Frozen Stiff (3 page)

“Wait up!” Derek called from behind. “You have the food bag!”

Cody lifted her paddle, watching water roll off the blade. Coasting, she made a half circle. Derek was a dot the size of a surf scoter. She hadn’t meant to leave him so far behind.

She waited for him to catch up. She sliced a couple of bagels with her Swiss Army knife and slathered them with cream cheese. Smoked salmon was the topper.

Smoked salmon
, she thought as she eyed the bright pink flesh. Her friends back home would be inhaling cheeseburgers and pizza. In ten days she would be back in school in Bakersfield, California, wishing she were in Yakutat.

At first she had hated the idea of spending summers in Alaska, away from her friends. Especially when she’d found out her mother had taken a job in a tavern. Now she dreaded going back. Her friends only half listened to her stories. The boys and clothes they talked about seemed so superficial. Now, Cody realized, she was more at home in a tavern than a mall.

In two and a half months of working in Yakutat, her mother made enough money in tips to support the two of them for the rest of the year, along with Dad’s child support. Fishermen from all over the world came to Yakutat and spent a small fortune to catch
steelhead and king salmon. After a successful fishing trip and an ice chest full of fillets they often tipped five dollars for a single bottle of beer.

“Save some for me.” Derek bumped into both her kayak and her thoughts. “I could eat a moose,” he said, laying his hand on a bagel.

The drizzle turned into steady rain. Cody slipped her yellow slicker over her life vest, pulled the hood over No Fear, and snapped down the rubber skirt on the kayak. Even a soggy sandwich tasted great in the wild.

“Wash the salmon off your hands when you’re done,” she said. “You don’t want to smell like a grizzly’s favorite meal.”

Derek stuck his rain-splattered sunglasses in his pocket. “That’s a joke, right?”

“No one jokes about grizzly bears in Alaska.”

Derek made another bagel and cream cheese sandwich without salmon. “What did you do with the bear horn?”

“It’s behind my seat,” she said, “and I packed extra batteries.”

“We should have brought a horn for me too.”

Cody noticed a tangle of twigs bobbing in the distant water. Probably a snag washed into the fjord on the rising tide. As it moved closer she felt a twinge in her backbone. “Derek,” she whispered harshly. “Don’t move.”

“What is it?”

The current seized her kayak and spun it around. Over her shoulder she watched the twigs turn into a
fin, a large triangular appendage moving up behind Derek’s craft. “Hold still,” she hissed over the wind as the current tried to pull them apart. Until now she hadn’t realized how swift the current was that day. The water tumbling down the mountains from rivers and glaciers must have added a powerful tug to the tides.

“What’s wrong?” he whispered again.

Cody silently pointed to the dorsal fin less than twenty yards out, speeding toward the kayaks. “I think it’s a shark.”

Even in the cold wind Derek’s cheeks lost all their redness. They drained to the color of the snowcapped peaks. He gripped his paddle, turning his knuckles the same stark white. Then he stared at the fin closing in on him. “How did it get in here?”

“This is the ocean.” Her matter-of-fact statement was lost on the brisk breeze.
It must have come in at Disenchantment Bay
, she meant to add.
Near Hubbard
. But she couldn’t get the words out.

“What’re we going to do?” Derek looked as if he was about to heave his sandwich. “Should we throw it some salmon?”

“You want to chum it?” Cody stared unblinkingly as the fin made a wide circle. If she whacked the side of her kayak with her paddle, the noise might scare it away. Or it might make it mad, make it want to attack.

Derek shivered. Then he started scratching his forehead, triggering a series of tiny red pools. “Can we outrun it?”

The creature made another pass and this time she noted the curved dorsal fin. “This was your idea, cousin dear,” she said, and used her paddle to shove his kayak toward the fin. “Shark bait!”

“Stop it!” he screamed. “What are you doing?”

Cody burst out laughing. “It isn’t a shark, stupid. It’s a white-sided dolphin.”

