by Will Hobbs
“What does it feel like?”
“That’s just about impossible to explain in words. You can’t tell where your skin leaves off and the universe begins, if that makes any sense to you.”
“It doesn’t, but I’ll think about it. It just sounds too hard to me.”
That got a laugh out of him. “Oh, I’ve always enjoyed doing things the hard way. I always was a low-tech guy. Never owned power tools, no microwave, no TV. Never even owned a car, but I did love my bicycle.”
“I could never do what you did, not in a million years. Think of all you’ve been missing….”
“Like shopping, waiting in lines, that kind of thing?” I could hear him chuckling.
“What about people? Didn’t you miss having friends?”
“Sure. We’re social by nature; it’s hardwired into our brains. The first year was brutal. I had doubts I could stick it out mentally or physically. I lacked a shelter that provided storage. I lived hand-to-mouth, and it was rough. Then I found the dry camp under the big overhang and was able to make myself comfortable. It was a challenge, making all those things you saw. I started thinking about staying. As time went by, I embraced the solitude. I came to see I wasn’t alone at all. I had those books I discovered, and I had friends—they just didn’t happen to be people.”
“You mean the animals.”
“Yes, and the island itself. Admiralty is so alive.”
“I never knew there was any place like it.”
“Kootznoowoo,” he said reverently. “The Fortress of the Bears.”
The first light was dawning as silence seeped back in between us. It was Atkins who broke it after only a few minutes. “Those wildlife people are right, you know, about the dog needing to go. It’s a marvelous thing that the wolves showed up. Admiralty is even wilder with wolves, and that’s good.”
“Where does that leave you and Bear?”
“I don’t know. I just don’t know. Start over again in the woods, I suppose. There are hundreds of islands, big and small. There’s the mainland, the interior. We know how to take care of ourselves.”
“But how? What will you do?”
“You’re concerned about me, eh?”
“I am!”
“I really don’t know. Haven’t had enough time to figure it out yet. Maybe I could do something different. Maybe restore an old sailboat; I used to think about that. I always wanted to see the Queen Charlottes off the coast of B.C. I’d keep my eyes open…. Maybe I’d come across some more evidence to support your father’s theory.”
“You might really do that? Get a sailboat?”
A pause, and then, “No chance.” His voice was thick with emotion.
“You lost me,” I said, turning around. In the early light, his eyes were cloudy and confused.
“Everything I’ve told you is true, Andy, but it’s not the whole truth.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Maybe I stayed because I painted myself into a corner. Lost faith, dug myself in deeper and deeper.”
“Lost faith in what?”
“The future. Our civilization is robbing it blind.”
“That may be true,” I said, “but vanishing doesn’t help.”
“I realize that,” he agreed.
“You don’t have to stay in the corner, you know. Why don’t you walk out and do something?”
Suddenly I could see it, a way for him to reconnect. He was the one. “What about the cave on Admiralty? Couldn’t you do the archeology? Someone will—why not you?”
“My credentials are a little rusty, Andy.”
“Don’t you want to find out how old the boats and bones in the cave are? What if they’re twenty thousand, thirty thousand years old?”
“That would be the greatest find in American archeology.”
“Well…”
“I’m too old for glory, Andy. It’s not on my list.”
“Not for glory, then. You’d have other good reasons. This is Admiralty we’re talking about! You’d have a reason to stay on Admiralty!”
The rim of the sun was showing over the mountains of Kupreanof Island. He lapsed into gloom and quit talking. We paddled on.
The coast was looming, but before we reached it, a large gray powerboat raced out to meet us. The letters on the side of the vessel were bold and black. “U.S. Coast Guard!” I shouted.
The wild man’s face was ashen. “This isn’t how I pictured it,” he said. “I thought I’d just drop you off and be gone.”
“Someone on the cruise ship must have seen us.”
