by Will Hobbs
Ryan thought they were the best grizzly tracks he had ever seen. He was all excited about taking pictures, but he read my thought balloon, and said, “We’ll keep our bear protection close at hand, in case that big fella is still in the area.”
Then and there, he showed me how to use the pepper spray and the bear bangers. Following his lead, I rigged my bear-banger pouch and pepper-spray holster on my belt. They made me feel like I was armed, sort of. Ryan said, “Were the tracks of that grolar bear bigger than these?”
“By a lot.”
“You know what? At this moment that grolar bear of yours is the rarest animal on earth. Photos of one in the wild would be the coup of a lifetime.”
I didn’t say a thing. I didn’t want to encourage him. This was crazy talk.
“You know what,” Ryan continued. “With the quote in my article to the effect that the grolar bear is probably a product of climate change, I have no doubt that a photo of one would land on the cover of National Geographic.”
“Don’t even think about it,” I said. “You have no idea. That bear would tear you limb from limb.”
Big grin. “After I had taken his picture, leaving you to write the article.”
I rolled my eyes.
“No worries, just kidding.”
We ate a quick lunch; Ryan was anxious to start down the river. He gave me a lightweight pair of rafting gloves and we went to work. When the boat was all rigged, he gave me a safety talk. As he finished that up, I pointed to my life jacket on the ground and asked what the stubby knife in the plastic sheath was all about. It was mounted chest high and upside down. “That’s in case you find yourself underwater and tangled in rope,” he said. “I’ve never seen it happen.”
I reached for my life jacket. Ryan said, “I don’t know about you, but I’m cooking with this bug shirt over my fleece shirt and thermal underwear. I’m stowing my bug shirt. Out on the river, we’ll be plenty warm with our life jackets on, and the bugs won’t follow us over the freezing-cold water.”
I followed suit, then put on my life jacket and snugged the cinches tight. “That’s the best life jacket money can buy,” Ryan said. “Doesn’t matter if you can’t swim.”
“I can swim pretty good.”
“Really? Where did you learn?”
“Indoor pool in Aklavik.”
“Really? Aklavik’s got a swimming pool?”
“The elders thought it was important. Too many of us used to drown.”
Ryan went aboard and took his seat on the big white cooler located back of center in the raft. He put his hands on the oars. “Ready when you are,” he called. “Let’s go find the caribou.”
I untied from the scrub willows, coiled and secured the rope, and shoved the boat into water deep enough for him to begin working the oars. Then I came aboard, keeping low. I settled into position on the cross tube in the front of the raft as the current caught us and we headed downstream.
I looked over my shoulder and found Ryan putting his back to the oars with a smile that radiated deep satisfaction. “So glad to have you with me, little brother,” he said.
Greenish like Ryan’s eyes, the river ran fast. It was about a hundred feet wide, and I could see every stone on the bottom. The spot where we launched was slipping quickly behind. Downstream, the mountain slopes on the left side descended into the river, here and there covered with dark spruce. Off to the right side the valley floor was open and treeless, the tundra dotted with ponds.
The land was huge and empty-looking, but I knew it was far from empty. The animals were out there. I told my eyes to go into hunting mode. I wanted to be the one who spotted the first wildlife.
It didn’t take long. As the raft turned a corner around the flank of the first mountain, I spied something downstream. “Bear!” I yelled. “Bear swimming the river!”
“Where?” big brother yelled back.
“Left side, a couple hundred yards ahead.”
Tucking the oar handles under his knees, Ryan leaned forward and unsnapped his big hard-shell camera case. Out came his black digital Nikon. He put it around his neck and started snapping pictures.
Swimming from left to right, the big tundra grizzly was approaching the center of the river. “Maybe it’s the one that left the tracks,” Ryan panted as he pulled on the oars, aiming to draw close to the bear. He tucked the oars under his knees again and snapped rapid-fire as the grizzly turned its massive head—wide, with frosty tips on the brown fur—and looked right at him.
The river was about to take another bend. The current swept us by the animal. Ryan snapped more pictures as the bear reached shallow water and rose from the river, water streaming from its sides.