It took a few seconds for her words to sink in. When they did, Derek threw a soggy bagel at her. “I’ll get you for this!” he shouted.

“First you have to catch me!” Cody shot back. “It serves you right for making me wait on the beach.” She was already pushing her paddle through the choppy water.

When the sun peeked through the dreary clouds Cody shed her slicker and tied it to her paddle. The makeshift sail swelled under the chilling wind blowing off the ice-capped mountains. Still, she was sweaty.

Southeast Alaska was one of those weird places where the tips of your ears could be crisp-fried to a crackling crunch while your toes were frozen to the point of tissue destruction. It seemed as if everyone who spent time here was frostbitten sooner or later. Fingers, toes, or cheeks.

She unsnapped the rubber skirt and rolled it back. Sweat, she knew, could freeze, like any kind of water. Some natives used the freeze-dried method for drying laundry: They’d hang wet clothes outside and let them freeze. Then they’d shake out the frozen water, leaving the clothes ready to wear.

Cody lowered her sail and glided into a narrow channel. The sandy shores were lost to a corridor of guano-splashed rock. She stared up at steep cliffs that rose so high that the sky was only a thin gray stripe far above. Raw peaks cut into cotton-ball clouds.

The current moved faster here, a torrent of water
that twisted and rolled past cliffs dotted with empty swallow’s nests. It seemed more like a river than an inlet of seawater. She half expected rapids to bubble up around the next bend, but that was ridiculous.

Cody paddled hard to keep from hitting the steep walls, but closer and closer she rolled toward the murky water slapping the granite. Both rock and water had minds of their own. Two against one. No fair.

Somehow she didn’t remember the current being this treacherous. The other times she’d paddled this canyon there’d been another person in her kayak. Two against two. Those were much better odds.

Her muscles screamed as she backpaddled feverishly, just missing a jagged rock aimed at her head. Finally the narrow corridor spit her out. On the other side, her kayak floated freely into clean waters rimmed with sandy beaches. She drew in a deep breath, and her pulse steadied to a more normal rhythm.

As the sun continued to drop, the sky turned a deep metallic gray, almost the color of the pickup, now sitting in the clump of berry vines. Cody glanced at her watch. Eight o’clock. Time to make camp. They shouldn’t tread any deeper into the fjord. Tomorrow they’d have to paddle all the way back.

She knew that finding a good campsite could be tricky; tides sometimes fluctuated twenty-five feet a day in Southeast Alaska, so beaches and meadows that looked inviting might be flooded within hours.

Worry poked at her as she pictured Derek in the narrow canyon. “Derek?” she called. Coasting with most of her body below the waterline, she felt like one
of the tide-pool creatures. Soon she and Derek would pitch their tent and sleep in the splash zone.

“Ya-hoo!”
The words echoed from the canyon, and she smiled.

Cody laid her paddle across her lap and rubbed the back of her neck. Derek’s hands were probably as sore as a bad tooth by now. She’d had blisters on her hands after her first day in a kayak. Now her palms were callused, from chopping kindling and other chores at the tavern.

She pointed the nose of her kayak at a protected cove, one of the overnight spots used by the outfitters. Gliding into the shallow water, she stuck her paddle in the sand and steadied her craft. Thank goodness for rubber boots, she thought, stepping into the white foam curling out from shore. Rubber boots with their waffle soles were good on sloppy ground; on sunny days she turned them down to her ankles.

After dragging the kayak above the waterline, she unwound the bow rope and wrapped it around a tree stump. “Over here!” she called to Derek a few minutes later.

Derek waved back and paddled to shore. “That was so cool! I almost flipped a dozen times!” His soft dark hair tumbled childlike over his forehead, making him look about six years old. “Do we go back that way?”

“How else would we get back?”

He climbed stiffly out of his kayak, almost tipping it over. “Why can’t we camp on the other shore? Closer to those glaciers?” he asked, picking at the
shiny white blister on his hand. “I thought glaciers flowed into the water, then chunks of ice broke off and fell in.”

