Wild Man Island

by Will Hobbs

  Derek’s Newfie? I wondered.

  Then I remembered. This was the Newfoundland that had been running with the wolves.

  The dog licked my face two, three times. Its tongue was wet and scratchy.

  Don’t leave, I pleaded mentally. Don’t leave, or the gulls will peck my eyes out.

  I waited, hoping the dog’s face would reappear.

  It did. The dog sniffed me like the bear had sniffed me, and it licked me again.

  The dog left my vision. I couldn’t tell if it was staying or if it had gone away. I was afraid it had gone. Its face didn’t come back.

  Yet neither did the seagulls.

  A while later I thought I heard a snuffle close by, and still later I thought I heard a yawn. I prayed that the dog was lying close beside me. Had stayed with me.

  At last I could move my eyelids. It was then I realized that I could breathe deeper. I could feel my fingers, I could feel my toes.

  Eventually I could move my head to the side. No dog, only forest and mountains against a bright blue sky. I rolled my head to the other side, and there was the Newfoundland lying in the sunlight next to the spear.

  “Good dog.” I mouthed. Little sound, if any, came out.

  In response, the Newfoundland beat his great tail up and down.

  I reached my right hand toward him. He smelled it, and then he licked it. The dog placed his great paw over the spear, and then he nuzzled the spear.

  I understood immediately. He was with me because of the spear, because I had that spear.

  11

  AS I INSPECTED THE DOG’S EAR, he nuzzled the spear shaft. It was six in the morning, and the sun was already climbing high in the sky. It was warm. Finally it was warm again.

  The fur on the Newfoundland’s ear was matted with blood and dirt. Flies were pestering his ear and the back of his head. If I could clean the fur, I could get a look at the wound.

  I tried to stand, to move over to the creek, but dizziness knocked me down. The dog got up and stood next to me. With a hand on his great back, I steadied myself and stood up.

  Something made me glance upstream. A bear was sauntering by.

  The Newfoundland, sniffing the wind, looked directly at the bear. The dog didn’t seem concerned. I snatched up the spear.

  The bear gave us a wide berth. It crossed the stream and angled toward the beach. I steadied myself on the spear and hobbled to the creek bank.

  It felt good to splash water on my face and in my hair. I took a long drink, raked my hair with my fingers, then sat on the bank as the dog waded into the water. He turned around and snapped at the flies bothering his neck.

  I closed my eyelids and aimed them at the sun. I hadn’t felt this warm since Baranof Island.

  The dog waded back and allowed me to rinse his ear. The cut wasn’t that bad. But where my hand rested on his neck, I felt a thicker mat of bloodied fur and discovered a wound that was more serious. “You run with a rough crowd,” I told him. My voice came out as ragged as I felt.

  The Newfie nuzzled my hand and wagged his tail. I was amazed that a dog capable of holding his own with wolves was this docile toward me. I wondered if the man with the spear was the only person this dog had ever known.

  The man with the spear, I wondered. Who in the world is he?

  Suddenly I was trying to sort out one of those crazy mixed-up dreams of a few hours before, when I lay paralyzed. My father and I had been making a spearpoint together. Suddenly he was all different. He had long gray hair and a big beard, and he was much older.

  Though it didn’t occur to me then, it did now: As my father led me into the cave, he looked just like the wild man. What was that all about?

  I knew the answer. Deep down, since I first laid eyes on him, I must have been hoping that somehow the wild man and my father were one and the same. That all this time, my father had been alive and hiding out on this island.

  Nice try, I thought. If my father had ever been missing, there might be reason for hope, but his body had been recovered at the foot of Hidden Falls.

  I shook the painful cobwebs out and returned to the present, to the dog. As I rinsed and cleaned the neck wound, I had to keep chasing the flies away. The wound was a couple inches long, nasty enough that a vet would have closed it. The best I would be able to do, now that the wound was clean, was to wrap something around his neck to keep the flies off.

  My thermal underwear top was extra long. I wouldn’t miss four inches.

  I stripped to the waist and still I felt warm. The sun had burned a large blue hole in the sky. The clouds had shrunk to the east, far beyond the cliffs that rose out of the sea in the foreground.

