Surviving Bear Island Page 4

  As my possessions lay before me in the flickering firelight full of faces, I battled with the thought that no matter how much I wished things were different, I was alone, all alone, and with what supplies I had lay in front of me. And wherever my dad was, right now, he was alone too.

  I glanced down the beach to where a small, rocky point jutted out into the water. At the base of the point, where I’d collected some of my firewood, were two enormous trees.

  Trees, I remembered. Big trees. “Yes,” I said. “Yes.”

  And now I knew where I had to go if I wanted to have any chance of getting off this island alive. It’s the place my dad would go to, too. The Sentinels.

  Long red rays from the sun stretched across the water as we paddled into the protected cove on the southern tip of Bear Island. We’d just made a five-mile crossing from the main land.

  “Good job on the crossing,” Dad said. “You were strong. Didn’t die.”

  “Thanks,” I said. We’d been out for over a week and even though my arms were sore, I was getting stronger from the daily paddling, just like Dad said I would.

  It was quiet in the cove. Like it was part of a different planet where the only sounds that existed were our voices and the sound of our paddles slicing through the flat water. The cove was U-shaped, about a mile deep with a half-circle of small forested islands protecting the entrance.

  Gigantic hemlock and spruce trees dotted the spit we were paddling along, the tips of their lowest branches in the water at the tide line. We beached the kayak, got out and stretched.

  “Your mom loved this spot,” Dad said. “The farthest from civilization she’d ever been. Let’s walk around before we unload. We’ve got a little time.”

  “The trees,” I said. “They’re huge.”

  “Your mom, she said the trees were like Sentinels.”

  “Sentinels?” I asked.

  “A Sentinel is a guard. A protector. Something that ensures safety.”

  “Cool,” I said, thinking of my mom and the way she saw the world. “It kind of feels like they’re watching over the place.”

  These trees, over a dozen of them, and twice as wide as my arm-span, towered above us, growing right out of the beach gravel and all on this narrow spit of land at the back of the cove. And there was almost nothing growing under them. Maybe I’d write a song about this place. For Mom.

  “I’m glad we made it here together. Not just for your mom, but for us.”

  I nodded. Mom. Sometimes at home it felt like she was in the next room or out in the garden. And here, I almost believed she’d appear under the trees. I could feel her. I wished she would ’cause I knew she really loved me, really wanted me.

  “We were gonna tell you together. Really, your mom was, but since she’s gone…”

  “What, Dad?” I said. “What is it?” I mean, he was springing back to life but was still quiet, and soft-spoken and there was no telling when he’d just shut back down again and it’d be like I didn’t exist. If he had more to tell me about Mom I wanted to hear it. I had some of her song lyrics memorized, and I’d started playing her guitar, and I’d read her stories over and over, but I wanted every scrap of information to help keep her alive in my mind.

  Dad looked at me, then put his eyes on the ground. “This is the place where we first talked about building a family.”

  I took a breath. “Did you even want to have a kid?”

  Dad turned toward me. “I’m not the kind of guy that would just go out and adopt on my own. But with your mother there was nothing I wanted more than to be a parent with her, to have our own. To have you. I know I haven’t been acting like much of a father, but that’s gonna change. I promise.”

  Then he gave me a big hug, the kind of hug my mom used to give me. And yeah, he was acting more like he used to before Mom died, but only since we’d been out here. The real test would be when we got home and I wanted rides into town to go to the movies, or to guitar lessons if he let me start them, or over to Billy’s house, or maybe to meet a girl if I was that lucky. And to teach me how to drive. Could my dad drag himself out of bed or off the couch for me instead of just driving into town once every two weeks to buy groceries, ’cause I’d go nuts if all I did was spend time at home outside of school with someone who’d barely speak to me.

  After we unloaded the boat and set up camp, Dad was taking me to our water source, this trickle of a stream spilling down a steep bank, when I saw something and said, “Dad, what’s that, back in the trees?” I pointed with one hand and walked toward it.

