Frozen Stiff (6 page)

Cody turned the kayak around. The wind swirled in minitornados that churned the water and sent it splashing over the bow. The kayak lurched forward in awkward spurts, lifting and falling as it slapped wildly at the uneven swells.

That was when she heard it.

A deafening crash rumbled through the steep mountain corridors. Thunder. She shuddered at the sound. It was too close. And it seemed to be in front of them. It didn’t seem possible. All the wind was blowing from behind, chasing them, closing in.

Maybe a second storm was coming at them from the ocean. They could be squashed by two raging storms.

The noise was like a firecracker set off in a tin can. Another bend in the fjord. There were no rocky ledges here either, or secluded coves. There was no shelter of any kind, except a giant tidewater glacier with its snout edging into the water.

“Is that Hubbard?” Derek hollered over the wind.

Cody shook her head. “It can’t be.” She couldn’t believe the massive wall of ice less than a mile away. The frozen face was as long as a football field across and more than ten stories high.

A woeful moan grew into a deafening roar, like the dull static of white noise. It hadn’t been thunder after all. A chunk of ice the size of Yakutat Tavern broke loose and plummeted into the water. Seagulls appeared
from nowhere, swooping down to feed on the brine shrimp brought up by the turbulence.

“Backpaddle!” Cody shouted.

A series of icy walls of waves four or five feet high rolled out from the broken chunk, now an enormous iceberg bobbing in the salt water. The giant waves aimed at the kayak.

Cody knew she should keep paddling, put as much water as possible between the iceberg and the kayak, but the undercurrent was too strong and much too swift. If the waves slammed the craft just right, her paddle would be torn from her grip.

“Hang on to your paddle!”

The first wave hit them sideways, spraying salt and buckets of water. The kayak dropped into a deep trough, tipped unsteadily, and nearly capsized. It lolled on its side and would have spit them out if it hadn’t been for the rubber skirts holding them in. The kayak rolled back the other way and righted itself.

Derek cried, “Here comes another one!”

The second wave struck harder than the first, lifting the kayak and letting it coast on the crest. One, two, three seconds. It seemed like a lifetime. Then it dropped flat into a deep trough. The wooden craft shook when it hit bottom, threatening to split at its canvas shell.

Wave after wave.

Boom, boom, boom
.

The next wave sailed right over the bow and slapped Cody in the face. She coughed, unable to
catch her breath. She felt as if she were drowning; still in the kayak and above water, but choking instead of taking in oxygen.

Even now the noise wouldn’t let up—the relentless gusts, the scream of seagulls, the slapping of paddles—all loud enough to wake the dead.

Cody clung to the paddle as to life itself, shouting to Derek to do the same.

The kayak finally pulled out of the wave and glided into the open air. Cody coughed up seawater. She’d swallowed a ton. Salt scraped the back of her throat.

“You okay?” she called back.

“Yeah,” Derek returned weakly.

“Paddle?” she barely managed.

“Got it.”

Both paddles still in hand. Two sticks. This crumb of news filled her with hope.

With a death grip she paddled hard on the right to turn the kayak before the next set of waves hit. Being slammed head-on was better than taking a lateral strike. It came, as she’d known it would.
Slam!
Not quite as hard as before. But the kayak still spun like a kicked bottle.

Each time a wave hit the kayak, water seeped into the rubber skirt. Several inches sloshed in the bottom of the craft. Some had even worked its way inside her knee-high boots. Everything was drenched: clothes, gear, and paddlers.

The waves finally weakened, dying into swells less
than a foot high. Cody slumped in her seat; her shoulders sagged. She was utterly exhausted. “We made it.”

High above the kayak and less than a half mile away the glacier mirrored a dozen shades of blue. Some of the ice was so light it was nearly colorless; some of it was so dark it looked black. The face of the glacier, where the ice had broken off, wore a new expression now, an ice sculpture of hundred-foot-high spires and turrets.

Catching her breath, she thought about how much of the earth was covered with ice—one-tenth, she’d learned from the outfitters. An entire ocean was covered with it, like a white layer of congealed fat on a pot of cold turkey soup.

She forced herself to put her paddle back in the water. Her muscles screamed at the first stroke. Her shoulder blades felt as if someone were tightening them with screws.

“We have to get away from the glacier,” she said. “Before it calves again.”

“I can’t lift the paddle.”

But Derek did. Barely. One stroke, then two.

Soon the kayak skimmed water that spread across the fjord like soluble paints on paper, bleeding colors too mixed up to have their own names. They were alone in this vast maze of land and water and disconnected from everything that was familiar. Everything that was safe.

Cody wished they’d never left Yakutat.

