Wild Man Island (5 page)

F
OR TWO MORE DAYS
I shivered in the rain and waited for rescue. I lived on seaweed, the tops of fiddlehead ferns, the few berries I could find, and one small fish that fell out of the sky. It was a herring that had slipped the grasp of an eagle.

The weather almost never let up. The clouds wreathed the tall trees with shape-shifting tendrils and shrouds. It all looked primeval, like a lost world.

The wolves seemed to have left, but not the bears. Especially when the tide was low, they came onto the beach to dig clams, to crack mussels, and to scavenge on the whale carcass.

As the bears crossed the beach, they would stand on their hind legs to get a good look at me. Every time, I was sure they were about to charge. Some of them would woof at me, but they left me alone, even the mother brownie with the two cubs. They seemed to know I wasn't a threat.

I was desperate to find something solid to eat. The mussel beds were exposed at low tide, and clams would have been easy to dig. Their siphon jets gave their exact location away.

The thing is, Julia had told us that eating wild shellfish around here was dicey. Every so often they were carrying some kind of microscopic bugs that caused PSP, paralytic shellfish poisoning. You could never tell for sure if they were good or not. You wouldn't know until you felt a tingling around your lips and gums. By then it would be too late. Very shortly you would be paralyzed. Maybe you'd stop breathing. People died sometimes, she said, and there's no antidote.

As weakened as I was, I was thinking about taking the risk.

On my way to the creek for fresh water I discovered that the ravens were eating the mussels. I saw one tear a mussel loose, fly up high, then drop it on the rocks in front of the treeline. The raven flew down, poked the mussel, flew up with it again, dropped it a second time. This time the shell must have cracked. I saw the raven gulp down its prize.

Sudden movement on my left caught my eye. I couldn't believe it, but what I saw was all too real. From the back of the beach, for no good reason, a huge brown bear was rushing me, coming full speed. I was about to wheel around and run for the sea when I caught myself, remembering that running was the worst thing I could do.

With its ears back, the bear was pounding toward me, sand flying up all around. When it was all but on me, the bear stood up and roared. I crossed my arms in front of my face. Terror burned through me white hot and turned me to jelly.

The bear wheeled away, twenty yards maybe. It was the monster male, the first bear I'd seen on the island. He charged again, towered over me a second time, baring his teeth and flailing his claws. I was sure he was going to maul me.

For some reason he didn't. He went away mad, roaring and threatening to come back and finish the job. After that, I was through with staying put. If that bear wanted me gone, I was out of there.

How long had I been on this island—five days? I was getting weaker all the time, and help was not on the way. The fishing boats weren't going to come close enough to see me. Maybe it was too shallow, too rocky along the coast.

I had to start walking. There had to be a village, or some cabins or something, if I just kept walking.

I started east, picking my way very carefully on my stone-bruised feet, fear still buzzing in every nerve. The heavy animal musk, the stink of that bear's gut washing over me, the horrible growling weren't going to go away anytime soon. I wished I had a weapon.

Late the next day, hobbling and weak and lightheaded, I came to an island-sprinkled bay that cut deep into the foot of Admiralty. The rain had stopped, but in its place fog had swallowed up the world. Only now and then, here and there, could I see anything. At one point I thought I was seeing rectangular shapes on the horizon line across the bay. Was my mind playing tricks on me?

I squinted. There really was something there. In the
foreground, a pier. Behind it, a cluster of buildings, some large, one with two tall smokestacks.

A village, maybe a cannery…I didn't care what it was.

Tears came to my eyes. “I'm going to make it,” I heard myself say.

As I stared, the fog erased the structures, every trace of them. I had to wonder. It might have been a product of the weakness, the dizziness. Maybe I'd imagined it.

No, I told myself, it was real. I had to believe that.

On my feet, such as they were, with my overall lack of strength, it was going to take a day to round the back of the bay and find out.

When I finally did see the place up close the following day, it was all of a sudden. One moment there was nothing in the fog but trees, rocks, seaweed, and the croaking of ravens. The next moment, the village, or factory, or whatever it was materialized right before my eyes.

