bush-like mineral growths, soda straws, and delicate strands of angel hair.

  My torch was still burning bright. It might last a long time. Only if I had to light the third one was I going to turn around.

  The cavern almost pinched closed. To keep going I had to duckwalk under a low ceiling streaked with black from the wild man’s torches, then scramble over a series of boulders.

  I came into another great room with six emerald pools, like jewels in a necklace, strung the length of its floor. I threaded my way among them. The walls were decorated with stone corals, some ribbed like radiators and some dimpled like brain coral. The pools were deep as some of the deepest hot pools in Yellowstone, and so clear I could see smooth white rocks, like giant cave pearls, glittering on the bottom.

  I entered a maze, a series of passages that wound around and over and through one another like tunnels in an anthill. At one point my eyes were on some strange feathery crystals on the ceiling. When I looked down again to the floor, it wasn’t a moment too soon. I was two steps from the edge of an abyss.

  The pit was circular, an immense well, uncannily like the abyss in the dream I had when I was paralyzed. The torchlight barely reached the other side.

  Carefully, I sat close to the edge but not too close. I leaned forward with the torch but couldn’t see the bottom. The light was just swallowed up. My stomach swooned with the falling sensation from the dream.

  I got to my feet and carefully made my way around the abyss along a flowstone ledge that was wider than the one in the dream, but not by much. After that the cavern narrowed and pitched downward. I passed a place off to the right where wind was whistling through a small, jagged opening not much bigger than a rabbit hole. It might have been big enough to squeeze through. The wind indicated much more cave, and the strong possibility of a way out in that direction, but it would be a worm crawl for as far as I could see into it. No, thank you; I would stick with this cavern, where I could stay on my feet.

  My torch was dimming. Most of its head was gone. I lit the next one. It flamed bright and I kept going.

  A minute later I came to a chamber with a long, narrow pool that, strangely, had ripples on its surface. How could that be?

  I wet my fingers in the pool, then tasted my fingertips. It was salt water.

  I shaded my eyes and made out a strip of faint natural light in the distance. Here was what I had been looking for, an exit, but I’d never expected it to open onto the sea. My spirits crashed. This entrance was useless. I wouldn’t survive swimming out of the cave in forty-degree water.

  My torchlight fell on an unnatural-looking object perched on the highest of the calcite terraces to my left. I climbed up to have a look. I was taken completely by surprise when I discovered a boat, a boat with a paddle. No, two paddles—there was even a spare.

  Thank you, wild man. Finally, a break.

  Here was a skinboat just like the ancient people used, made of hides pieced together over a wood frame. It was as long as a large canoe but twice as wide across the beam, just the right size to squeeze out of the cave—at low tide, that is. At high tide, the entrance would be underwater.

  Was this why the wild man used the cave? To get to his boat? A boat stored where it couldn’t possibly be discovered?

  I tossed the hide bag inside. “I’m out of here,” I heard myself say, and the echoes said it three more times. I propped the torch where it would keep burning and dragged the boat down the terraces to the water. I climbed in and paddled for the exit.

  As I approached the jagged opening, the water got rough, so rough the boat struck the rocks as it was jostled from side to side. The wind had been blowing hard that morning, and now there must be a storm raging outside.

  Maybe this isn’t so smart, I thought, as swells surged through the opening and pushed me back. The tide was coming in, and I had only so much time before the opening closed. As it was, I was going to have to duck if a swell lifted me up. What I really needed was a helmet, or to have arrived here an hour earlier.

  Suddenly the water level dropped—a trough between swells—and I shot out of the cave into the open air, clawing at the last with my hands. I ducked my head and began to paddle as a swell lifted me up and almost tossed me back against the rocks.

  Through sheets of rain I could make out tall cliffs on both sides. I was at the back of a V, a shallow V in the cliffs that provided almost no shelter from the gale. The sky was purple black and the strait was all whitecaps and waves breaking toward me. This skinboat would capsize out there, no doubt about it.

  No hope. No chance. For the time being it was all I could do to keep off the cliffs. I had to get back inside the cave, and quick.

  I managed to get the boat turned around and pointed back toward the cave. The entrance was looking awfully small. I didn’t know if I was going to be able to wedge back through it.

  In between waves, I rushed the entrance. The bow bounced off one side and I stroked hard, twice, and got it aimed inside. A wave pushed me sideways. I paddled hard on the other side and got it pointed inside again. A wave lifted me up and suddenly I was higher than the entrance and being pushed right into the cliff. I fell onto my back, or my head would have been crushed.

  The boat was wedged inside the opening and was taking a beating. I got up on my knees, tried to claw with my hands, and succeeded only in bashing the top of my skull as a swell rose from underneath.

  Whether it was my doing or the weather pushing from the outside, I squeaked into the cave. The top of my head was pounding. I touched it gently and my fingers came back bloody.

  Somehow I had banged my right shoulder as well. Great, just great.

  Back where I’d started, I dragged myself out of the boat, retrieved the burning torch, sat down. All I could feel was pain, the deep, dull pounding of my skull and the wrenching ache in my shoulder.

