Surviving Bear Island Page 6

  Dad had said, “If I can imagine feeling the bump and then lifting, then I’m ready to dip net.” That year we netted thirty salmon in two hours. A week later Mom was dead.

  The fish moved upstream, approaching where they’d been before I’d spooked them. In another wave the fish advanced to their original position. I bounced on my toes and that made my blisters burn even more.

  Do it and do it right. But how did I know what was right? I just had to feel it. Try it. Imagine bringing the gaff down and tugging. Yanking a fish onto the gravel bar, then pounding it with a rock.

  The salmon were headed upstream to spawn—that was their goal. And not up just any stream, but the very stream where they’d had their start as eggs. Well, they weren’t all gonna make it. Not if I could help it.

  I raised the gaff with both hands, held it over my head, then swung it down, hard. A splash and wave erupted on the water’s surface.

  “I got one! I got one!” I shouted, as I pulled a fish from the water.

  On the gravel bar the fish flopped wildly, and broke free from the hooks. I dropped the gaff, scooped both hands under the fish and flung it away from the water. It hit the rocks and kept flopping and flipping, then became still. I picked up a grapefruit-sized rock, grabbed the fish just above the tail and smashed it on the head. Spasms ran up and down the fish. It broke free and flopped again.

  I gripped it by the tail and hit it a second time. It jerked once, then became still. Blood ran from its bulging eyes.

  I picked up my gaff. I wanted more. I could scarf down three or four salmon, or eat a whole school, no problem.

  I had the situation under control. I was doing it right. It was almost easy.

  I waited. The school of salmon moved back to its original position. I swung again, connected again, and yanked, but then stumbled and fell backwards.

  Broken ends of fishing line trailed off the pole.

  “No,” I said. “No. No. No.”

  I raised the hookless gaff over my head and slammed it down. I stood up and kicked the gaff. I picked it up, stared at the place where the hook should have been, and slammed it to the ground again.

  “Worthless,” I shouted. “I’m worthless.”

  Then I felt the trembling. If I kept losing hooks, I’d starve. And that would be sad, loserville-sad—to starve when there were lots of fish just because I couldn’t figure out how to catch them.

  That night, by the fire with a burncooked fish in my belly, I sat with the hookless gaff in my hands, the broken ends of fishing line hanging in the firelight.

  I knew I needed to catch more than one fish with one hook. I’d die if I couldn’t do that. No room for mistakes. Or at least, no room for making the same mistakes. I needed to learn from this.

  Learning life’s lessons sure can be hard.

  You can’t learn nothin’ if you don’t leave the yard.

  Yeah, more of my mom’s lyrics. My mom would say that by gaffing a salmon I’d left the yard. But now, if I just tied another hook onto the end of the pole without changing the way I did it, that’d be like staying in the yard.

  I set the pole down. I lay back on the life vests and covered myself with the emergency blankets.

  I worried about the gaff some more, but no solution came. I’d been so proud of how I’d thought it up, built it, and then caught a fish. I wanted the gaff to work just the way it was, but knew that was impossible. Just like I wanted to have not screwed up on the day of the accident—impossible.

  CHAPTER 11

  MY EYES opened, then closed again. Then opened. I saw my dad bobbing in the green waves, then his life vest washing ashore.

  Then I saw it all again. I closed my eyes tight, then opened them again and saw the gray morning light through the trees.

  Then I remembered the fish, the gaff, the hook.

  I shivered.

  My head hurt, pounded like someone was beating on it with a club.

  And my throat was dry, like it was coated with sawdust.

  A thin wisp of smoke snaked upward from a partially burnt log. I rolled the log over and stirred the coals beneath it. A few red embers glowed, holding a sliver of last night’s blaze.

  I placed a couple of small sticks on the coals, blew until the smoke started to rise, then headed for the creek.

  Small drops of cold rain dotted the cove as I squatted beside the creek, cupped my hands and drank. The peaks at the back of the bay were blocked by a wall of gray, the clouds closing in on me like a pack of hungry wolves.