I stood dumbstruck. I wanted to shout for joy, but no sound came out.

The longer I stared, the more I saw that something was wrong. My heart sank. There wasn't a single boat by the pier or anywhere else for that matter, no smoke from the smokestacks, only traces of paint on the dull gray boards of building after building. I could make out the name TYEE written large across the front of one of them. Whatever this place was, it had been abandoned long ago.

No help, just ruins, just another obstacle. I was going to have to pass around the back of the pier through a welter of rusted machinery.

It occurred to me that in one of those buildings I might find some sort of map. Even if it was outdated, it would be a hundred times better than no map.

The floor of the first building was strewn with antique junk, all badly rusted: saw blades, screws and nails, outboard engine parts, and a hundred other hazards. I backed out, careful of every step I took. A rusty nail through my foot could finish me.

The next building was nearly engulfed by the forest. I stepped into a wide hallway with cubicles stacked four high on each side, beginning at waist height, on top of what looked like rows and rows of dresser drawers. The cubicles were about two feet wide, three feet high, and six feet deep. Ladders nailed to the wall down both sides of the hallway provided access.

The cubicles appeared to be some sort of storage bins. The first one I looked into was decorated with clippings from Chinese newspapers, badly yellowed over the years. Mice had pulled the stuffing out of a disgusting looking pillow.

They're sleeping bunks, it suddenly came to me. This settlement must have been a cannery, and this building must have been the housing for Chinese workers, a hideous beehive of a dormitory.

A few minutes later I was walking on a concrete floor through the biggest of the buildings. The emptiness echoed with the shrill calls of hundreds of small
nesting birds that flew among the high rafters. The broad floor was empty except for several large piles of fishing nets.

Out back, I stepped into a small house with almost all its windows intact. I guessed it was where the manager of the cannery used to live.

One room of the house had an old bedstand with the wreckage of a box spring on it. The walls were plastered with faded black-and-white covers of
Life
magazine. From the early fifties, I saw as I took a closer look.

A floorboard creaked as I stepped back. A second later, I thought I heard something out in the hall—quick footsteps, it sounded like. Someone was here, in this building!

I darted into the hall and raced to my right through a room with a fireplace and bookshelves, and ran out the back door, which was open. Running away, with several books clutched in one hand and a spear in the other, was a man like a walking mountain range, a giant of a man overgrown with gray hair. His clothing, a knee-length robe cinched loosely at the waist, was made of some sort of strange fiber.

“Help!” I yelled just as loud as I possibly could.

Like a deer sometimes does, bounding away, the man held up for a second, stopped dead still, and looked back over his shoulder.

He looked startled, afraid. His eyes took me in quickly but avoided mine.

Under a pointy thatched hat, his hair was long and gray. His full gray beard reached halfway to his waist.
Over his shoulder was slung some sort of carrying bag made of hide.

“Help me!” I shouted again.

No reply, except for the croak of a raven that suddenly flew from the trees.

My eyes went to the large black bird thrashing my direction. Suddenly it ruddered with its wedge-shaped tail and swooped right at me. Its dark eyes were looking into mine. I raised my forearm to ward it off, but it pulled up at the last second. I felt the rush of wind off its wings.

By the time my eyes found the man again, he was bounding away. Agile as a fleeing buck, he disappeared into the fog and the cedars, and the raven with him.

I
SNAKED MY WAY THROUGH
devil's club to the spot where the man had disappeared. I looked for the slightest movement, listened for the faintest sound. Nothing. The forest had swallowed him up.

While it was still possible, I recalled every feature that I could. First off, he was big, real big: maybe six foot six, and stout as a tree trunk, but at the same time so well camouflaged he could be mistaken for native vegetation. A forest man, a wild man of the forest, that's what my head was telling me I had seen. His eyes were light-colored, probably blue, in a face that was angular and chalky gray, like an outcrop of limestone. A scar angled from his forehead to his left cheekbone. The wild man's long hair and even longer beard were so much like the lichens hanging from the nearby tree branches, they suggested that what was growing on him wasn't only hair.

