by Will Hobbs
It came as a sudden surprise—a jolt, a solid, powerful jolt under my legs. Barely able to believe it was happening, I felt myself and the kayak rising up above the water and tipping. I tried to lean, tried to use my paddle to keep my balance, but I had passed the sickening point of no return. I was going over.
Suddenly it was dark, and so cold that the sea water felt like an electric shock. I couldn’t breathe and I was fighting five-alarm panic. For a split second I saw the hindquarters of the sea lion as it swam away. My hands went to the release on the spray skirt, and I began to kick my way out of the kayak.
5
ON MY HANDS AND KNEES, I clawed my way out of the water and collapsed. The beach was black gravel and small rounded stones, driftwood sticks and seaweed and tiny beach flies buzzing in my ears. Inches from my face, a wide glassy frond of seaweed was dancing with little darts of water that splashed into my eyes. It took some grinding of my mental gears to realize it was raining.
I forced myself off my belly and sat up. I was shaking violently. The sky was dark and gray. I stared at my bare feet. My rubber boots and my socks were gone. The spray skirt was no longer around my waist. I looked at my hands, torn up from clawing at the rocks in the shallows. They didn’t seem to belong to me. I could barely feel them.
As if it might help, I folded my arms across my life jacket. The shaking was getting worse. I couldn’t recall the name of it, but I knew there was a name for what happened when your body got too cold. A fancy name for freezing to death.
From across the cove, a solid sheet of rain was coming right at me. All I did was stare at it.
Something came back, something from the class my mother made me take before I started kayaking. If you’re still shaking and the cold is still extremely painful, there’s time. It’s when you aren’t shaking anymore and can’t feel the cold that your systems are shutting down.
The rain lashed my face. Get up, my mind screamed at my body. Do something or you’re dead. Get off the beach and get out of the rain. Get in the trees. Your only chance is in the trees.
I staggered off the beach and through some grass, but driftwood logs jumbled at the back of the beach stopped me. I clambered over them and banged my leg and fell twice and picked myself up and kept going until I reached the strip of bright green alder trees and the dense bushes that grew between the beach and the forest.
The thicket of bright green might as well have been a wall. Most of it was the man-high bushes with leaves the size of small umbrellas, like on Baranof. They were wicked, I remembered, but I couldn’t remember their name and couldn’t remember why they were wicked.
My teeth chattered loud in my ears and the skin over my skull was so tight it felt like it was ripping. I stumbled along the front of the thicket until I found a path that led through it. The slope was slippery with the rain, and I had little control over my body. Frankenstein, I thought. I’m Frankenstein. I was shaking from head to toe. About to fall, I reached for whatever was nearest and grabbed a stalk of the bushes. My right hand came back on fire. I stopped and stared stupidly at my palm and fingers all full of tiny quills.
Then I remembered. Devil’s club, that’s what it was called.
My eyes returned to the trail and I saw a bizarre sight, a large bright red blob of something like jelly in the middle of the path. There were hundreds of black dots in it and I couldn’t make any sense of it. I stepped over the blob and kept going.
Once in the forest, I couldn’t feel the rain anymore. There wasn’t much light. I was under trees as big around and tall as redwoods, a forest on an immense scale compared to what I’d seen on Baranof.
“Get your clothes off, fool,” I heard myself saying. “They’re wringing wet.”
I sat down on a mossy log. With my trembling left hand I managed to unzip my life jacket, the fleece jacket, and the vest, then tried to make my frozen fingers undo the buttons on my wool shirt. In frustration and fear I ripped the shirt open at my neck and at the cuffs, and pulled it over my head.
With the rest of my clothes off, I sat purple-naked, shaking so hard it felt like my skinny ribs would crack, and squeezed every drop of water I could out of my clothes. I had to ignore the stinging of the spines in my fingers.
Starting with my thermal underwear, I began to put everything back on. The thermals, pants, vest, and jacket were all synthetics that weighed almost nothing and dried fast. My shirt was wool but I knew from backpacking at high altitude that wool can keep you warm even when it’s wet.
Rain was dripping through the canopy of the forest, but not that much. The problem now was, the air was so cold.