  I headed back to my camp. A couple life vests, the two small survival kits, plus a fire—that was camp.

  I rubbed my hands together. If only I could’ve reached that dry bag with the sleeping bags. Then at least I’d have something to separate myself from the weather. A cocoon I could curl up in.

  I really wished I had a tent. Just a small tent—sleeping bag not included—to shed the rain.

  On the trip I’d felt cooped up when we stayed in the tent for a couple days during a storm. It had sucked. I wished it sucked like that now.

  If you don’t have what you want, what can you do to work toward what you want?

  “What do I want?” I said. “What do I want? I want to find you. I want to get off this freaking island! But right now, right now, I just want to live. I want to be warm and dry. And I want to eat—all the time.”

  My stomach growled. Eat some berries first, I figured. Then build a shelter. Then fix the gaff. And just keep moving around, that’ll help keep me from freezing. And keep searching for signs. Any signs that my dad might have left.

  On a hillside I found berry bushes, their stems stripped of leaves, a stray berry here and there. And bear scat. Big piles of bear scat speckled with purple and sprinkled with green. Those bears must eat tons, literally tons, of berries. Eating machines.

  But the island was big, too big for bears to eat all the berries. I worked my way across the hillside until I found a patch the bears had missed.

  The berry juices stung the open wounds in my mouth.

  I shoveled them in anyway, but kept my eyes and ears on stand-by.

  My dad climbed to the top of a mountain on one of his trips out here and counted nine black bears foraging for blueberries on the mountainside below him. At the time I thought the story was cool. I’d wanted to climb a peak and see that. But now, it freaked me out.

  Were any bears moving my way? Was one just out of sight behind a fallen tree? So much to worry about when all I wanted to do was eat.

  Eat.

  Eat.

  Eat.

  Not like at home where I used to read and eat, or watch a movie and eat. Eat when I wasn’t even aware I was eating.

  Especially after Mom died. For a while I just ate what I could. I mean, Dad was down, way down. I’d make him a sandwich when I was making one. And I’d do most of the cleaning up, which was good because I needed something to do.

  We had a freezer full of salmon, but he wouldn’t touch it. Mom had freezer-wrapped all of it and labeled it with smiley faces and the date, and on the freezer paper had drawn little stick figures of me and Dad fishing. And she’d done all that just a few days before she died. I know it’s still there because every once in a while I’d open the chest freezer just to look at those drawings. Everything was there, behind that chain with the sign that said, No Trespassing.

  But out here, you take a good look around. Eat for a few minutes. Take another look around.

  Eat.

  Look.

  Eat.

  Look.

  And listen.

  Always listen.

  And while I ate and looked and listened, my mind pounded with one word: Shelter.

  Shelter.

  Shelter.

  Shelter.

  I worked my way through more berry bushes that had been stripped by bears, searching for another patch they’d missed. I was dodging more mounds of bear scat when I noticed a pile that was smashed in the middle. My mind flashed to the bear scat I’
d stepped in my second night stranded on the island. I found an undisturbed pile, stepped in it and studied the result. It looked just like the smashed down pile. It was a print. A boot print.

  “Dad!” I yelled. “Dad.” I kept moving through the bushes calling for him. I mean, who else could’ve made that track. And he’d be looking for berries just like me.

  I didn’t see any more tracks and no one answered my calls. Maybe he was just out of shouting distance. And, he would come to the stream because the fish were there.

  I returned to my sorry excuse of a camp.

  Don’t sleep where you eat. Keep your kitchen separate from your bedroom. Keep a clean camp. Don’t give a bear a reason to be interested in where you sleep.

  I stood next to the smoldering fire. I knew I couldn’t build my shelter here—with the fish-smell. Didn’t want to be easy prey or I’d never reach the Sentinels.