  Starting at those cliffs, I couldn’t walk the coast. What was I going to do now?

  For the time being at least, I had a companion. I didn’t feel nearly so gloomy as I had before I’d eaten the mussels. For some reason, my stomach wasn’t cramping anymore. Maybe this was just a side effect of the poison.

  I sliced the material from my thermals, rinsed it thoroughly, then tied it around the dog’s neck. For the time being, the flies couldn’t get to the wound.

  The wind was starting to blow. It was nine in the morning. A new blanket of ribbed clouds was racing in from the west. The sunshine wasn’t going to last. I took a quick bath in the stream.

  The dog suddenly became agitated. He started trotting off, barking at me. No doubt about it, he was telling me he was leaving. It seemed for all the world like he wanted me to follow. He kept trotting up the stream bank, as if he intended to follow the stream inland.

  As I pulled on my clothes, I had one eye on the dog and the other on the cliffs. “I’m not sure if I should go or stay,” I called to the dog. “I’m finally close to deep water. Next to those cliffs, maybe I could flag a fishing boat.”

  With an air of finality, the Newfoundland walked far up the stream. He looked back only as he was about to disappear behind some brush. Again, he barked.

  He was waiting, but he wasn’t going to wait long. I had to make a decision.

  The dog, somehow, was my only lifeline. Everything else was uncertain. My only certainty was this dog. He was in prime condition. He knew how to find food of some kind, and was bound to lead me to it.

  Unless his food was provided by the wild man.

  If that’s where he leads me, I thought, then so be it.

  I pulled on my life jacket, tucked the knife away, and snatched up the spear.

  12

  THE NEWFOUNDLAND WAS FLANKING the broad, swampy meadow, keeping to the high ground along the edge of the forest. I was following in a daze. It was a struggle to keep up. The poisoning sickness, on the heels of starvation, had left me weaker than ever.

  On my right, suddenly, a small miracle: a bank of salmonberry vines speckled with bright red fruit. There were blueberries, too, everywhere I looked.

  There was bear sign here, tracks and scat, but at the moment no bears. I leaned the spear against a tree and picked berries as fast as my hands could move. They were indescribably sweet.

  Not too fast, I thought dully. See if your stomach will accept them.

  I slowed down, but even so, they all came back up. The nausea hit me hard; I couldn’t keep my feet. After a few minutes, I thought, I’ll try again.

  The dog came to my side, sat on his haunches. I followed his gaze. The sea of emerald green grass and bushes on the estuary below rippled like sails in the wind. The Newfoundland was watching a mother brown bear and three cubs. They were following the creek toward salt water. He lost interest and began to nose around for something to eat.

  I thought my stomach was ready for another try. This time it accepted the fruit. I kept eating.

  I had to laugh, remembering that Julia had told us that nearly every blueberry has a little larva inside. “There’s a certain fly that lays its eggs in the blueberries,” she explained. This, after the group had gorged to the gills on one of her nature walks. “Perfectly harmless,” she assured us with a mischi
evous smile. “Good protein.”

  “Good protein,” I said to the dog, who turned from gumming old deer droppings to lapping fresh bear scat, the kind that looked like a pile of red jelly. I recalled how I’d been counting on this dog to lead me to food. Maybe that wasn’t such a smart idea.

  I felt a small surge of strength as the fruit sugars coursed into my blood.

  It was comforting, recalling Julia’s face. On account of her calm manner and her love of natural history, she had reminded me of my mother. It came as a jolt when I realized that I could only half remember Julia’s face and Monica’s too, and the faces of the other people on the sea kayak trip. It seemed like I’d known them in another lifetime.

  The Newfoundland was impatient to be underway. I followed. Soon the easy going ended. We climbed a high ridge that appeared to be a spur of the island’s mountain backbone. Mercifully for me, the dog was following deer trails that angled up the slopes. A couple of times I had to retie loose, flapping ends from my makeshift footgear.

