Demon Spirit, Devil Sea

by Charlene D'Avanzo

  Sleep and die. Angelo’s waiting.

  The will came from somewhere deep. I lurched from one side to the other and clawed my way forward.

  Gasping and exhausted, I had to rest. I rolled over and looked at the sky. Pale blue, so pretty. I closed my eyes.

  No…no. Beat Richard. Beat the bastard.

  I flopped over and floated on my belly. A wave pushed me toward shore. I opened my eyes underwater. Bottom, solid bottom.

  My feet touched rocks. I fell backward, got my feet under me, threw my body forward. I grabbed seaweed, pulled my numb, trailing body to shallower water, crawled up onto the beach, and collapsed on my belly.

  Get up. Up. Now.

  On hands and knees, I panted, head down, and willed my breath to slow down. I crawled until I reached the side of the rock dome and stretched my neck so I could just see the little bay over the rock. The boat was gone.

  I unfurled, shoved out a foot, tried to stand, and fell backward, shivering violently. Angry, I knelt again, planted my feet, and slowly stood. My legs and arms quivered. Trees, beach, and water swirled around.

  The first steps were clumsy, zombie-like. I made it to the other end of the pebble beach, turned, and walked back faster, circling my arms like a windmill. A couple of trips up and down the beach got my blood moving. I stopped to look around and take stock of my surroundings.

  The beach was small, maybe a few hundred feet long, the high-tide line littered with branches and other debris. Beyond that, higher ground was carpeted with mounds of thick green moss. I could guess why. Fresh water probably seeped through the moss before it ran into the ocean.

  Fresh water to drink.

  A dense forest spread back from the moss carpet.

  I faced the ocean to gauge the weather. Sunset was a couple of hours away. Even so, the sky looked ominous. Black clouds raced toward me and confirmed Richard’s prediction. A storm approached. I’d already had a close call with hypothermia after the fall off the Henry George. A long night of pelting, cold rain would kill me.

  Rescuers would find my dead body sprawled out on this lonely, godforsaken beach. Angelo would be overwhelmed with grief, Harvey pale and sobbing, Ted grim and silent.

  None of that was going to happen. I’d find some way to shelter in that forest—beneath the cover of overlying braches if nothing else. A rocky spine ran north-south along the whole of Haida Gwaii. There might be a rock overhang.

  The first step onto the moss carpet confirmed my guess. My foot disappeared into a hole that instantly filled with water. I dipped in a finger and tasted it. Fresh. Bending over, I cupped my hands and slurped. A little skanky, but I didn’t care.

  Slogging through a hummocky bog is always a challenge, but exhaustion and lack of coordination made my trek grueling. Again and again, I tripped over a hidden obstacle and fell into a puddle of waterlogged moss. My clothes were already drenched, so getting wet wasn’t the problem. But getting up again was, since the glop gave no purchase.

  Short of the forest, I fell again, lay back, and hooted hysterically into the sky. My situation was absurd—what did I think I was doing? There was nowhere to go. Laughter turned into tears. No question, I was losing control.

  I rolled over to a stump that looked like it might hold my weight. It did. I sat on it. The puddle next to the stump had seemed warmer. I stuck my hand in the moss. Warmish water. Huh.

  At the edge of the woods, I stepped up onto dried land and peered in. Dense trees and the fast-approaching storm gave the forest an unwelcoming gloom. I squeezed between two skinny trees, ducked under an inclined one, and leaned back to think.

  I touched the bottom of my right pants pocket and felt a little bump. Good.

  Soaked and shivering, I only wanted to lie on the forest floor and sleep. Every bit of my body ached. I closed my eyes. Dreamlike, the smell wafted in. I popped my eyes open, sniffed in all directions, and zeroed in on one. The distinct odor was to my left. The last time I’d smelled that was on Kinuk Island.

  The acrid scent of hydrogen sulfide.

  With renewed energy, I followed the smell, clamored over downed trees, and squeezed through standing ones. The sulfur grew more pungent and drove me on.

  I pushed my way through a thicket and stepped into a grassy clearing. Twenty feet ahead lay a hill of exposed rock. I circled the base in the direction of the pungent odor. Squinting in the dimming light, I could see the rock was fine-grained—volcanic, maybe basalt. The rain was hardly noticeable at first, but as thunder boomed in the distance, the sky pelted me with cold needles. Up ahead, I could just make out what looked like an opening in the rock. I ran for it and slipped inside. Sulfur aroma greeted me.