  Dad fell into step beside me. “Used to be a sauna way back when—”

  “A sauna? It’s just a pile of junk.” I pointed to the pile of rotting, moss-covered boards and a few plastic five-gallon buckets that lay in a heap.

  “The Forest Service was supposed to haul the rest of that junk out of here, but then gas prices shot up and they cut way back on travel, just like the rest of us. Must be a pretty low priority right now. So few people come way out here. A few kayakers in the summer. Occasionally a hunter motors out in the late fall, or early winter. Someone who’s willing to spend the money on gas.”

  I grabbed the end of a two-by-four and it crumbled in my hand, like scrambled eggs.

  “Twenty years ago you’d get a handful of people out here in the summer, and during hunting season. Not anymore. And where we’re headed from here, it’s even more remote. New territory for me. The exposed side of Bear Island. No one goes out there, but after that crossing, I think you’re ready.”

  CHAPTER 8

  THE NEXT day I walked south along the coast—the salty smell settling into my nose—with my dad’s vest slung over one shoulder. The rocky beach turned into a cliff and I had no choice but to head inland if I wanted to continue south toward the Sentinels.

  I glanced back at the fallen tree with the ten-foot-long rock arrow I’d made on top of it pointing south. And just behind it, a seven-foot-tall stick I’d dug into the ground, piled rocks around its base, and then attached the yellow spray skirt at the top.

  “Dad. You’ll see the arrow, right? You’ll know what it means, right?”

  But if he didn’t see it, at least I’d tried. I mean, I’d searched to the north, and then I’d found his vest to the south. I couldn’t just wait here, hoping. I had to go and just hope he was going in the same direction. He could’ve kept swimming around this cliff and then came ashore.

  But here I was—with or without him—stuck on this island. At home with my zombie dad I’d felt isolated, but this was true isolation. Just me and the rocks, the trees, and the rain. No town just ten miles down the road. No school to go to five days a week where I could see people. No phone. No food. No people. No nothing.

  I don’t think my dad really cared if he ever saw people, but me, the main thing I’d been looking forward to after the first week of the trip was seeing people. That, and taking a shower.

  I turned, and clawed my way through the belt of alders that separated the forest from the beach. Stiff branches crisscrossed every which way. It was like working your way through a web of steel cables. But once I broke through, I was in the old growth. My dad loved that phrase. Old growth. To me it sounded kind of nasty. Made me think of my fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Harper, who never clipped her fingernails. They were long and grayish. My back used to crawl, like an army of spiders were moving up my spine, every time she’d set one of her hands on my desk.

  But in the forest, old growth meant big. And green. And wet. Like you were in a giant terrarium. I recognized skunk cabbage, and the palm-shaped leaves of devil’s club springing from their thorny stems, two of my dad’s favorite plants. And blueberry bushes. But the rest of the plants, I didn’t have a clue about. Maybe there were more things to eat, there had to be, but I didn’t know. There was so much I didn’t know.

  I knew the names of the trees towering above me. Mostly Sitka spruce and Western hemlock.

  Spruce have square needles and hemlock have flat ones.


  And from some of the tree branches this light green-yellow, lacy stuff hung, draped like tinsel on Christmas trees. Strands of it two and three feet long.

  The northernmost rainforest. The jungle of the north, that’s what Dad called this place.

  We’d vanished—that’s what it’d look like. I don’t even know if Dad had told anyone where we were going. He put the chain across the driveway with the no trespassing sign on it when we left. And after the four hundred mile drive to Whittier, Dad hid the truck in an abandoned boat yard to avoid paying the hundred bucks it cost to park in the lot. And instead of using the boat dock—didn’t want to pay for that either—we hauled all our gear down this steep bank to a mud-hole of a beach and launched. That’s what he and mom used to do. Great plan if you’re planning on disappearing.

  In some spots the devil’s club and skunk cabbage grew so thick you could hide an army tank in it. I kicked at some moss concealing a decaying log. It’d be easy to disappear in the rainforest. Thick green moss covered everything on the ground. Hopefully it wouldn’t cover me.