Hurriedly, Ryan put his camera away and cinched the straps tight that secured the camera case. As we rounded the bend, he began to spin the boat so he could see downstream.
As the front of the boat swung around I saw what lay ahead of us a split second before my brother did. My heart was in my throat. Shore to shore, the river was blocked by ice. It was three feet high, and we were headed straight for it.
Ryan pivoted the boat and rowed toward the right shore with all his strength. There wasn’t nearly enough time. “Nick!” I heard my brother cry as the raft was swept sideways against the white wall of ice. The heavily loaded raft flipped over and sent us flying headlong into the freezing river.
9
DISASTER
The shock of getting thrown into the river and under the ice took my breath away—what little I had in my lungs as we capsized. The cold felt like a lethal jolt of electricity. All was confusion and chaos. Flailing, I righted myself in the swift-running current and knocked my head against a ceiling of solid ice. Underwater I found no air, no gap between the river and the ice.
From the corner of my eye I saw Ryan in the same deadly fix. The water was cold beyond belief. I panicked. This was it. There was no escape.
I didn’t know how long I could hold out. Not much longer. After that one glimpse I had lost sight of my brother.
As I got swept along, my head kept bumping the ice, and still I couldn’t find an air pocket. The end was coming quick. I was going to black out. It wasn’t like they say, with your whole life flashing before your eyes, people’s faces and all that, not even Jonah’s. Disbelief and fear, that’s all there was.
Ahead and to the right, I saw something different from the ceiling of ice all lit by sunlight: a dark patch, almost black. What was that?
Somehow I connected to Jonah, a memory of him telling me what to do. I had to swim toward that dark circle. Stroking and kicking hard as I could, I remembered why. The darkness meant open water.
The river was running so fast, I would have only one chance. Against the force of the current, how was I going to pull myself onto the ice?
Knife, I thought. Eyes locked on that nearing dark patch, I pulled the rescue knife from my life jacket as I kept stroking with my free arm. Kicking hard with both legs, I got there. Bursting through the dark water and into the open air, I stabbed the stubby knife into the ice all the way to the hilt.
The knife held. I kicked hard and dragged myself out of the river and onto the ice.
I lay there gasping and heaving for breath, frozen to the bone. I was shuddering and shaking so bad, I didn’t think I could stand up. Then I realized I shouldn’t even try. The ice might break underneath me. I crawled on my elbows toward the shore.
At the shoreline I clawed my way onto the rocks. Ryan was nowhere to be seen. I stumbled along the grassy top of the riverbank. Fifty yards farther on, where the ice jam ended, the river rushed downstream, open and clear. I spied the raft way down there, bottom side up. A couple of seconds, and it passed out of view around the bend.
Where was my brother? I scanned the shore beyond the ice, both sides of the river—no sign of him. “Ry-an!” I called, shivering and shaking. “Ryyyyy-an!”
In a full-on panic I broke into a run, or tried to. I tripped over my own feet, then got up and
kept going. Ground squirrels standing by their burrows dived for cover. Where the ice ended, I made my way down to the river’s edge. Scrambling along the rocky shore, I fell two, three times. I had next to no control over my shuddering limbs. Where was Ryan? Had he drowned, was he dead? Was I alone?
I staggered down the shore, falling and rising and shaking and falling. All the winters I had been through, even those times I had been on the windy sea ice at thirty below, I had never experienced cold like this. I had to warm up, and soon. My body core had gotten much too cold. “Ryyy-an!” I screamed.
Don’t give up, you have to find him. Maybe he blacked out and he’s still in the water. If so, you have to pull him out fast. I scanned and scanned and saw nothing.
From the corner of my eye I caught some movement downstream, on the far side of the river. Then nothing. I ran past a long clump of brush for a better look, and glimpsed a flash of orange, an orange life jacket. It was Ryan, out of the water and stumbling along the rocky shore. Just then he tripped and fell.
“Ryan!” I yelled at the top of my lungs. He couldn’t hear me over the sound of the river. “Ry—an! Ry—an!” I yelled, then stumbled downriver until we were opposite each other. By this time he had seen me. “Nick!” he screamed. “Nick, you’re alive!”
My brother had been in the water longer than me, and had even less control over his body. He fell down, got up, fell down again.
