Wild Man Island (4 page)

T
HE BEAR PAUSED TO SNIFF THE AIR.
My heart was jacked up full throttle, but I didn't so much as blink an eye. Time slowed to a suffocating standstill as the bear looked all around. I pictured those front claws, long as my fingers, gutting me like a trout. At last the behemoth lumbered toward the beach along the trail that passed through the devil's club.

The trail. Of course it had been a bear trail. The red jelly on the trail, that was bear scat. The hundreds of black dots in the scat, those were berry seeds.

This animal was nothing like the black bears back home. It was a dark brown and it was a walking mountain of muscle and fat. As the bear disappeared through the thicket onto the beach, I finally took a breath. I wasn't going onto the beach to look for the kayak and paddle anytime soon.

Finally I began to see straight. What an insanely stupid fantasy—rescuing myself, getting the search called off. Embarrassment was the least of my worries. Search planes were my best hope, maybe my only hope.

The problem was, would anybody even look here?

As I tried to pull bristles of devil's club from my
right hand with my teeth and my fingernails, I racked my brain to remember whatever I could about Admiralty Island. Julia had pointed it out across the strait during her last campfire. Admiralty was about a hundred miles long, I remembered her saying that. It was one of the big three, along with Baranof and Chichagof. They were often called the ABC Islands.

I cast my memory back to the view from my tent. Admiralty was a uniform dark green from tidewater up to timberline. It had never been logged. The slopes of Baranof and Chichagof looked much different, like patchwork quilts. Some of the patches were dirt brown, where all the trees had recently been taken off. Admiralty's trees were old growth. Admiralty was wilderness.

Wilderness. Under the circumstances, I couldn't imagine a more ominous word, unless it was
bears.

What else did I know about Admiralty? “All three of the ABC Islands have brown bears,” Julia had said early in the trip. I knew for an awful fact that the bear I'd just seen was a monster grizzly. Brown bears, the naturalist had gone on to explain, were the same animal as grizzlies—
Ursus arctos.
Brownies, as Julia called them, got a lot bigger in southeast Alaska than the grizzlies in the interior because of all the extra protein that salmon added to their diet. Some topped a thousand pounds.

Tell me about it.

Julia said there was another name for Admiralty, the Indian name. The Indians called it the Fortress of the Bears.

I felt sick, remembering what she'd said next. “Admiralty Island has the densest population of brown bears in the world. One per square mile.”

Bears went onto the beach here, I knew that already, and the beach was where I was going to have to be during daylight. An airplane wouldn't have a chance of spotting an elephant under this forest, even if it was painted orange.

Raindrops spattered around me all night, and with my mind spinning its wheels, I couldn't fall asleep. I had a raging thirst and my stomach was balled up into a stone. I hadn't eaten in more than thirty hours. When I almost felt like I could sleep, that's when the howling started.

It had come from the direction of the beach, close enough to tear out my heart and hand it to me on a plate. The howls were long drawn out and mournful, deeper pitched than the wailing of coyotes. I didn't have a shred of doubt they were coming from the throats of wolves.

A video I'd seen about wolves being brought back to Yellowstone said there was no record of a healthy wild wolf killing a human in North America. I wasn't reassured. In the dark, that eerie howling scared me half to death. It was five
A.M.
before much light reached the forest floor around my hiding place. When was the soonest that rescue could come?

Today. Anytime now. Morning, afternoon, evening. If they were going to be able to spot me, I was going to have to stay on the beach.

The heavy rubber rain suit in the rear hatch of my kayak came to mind. Too bad I didn't have it, and the boots, and the hat designed to shed rain past the collar.

Knock it off, I told myself. Think about what's possible.

I should be able to find some fresh water. Maybe I could go without food a while longer, but I was going to have to find water.

At 6:30
A.M.
I heard an airplane. It sounded far off, but it was sure enough an airplane. I mustered enough courage to crawl out from under my hiding place and follow the bear trail down to the beach.

The sky was leaden, and it was drizzling. I could no longer hear the airplane. No sign of the kayak. No such luck.

The beach had shrunk from what I'd seen before. What was the tide doing? Coming in, I calculated. At high tide, within a few hours, I'd be hemmed right up against the driftwood and the trees and almost impossible to spot.

Conditions were terrible for flying. A heavy blanket of clouds made a low ceiling, no more than five hundred feet judging from the slopes above. Beyond the cove, the gray face of the sea was rolling and whitecapped as far as I could see.

Would they even look for me here, on the southern foot of Admiralty?

The wind had been blowing hard from Baranof to Admiralty across Chatham Strait. Wouldn't they more likely look along Admiralty's rugged, rocky west coast,
than around the corner on the southern shore?

I looked west, to the near slopes that rose jagged and sheer out of the cove and disappeared in the clouds. The climb and the descent to the west coast would be murderous without boots. At tidewater I'd come out of the forest onto a ragged strip of jumbled rocks.