  If my dad had crawled into the forest and passed out, it’d be easy to miss him. I thought about going back and searching more of the coastline to the north, but the farther north I went, the longer it would take to get to the Sentinels, and with the way the waves were pounding south the day of the accident, I doubted my dad could’ve swam against them. He had to be south.

  And now the possibility that I might not survive kept hammering me. I might try and try and try and still I might die. And I might never find my dad. Maybe he’d survive and I wouldn’t. Or, maybe I’d survive, but if I never made it off the island, what kind of life would that be? A short one, probably. A short, lonely one.

  Alone. Alone. Alone.

  “I am alone!” I shouted. “Someone. Anyone. Come and get me!”

  Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw some brush shake. I turned and said, “Dad? Dad, is that you?” I walked toward where I’d seen the movement, calling for him over and over. And then I saw more brush shaking, so I kept going and kept calling, my heart pounding in my chest. I knew I’d find him. Then the black rump of a bear disappeared ahead, the brush bending as the bear continued moving away from me.

  At least it hadn’t come at me. I turned and retraced my steps and kept going. I’d find my dad if he were on this island. And I’d leave more clues as to where I was going so he could find me.

  I was walking next to a waist-high decaying log sprinkled with hundreds of evergreen saplings. Nurse trees, I think Dad called them. All that new life from one dead tree. But what about people?

  When people die are they gone for good? Or are they in Heaven looking down on you?

  With Mom, sometimes I felt like she was close by. Especially when I listened to her music. This one set of her lyrics just kept coming back to me, maybe ’cause I’d listened to it so many times.

  Every fire’s a ceremony.

  Every story’s a testimony.

  If you pay attention, you will know what the river knows.

  Lots of people believed in heaven and God, but me, I didn’t know what I believed. One time before Mom died, Dad and I were out on the deck. He was cooking salmon on the grill, and I was sweeping up a bunch of dead carpenter ants, when these three guys in white, button-down shirts came walking up the driveway. If you took the time to walk up our driveway, you must really want something. I mean, it’s like five-hundred feet long and does a big S-curve up a steep hill, and it’s out in the boonies.

  These guys wanted to talk religion—their religion, whatever it was. Dad was polite and let them make their introduction and show their pamphlets, but eventually he pointed to the trees and said, “Church of the Earth. That’s what I belong to. I respect your beliefs and hope you’ll respect mine, too. For me, life is here. Life is now.”

  As I walked, my raincoat, rain pants and rubber boots mostly shielded me from the moisture covering the plants. But crawling over and under fallen trees, and then climbing up the slope, I began to sweat, and soon was wet from the inside.

  When you’re wet, the only way to stay warm without a fire or a change of clothes is to keep moving.

  “Yeah, yeah, Dad, I remember.”

  I reached the top of the first ridge and a flat, broken forest lay before me—stands of trees separated by small ponds and wet meadows.

  Muskegs. Soggy but pretty. Too wet for trees to grow. Mostly covered in deer cabbage—those ankle-high, heart-shaped leaves about as big as your fist.

  Dad loved to kick around in muskegs. He’d shown me the tiny red sundew plants that ate insects, and said if we’d been out here a month earlier we’d have seen all kinds of flowers. And the ponds that dotted the muskegs, some of them covered with green lily pads the size of Frisbees. He talked more on this trip than he had the past three years combined. Not that my dad was ever much of a talker, but Mom could get him to talk. It’s like she had some secret key that unlocked him, and when she died that key went with her until he came back out here.

  But now. I shook my head. I stared at the blanket of deer cabbage until it turned a blurry green. My jaw felt heavy, like there was a twenty-pound weight attached to my chin. Where was he?

  On the edge of the muskeg, I found some blueberries. I ate and ate. Handful after handful of blueberries. Bush to hand to mouth to body.

  And my thoughts raced. I wanted fish. I needed fish. I’d get back to the coast on the other side of the cliffs and find a salmon stream and figure out how to catch them. That’s where my dad would go, where the fish were. I wished I had a map.