I was thinking clearly enough to have this much figured out: I wasn’t capable of swimming to his side and he wasn’t capable of swimming to mine.
Ryan got to his knees. I cupped my hands to my mouth and hollered loud as I could: “SHOULD … I … TRY … TO … CROSS … ON … THE … ICE?”
Ryan managed to regain his feet. “DON’T TRY! IT MIGHT BREAK! STAY THERE, MAKE FIRE!”
My hand went to my trousers pocket. The lighter he’d given me was still there. There wasn’t a bit of driftwood on the shore. I looked around for the nearest trees.
On Ryan’s side of the Firth, spruce trees grew on the mountain slope that rose out of the river. My side was valley floor, open tundra, most of it grassy and dry. The low places held ponds and muskeg swamp. My eyes landed on a clump of spruce trees on a knoll a couple hundred feet downstream and a couple hundred feet back from the river. “OKAY,” I yelled.
I turned and began to climb the riverbank as best I could manage. “SORRY!” Ryan called after me.
Atop the bank, I steered for those trees. No time to lose, I kept telling myself.
The clouds had thickened since Red had taken off, and the temperature had dropped. How much I couldn’t tell. The wind was beginning to rise. I wasn’t shivering and shaking anymore, and that wasn’t good. It was like I had turned to stone.
Pursued by the bugs, I climbed the knoll to the clump of spruce trees. An opening that faced the river led to a small clearing in the miniature grove.
First thing I did was to force my clawlike fingers into my pocket. Pulling the lighter out was anything but easy. It fell to the ground, small and red. I set it on a rock where the air might dry it out.
No taller than twenty feet, the trees huddled close to one another, their outer branches extending all the way to the ground. The inner branches were long dead from lack of sunlight. I crawled in on my hands and knees and went after the dead stuff. I was wearing those rafting gloves Ryan had given me. They helped as I broke off handfuls of brittle, dead branch tips skinny as soda straws.
By the time I collected some thicker wood, I could barely function. I propped my kindling against a rock, like Jonah had showed me when I wasn’t any taller than his waist. I knelt down and tried to make my thumb turn that little metal wheel on the lighter.
For the life of me, I couldn’t do it. Couldn’t get my thumb on it, couldn’t work the thumb when I did. Mosquitoes were buzzing in my ears and landing on my face, drawing blood, no doubt, but I couldn’t feel them.
For crying out loud. I was beyond desperate, and that wasn’t helping. After a few more attempts I thought to take a glove off, and warmed my hand in my armpit. After a minute I was able to work my thumb and fingers. I tried the lighter again. The flame sputtered out the first couple times, but then it held.
The kindling caught, and the flames grew quickly. I added the bigger stuff and went for more. Satisfied that my fire wouldn’t die out, I stripped, wrung out my clothes, and spread them out on the branches. As long as I stood in the smoke, I was out of reach of the mosquitoes.
As I stoked the fire and warmed myself through and through, a front was on its way in. The clouds were thickening and the wind started blowing hard enough to make the mosquitoes go to ground.
By now I was coming out of the immediate shock, enough to get a grasp on the situation—complete disaster. I remembered Ryan saying that even if we flipped, which wasn’t going to happen, all we would lose was our sunglasses.
What about my baseball cap, Ryan? What about the bear spray off my hip? That big tundra grizzly we saw in the river might appear at any second. How are you going to get your boat back? You fool, you clueless fool!
“SORRY,” he had hollered.
What a mistake this had been from the very beginning, the whole thing, and me getting sucked into it on account of him being my brother. Finding huge numbers of caribou to photograph—what were the chances? I’d lived up here my whole life and never seen thousands. Never even saw five hundred. And the article he was going to write. What did he know about caribou? How could he write about us, when he wasn’t even a hunter? “Sorry, Nick, you can’t bring your rifle.”
No more than two miles down the river, we’d lost everything. Everything! What was his plan for getting the boat back? The satellite phone was on the raft, and the raft was on its way to the Beaufort Sea. What were our chances of getting rescued without the sat phone—approximately zero?
Nice, Ryan, really nice.