The Coast Guard boat had cut its speed. The walking mountain range of a man was fenced in. The cutter was drawing close. There were four sailors at the rail. “Think of it as hitching a ride,” I suggested.
“It’s too fast, too selfish, too destructive, too scary,” he said.
“What is?”
“The world.”
“So, there’s no hope for it?” I said bitterly.
I looked to the sailors and back to Atkins. His eyes were cloudy again, and he wasn’t going to answer. As for me, I was so happy to see the Coast Guard, tears were streaming down my face. It was over.
24
THE SAILORS WERE AWFULLY HAPPY I was alive. My name had caused a lot of distress ever since I disappeared. They spared us from questions, maybe on account of David—his strange bark clothing, wildly overgrown hair, and grim look. He looked like a wild animal that had been captured and caged.
David wouldn’t go inside. He sat on the deck with his arm around his dog. Bear was shivering with fear from all the strangeness. The din from the engines didn’t help. I guzzled hot chocolate and went through almost a dozen donuts. After a ninety-minute ride we set foot on the Coast Guard dock at Kake.
The station commander came out to greet us. He reached out his hand and my feral friend took it. The commander introduced himself as normal as you please, like he was meeting somebody in a business suit. “David Atkins,” the wild man said in return.
It wasn’t long until we were both showered and dressed in Coast Guard-issue boxer shorts, trousers, and short-sleeved shirts. They even gave us our own bungalow. VISITING OFFICERS’ QUARTERS the sign over the door said. Our windows looked out on boats in the harbor and rafts of hundreds and hundreds of logs. A totem pole soared a hundred feet or more above the village. The mountainsides were a checkerboard of logging clear-cuts, which reminded me how wild Admiralty really was. “This floor under my feet feels strange,” I said to David. “It must feel really weird to you.”
“Everything is weird,” he acknowledged. “Don’t worry about me and Bear. Run over to their office and make your calls.”
Kake was wired into the rest of the world, with cell phones, e-mail, fax, and satellite. I called home and my grandmother answered. She sounded like she was next door.
Of course, my grandmother couldn’t believe it was me. As soon as she caught her breath she told me that my mother was still in Juneau, had never left since she first went up there. I got the number for the Prospector Hotel, where she was staying. I gave my grandmother the Coast Guard number in Kake, then dialed up the Prospector Hotel as fast as I could.
My mother wasn’t in, so I had to leave a message. Then I got Shayla Matlock’s number and called her office. Bingo—it was Shayla on the other end. “Where are you?” was the first thing she said.
“Kake,” I told her.
“How in the world did you get to Kake?”
“By skinboat, most of the way, with your hermit. The Coast Guard picked us up and brought us in.”
“We were so sure you were still on Admiralty. Your mother is here in Angoon—got here this morning. I contacted her as soon as I could, to let her know you were alive. She was just over in Juneau.”
“Can I talk to her?”
“She’s at the chief’s house, having coffee. I’ll make sure you get to talk to her. Tell me, is David Atkins still with you?”
“You figured out his name,�
� I said guardedly.
“I tracked down that old newspaper article. The main thing we’ve figured out is that we have egg on our face.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, when the Forest Service guys found their way into that overhang where Atkins lived, they were astounded at all the artifacts, and a mural carved into the rock and…just everything. Couldn’t get over it. They came back telling everybody that the place should be protected as one of Admiralty’s historic sites, like the old Stan Price homestead on Pack Creek. Word has spread around the agencies like wildfire. The superintendent has signed on to the idea; he’d be the most unpopular guy in Alaska if he gave the hermit any more grief. Is Atkins okay?”
“I don’t know if I’d use that word. He looks pretty disoriented.”
“People want to know if he’d go back and live there as a sort of living exhibit. We could keep it very low key, just small groups of people coming to visit. What do you think?”
I couldn’t imagine the wild man agreeing to that. It would be his worst nightmare. He’d be on display, no matter how low key they tried to make it. “I think I have a better idea,” I said. “Just let me think about it some more. We can talk it over when I see you.”