  On the far side of the ridge, under deep timber, we dropped several thousand feet. At last, through the trees, I saw the slope bottoming out at a rushing creek. The creek was crisscrossed by deadfall spruce and hemlock.

  The Newfoundland seemed eager to get down there. I soon understood why. The stream was teeming with sockeye salmon. “This is more like it,” I told him.

  I approached cautiously. To my relief, there wasn’t a bear in sight. The dog waded into the shallows, lunged at a couple of fish making furious runs around his legs, and missed. He soon came up with a big salmon thrashing in his jaws. The Newfie waded out of the shallows, then dropped the salmon and pinned it with one paw, just like a bear. The body of the fish was bright red, its head dark green. The dog began to strip the skin down the fish’s side, exposing the bright red meat.

  With an occasional look in my direction, the Newfoundland ate the flesh from the backbone. Rather than flip the fish over and eat the other side, he waded back into the stream for a new one.

  By this time I’d whittled a sharp point on a stick of alder and waded into the stream. In a couple of minutes I had my own salmon. For mercy’s sake, I quickly severed its spinal cord behind the neck. The big fish thrashed a few times from reflex, then lay still.

  I sliced a fillet from the backbone on each side and washed them in the stream. I sat on a log in a patch of sunshine, draped one fillet over a branch at arm’s reach, and began to eat the other one, stripping the red meat with my teeth from its backing of skin. The meat was more than tolerable, and my stomach was going to accept it.

  I had just finished the first fillet and was about to reach for the second. A bit of motion caught my eye. I looked up, and there was a big bear at streamside, not forty feet away. Over the rush of the creek, I hadn’t heard it approach, not at all. Why hadn’t the dog barked?

  The Newfoundland, rather than barking or running away, was slowly moving toward the bear.

  For its part, the bear had its head to the ground. It was standing over the spear. Why hadn’t I kept the spear at hand?

  The knife was also out of reach, there on the gravel where I’d used it.

  Wagging his tail, the dog waded the stream and walked right up to the bear. To my amazement, the Newfoundland rose on hind legs and pawed the bear’s shoulder. In response, the bear gently raked the dog’s side with its claws, then took the dog’s entire head in its jaws.

  All the while, the brownie had his eyes on me. I kept looking from the bear to the knife. It was too far away.

  Anyway, it was too late. The bear was ambling over to me. To me or the fillet on the branch, I couldn’t tell.

  The bear stood on two legs and clawed the air. I stayed exactly where I was and tried to calm my jackhammering heart.

  The bear came down on all fours, approached the last few steps. With one eye on me, the bear reached out and flicked the fillet from the branch, then proceeded to eat it practically at my feet. I could have almost touched the huge muscled hump on its back.

  There was a scrap of fish left under that giant paw. And here was the Newfoundland, nosing in as if to take it for himself.

  The bear growled at the dog, and the dog backed away.

  It was all so strange, so dreamlike, and I couldn’t begin to understand what was going on.

  When the bear was finished eating, he turned around and planted himself at the foot of the log right next to me. Just sat there on his hind end and put his huge face next to mine.

  I didn’t know what to do. I did nothing. I tried to keep as calm as I could.

  The bear got up, nuzzled the dog again, then ambled away.

  Hours later, as I followed the dog up the flank of another mountain ridge and deeper into the island’s interior, I was still trying to sort out what had happened, and how, and why.

  I got nowhere. I had no idea.

  It was dusk by the time an explanation came to mind. The big Newfoundland and I were holed up next to each other in a soft pocket among the trunks of giant spruce trees, and I was drifting off to sleep. There’s only one way to explain it, I thought: It never happened. Maybe I was still paralyzed, still back at the beach. Maybe everything since was dreams, too.

  My hand went to the dog at my side. I stroked the long black fur. The dog lifted his broad head and licked my hand.

  I felt like I was conscious. Right now, it didn’t feel like dreaming. But was I actually here, under this forest, with this dog?

  Before I found any answers, I was asleep. I was so exhausted, and so confused.

  13

  MORNING BROUGHT RAIN, cold, hunger, and reality. I hurt too much for all of this not to be real.

