Wild Man Island

by Will Hobbs

  The tide was lower than when I’d attempted this before. As we cleared the opening we found the stars out, and there was quite a bit of light from a half moon. It was all so calm and peaceful, nothing like I’d found it before. We paddled out of the tight V formed by the cliffs and into the wider bay. I was so relieved to be on the water and to be putting Admiralty behind me at last. “Now, how do I get home? Where can you take me?”

  “Kake. It’s a Tlingit Indian village across the water on the next island, Kupreanof. From there you can fly to Juneau or Petersburg.”

  “This skinboat—can it make the crossing?”

  “Of course. I’ve done it before.”

  “If you say so, David. What kind of skins are these?”

  “Seal.”

  “Your Newfoundland—does he have a name?”

  “Bear. His name is Bear.”

  “I should have guessed. Suits him, suits the island. Those wildlife biologists don’t think he came from Angoon. So, where did he come from?”

  “I can only guess. I found him wandering around lost. Off some boat probably, fishing boat or sailboat.”

  “Before him, did you have another dog?”

  “I had a bear once, an orphan cub. For a while I had them both, but I had to kick the bear out after two winters, like his mother would have.”

  Suddenly I remembered my strange encounter with the bear that had sat beside me. I told Atkins all about it and he busted out with a deep belly laugh. It was the first time I’d heard him laugh; I wouldn’t have thought he was capable of it. “Oh, that’s him, no doubt about it. There isn’t another bear on Admiralty that would’ve behaved like that around a dog or a human. I’m surprised the bear hunters haven’t gotten him by now.”

  “Did your bear give you that mark on your face?”

  “Yeah, sometimes he played rough.”

  “What about your bearskin sleeping bag? Did you kill that bear?”

  “I scavenged that skin.”

  “Have you ever had to defend yourself with your spear?”

  “Came close a couple of times. There’s a couple of awfully cranky bears on this island, but they were smart enough to respect the spear.”

  We paddled on. I shivered to think that we were going to attempt this crossing at night. “What about waiting for daylight?” I called over my shoulder. “I mean, you aren’t really hiding anymore.”

  Silence was my answer. I should have known I was fingering a nerve. I was on my way home, but what in the world was he going to do now? Behind everything he said, even behind his laughter, there was sadness.

  “How are you navigating?” I asked over my shoulder.

  “By the current and the stars,” he replied.

  I took in the night sky, the half moon, the vague, dark shapes of the islands, the reflections of the moon and the stars on the water. I listened to the lapping of the waves on the drumlike sides of the skinboat and breathed the salt smell deep into my lungs. Eyes closed, I paddled on, stroke after stroke.

  The explosive sounds of whales spouting on both sides of us took me back to how it all began, back at Cosmos Cove on Baranof Island. I kept paddling and let my mind go back to Hidden Falls, where I’d told my father I meant to carry on where he left off. I remembered all too vividly the windstorm that pushed me over to Admiralty, how I’d fought to stay upright. All the images came flooding through me: the brooding dark forests, that handful of devil’s club spines, soaking rain and screaming eagles, the tok-tok-tok of ravens, the dead orca on the beach, gray and black wolves and a dog leading me through the clouds, a bear standing over me, a wild man running off with books in his hands and a startled look in his eyes.

  I opened my eyes and found myself still on the water, still paddling, surrounded by dark islands and stars and sea, bobbing in a fragile boat over depths too cold and too deep even to think about.

  Keep paddling. Don’t ask. Have faith. Let it be.

  22

  “JUST KEEP PADDLING, WE’LL GET THERE.”

  The hoarse voice from the back of the boat snapped me back to the present. “Are we gaining on it?” I asked. “This strait seems so far across.”

  “This isn’t a strait, it’s Frederick Sound. Talk to me, keep me alert. Tell me about that part of the cave I’ve never seen.”

  “It’s incredible—it has an underground stream,” I began. I told about the salmon and the seals, about the bear leaving with a seal through the opening on the ridge above the cove.