As soon as I got off the phone with Shayla I called Adventure Alaska in Sitka. Monica and Julia were out on another trip, but I left a message. It was a little confusing. The guy who answered the phone had just arrived from California and had no idea a kid from one of their trips was missing.
Nobody was home at Derek’s or Darcy’s. I had to talk to their answering machines. I was so disappointed, all I could spit out was that I was fine, happy to be alive, and would call as soon as I got home.
When we left Kake that afternoon, the Coast Guard flew us across Frederick Sound, over the mountains of Admiralty Island and into Angoon. That’s where I met up with my mother, at the chief’s house. My mother hugged me until I thought I’d stopped breathing. And she couldn’t stop thanking David. He wasn’t looking quite so wild anymore; he’d gotten a radical trim from the Coast Guard barber. Made him look a lot younger too. He turned out to be forty-nine.
Before Mom and I headed home, Shayla and David and I talked about finding a way for him to stay on Admiralty, a way that he could live with. He agreed he was interested in working on the archeology, but he wasn’t about to be giving tours of his former camp, nothing like that. Finally Shayla suggested he could live in a small cabin, off by himself but near his old home. They’d work out the details later with the powers that be, but it would mean he couldn’t keep his dog. Not if he was going to live on Admiralty.
It must have been agony, trying to make that decision. David slept on it and still didn’t have an answer for Shayla in the morning. I had an idea he was going to ghost off into the wilderness somewhere with Bear. I didn’t think I’d be around long enough to learn how it came out, but I was pessimistic. No matter what, he wasn’t going to be parted from his dog.
The floatplane that would fly us to Juneau was splashing down, and we were all standing around the dock without a word to say. Shayla, my mother, and I sort of clustered together, with the wild man and Bear off to the side.
Bear would have come over and nuzzled my hand if I was by myself, but he was still shy as a wolf around strangers. I caught his eye, and mouthed the word good-bye, but couldn’t stand to look David in the face. After all we’d put each other through, we might have been glad to get rid of each other, but I didn’t feel that way at all. I wanted to know that he and his dog were going to be all right.
The pilot killed the motor and climbed out of his cockpit. He stepped from the pontoon onto the dock, where he tied off his airplane. “Two for Juneau?” he asked, looking around at the four of us.
My mother put her arm around my shoulder. “That would be Andy and me,” she said cheerfully. I turned to the wild man with a lump the size of a basketball in my throat. “Well, I guess this is good-bye.”
He reached out and put his huge hand on my shoulder. “Maybe I won’t see you soon, but this can’t be good-bye.”
I strained to decipher his words. “Does this mean you’re rejoining the world?”
David glanced at the sprinkling of simple frame houses that was Angoon, and chuckled. “I got a couple of toes back in it, and it feels right.”
To my surprise, his eyes were brimming and tears were about to spill. “Do me a favor, Andy?”
“Name it, big guy.”
“Take Bear for your own. Take him back to Colorado. I have a hunch he’d thrive in your orchard. I want to do the archeology in our cave. I can handle it, and I want it real bad.”
In a nanosecond, I ran it through in my head, about Bear. There was no reason it wouldn’t work. I turned eagerly to my mother. She was already nodding her agreement. “You got a deal, and I got a dog,” I told him. “I’ll take good care of him.”
Shayla’s smile was dazzling. “Well, this is good news all the way around.”
I was awfully attached to that ivory carving, but now was the time to give it up. That skinboat effigy would be a huge foot in the door for David. He could get hooked up with a university, I was sure of it, if he held the key to what might be a huge discovery. “Here’s a start on your new beginning,” I said, as I brought the ivory artifact out of its hiding place and pressed it into his hand.