  Deeper and deeper into the wilderness, the dog led me on. We climbed out of the forests and onto mountain meadows where it was higher and colder and there was no shelter from the rain.

  The Newfoundland led me higher yet onto the short-grass tundra, alongside an ominous bear highway of deep, alternating footwells filling with water. Rain clouds were hanging on the snowfields and peaks above. My feet hurt a lot; my sandals were only two notches more comfortable than torture devices. I was getting slammed by a tidal wave of doubts. Maybe I’d chosen dead wrong to follow the dog. Going inland was looking like the last thing I should have done.

  I had lost all my markers. There was a spear in my hand and I was following a huge black dog through the clouds. Everything familiar was gone: home, my mother, my grandparents, my friends, Orchard Mesa, Grand Junction, the heat, the Colorado River…all gone, replaced by the numbing immensity of this dreamlike island.

  The Newfoundland had been pausing to sniff the wind and for some reason, was quickening his pace. Through the drizzle, near the foot of a massive landslide scar, a red mass of some kind was heaped on the tundra barely above the tree line. I was so cold I couldn’t begin to guess what it was.

  The dog suddenly halted, perked up his ears, listened intently. Then he tilted his head and began to bark, each bark coming slower than the previous one and the last trailing into a sort of howl.

  A little closer and I could make out large black birds on and around the red object. Ravens. Then I made out the glint of bone. The ravens were on some sort of carcass. A bear, of course—nothing else was that big. But why no fur?

  The dog approached cautiously, and so did I. The drizzle wasn’t strong enough to mask the droning of flies or the smell of all that meat gone rancid. I was shocked by how much the skinned-out animal resembled a human being.

  In the soft spots around the carcass I made out the imprints of boot lugs, three different patterns. Three hunters had stood here, I thought dully. I’d missed them, missed the chance to get off the island with them. I was a couple days late, but close didn’t count. It might as well have been a year since they’d been here.

  The bear’s skull was missing. Why was that? Two gaping wounds marked the exits of high-powered slugs from the chest cavity. The birds had opened up the belly and dragged the guts out onto the ground.
The redness of it all, the rawness, was even more shocking up close. There wasn’t a trace of the hide; the paws and claws were missing. All four feet had been sawed off.

  What kind of hunters would do such a thing? Poachers? Maybe it was a good thing I hadn’t come across them. A witness to the crime, that’s what I would have been, and who knows what they would have done with me.

  I backed away. The Newfoundland was tearing away meat along the backbone, growling all the while at the ravens hopping close to the carcass. An eagle was watching regally, biding its time from a spruce at the edge of the forest. I noticed dog tracks even bigger than the Newfoundland’s. No, they were wolf tracks. The wolves had been here, but judging from the carcass, they hadn’t eaten. Why not?

  When the dog had eaten his fill he led me back into the forest and down to another salmon stream. It was teeming with sockeyes but the Newfoundland didn’t pay them any mind. He splashed through the stream and started up the slope on the other side. I tried to get him to stay with me while I made another jabbing stick, but he was leaving whether I came along or not.

  Freezing cold, I followed. Cursing under my breath, I started up the beginning of a steep slope that was a patchwork of giant trees, knobby gray outcrops, and sheer cliffs. Where in the world was he going?

  Behind a massive spruce that had fallen against the cliff, the Newfoundland trotted up a steep ledge. He looked back for a second; I tried to call him back but he kept going. I had to scratch my way up on all fours. I followed along narrowing ledges that zigzagged upward a hundred feet or more above the valley floor.

  All at once there was nowhere to go. We were standing above thin air. It was fifty or more feet straight down to the beginnings of a steep talus slope.

  I was at my wit’s end—frustrated, freezing, exasperated. For no apparent reason, the dog was all excited, as if he’d reached his destination.

  Immediately ahead of us along the cliff, the rain was dripping from the outer edge of big overhang and a long, shallow cave underneath it. It wasn’t a true cave; it was more of a big rock shelter. An alcove was what we would call it in the Southwest. It was in nearly inaccessible alcoves like this that the ancient Indians had built their cliff dwellings in the red cliffs back home.