  “All this right under my nose!” he exclaimed. “Goes to show what I’d always expected. I had worlds more to learn about that island.”

  I asked why the salmon were running up through the cave when there was no gravel inside there, no place to spawn. After thinking it over, he guessed that the salmon were headed for the same lake as the salmon in the creek above ground, the one near his camp. The cave stream, he thought, must leave the lake underwater. The salmon swimming through the cave must use that opening to reach the spawning gravels on the bottom of the lake.

  “Try this, then,” I went on. “Would you believe caribou skulls in the cave, caribou antlers?”

  “Sorry, that’s flat-out impossible.”

  “I know, it sounds crazy. But my father found caribou bones in caves on Prince of Wales Island.”

  “Your father?”

  “He was an archeologist, too.”

  “Aha,” David Atkins said. “You’re less and less a mystery. I assume your father had those caribou bones dated.”

  “He did. Along with bones from brown bears, marmots, a kind of tundra antelope….”

  “I can’t believe this. That’s less than a hundred miles south. All this from Prince of Wales Island?”

  “All from Prince of Wales. And the dates showed that all those animals, and a lot more, lived on that island continuously for forty thousand years.”

  I heard only the sound of his paddle. I was so eager to hear his response, I barely registered on the blinking light from the buoy we were passing.

  The silence went on so long, I broke it myself. “Really,” I insisted. “He had the bones tested at the best lab in the country, at Boulder, Colorado.”

  “I know that lab. Used to use it myself. You’re saying those animals were on these islands during the last forty thousand years? Archeologists have always believed that all these islands were covered with a thousand feet of ice, and that the ice sheets went all the way out to the continental shelf, right to the sea. We assumed that the brown bears swam here within the last ten thousand years, after the last Ice Age. That’s just staggering to picture these islands ice-free. Nearly unbelievable.”

  “Not all the islands, just parts of some of them. The open parts of the islands would have been covered with tundra. There wouldn’t have been many trees then.”

  “Similar to what you’d find around the Arctic Circle today.”

  “That’s it. Good habitat for caribou, bears, salmon, all sorts of—”

  “Did your father find any human remains?” The hermit-archeologist seemed to be caught between total disbelief—he was still wondering if I was making most of this up—and unbearable curiosity.

  “One skeleton,” I replied. “It’s called Prince of Wales Man. Unfortunately, it was only nine thousand-and-some years old. He was hoping for something a whole lot older. You see, he never believed the standard stuff in the textbooks.”

  “What stuff? You mean he didn’t believe that people used the land bridge across the Bering Strait from Siberia twelve thousand years ago? He didn’t believe that’s how the Clovis hunters came to the Americas?”

  “Sure, he believed that, but he didn’t believe they were the first.”

  After a long pause, loaded with tension, Atkins said, “You’re telling me that other people, earlier people, could have used all these islands as stepping-stones, something like that?”

  He was beginning to imagine it. It was such a beautiful theory.

  “From one stepping-stone to the ne
xt,” I encouraged him. “Traveling by boat, hunting and fishing as they went, around the rim of the northern Pacific and down the west coasts of the Americas. And way before twelve thousand years ago. Who knows how long before?”

  “That’s a revolutionary idea,” he said skeptically.

  “I know, but listen to this. After my father made his discoveries on Prince of Wales, there was a huge discovery way down in Chile, in South America. A site with hundreds of artifacts that tested out to at least a thousand years older than the oldest Clovis artifacts ever found.”

  Again, silence. “David? Did you fall asleep on me?”

  “I’m speechless.”

  “There’s a site in Virginia called Cactus Hill that’s seventeen thousand years old. Think how far back that pushes it.”

  The big man’s amazement was strangled with a sudden cry. “On our right!” he yelled.