Back home in Orchard Mesa, the most surprising thing happened. We started getting e-mail from David. At first it was a stretch to picture him sitting in front of a computer. Then we began to hear from him almost every day, which was terrific. I guess that ancient boat and those ancient bones had set his imagination on fire, and he wanted to learn as much as he could as fast as he could. He had a lot of catching up to do, and the Internet turned out to be his ticket to ride. He could do it all without leaving the island.
By the end of August, David had accepted an assignment doing fieldwork on Admiralty for the University of Alaska in Juneau. He had a spot for his cabin all picked out, back in the trees near where the stream that ran by his old camp emptied into the sea. Pybus Bay was the name of the area, it turns out. He could live there as long as the archeology work lasted, which probably meant he could stay as long as he wanted. In addition to the burial chamber, there was that other room with all the animal bones, and the likelihood of even more discoveries.
In one of his e-mails, David mentioned that he hadn’t made it to Juneau yet. Everything he needed, he said, he could find at the village store in Angoon. Somehow this didn’t surprise me. Once the archeology work got started, his supplies would be flown in every couple of weeks by floatplane. He was going to have a laptop with a built-in antenna that would transmit right from Pybus Bay.
As for my old camp, David reported, they had me put the rest of my things back right where they were, the ones I grabbed when we were leaving. They even retrieved the skinboat from Kake. It’s going to the museum in Juneau. They’ll display it as a replica without my name on it. I’m still jumpy about that sort of thing. They’ve closed off the overhang so nothing can be taken, and they’ve agreed not to do anything with it, or publicize it as a historic site, until I’m agreeable or dead. They think it will be of interest.
No kidding it will be of interest, I e-mailed back. Bet ya there’s nothing like it anywhere. By the way, before they do an inventory or something, could you grab one of your Clovis points for me?
You got it, he replied.
Plus, I want flintknapping lessons, I fired back.
Got that too, came his answer. What else do you want?
I want to know how old Admiralty Island Man is.
You’ll know as soon as I know. They’re taking their sweet time at that lab there in Boulder. I hope he’s old as the hills. Hey, Andy, notice that word, “hope”? I’m big on it these days, thanks to you. By the way, I’m adding people in boats to my mural—just off the coast of Alaska.
Finally, the day came. It was in late fall. Bear and I were in the orchard. I had my back le
aning against our oldest tree with my hand resting on the crown of Bear’s head and I was thinking about Admiralty, how the snows in the mountains were forcing the deer down, how the wolves were following them into the forests, how the bears were going into hibernation, how David was starting the fieldwork.
The shadows in the orchard were long. The low autumn light was filtering golden through the trees. The fruit was all picked and the deer were coming into the orchard for the drops. Bear had amazing restraint. He’d perk up his ears at them, but never bark.
My mother came tearing through the orchard like the house was burning down. “News from Admiralty!” she cried, so loud my father might have heard. “Twenty-three thousand years old, Andy! Twenty-three thousand years!”
As soon as the news sank in, I realized this wasn’t the end; it was just the beginning. So many islands, so many more caves waiting to be discovered. So many more clues to the puzzle of the earliest Americans. And I plan to be a part of it.
I know I’ll have a lot more adventures in my life. But even if I live to be a hundred, I doubt one will ever come along to compare with those ten days on Admiralty. The beauty of the place, its raw power, live in my memory stronger than all the hardships. All I have to do is close my eyes and I’m back there hearing the spouting of the whales and the screaming of the eagles. I’m thankful that there is still such a place on this earth.
Admiralty, Kootznoowoo, the Fortress of the Bears. To this list of names I’ve added another. I’ll always think of it as Wild Man Island.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Wild Man Island grew out of several sea kayak trips I took with my wife and paddling partner, Jean, along the shores of Admiralty and Chichagof Islands. Camping under the towering old-growth rain forest, observing brown bears at a salmon stream, and paddling among sea otters, harbor seals, Steller’s sea lions, and breaching humpback whales gave me a wealth of impressions and the desire to write a story that would invite readers into the island world of southeast Alaska.