  I waited for my eyes to adjust. Light from outside dwindled a couple of yards in. Beyond that, the cave was ink black. I dropped onto hands and knees. The cave floor was smooth, hard rock. I hoped no dead animal lay in front of me. Or worse, a live one.

  Blind, I slid my palms and knees across the level surface and inched forward. Twenty-odd feet in, the air became much warmer and dense with humidity. Sulfur stung the lining of my nose.

  I reached my hand out. Gloriously hot water.

  23

  Though I knew it would’ve been smart to check the water for animals, dead or alive, I didn’t. I slid face-forward into heated manna. The shallow pool covered my body. That was enough. I turned over and stared into the black. I might starve, but I wasn’t going to freeze to death.

  Outside, the storm sounded fierce. Thunder rumbled and boomed. Before I fell asleep, a flash of lightning lit the cave.

  I woke up confused as to why I was hot and wet. The memory flooded in. I’d jumped off a boat into arctic seawater, clawed to shore, slogged through a bog, and discovered the cave. Outwitted Richard, so far at least. A Brothers Grimm tale.

  I was terribly thirsty, but had doubts about the hot water. The alternative wasn’t good. I’d have to crawl out of the cave to the bog and might not find my way back. I sat in the shallow pool, cupped my hands, slurped, lay back again, and fell into a deep sleep.

  The next time I woke, it appeared to be daytime. In dim light, I could see the cave’s rough roof and edges of the pool. I crawled onto the dry floor, over to the cave’s opening, and blinked. I held out my hands and studied them. They were wrinkled like an old, old woman’s. Standing in the morning light, I tried to figure out what to do, my waterlogged brain in slow mode. I shivered in the crisp morning air. Neurons kicked in.

  When the sun was higher, I could spread out my clothes to dry. But that wouldn’t be for several hours. My stomach rumbled. Good sign. I touched the bottom of my pocket again. Still there. That was something I could deal with. It might even work.

  In the longhouse, Ted had needed matches when the battery-operated lantern failed. I dug the emergency kit out of my duffle and tossed him the little tin of waterproof matches. When he’d finished, I’d slipped the tin into a tiny pouch in the bottom of my pants pocket and forgotten about it. Sometimes forgetfulness is a good thing. I’d seen pieces of wood mixed in with dried seaweed along the beach’s high tide line. Getting there meant a slog through the bog again, but it was something I’d have to do.

  Rested and with the morning light, I traversed the forest and bog quickly. Out on the beach, a cold wind gusted off the water. Shivering, I fast-walked up and down the beach to warm up, picked my way along the flotsam, and pulled up pieces of wood. The rain had drenched most of the litter but a find at the end of the beach was a blessing. A ripped piece of tarp lay across a mound of debris, its corners held down by soggy kelp and some rocks. Gingerly, I pulled the tarp aside. Amphipods jumped around in indignant confusion. I reached into the litter. For the most part, the wood was dry.

  Thank you, god.

  I tried to remember the rules for starting a campfire under wet conditions. It was critical to get the fledgling fire off wet ground. Crisscrossed sticks would make a good base. Also, I needed to start with little pieces of dry wood and grass. When that got going,
I could add pencil-size pieces, followed by larger ones.

  I built the base and made piles of tinder plus progressively larger pieces of sticks and other wood. I was about to light the first match when I remembered a few phrases from Jack London’s To Build A Fire.

  He knew there must be no failure…a man must not fail in his first attempt to build a fire…

  “Stop it,” I said aloud. “He was in the Yukon in a snowstorm.”

  Just like it said on the box, the first match burst into flames. I held it under the tinder. The dried twigs caught right away. I cupped my hands around the precious flames to protect them against the breeze and took my time adding larger pieces. Soon, the little fire was burning well. Shivering in wet clothes, I added a couple of small logs. They crackled and flamed. I stood back to let the wind reach the fire and jumped up and down to warm up. Two more logs did it. The fire radiated heat. I rotated back and front and relished the delicious warmth.