  What now? Drag the boat above the high-tide line and wait for low tide to come back?

  Well, that’s what I was going to have to do. Wait for hours and pray for the weather to calm down.

  I waited. Time dragged so slowly it was torture. Seconds were like minutes, an hour felt like a day. My second torch was dimming when I spied light flickering off the walls back in the cavern. My breath caught short and my heart skipped a beat. As I rose to my feet I saw the silhouette of the wild man coming down through the cavern, holding a torch aloft. He was moving quickly.

  I had to do something quick, and suddenly I knew what it was. I grabbed up the bag and ran in the wild man’s direction. The rabbit hole I’d passed was near. I might be able to squeeze my skinny hips through that tiny opening if I was very lucky.

  Suddenly every depression in the Swiss-cheese wall on my left looked like my rabbit hole. I wasn’t going to find it in a panic. I had to get myself under control. The wind, I remembered, had made a sound rushing through it. I closed my eyes and heard a faint whistle. The rabbit hole was still ahead of me.

  As soon as I got there, I shoved the bag and my life jacket through. A glance over my shoulder, and I saw the wild man closing in on me, almost running. He could see what I was about to do. There was something different about him…. He’d exchanged his bark clothing for leather.

  Too bad, I thought—I could have lit him on fire.

  I don’t know if I would have, could have done such a thing. I was so frightened, I don’t have any idea what I
would have done.

  Torch in hand, I squirmed and crawled, scratched and kicked my way into the hole. For a second I was wedged tight as a cork, but with a twist of the hips I scraped through.

  I kept wriggling forward. The wild man had weapons and I wanted to get out of reach fast. I kept pushing until the twists and turns led me to a room where I could stand up. Hollering reverberated from the direction I had come but I couldn’t make out a word.

  I didn’t answer. He couldn’t touch me here.

  I put my life jacket back on. I lit my third torch and I breathed easier. It wasn’t possible for the wild man to squeeze through that hole. An anaconda would have an easier time getting through a garden hose.

  I was safe, in a manner of speaking. Now I had to find another way out before my last torch failed.

  This was insane.

  16

  THE FACT THAT I WASN’T FOLLOWING a single footprint sent a tingle down my spine. I might be the first human being ever to set foot here, and I might be exploring my own tomb.

  Sometimes I had to get down on my belly and crawl forward, choking on the oily torch smoke. Sometimes I had to climb over blocky limestone boulders. Once, on a steep slope going down, I thought for sure the passage was pinching shut. But there was another rabbit hole down there. All the time I was mostly moving to the right and moving down, inside a sort of corkscrew.

  After that I was climbing again, and then it was up and down and around and around. I lost all sense of direction. Time was working against me—the head of the torch was halfway gone. I kept trying to push back my fear of the light going out, but the fear was gaining on me. What was I going to do, turn around and try to wriggle my way blind back to the sea exit? Was that possible?

  As I stood there I heard faint echoes of what sounded like rushing water. I guessed that a larger cave was ahead. I followed my torch forward, desperate for a break in my luck.

  The passage began to widen. Now it was decorated with fantastic mineral sculptures. The sound of rushing water grew louder and louder. Ahead of me the floor was strewn with bones: ribs, vertebrae, the skulls of small animals with big canine teeth, skulls of bears, and even the skulls and antlers of what had to be caribou.

  How old were these bones? How many thousands of years had it been since caribou lived on this island?

  Either these animals had died here, or animals or people had dragged them here. There had to be an opening nearby.

  I knelt close and peeled my eyes. If only there were human remains, any mark of humans: a scraper, a stone point stuck in one of these bones, picture writing on the walls.

  I was so ready to make a big discovery, so ready. But I had no time. There might be something here, but it would take a proper archeological dig to find it. I had to keep going.

  I pushed ahead toward the ever-louder sound of rushing water. Seconds later my torchlight fell on a creek flowing through a cavern that took my breath away. It was two hundred feet, easily, from the creek to the monumental stalactites suspended from the ceiling.

  Immediately, another surprise: My torch wasn’t the only light source. Downstream, the creek and the far slope were lit by natural light from an opening I couldn’t quite make out. The only thing was, could I reach it and could I crawl through it?

  Motion in the creek caught my eye. There were animals in the water, live animals. Their heads were above the water at times, then suddenly they would disappear.

  A couple of harbor seals. They’d swum here from salt water. What did it mean, that the creek emptied into the ocean underwater?

  In another minute I found out why the seals were in the cave. One had a salmon in its mouth. Taking a second look at the creek, I recognized the quick flurries of fish running just under the surface.

  A salmon run, and seals, and that wasn’t all. Suddenly, from behind a formation that looked like a gigantic frosted cupcake, a brown bear rushed into the stream and swatted one of the seals with a crushing blow. The bear turned with the seal in its jaws and climbed the steep slope toward the light.

