Surviving Bear Island (6 page)

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 my 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.

I tried to dig my feet in sideways, but the rocky ground was just as slick as the slope above. So I started grabbing the berry bushes by their bases for a little balance. I could see downslope where there were more trees. I hoped it'd be less steep, too. Plus I could go from tree to tree when I got there.

But for now it was sidestep, sidestep, sidestep, grab a bush at the base, and rest. Then repeat.

I worked my way around a boulder, and then sucked air into my gut as my foot grazed the rump of a black bear.

The bear twisted away from me and I jumped backwards. My feet scrambled for grip as my arms reached out for the steep slope. I grabbed a berry bush by the base and it gave way. I fell backwards, like I'd been dumped out of an airplane, and landed on my back with my legs flat, pointing downslope. A sea of green flew over me as I bumped down the slope and gained speed with no sign of stopping.

I let out a scream.

Then my heels hit something that sent a jolt through my hips and all the way to the base of my head. I flopped forward, and all of a sudden I was flying through the air. Everything slowed down, like an instant replay of someone doing a ski jump.

I knew I was moving, was airborne, but felt no pressure—no resistance. Then I slammed into the ground. Face first. Mouth first.

WHEN I
tried to breathe, I felt all these sharp pains, like when I was helping Dad build a deck and my stomach slammed into the end of a beam and knocked the wind out of me, only this was a hundred times worse.

I rolled onto my side and curled up, my whole body trembling, like how a dog quivers when it's scared.

I lay there until the trembling died down and I could breathe without all the pain.

I lifted my head, then moved my arms and legs. They seemed okay. I sat up. That's when I noticed the taste in my mouth.

I spat some bloody saliva, ran my tongue between my teeth and lower lip, and felt two flaps of flesh where there shouldn't have been any. And under the flaps, I poked the tip of my tongue into two deep gashes.

I spit more blood. The gashes stung, like pieces of hot metal were pressing into them.

If my mouth had been open when I'd hit the ground, I'd have broken my teeth.

Check everything. Carefully.

I pressed a finger onto my bottom lip and it came back bloody. I wished I had a mirror. I mean, I didn't know if the blood was from the gashes, or someplace else. I pulled my lip out and curled it down, trying to see the damage, but that didn't work 'cause my nose blocked my view.

I ran my hands across my face but didn't find any more blood. My lip felt tight, like I'd been punched in the mouth by the mountain. And my cheeks on both sides of my nose just below my eyes screamed with pain.

I lay back down on my side and pulled my knees to my chest. I was never gonna make it to the Sentinels.

My sweat cooled and I started to shiver.

Get up.

“Shut up.” I waited but didn't hear anything in response. “Good.” I said. “I don't want you whispering crap into my ear. You say almost nothing for three years. You can't just turn it on and expect everything to be okay.” Another shiver ran through my body. The bottoms of my feet were going numb.

“Okay,” I told myself, “If I just lie here, I'll die for sure. And, what if I don't find my dad? I make it to the Sentinels but he doesn't? What then?”

Live in some kind of home for the homeless?

Or with my uncle and his family in Michigan? I'd seen him once my whole life. He came up after Mom died. Tried to talk my dad into doing some kind of religious ceremony. Said there was still time to
save
my mom.