  The fire was a blessing. I could sit by it at night and stay warm. There was lots of wood around. Besides that, mussels and other edible creatures lived in shallow seawater. Steamed over hot coals, they’d be delicious. When Canadian police searched for me, smoke from my fire might be visible during the day and flames bright at night.

  Rescue. Harvey and Ted must be frantic, trying to figure out what happened. I hadn’t shown up in the Victoria airport or called about a late plane. They would have waited for the Skidegate flight to unload in Vancouver and panicked when I wasn’t among the departing passengers. They knew I’d get in touch if I could.

  And Angelo. We’d talked a half hour before I was kidnapped. Harvey and Ted would call him. He’d know something was terribly wrong. I’d never miss that plane without contacting anyone. He also had a funny way of sensing my danger. I felt guilty about his angst.

  I didn’t know how long the Royal Canadian Mounted Police would wait before they’d begin my search. Probably twenty-four hours. Out in the swamp, a long time. No point in worrying about that now. My job was to keep myself alive until help arrived.

  The place needed a name. I looked around and said it aloud. “Swampy Point.”

  I watched the fire until there was a good bed of coals. Time to collect more wood. Wood of all sorts littered the beach—big and small branches, pieces of dock, bark of various kinds, logs. I carted wood until the piles looked large enough to feed the fire for a good while.

  Luckily, the day was clear. When the sun was higher, I took off my damp clothes and spread them out in a line along the shingle. Buck naked, I sat on a smooth log on the high-tide line next to the fire.

  The first rule of survival was to find shelter. I had my shelter cave with a heat source independent of my fire. I had two sources of fresh water—the bog and sulfury water in the cave. Now I needed food.

  In tennis shoes, and with a little yelp, I waded into shallow water. Mussels attached to rocks were large and abundant. I let them dry in the sun and nestled a half dozen on the coals at the base of the fire. My mouth watered with the delicate aroma of steaming mussels. With a stick, I pulled one out. The hot, soft meat was easy to dislodge from the shell. I slid it into my mouth and groaned. Delicious beyond words.

  I finished the first six and cooked six more. They sizzled and smelled even better than the first batch. I tossed the shells into the water, spotted something red stuck between two rocks, waded in, and grabbed my fleece pullover. Squeezing out seawater, I added it to the row of drying clothes.

  At the end the beach, movement caught my eye. I stopped dead. A hulking animal emerged from the shadow into the sunlight. The black bear moved its massive head back and forth and sniffed the air. I had to cover my mouth to stifle the scream.

  The bear must have smelled the steaming mussels. My cooking had attracted a vicious predator.

  Adrenaline shot through my body. I desperately wanted to run somewhere, anywhere. I whipped my head from side to side. No tree near enough to climb. The swamp and ocean were both bad choices. Nowhere to go.

  My wilderness training kicked in.

  “Don’t run. It will chase you. Watch for aggressive behavior. Jaw snapping, huffing, ears laid back.”

  The bear had caught my scent. Its ears were definitely laid back, and I could hear the pants. Slowly, like a cat, it came toward me.

  “They may crouch and creep in your direction, gaze laser-focused.”

  There was only one thing to do. Get as big as a five-foot-seven woman could and make lots of noise. I grabbed a solid piece of wood the size of a baseball bat, spread my legs, stretched out my arms, and waved them up and down. Screaming like a banshee, I prayed a naked lady would scare the bejesus out of the creature.

  The bear stopped and stood on its hind feet like it was trying to figure out what this thing was. Standing, the massive animal looked ten feet tall. It dropped back onto all fours.

  24

  Squealing, the bear galloped at me. Twenty feet away, I could count the teeth between its orange pitchfork-sharp incisors. At fifteen, I looked into beady black eyes. Ten feet, my legs shook so hard I could barely stand. My legs trembled and arms quivered, but my god, I stood my ground.

  At five, I knew this wasn’t a false charge.

  Both hands on the piece of wood, I reached back like I was about to hit a home run and slammed the bat into the bear’s snout.

  It let out a hideous scream. I was sure the beast was going to charge again. But with one look to the side, Ursus americanus splashed into the water and swam quickly away.