Even our bug shirts were on the boat. He’d said we wouldn’t need them when we were out on the river, over the freezing water. I’d stowed my mosquito repellent too—afraid of losing it out of my pocket!
Over the next couple hours I dried my clothes by the fire, careful not to scorch them. At last they were dry, and I put them back on, along with my boots, which were still wet but not sopping. Never try to dry them by the fire, Jonah had told me a long time ago. They’ll get ruined for sure.
Thoughts of Jonah helped me push back the anger and the fear. I was up against it, but not nearly as bad as him. He’d be expecting me to live through this no matter how bad it got. I had to get ahold of myself and think positive. Who knows, maybe the raft had gotten hung up on something downstream. Maybe Ryan was already down there doing something about it.
It was time I checked to see if my brother was even alive. As I left the sheltering trees, I had little doubt that rain was on the way. Unfortunately, our rain gear was on the raft. I still had my waterproof watch—that was something. The time was 8:35 p.m.
Smoke was rising from back in the trees a ways down the far side of the Firth. I got ready to holler Ryan out to the shore. No need—he was standing at river’s edge farther downstream with his eyes on my side of the river. No more than a hundred yards from where I stood, thirty or so caribou bulls were making their way down to the river to drink. Only the width of the Firth separated Ryan from those magnificent animals with their huge racks. It must be killing him not to be able to take their pictures.
I didn’t feel sorry for him. If he hadn’t been so busy taking pictures, he would have seen the ice sooner. There would have been time to row to shore.
From our separate sides of the river, we watched the bulls go. Ryan walked upriver until he was straight across from me, and hollered that he had seen smoke from my fire. “YOU OKAY?”
“I’M OKAY!”
“THANK GOD!” He yelled that he thought it was going to rain. “STAY DRY, NICK. STAY PUT.”
Duh, I thought. I fought the urge to go sarcastic on him. That wouldn’t help a thing. “GO
T IT,” I yelled back. “WHAT NOW?”
“I’M GOING TO TRY TO FIND THE RAFT. YOU STAY WHERE YOU ARE. MAYBE IT DIDN’T GO FAR.”
“WHEN ARE YOU COMING BACK?”
“TOMORROW AT THE LATEST! IF I DON’T FIND IT, I’LL SWIM ACROSS TOMORROW. WE WILL GO FARTHER, LOOK FOR IT TOGETHER.”
“GOT IT!”
Suddenly there came a huge cracking sound, then a second crack. I’d heard that sound my whole life—ice breaking up.
We both looked upriver, seeing nothing at first. Half a minute later, around a bend, here came the ice, hundreds and thousands of chunks of it, some small, some as big as refrigerators and pickup trucks. The shore-to-shore ice jam that had flipped our raft was soon passing us by in bits and pieces, grinding and scraping and hissing and jostling as it headed for the sea.
Ten minutes later the river was running clear. Every last trace of the ice had gone out. No doubt we were both thinking the same thing. Too bad we didn’t camp where Red let us off, and launch the next day.
“I BETTER GET GOING!” Ryan hollered. “GOTTA CHASE THE RAFT!” He waved and started hiking downriver at a brisk pace.
It crossed my mind I might never see him again. The Arctic has a way of swallowing people up. You make a big mistake, most likely you pay for it.
“GOOD LUCK!” I shouted after him. Angry and annoyed and irritated as I was, I was depending on him to come through.
10
MY SIDE OF THE RIVER
Watchful for that grizzly we had seen swimming the river, I climbed over the top of the riverbank. My fear was rising. I shouldn’t have let Ryan split us up.
The wind was buffeting my little spruce grove on the knoll. Dark clouds were spitting rain as I came to the clearing among the trees. The fire was out, and I had used up all the dead wood within reach. I crawled into the trees and found a spot to wait out the weather under the dense, sheltering branches.
Sitting there with zero bear protection, my back against a spruce trunk, I was spooked nearly to puking. Barren-ground grizzlies—tundra grizzlies, Arctic grizzlies, whatever you want to call them—are more aggressive than grizzlies below the Arctic Circle. They have a shorter food-gathering season, which means they have to eat mostly meat. And to get enough meat—mainly caribou, dead or alive—they have to fight each other for it. Only the fierce survive.