Sheltered by the cape, this cove looked friendly by comparison.

Stay put, I told myself. That's what you're supposed to do if you get lost. That's what they tell hunters every fall in Colorado. You'll only make things worse if you try to hike out.

Be patient. They'll look for you here. Give it time.

I scanned the cove toward the east. Halfway around there was a break in the mountains that backed the beach. There would be a creek there, and fresh water.

Where the cove flared seaward again, almost at land's end, my eyes picked up a large rounded object at water's edge.

A whale, a beached whale. From the black-and-white pattern I recognized it as an orca, a killer whale.

There was motion around it.

I squinted. What I saw was a bear, unmistakably a bear, with two dark moving specks close by that had to be cubs. The whale was dead, and the bears were feeding off it.

In the drizzle, I stood just out of reach of the rising tide and watched the bears at the whale and the sky. The drizzle turned to rain. I should have been building some sort of shelter on the beach.

Across the cove, the bears were about to have company. Big dogs, I thought at first, but just as quickly I figured out it was the wolves I'd heard during the night.

I squinted. There seemed to be six or eight of them trotting down the beach toward the whale and the bears. They slowed to a walk, but kept coming. I wondered what would happen. The mother bear charged them, then retreated. With the cubs at her heels, she made a beeline for the trees.

With the tide coming in, I knew I had better go to the creek while there was open beach remaining. I was able to follow a thread of sand among the smooth dark beach stones and above the slippery seaweed and the mussel beds. I chose each step carefully. It would be so easy to bruise or cut my feet.

Heavy rain, in sheets off the sea, forced me into the forest before I could reach the creek. I could see the stream where it splashed across the beach after leaving a swampy estuary of muck and waist-high grass. These flats stretched half a mile or more inland before the mountains rose into the clouds.

I wrung my clothes out, then spent a couple of hours under the forest cover waiting for a break in the rain and listening for an airplane. My stomach was cramping. At the first sound of a motor, I was prepared to sprint onto the beach and wave my life jacket.

No airplanes, but miles away and barely visible through the rain, a fishing boat was passing from right to left. My spirits surged. Sooner or later, a fishing boat would pass close to shore.

I thought about my mother, how she was counting on me. If only because they hadn't found a body, she wasn't going to count me out.

Knowing her, she was on her way to Alaska. It would kill her to wait, not to be part of it. She would try to search with the float pilots. By now she would have figured out how close I'd been to Hidden Falls. She would have told everybody to make Hidden Falls the bull's-eye of the search. Unfortunately, that wasn't going to help.

Maybe hearing about my father would help Monica and Julia understand me taking off like I did. It was awful, what I'd done to them. Right now they were thinking it was 99 percent certain I had drowned, and they would feel responsible. I wished I could say I was sorry.

I had better come through this. That was the only way I could take the weight off them, and my mother too. My mother had thought I was old enough and mature enough to make the trip to Alaska by myself.

You're a piece of work, I told myself. Good job, Galloway.

I
N SIGHT OF THE CREEK,
I found a hole in the base of a giant spruce and crawled in for the night. My belly was full of water and nothing else. It felt like a wild animal was gnawing on my insides. With all the cramping and the shivering, the shrieking of the wind and the howling of the wolves, I had a terrible night. All the while I kept thinking about fire, wishing I could make fire. Fire to keep me warm, fire to ward off bears, fire to make smoke to signal an airplane.

Everywhere, tree limbs were draped with white, wispy stuff that looked like Spanish moss. Old-man's beard, Julia called it—some kind of lichens. Great firestarter, she said. Put a match to it and it would burst into flame. If only I
had
a match.

“Shoeless and clueless,” I muttered. I wasn't even carrying a pocketknife. All I had on me, in one of the zipper pockets of my fleece vest, was a credit card in case I needed cash from an ATM. How useful.

When the light came up, I could see bears in the estuary. A mother grizzly ate grasses while her cubs wrestled. Not far away, two mostly-grown bears were playing or fighting, I couldn't tell which.

From my hiding place I could see that the wolves, five gray and three black, were still on the whale carcass. There was a commotion of gulls overhead; the ravens and bald eagles waited close by. Far out on the water, a ferryboat was passing down the center of the strait.

I was just about to go onto the beach when I realized that the wolves were leaving the carcass and heading in my direction.

From the forest cover, peeking over a log, I watched them trot by in the rain—fluid, tireless, silent. They were even larger and more powerful looking than I would have guessed. Six of them passed, led by a magnificent black wolf that had to be the leader, the alpha male. A gray and a black lagged at the back of the pack. These two were more interested in play fighting than in keeping up. They stopped to nuzzle each other and to stand up on their hind legs and gnaw each other on the ears and necks.

There was something about the black one of this pair. It was a lot less streamlined than the others and somewhat bigger. It was blocky and long-haired, and looked like a Newfoundland dog.

No wonder it looks like one, I thought, it
is
one. It's not a wolf, it's a dog.