  Panting, I stumbled up to the big log. I slid onto my butt, put my head down, and waited for the spinning to stop. When it did, red blotches came into focus on a rock at my feet. I ran a hand along rock’s surface. My blood felt hot and sticky. Blood streamed out of three deep gashes that ran from my upper right arm nearly to my wrist. The bear had clawed me, and I hadn’t even felt it.

  There was no pulsing, so the claws hadn’t cut an artery. Still, I had to slow the bleeding and clean the wound. I scanned the water for the bear and looked up and down the beach. Nothing. My arm began to throb. I held it away from my body, stumbled to the water, waded in to my knees, and slid the arm underwater. The salt stung. Red streams swirled away from my skin and turned the water pink. I kept the arm in as long as I could take it and pulled it out. Blood oozed from the wound but didn’t flow.

  William had walked into the ocean to wash his wound, too.

  I stared at the slashes through my skin. They were deep, but no bone was visible.

  “Nothing stitches couldn’t fix,” I said to my appendage. “I’ve only got to stay alive until someone can stitch you up.”

  Ooze turned into drips. I dunked my arm again and tried to figure out how to fashion a makeshift tourniquet.

  Holding my arm above my head, I walked up to the row of drying clothes, grabbed my bra, twisted it into a rope, and wrapped it high and tight around the damaged limb. With both hands, I managed to tie a knot. The wounds throbbed and oozed blood, but it slowed to a trickle.

  I scanned the ocean and beach for the bear. Nothing. I’d have to stay near the fire, be vigilant. In the distance, water splashed. My stomach clenched. Just a gull. To keep sane, I had to focus on essentials. Gather wood, keep the fire going, dry clothes, check the injured arm. Look for bear.

  I tried to not obsess about when and if rescue would come. I’d listened for low flying planes—a sign someone might be looking for me—but heard none. There was no sound of a motorboat either. Except for gulls, crows, and my other animal neighbors, Swampy Point was maddeningly quiet.

  And after being charged and attacked by a bear, I was desperate to get away from the godforsaken place.

  Think about something else.

  The hot pool. That was bizarre. Richard said I’d die from hypothermia, but he instructed Bart to motor far into the wetland to a spot with heated water. Since Richard seemed to know all about the swamp, where I ended up made no sense. There had to be an answer to the paradox.

&nbs
p; It came in a flash—so obvious I felt foolish for not realizing the explanation right away.

  When I first slid into Swampy Point’s hot pool, the rock bottom felt smooth. Unlike Kinuk’s, it was free of slime and sediment. That meant the pool had been dry until very recently. I was no geologist, but there was a likely explanation. The same tectonic event that had drained Kinuk’s pool must have altered the underground plumbing here so that hot water flowed into cave’s pool.

  In other words, two days ago the Kinuk pool was full and Swampy Point’s empty. Now it was the other way around. If that were the case, I was the luckiest woman on the planet or someone or something in another realm was watching out for me.

  Even though I sometimes sent up a prayer to my dead parents, I didn’t believe in guardian angels. My prayer was a gesture of remembrance, not a genuine appeal to a higher force. A week ago, I would have insisted spirits, angels, and any otherworldly creatures didn’t exist. My parents couldn’t intervene on my behalf. But after what had happened here, I wasn’t so sure.

  At the moment, this mystical dilemma felt too intense to deal with. I stared across the gray-blue bit of water in front of me. My home in Maine offered an unbroken view of the sea to a far horizon. Nearly every day, I stared into fog, a bright morning, or the setting sun and let my thoughts drift. Now, a swampy jungle blocked what I could perceive.

  Huh. If a person’s view of the world shaped their perception, did my automatic rejection of anything spiritual limit my self-awareness? I shook my head. A philosophical question like that would have to wait until my survival was more secure.

  Everything but the pullover was finally dry. The blessedly warm undies and pants felt like heaven but the turtleneck was tricky. It slid it over my head and good arm but only lay shawl-like on my right side. I tossed more wood on the fire, leaned back against the log, and promptly fell asleep.

  I woke confused and sore. Shoved against the log, my neck hurt. The arm throbbed. I jumped to my feet and looked around in every direction. No bear, but I’d left the fire unattended. Luckily, the bed of coals still glowed red. That fire was my lifeline. It needed my full attention, and a mistake like that couldn’t happen again. I added more wood until flames curled around the crisscross of logs.