  I turned and saw something that should never have been there. We’d been so deep in conversation we hadn’t seen it coming—a gigantic ship, four or five decks high, lit up bright as a chandelier. I blinked and stared, trying not to believe what my eyes were telling me. In front of it there was no sound, none at all. “Is it heading our way?” I asked, hoping against hope that it wasn’t.

  “It sure is,” Atkins replied.

  The dog knew something was wrong. He stood up in the boat and yawned anxiously.

  “Keep paddling,” Atkins hollered.

  “How do we know we aren’t paddling into its path?”

  “We don’t. I can’t tell yet.”

  I looked at the ship again. A cruise ship, steaming for Juneau in the middle of the night. And it was closing unbelievably fast.

  I’m not going to get home after all, I thought. “Which way?” I yelled.

  “There’s a buoy ahead. It’s at the edge of the shipping channel. We get close to it, the ship will pass behind us. Go! Paddle hard! Paddle as hard as you can!”

  I put my head down and I paddled my lungs out. I paddled like there was no tomorrow, which was about to be the case. When I looked over my shoulder a few minutes later, the ship was still bearing down on us, but at an angle that would take it behind us. We were going to clear it. I let up.

  “No!” the wild man roared. “Don’t stop! Keep paddling! It’s the wake that’s the danger. We have to get as far away as we can. After it goes by, the wake is going to hit us like a tidal wave!”

  Great, I thought, that’s just great.

  “I’m sorry,” I heard him saying.

  That was all I needed. It sounded like last words. I paddled like a banshee, sucking wind, breathing only terror. The ship was close now, a couple hundred yards away. It filled the sky.

  The ship passed behind us. Then I heard the big man’s paddle flailing. I looked and saw him backpaddling. “Help me spin it around!” he yelled. “We have to face the wave!”

  I could see it all too well in the moonlight, the high lifting wave on the leading edge of the cruise ship’s wake.

  “Straight into it!” Atkins shouted. “Paddle straight into it as fast as we can!”

  For a moment I wondered if he was right. I had my doubts about breaking through it. I could picture it pitching us end over end. But there was no time to turn and run. We were committed.

  I paddled with everything I had. How I wished it was his weight in the front, not mine, at the moment we would meet the wave—which was going to be real soon.

  At the crucial moment, with the wave high above us, I paddled one last stroke and then threw my weight onto the bow. We cleaved the top of the wave. The question was, did our skinboat have enough momentum to carry us through it? I felt a powerful surge from the stern—Atkins must have been paddling furiously—and then the wave broke on both sides of us as we pitched at a sickening angle, then came down upright.

  “Bear!” Atkins yelled. I looked over my shoulder and realized that the dog was missing.

  23

  I STRUGGLED WITH MY PADDLE to meet a second wave. The wild man was no longer paddling, and it tossed us sideways. By dim moonlight, Atkins was trying to spot his black dog in the black water.

  “There!” he cried finally. “Over there!”

  I spotted the dog’s blocky head, there one moment, gone the next. The Newfoundland was being sucked down into the powerful whirlpools in the cruise ship’s wake.

  “There,” Atkins yelled again.

  I spotted Bear and paddled hard. I maneuvered us close, and Atkins managed to haul the dog into the boat.

  The big Newfie was beside himself with relief, whining and crying and beating his tail against the skinny wood frame on the floor of the boat, all at the same time.

  I felt exactly the same way.

  Atkins picked up his paddle. We continued on in silence. I was drained, weak all over, and angry, angrier by the minute. He could have gotten us both killed, and he wasn’t going to say a thing. Finally I threw down my paddle and exploded. “Why did we have to do this in the dark?”

  At first he didn’t answer, then, “I’ve been hiding a long time.”

  “They already found you, don’t you remember? Is it important that they don’t catch you? Are you going to disappear again, is that it?”

  “We would have been okay,” he replied unconvincingly. “I got so excited about the archeology and all, I shut down the rest of my brain. I just wasn’t paying attention. No excuse for it. I’m sorry, Andy.”