His bushy eyebrows were raven black.

His robe—what had it been made of? Bark fiber, maybe, same as the pointy, conical hat designed to shed the rain.

The spear at his side was nearly his height, with a
finely crafted, fearsome-looking point. From head to toe, he looked like he had stepped out of the Stone Age.

Suddenly I was skeptical of my own senses. In the fog, I could have imagined him, every detail. Everything about the encounter and about him had been so strange, so dreamlike.

Starvation could account for it.

I stood looking at the buildings, the pier, the ruins of the cannery. I couldn't blink
them
away. In the fog, they looked otherworldly, but they were real.

An eagle flew by with a fish. A raven went
tok-tok-tok.

I returned to the house with the
Life
covers. Still there. I went back to the room with the fireplace and the bookshelves.

The shelves were mostly empty except for a few
National Geographic
s from the 1920s and a dozen or so books that were the exact size and color of the ones I'd seen the wild man clutching in his hand. All were dusty brown. Harvard Classics, they were called. I picked one up:
Wealth of Nations,
by Adam Smith. I put it back, thinking it wouldn't have been my first choice, either.

This was absurd. A man from the Stone Age, visiting his local library. Had he really been here? How could I prove it?

Suddenly it was important to prove to myself that I wasn't going crazy. What about footprints?

Close to the spot where he had disappeared, in an opening among the devil's club, I found a single imprint
in the mud. It had a woven pattern. The man must have been wearing sandals of woven thatch.

I
hadn't
imagined him. He really had been there, and I had called out to him. He had seen that I had nothing, and he'd run away.

Hey buddy, I thought, I wasn't the one with the spear.

I walked down to the water, crushed that I'd come so close to help and come away with nothing. If the wild man could read those Harvard Classics, he must have understood my cry for help.

Who in the world was he? Were there others?

An hour later I was still at the fogbound cannery. I'd searched for a map and for canned goods, any sort of food, but had come up empty. I felt so defeated. I sat on a flat rock under the wobbly pier and watched the tide rise among the barnacle-encrusted rocks. The bottom was thick with starfish and neon-green sea anemones, nothing I could eat. It was going to be difficult to make myself keep walking. It was too hard. I was too hungry.

Why hadn't Stone Age man helped me? Done something, anything?

Just then I heard it again, the thrashing of a raven's wings. I looked up and saw one of those shaggy-throated rascals eyeing me with what looked like intelligence. I had a feeling it was the same one that had been with the wild man. Did that mean that the wild man had come back?

Croaking wildly as I scrambled up the bank, the raven flew off into the forest.

The spear. There it was, just lying on the ground. Next to it lay a bone-handled knife with a stone blade. Stunned, I looked around for the wild man, but he was nowhere to be seen.

I picked up the spear. The long wooden shaft, light yet true and solid as iron, was smooth from handling. The spearhead was about four inches long and a thing of beauty. At my first close glance I knew exactly what it was—a Clovis point. My father used to make Clovis points for collectors and museums.

I couldn't believe it. This was the classic weapon of the mammoth hunters. For a long time, Clovis hunters were thought to be the first people who came to North America.

This point was a gem, elegantly chipped to sharpness on both edges and finished off with a groove down the center of each side. It was made of dark volcanic rock like the basalt in the Gunnison River country in western Colorado.

So the wild man had helped me after all. Left me the means to defend myself on the Fortress of the Bears.

The blade of the stone knife was about three inches long, and made from greenish jade-like rock. The handle was made of antler, probably deer antler. The blade was hafted to the handle with some sort of animal sinew.

Under the straps of my life jacket would be a perfect place to stow the knife.

Could I feed myself with the spear and the knife? I didn't know. If I threw the spear at something, a fish or something, I might break the point. It was too valuable
to use like that. With the knife, though, I could make a long jabbing stick. The next time I crossed a stream, I would be able to spear fish. I should be able to make a lot of other things too. Enough to get by.