  In a kayak if you wanted to get to the end of Bear Island you followed the shore and paddled. But traveling on foot—there were lots of obstacles. Cliffs, swampy muskegs, deadfall, mountains.

  I picked more berries and put them into a Ziploc bag from one of the survival kits.

  School had to have started by now. I was registered but I was just a name on a list. Billy would call when I didn’t show, but he’d probably just leave a message and wait for me to call back. And if he came all the way out to my house, which was unlikely, he’d see the chain across the driveway and the no trespassing sign. Billy had been away most of the summer visiting his grandparents in the lower 48, so I hadn’t told him where we were going.

  As I crossed the muskeg the wet ground sucked at my boots and kicked up a smell, like boiled eggs. I worked up another sweat and my thermal underwear stuck to me like a second skin.

  On the far side of the muskeg I stopped and looked back at my soggy footprints in the blanket of deer cabbage. Trail to nowhere, that’s what my prints would look like from the sky. Like an alien had dropped down, walked across the muskeg and then lifted off.

  I was here. But here was nowhere. Stranded. My stomach burned. I pictured the worms wiggling around in there. Nowhere to go.

  I kept clawing my way up, just wanting to top this ridge and get back to the coastline. A layer of sweat covered my body, so I got chilled every time I stopped to rest or pick berries.

  Finally, I broke out of the trees. The land was still pretty steep, but without the tangles of deadfall, the walking was easier. The slope was covered with boulders—like a bag of giant marbles had been spilled from the ridge-top.

  I headed for the low point in the ridge, the way that looked easiest. The bottoms of my feet ached from walking in the thin-soled rubber boots, made more for standing in water than trekking through the mountains.

  Faint depressions in the tundra, spaced like footprints, stretched out in front of me. I turned around and noticed that the marks my boots made were similar to the depressions ahead of me. In the forest it was hard to see any kind of track unless you were right on top of it, but here, the way the land opened up I could see the fresh imprints of where someone had walked. And only one other person could’ve made those tracks in front of me. I picked up my pace and followed them. And I thought, yeah, I was right to head toward the Sentinels. Somewhere deep down, I’d known that’s what m
y dad would do too. “I’m gonna catch you Dad. Soon.”

  At the top of the ridge I stared down a steep mountainside, way steeper than the one I’d come up. The first part was treeless, then below it, the forest started. And beyond the forest lay a huge pear-shaped bay of blue water.

  Hidden Bay, I remembered. We’d crossed the entrance early in the day of the accident.

  Biggest bay on the island. Ten miles long, and over four miles wide in the middle. Too bad we don’t have time to explore it. Next time, we’ll go in there. Probably some good salmon streams.

  The place was killer beautiful. Like if you had a boat full of supplies and you were in the bay, it would be amazing. But for me, the thing that made this place beautiful, the endless miles of empty mountains and water, was the thing that could kill me.

  It’d probably take an hour to paddle across the mouth of the bay, but it’d take me days to walk around it.

  Suddenly the Sentinels seemed very far away to me, too far. I couldn’t swim across the mouth of Hidden Bay, or any other bay between me and the Sentinels. I’d have to walk if I wanted to get there. But I had to eat, too.

  Maybe I’d run into someone before I got there. Another crazy kayaker like my dad, or someone in a boat who didn’t care about how much money he was spending on gas. But I knew chances were slim. I mean, the reason my dad wanted to come out here was because no one else did.

  I started side-stepping my way down. Slippery areas with rock beneath moss, covered with chest-high Devil’s Club, shared the upper third of the mountainside with patches of other plants I didn’t recognize. There was a scattering of boulders on this side of the ridge too, and a footprint here and there.

  I tried to avoid the slick, mossy areas, but twice found myself crab-walking down, sliding my butt on the moss ’cause I didn’t want to fall and get tangled up in Devil’s Club.

  Finally, I reached the edge of the forest. But it was even steeper, almost like the cliffs on the coast. If I’d had a long rope I would’ve used it. The trees were small and spread out. And there were lots of blueberry bushes that hung like curtains down the slope, but they didn’t have any berries on them.