  On the spot, I knew two things. The first was, if a bear could get in, I could get out. The second was, I wasn’t going to even think about it until dark, or I might run smack into a bear. In the dark hours they shouldn’t be seal hunting.

  In the meantime I had about six hours to kill. When my light ran out I had to be within easy reach of the entrance. Right now I had a chance to make a discovery. This place seemed so likely to have been used by ancient people, I could taste it.

  I walked upstream alongside flowing white terraces of calcite. No tracks of bears in the muddy places, thank goodness. The rooms were so large it was almost like I was in a canyon outdoors. Everywhere I looked I saw magnificent columns, draperies, icing-covered flowstones, doll houses, castles, tiny rooms tucked in the walls and furnished with exquisite miniatures. Yet, all these works were made by nature. What I wouldn’t have given for a single human artifact, or simply some ancient graffiti on the wall.

  In between the great rooms the cavern narrowed, but I always found a way to continue on one side of the creek or the other.

  I entered a room where the rushing water was much louder than before. It was the most spectacular of all, a grotto, a perfect sphere, with the creek spilling from a tunnel at the far end into a pool that took up most of the grotto’s floor. Smooth walking terraces led around the pool on either side. Set back from the terraces were freestanding figures that looked like an army of giants standing guard. The underlying rock that made up their bodies was a rich yellow brown, and it was all topped by layers of bright white calcite icing, giving the giants hoods and capes and teeth and ribs.

  The grotto turned out to be as far as I could go. Salmon were leaping up and into the jet of water pouring out of the tunnel at the head of the pool, but I wasn’t going to be able to follow. The water in the tunnel would have been chest deep, and there weren’t any handholds.

  I walked around the side of the great pool, drawn by the place where the creek burst out of the wall.

  At the end of the line, I tried to picture ancient people standing exactly where I was standing. This cave would have been quite a wonder; they would have wanted to explore it. Ancient people all over the world had used caves. They were special places, sacred places.

  Could they have found a way in?

  Yes, through the bears’ entrance, or else through the mouth of the creek. Back then, the creek wouldn’t have entered the ocean underwater, like it did now. Sea level was three or four hundred feet lower; the stream would have burst out of the cliff, high above the sea, in a spectacular waterfall. The people down below, paddling on the ocean in their skinboats, would have been impressed. Somebody would have said, Let’s climb up there and see if we can get inside.

  Talk about explorers. They were the originals. Every day, a new world.

  I strained to make out pictures on the walls, but they just weren’t there. Imagining they had once been, until time and dripping water and minerals had covered them over, made me feel a little less disappointed.

  I was about to turn back. My eyes ran up the flowing slope on my side of the stream to a small chamber twenty or so feet above, like an open jewel box decorated with mineral encrustations. Where I was standing was not the last reachable spot in the cave. That little room was.

  Torch in hand, I skittered up the slope. In front of the chamber, I perched on a small balcony and looked inside.

  I held my breath, afraid to make a sound lest it break the spell. Here it was, the prize I’d been hoping to find: a human skull sparkling with a coating of bright gypsum crystals. The chamber was so small, the skull was almost within arm’s reach, though it was against the back wall. It took me a few seconds to see that the entire skeleton was there, the bones all covered with gypsum crystals and calcite. Within the crook of the skeleton’s arm, on a bed of cave pearls, were three miniature boats carved from ivory.

  It was uncanny how close their proportions were to my father’s soa
pstone carving, the one my mother had left at Hidden Falls.

  Dad, I thought. Can you see me? I found your proof. A burial, and boats to go with them. Boat people, just as you always figured.

  There was even more: in the corner of the chamber, small carvings of seals or sea lions, each with a harpoon sticking out of its body.

  My torch was sputtering badly. It was time to go, and quickly. I took another good look, trying to memorize every detail. I removed one boat; it fit in the palm of my hand. The fossilized ivory didn’t seem fragile. I tucked it in the deepest pocket of my vest, zipped up my fleece jacket, rebuckled my life jacket. The tiny boat was good and secure.

  Time to go. Time to get out of there and get home. I had my prize.

  How old was it? That was the question.

  While I still had light, I hurried back to within sight of the entrance the bear had used. Long after my torch had gone out, I waited out the dimming of the natural light from outside. I ate some jerky, dried salmon, and pemmican. When it was all but dark, I made my move.

  Knowing full well that a bear might be napping at the opening or very close by, I inched my way through the jagged portal, which reeked with the scent of death. I stumbled across the remains of a small carcass with extremely long finger bones—a harbor seal. It took some time to find my way in the near dark through the maze of trees and boulders outside. I was weary through and through.

  What I needed was a safe place to sleep. The stars were coming out, hard and sharp as diamonds. The storm had been replaced by dead calm. The gurgling of a creek down below was the only sound. Through a break in the trees I saw starlight reflected on ocean water. I would stumble over the edge of a cliff if I kept going. I curled into a ball and fell dead asleep.

  17

  I HEARD A FLUTE. I MUST BE DREAMING, I thought, but as I blinked myself awake and shook the cobwebs out of my head, the music was still there.