Then, if I followed the coast a little farther, I might get past these rocky bays. I might reach a place where fishing boats hugged the coast. Signal one fishing boat and all this would be over.

I had to keep walking, but walking was already too hard, too painful with the bruises and all the small cuts on my feet. As soon as I thought about it some more, my gratitude to the wild man wore thin. I couldn't eat the spear or the knife. He could have invited me to dinner.

I laughed out loud. This was all too crazy to be believed.

At least you can still laugh, I told myself. That must be a good sign. I tried the knife on a lock of my hair. It was sharp as a razor.

Make something to protect your feet, Andy. Weave some sort of sandals like the wild man's.

Out of what?

The answer came immediately: cedar. Julia had said that the Indians had been able to stay warm on this rain coast for thousands of years because of their mastery of the inner bark of the cedar tree. The wild man must have mastered it too.

When I got started again I was wearing footgear of sorts. I'd figured out what inner cedar bark was, freed a slab of it with the knife, made strips, pounded them soft
with a rock, and woven a crude pair of sandals. They were two layers thick, so they would last. It had taken me the rest of the day and half of the next. They looked awful, lashed over the tops of my feet and around my ankles, but they would do the job.

I'd also made a long jabbing stick with a sharp wooden point. All I needed now was a salmon stream, and I wouldn't be hungry again. Sushi would suit me just fine.

I followed the coast to the east. From far off came the sound of a foghorn. A ferry, I guessed. I thought about the cafeteria on that boat. Unbelievable amounts of food. Hot food, hot showers. People to talk to. Cell phones. But mostly, food.

Midafternoon, the fog finally started to lift. There was another creek up ahead, the biggest yet. In Colorado it might have been called a river. As I hurried toward it I pictured salmon so thick I could walk across on their backs. That's what I really needed, a salmon run.

What I found was a few trout that flashed away into the holes under the banks. With a groan, I lay down on my belly and made myself drink some water. Nothing on this island was ever going to be easy.

Where the creek crossed the beach, I rinsed seaweed. Bite by bite, I put a disgusting amount of it into my stomach. Why weren't there salmon in the stream, big fat salmon, so many I could spear any one I wanted? I was sick of this, so sick of the hunger, like a wolverine in my insides, and it never went away. I didn't know how
much longer I could stand it. Most of all, I was sick of my luck.

My eyes fell on a bed of mussels. I grimaced at the image running through my head: I was starving to death in the middle of a grocery store.

Every so often they're poisonous, Julia had said.

Every so often,
I thought. As in,
once in a while.
As in,
rarely.
It was just that they were risky.

I was ready to take that risk. If chances are good that they're edible, I heard myself thinking, I'm going to try it. I can't be unlucky
all
the time.

A minute later I was smashing a mussel with a rock, prying away pieces of shell with the knife. It wasn't like I'd made a conscious decision. It was just knowing that people eat mussels in restaurants from coast to coast, and imagining myself being lucky for once.

I would eat just one, nibble it at first, see what happened. If I felt that tingling sensation Julia talked about, I would quit.

Out of its shell, the mussel was about as long as my little finger and slimy like a raw oyster. I couldn't afford to slide the whole thing down my throat. I had to be careful.

I chewed slowly. No tingling sensation, no numbness. It was tough going. Maybe after the first few I would pound them with a rock to soften them up like I did with the cedar bark.

I chewed the whole thing up and swallowed it. I ate a second one.

It was when I was chewing the third one that I felt
the tingling. Just a little tingling on my tongue and along my gums and the inside of my lips.

As fast as I could, I spit the slimy stuff out. I tried to retch what was already in my stomach but I was unsuccessful. I stuck my finger way down in my throat, again and again—that didn't work either. I wondered if the poison was numbing my senses, like the shot you get before an operation.

Suddenly, everything felt strange. My vision started to swim, and I felt myself losing my balance. Fearing the worst, I grabbed the spear and the knife and dragged myself off the beach so the rising tide wouldn't drown me.

Before I could get to tree cover, I was struck down. Just struck down like falling timber.