It was a male Newfoundland, a big “Newfie,” as my friend Derek referred to the breed. He had one; it was half as big as their kitchen.

This one had a bright red wound on one of its ears. It was tussling with the gray wolf, a female, who had expessive facial markings and dark tips on the guard
hairs of her shoulders and spine. The underside of her body, the insides of her legs, and the underside of her tail were white.

Just before the wolf pack would have disappeared in the tall grass of the estuary, the leader turned around and surprised the dog. Playing with the gray female, the Newfie had his back turned when the alpha male attacked.

For a few seconds the two were a snarling whirlwind. The Newfoundland quickly retreated. He wasn't nearly as agile as the wolf, or as powerful or aggressive. The leader drove him even farther away.

The gray wolf who'd been playing with the dog lay back her ears and howled. The dog, in return, barked at her.

All of a sudden came the sound of a motor. An airplane, and I wasn't where I needed to be.

The wolves bolted into the tall grass with the dog in pursuit.

I ran onto the beach, no matter that I was tearing up my feet. The plane was already past the cove and all I got a look at was its tail. A few seconds, then the plane was gone.

I yelled myself hoarse in rage and frustration and fear that it wouldn't come back.

From now until whenever, nothing—not rain, bears, or wolves—was going to keep me off this beach. I hastily improvised a big SOS out of driftwood.

The airplane did come back, only minutes after I'd assembled the message. I could hear it before I could
see it; I had the life jacket off and ready to wave.

It was raining hard, which wasn't going to help.

At the crucial moment, I was clear out in the open, waving my life jacket, jumping up and down, and screaming. The plane roared over the cove and the cape, then disappeared to the west.

Surely they'd seen me. Surely they were about to circle around for another look.

The airplane never came back.

Maybe the pilot had been distracted for a second. Or maybe they just couldn't see me because everything I was wearing was dark blue and so was the life jacket. Through the rain, against a dark gravel beach, I just wasn't visible enough, and neither was the driftwood SOS.

It had to have been a search plane. That's what hurt the most. Exhausted, I finally went back to the forest to wring out my clothes. I tried to make fire by striking rocks together next to a bed of old-man's beard. I made sparks, but that was it.

My father would have been able to make fire. By now he would have made himself a sharp stone knife, and with the knife he would have fashioned a bow drill and made fire with it. Then he would have made himself a spear, tipped with a deadly stone point, to defend himself against the bears.

But I had never learned flintknapping, and I couldn't defend myself, and I wasn't going to be able to make a knife and a bow drill and fire.

So quit thinking about fire, I told myself. The cold isn't bad enough to kill you.

The rain was letting up. After a while, even the drizzle stopped. Where the creek left the tall grass and looped toward the beach, I went looking for fish and spied some trout. I tried to bash them with a stick. I threw stones at them. It was pointless. It was maddening.

I followed the creek down to salt water. Julia had said that all the seaweed was edible. It was everywhere around my feet, attached to individual stones by holdfasts, as she called them.

I picked out a few of the brown ones that looked like transparent brown rubber gloves and a couple of the sea lettuce. The sea lettuce was a clump of green weed with transparent blades.

“They're just algaes,” Julia had said, “brown or green algaes. Even the ribbon kelp and the bull kelp is edible. You pay good money for these in health food stores.”

I'd laughed along with the rest, but I wasn't laughing now. I shouldn't have waited this long.

They need to be rinsed, Julia had said. That's what I did now, in the creek.

The brown one that looked like a rubber glove tasted like one. The sea lettuce went down easier.

It all came back up.

I waited until the cramps subsided, then tried again. Chewing very slowly, I ate one clump and waited. A second clump and a third stayed down. I wondered if it would help with the weakness and the dizziness.

I had a feeling that the airplane wasn't coming back. Whatever search zone had been drawn on the map didn't include where I was, or planes would have come in the first two days. The plane that had buzzed the beach had been somebody looking beyond the search zone.

But why were they so sure the search didn't need to include Admiralty's southern coast? I racked my brain trying to think from their point of view.

Suddenly I knew the answer. They had found the kayak.

They had found the kayak, maybe even the same day it happened, and nowhere near where I was. The currents had grabbed it, and the reversing tide had sent it back to where I'd started—on Baranof. The kayak could have floated all the way back to Cosmos Cove or even farther north.

They knew that I had spilled. Spilled into forty-degree water. They thought I had drowned close to camp.

Probably they had shut down the search within a day or two. One plane, the one that flew right over me, had kept looking. My mother was probably in it.

The weather wasn't breaking up. It came on stronger than ever. I needed a shelter on the beach. What choice did I have but to keep watch? I had to believe I was going to get another chance.

Barely above the high-tide line, I drew out a square and planted poles at the corners. The poles were
branches I'd broken off, each with a forked top to receive cross members that I decked with cedar fronds.

It kept raining. I sat on a chunk of driftwood under my little shelter and waited for airplanes that never came.