“It’s called calving, Derek. But only tidewater glaciers touch the water and calve. These are hanging glaciers.” Cody glanced across the fjord at the silver lines of ice striping the mountains, knowing that nameless glaciers had scoured the bases of these peaks for centuries. “If we were on the same side, we wouldn’t be able to see them at all,” she said, shrugging out of her life vest. “We’d be underneath them and the trees would be in the way.”

Derek tied his bowline, then dropped onto the deep sand and stared at the frozen rivers. Each time the sun broke through, the glaciers shone like satin ribbons. “Awesome,” he said softly.

“Yeah.” She dropped next to him and flipped through her tide table. “We have to drag the kayaks above the high-tide line.”

“I can’t get used to it,” he said. “This water looks more like a lake.”

“Weird, huh?”

It seemed to take forever to clear a flat spot for the orange dome tent. Turning their arms into shovels and rakes, they rid a sandy circle of driftwood and rocks, then tossed sleeping bags inside the tent, along with personal gear. The kitchen stuff was piled as far away as possible from the tents, near the kayaks, which had been dragged above the high-tide line earlier.

Cody hooked the bear horn over her belt and
grabbed her washcloth and soap. Then she thought twice and tossed Derek the horn. “We’ll start dinner when I get back.” She felt stiff as she teetered across a fallen tree, as if her joints had started to freeze. “I’m going to the falls to wash up.”

She jumped down on the far side of the log and headed up a wide trail that snaked into the rain forest. Although it was after nine at night, it would stay light for several hours. But inside the forest, tall trees with dense canopies pulled everything into inky shadows. Tangled vines and dead limbs twisted overhead. Some bird she couldn’t name screeched at her for trespassing.

Cody belted out her favorite Alaskan ballad in case there were any bears around. If they heard you coming, they got out of the way. That was what the outfitters told their clients. At times like this she liked to think of their Latin name,
Ursus arctos horribilis
.

After a quarter of a mile, the trail broke out of the woods and opened up to a stream that rushed down from a series of waterfalls. Indian paintbrush and blue-pod lupine studded the few dry patches. They were similar to the wildflowers in California but a lot taller, probably because of Alaska’s longer summer days. Fish swam in a pool under the falls, looking huge from the water’s magnification. Too bad she hadn’t packed her fishing gear. Nothing tasted better than fresh fish cooked over an open fire.

Cody hesitated a minute before stripping to her waist. She suddenly had the uneasy feeling that someone
was watching her from deep in the forest.
Ridiculous
, she chided herself.

The sun ducked behind a mountain with a finality that made her even more restless. She wasn’t afraid of the dark, so that wasn’t it. It was something else. Something she didn’t want to name. She shivered.

Keeping her sports bra on, she lathered her armpits. She soaked her washcloth, which was so icy cold it numbed the tips of her fingers. She washed her face and rinsed her pits, then let the breeze raise goose bumps on her skin.

That was when she heard it: rustling in the bushes. On the other side of the stream. Startled, she turned. “Derek?” Nothing. Then more rustling. “Derek?” Maybe he wanted to pay her back for joking about the shark? But the noise was coming from upstream, not down.

Cody scrambled up on a boulder and scanned the trees. But the bushy vines and limbs guarded the forest against her scrutiny.

While she was straining to see, her boot slipped on something squishy. She looked down: bear scat. It was fresh, too. Black bear or grizzly? She didn’t know.

Calm. Stay calm
, she told herself.
Don’t panic. Animals can smell fear. And I probably stink with it
.

Stupid! Only bears would make such a wide trail through the forest. Nothing else. Cody wanted to race back to the beach, grab her kayak, and split. But she knew better. Running brought out the hunting instinct in predators. She would instantly become prey.

A black bear suddenly pushed into the sunlight across the stream. Cody didn’t move. Not a single eyelash. The bear looked at her, surprised. She looked back, but not directly into his eyes.