Shivering and shaking, I put my life jacket back on and zipped it up, grateful for the additional layer around my chest. At least I’d had the sense, I thought, to put it on when I went paddling on flat water this morning.
It all came rushing back. It hit me full force: how totally, absolutely, monumentally stupid I had been.
Stupid, stupid, stupid.
You’re a fool, I told myself. I can’t believe what you did. So sure of yourself, and you knew nothing. Nothing.
I heard myself laughing out loud. My voice was herky-jerky and out of control, like my limbs. I didn’t know why I was laughing. It was crazy to be laughing.
The eerie stillness of the forest immediately absorbed the sound, swallowed it up.
I tried to get warm by jogging in place. Before long I could tell it wasn’t working, not nearly enough. My insides were deadly cold. Without a fire I couldn’t last. I had to get some body heat back somehow. If not fire, what else? My eyes cast wildly around for possibilities. How, how?
I couldn’t see an answer. I lost precious time stumbling around looking for one. All I could see was trees. The trees better be the answer, I thought. There is nothing else.
A hole in a tree? Find a tree with a hole in it and crawl into the hole?
Not warm enough. Not warm enough to pull me back.
My eyes fell on a gigantic spruce that had fallen over long ago. Its bark was gone and it was nothing but a spongy, decaying mass with ferns growing along its mossy length, farther than my eye could see.
Get inside that thing, I told myself. Somehow, get in it, or get under it, or something.
What I had in mind sounded crazy. I needed a digging tool. What? What?
A digging stick, a jabbing stick, any sort of stick.
I tore at a branch from a small downed tree. The trunk was so rotten, the branch pulled right out of its socket and I fell over backward. The branch was still sound. It had come out with a thick knot at the end that tapered down like a spearpoint. I could dig with it just the way it was.
I ran along the length of the giant spruce and found a place where it had fallen across a dip in the ground. Daylight was showing under the tree. I attacked the underside and it shredded easily. The wood was so punky it really wasn’t wood anymore, just pulp. The pulp was dry, which was good, and it weighed nothing.
Insulation, I thought. Insulation might be my only chance.
I speared and dug and hacked until I had made a burrow in the underside of the rotten log. Like an animal going into hibernation, I crawled in and pulled the pulp up against myself until only my face was open to the air. I had a thick layer of dry shreds under me, and I felt like I was packed inside a cocoon. Now I could only hope that my skinny body was still producing some amount of heat. If it was, my cocoon might keep me from losing it.
If I was lucky.
It took awhile, but at last I wasn’t vibrating like a power sander. Maybe the rotting tree was generating a little heat. Whatever the reason, gradually, very gradually, the shaking turned to shivering and at last even the shivering quit.
That was when I turned to worrying about what came next.
I pulled my left arm free and looked at the bombproof sports watch my mother had given me at the airport in Grand Junction. It was still spitting out numbers just fine. 3:15 P.M., July 26. What were Monica and the others doing? Were they bac
k in Sitka, or had the windstorm and the rain kept them in Cosmos Cove? Had the floatplanes been able to pick them up?
Monica, the group, the floatplane pilots…it was so embarrassing to think about, I couldn’t stand it. What did Monica think when she first discovered me and the kayak gone? When the windstorm struck, what did she think then?
Monica must have been sick, just sick about it. Julia too. What were the people in the group saying? My mother…what would she hear, and what would she think?
I couldn’t believe I had done this to her. Of course she would find out, and before very long. Maybe even tonight. It would kill her, just kill her.
Maybe the floatplanes had been delayed, I thought. Maybe nobody but the group knows, even now.
There had to be a way to erase all of this, like it never happened.
The kayak! Maybe I could recover the kayak, and the paddle too. When the tides changed, the current would run in the other direction. I could paddle all the way back to Cosmos Cove, maybe even get there before a search even gets started.
I was about to start back to the beach, to look for the kayak, when a bit of motion caught my eye. Something was coming down through the forest.
It was a bear as big as a haystack, with a wide face and a prominent hump behind its shoulders.
6
THE 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.