  It was the first time he’d called me by my name. I felt myself calming down. What did I care if he was going to play his hermit game for the rest of his life. I said, “All’s well that ends well, eh?”

  “Want to take up where we left off?” he suggested meekly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “We were talking about your father’s theory, about the first people into the Americas moving south by boat, from island to island, during the Ice Age.”

  I said, “I’ll talk about that any day.”

  “Hard to prove,” he said as we paddled on. “Hard to find the evidence. Their camps would be under four hundred feet of seawater. Ocean level is much higher now, as I’m sure you know.”

  He was nibbling at my father’s theory, but he wasn’t really hooked yet. This wasn’t trout fishing, where you set the hook; it was more like fishing for big channel cats. I needed to feed him some more bait, and let the big catfish hook himself. I said, “My father thought that the best chance for finding artifacts, or for burials, would be in caves. People could have climbed way above the sea and buried people inside caves, or left things.”

  “Like the ivory boat you showed me. That can be dated. Too bad there wasn’t something more with it, especially bones.”

  I said, “There were bones, David.” Then I told it all. I told about the burial and the two boat carvings I’d left untouched, and the little ivory effigies of sea mammals with tiny harpoons stuck in them. When I was done, Atkins didn’t say anything for a long time, and then he said, “You’ve found something that might be monumentally big, depending on how the dates turn out. Your father would be proud. I have to ask…you speak of him in the past tense.”

  I told him about Baranof, what happened on Baranof Island, and then he said, “I would have liked to meet him.”

  Now he wanted to know all about me. I told him I was born in Eugene, Oregon, that my father was a professor at the university there. How after my father died, my mother moved us back to Colorado, where she was from. I told him about the orchard, how my mother and I lived just down the lane from my grandparents. I described living in the middle of ten acres of peach trees and apple trees, how my mother was a labor and delivery nurse, a “babyslinger,” as she described herself.

  “You have a fine life to go home to,” he told me.

  “What will you do now?” I couldn’t help asking.

  “I don’t really know. I can’t go back to Admiralty. That much is for sure.”

  He was going to let the conversation drop. There was something else I had to ask
him. I wasn’t very diplomatic; I just spit it out. “The newspapers reported that you drowned—that’s what Shayla told me. Why did you want people to think you were dead?”

  He shook back his huge mane of hair, then slowly smoothed down his long beard.

  “You don’t have to talk about it,” I said.

  “I’ll give it a try,” he said with an uncertain laugh. “I know I’m a strange one…. I figured I had to be presumed dead for my experiment to have any integrity. If I had people writing about what I was doing and coming to see me, it wouldn’t.”

  “So you landed the boat, then put it in gear and sent it off trailing a fishing line?”

  “No, I swam ashore. I just let the boat keep going without me.”

  “You’re kidding. What did you have with you?”

  “The clothes on my back, nothing else. I burned them as soon as I made some new ones. It was all a part of my experiment. I wanted to see if I could survive solely by prehistoric means. I wanted to see what it would actually be like to live in the Stone Age. I used to teach flintknapping, fire starting and so on. I knew a lot of what I would need. At first it was only going to be for a year.”

  “But what about your family?”

  “Not much family left. Both of my parents are gone. I never married.”

  “Why did you stay so long? Wouldn’t a year be long enough?”

  “The place grew on me. It happened so gradually I hardly noticed it at first.”

  He’d stopped paddling. I turned around to look at his scarred and weathered face. “Admiralty is one of the finest places left on earth,” he said. “Nature still rules. I felt more alive there than I’d ever been. I came to feel like I was an explorer, living a big adventure.”

  “I understand about the adventure, but what do you mean by being an explorer?”

  “I’ve been exploring the human past—the deep past. For 99 percent of human history we lived as a part of nature, not apart from nature. I wanted to know what that meant, what it felt like. I wanted to know who we were before all the technology, the cars, the big cities, before we became nature’s lord and master. It was an idea that grew and grew until I had to act on it.”