  But I also knew that I needed to stay here for a little while. I mean, a creek full of fish. If I could stuff my face for few days, build up my strength, then I could make a push for the Sentinels. Plus, this is exactly the kind of place my dad would search for, too. Where there was a food source. That print just had to be his.

  Just above the highest strand line, shielded by a band of alders, I discovered an earthen bank about eight feet high. It was kind of dark beneath it because the alders were so thick, but it was a solid wall.

  I studied the bank, trying to imagine a shelter.

  BEFORE THE ACCIDENT

  “Dad, there’s a rock straight ahead. Go right.”

  “Thanks, Tom.”

  The boat swerved and we glided by the pale green rock peeking out from the trough of a wave. We hadn’t seen a sea lion in over an hour.

  We rounded a point and the wind hit us straight on. I pulled harder and kept licking the salty spray from the waves off my lips while keeping an eye out for more rocks poking through the surface, and for more sea lions and whales.

  CHAPTER 12

  I DRAGGED five large deadfalls to the edge of the bank and slid them over, about two feet apart from each other. I gathered sticks and branches, and placed them every-which-way across the deadfalls to make a roof. Something to get me out of this constant rain.

  I hauled a bunch of rocks from the beach and built fire rings half-in and half-out of the shelter on the two open-ended sides.

  Then I sat inside and tested it out.

  Yeah, it was damp and dark. Cold, too.

  Just a triangular cave—dirt wall, stick roof, moss-and-mud floor. I hoped it’d feel different with a couple of fires blazing. And I knew I could make it better. Water was already dripping through the roof. But if I spent all my time on the shelter, it’d just turn into a tomb.

  I wasn’t Mr. Skinny when I started this trip, but I was now.

  My clothes hadn’t magically gotten bigger, but they hung on me.

  And my face? I’d seen my reflection in a puddle yesterday. It looked like it’d been stretched, the way it’d appear in one of those fun-house mirrors.

  I scavenged for more berries between my shelter and my kitchen, but they were play food compared to the fish.

  At my kitchen I grabbed my gaff, and life vests, and headed back to my sleep shelter.

  Energy. It takes energy to make things happen. Sometimes it takes a big push to break through to another level. Rome wasn’t built in a day.

  His voice just boomed out loud or whispered in my ear with no warning. And the words weren’t always things I’d heard him say before. Was he really speaking to me?

  When I heard his voice I missed him even more.

  And then I thought about home, and if I made it off this island but never found him, just what would be my home? And what was happening at my house now? Was anyone trying to figure out where we were? Would they notice that the kayak wasn’t under the deck? Not unless they knew it was there in the first place. Had anyone even bothered to ignore the chain across the driveway and go up to the house? But even if they had, what clues would they find?

  My hands had nicks and cuts from yanking and dragging bark-covered branches. The tips of my fingers throbbed, my fingernails packed with dirt and bits of bark. My blistered feet stung with every twist, turn, and squat.

  And my shrunken stomach called out for food. I’d worked so hard, but still I had no food, no fire, no gaff. All I had was a cold, leaky shelter. A place to die.

  That night I sat perched on a life vest between two fires, still in my raincoat because of the drips and drizzles that penetrated my shelter.

  The other life vest and emergency blankets lay in a pile.

  An image of my dad bobbing in the waves invaded my brain. I took some deep, slow breaths and tried to picture Dad before the accident. Before the trip turned bad. His quiet smile. Kind of crooked on one side of his mouth. Just like mine.

  I knew he’d be proud that I’d caught a fish and built a shelter. “It’s big enough for both of us, Dad.” And that I hadn’t eaten the Meal Pack bars from his survival kit even though I thought about eating them like three-hundred times a day. And that I’d even thought of trying to go to the Sentinels. I glanced toward the bag holding the combined survival kits.

  Dad would take care of what he had. Wouldn’t waste anything. At home and on building sites he backed screws out of old boards and reused them. When he cut a tree down for firewood, he used the whole thing instead of just chucking the small branches.

  I wondered what he was doing now. Maybe he’d found some of our gear. Maybe he had some matches or a lighter or a fishing pole. Maybe he had the tent. Maybe he had some of our food. The graham crackers and chocolate bars. The marshmallows. My mouth watered and my empty stomach burned, trying to digest itself.

  I picked up the gaff.

  Make it better, I thought. Stronger.

  “A fish is gonna pull, and I need to be able to pull back.”

  I took a lure from the kit and threaded fishing line through the eyehole.

  I tied a knot in the line, creating a small loop, then cut the remaining line, and kept cutting and tying until I had five loops through the eyehole. With a piece of rope I tied the lure onto the gaff so the hook hung over the edge.

  I ran a piece of rope through all five loops, wrapped it around the pole and tied it.

  I wrapped another piece of rope around this rope and tied it.

  Then I took a fourth piece of rope and wrapped it around the fishing line, hoping to hold the lure in place in as many ways possible.

  I pulled on the hook—it held. I stepped outside and sunk the hook into an alder trunk just inside the ring of light, and pulled. The hook started to bend.

  I smiled, then whispered, “That lure isn’t going anywhere.”

  CHAPTER 13

  THE NEXT day gray puffy clouds scudded across a blue sky. No rain, but the northerly breeze crawled up my sleeves and down my neck. Cold. Just plain cold.

  But I’d noticed something. Rain clouds came from the south and stayed until a wind from the north blew them away.

  Patterns. Weather patterns. Back in Fairbanks, who cared if it was forty below in the winter when you had a warm house to hang out in or all the right clothes to go outside if you wanted to? You didn’t really need to deal with the weather unless you lived in it.

  You only needed to pay attention to the things that were threatening you. I mean sure, you paid attention to other things, but you didn’t have to.

  Out here, I needed to pay attention to everything. Like where I put my feet so I didn’t fall. Was the hook secure on my gaff? Was a bear following me? Did I have enough firewood to at least last the night? Little mistakes could turn into big mistakes. Like my dad said, when you’re alone in the wilderness, everything is magnified.

  I headed for the creek, ready to try my new gaff. At my kitchen, the coals from my cook fire had been scooped out and scattered. A pile of bear scat dotted with blueberries crowded the tree I’d slept under that first night.

  We are all potentially
food for something else.

  Okay, okay, I thought. All part of the cycle. Everything is made of recycled nutrients. Berries, bears, people. And once you’re dead, you’re just a pile of nutrients.

  Like, if I died out here, what happened to my body wouldn’t matter. Bears would chew on me. Gulls would peck my eyes out. Bugs would gnaw on me. Flies would lay their eggs. They’d hatch, and the maggots would feed.

  I kicked the bear scat out from under the tree. This was still my kitchen. I wouldn’t turn into bear food—not without a fight.

  I stopped to look and listen, then stepped out of the forest, squatted by the stream channel and drank.

  I forded the first two channels, then walked across the gravel bar to the main channel, anxious to pull a struggling salmon from the stream. I scanned the water for signs of movement. For swaying dorsal fins.

  But all I saw was empty water. I squinted at the channel, like if I looked hard enough, they’d magically appear.

  “Where are they?” I said.

  I glanced upstream. I wanted to fish out in the open. Where I could see. I didn’t want to go up the creek, and be closed in by trees and brush. But there had to be some fish up there. That’s where they spawn. But there had to be bears, too.

  A cramp ran through my abdomen. I took a step upstream. My chest felt raw. Like I was breathing in tiny fragments of glass. The next couple lines of my mom’s song about leaving the yard ran through my head.

  It might be scary, especially at the start.

  You’ve gotta take that step. You’ve gotta have some heart.

  Where the gravel bar ended and the channels came together, the water ran deep. I backtracked a ways, crossed the side channel and followed it up to the same spot on the stream bank. In the beach grass I saw the rotting remains of bear-killed salmon.

  Make noise to let the bears know you are there, especially if you can’t see very far. The last thing you want to do is surprise a bear in a tight spot.