The violent tailwind died to an occasional gust, but the undercurrent stayed just as fierce as before, drawing the kayak toward the ocean—toward Disenchantment Bay and Hubbard Glacier.

“Some people think the Ice Age is still with us,” Cody said. “That we’re in a warmer phase of it.”

Derek strained with each stroke. “Do you think that berg is like the one that sank the
Titanic?”

“That’s just a baby,” she said. “Some of them are over a hundred miles long.”

“No way!”

“Way.”

Cody looked back at the clouds suspended over Yakutat: a solid wall of black. “Maybe we’ll luck out,” she said. “Maybe the storm will dump all its rain in town. It’s about time we had some
good
luck.”

The kayak skimmed away from the calving glacier, away from the three-story iceberg, in case it rolled. “No one in California will believe this,” Derek said.

Cody’s strokes were as lifeless as her arms, with about as much power as a frayed bow rope. Her shorts and T-shirt were soaked. Her sleeping bag was a soggy
mess under her rear. She wondered if wet clothes could freeze to skin.

“If it’s raining in Yakutat,” Derek asked, “won’t all the water drain into the fjord?”

“Add tons of water from rivers and streams and runoff from glaciers,” she said.

Cody peeled off her rain slicker, then unsnapped the rubber skirt and rolled it back. Earlier her toes had been numb. Now they’d started to burn. The glare off the ice and water was blinding, like having a sunlamp plugged in only inches from her face.

“Look for a place to tie up.” She forced the water away with deep strokes, glancing at Derek. “We have to build a fire and dry out.”

Derek pulled his T-shirt away from his wrinkled skin. The whiteness was stark against his tanned arms. “Maybe there’s something to eat around here.”

“We should be able to find some berries.” Cody was half starved too. She had a gnawing sensation that felt as if her stomach had started eating itself. “Where’s the trail mix?”

“Buried at sea along with my sunglasses.”

“How did that happen?”

“They just fell overboard.”

At a cultural fair earlier in the summer Cody had watched natives drying salmon, roasting seal flippers, smoking bear meat, and fermenting fishheads. Now she scanned the terrain above the waterline and wished she could remember how they preserved berries.

She wasn’t looking for shelter anymore, just a
small clearing in the trees where water met land. A place to tie the kayak, build a fire, and find something to eat. She scanned the areas that had once been mudflats and sandy beaches, that had supported a world of small animals only the day before, now all under water. Somewhere there had to be a place to stop.

Cody couldn’t remember ever being this tired. She was so exhausted that she felt like dropping her head in her hands and blubbering like a baby. Suddenly she was overcome with emotion.
If I don’t make it back to Yakutat, and die out here in the wilderness, then Mom will be alone
, she thought.

I’m all Mom has now. We can’t die out here
.

There was another reason to survive. She’d never told her dad how she felt about what he’d done. She’d written lots of letters but never mailed any of them.

Cody swallowed the ache in her throat, using all her strength to search the old-growth trees and rocky knobs for a place to tie up. Normally grasses and sedges sprinkled the shoreline, mixed with splashes of colorful wildflowers. Edible herbs, even. Now they lay rotting under several feet of water.

She wondered what finally had happened back in 1986, when Hubbard had surged. The glacier hadn’t closed off Disenchantment Bay forever; otherwise Russell Fjord would still be a lake. Then she wondered if seals and porpoises had been trapped in here too. If only she’d paid more attention when the outfitters had talked about it.

She blinked at the sun passing far beyond the midday mark. Her eyes felt as if they’d been ground with
coarse salt. Each blink rubbed the grains in even deeper. Sunburned. What she’d give for a pair of shades.

Derek nudged her. “Did you see that?”

“What?”

“Something moved in the forest on the other side of that stream.” He lowered his paddle and pointed across the water at the distant forest, thick in some places, sparse in others. “Something big.”

She followed his gaze beyond a silty stream; the sound of water played everywhere. “Maybe it was a bear.”

“No way. It didn’t move like a bear. Has anyone around here ever mentioned Bigfoot?”

“Don’t be stupid.”

“I’m not. I know what a bear looks like. I’ve been to the San Diego Zoo. It wasn’t a bear, Cody. That thing I saw stood up straight and walked like a person.”

“Out here?” A wave of gooseflesh rose on her already chilled skin. Déjà vu. She’d experienced the same sensation at the waterfall the day before. For an instant she’d wondered if something had scared the bear away.

“It was probably a shadow.” Cody searched for an answer that made sense. “If the angle of the sun was just right, a bear might look like a person. Or maybe it was a tree.”

“Right.” Derek didn’t sound convinced. “A tree that walks.”

She turned on her sleeping bag and water oozed
from the goose-down lining. He had her on that one. For the first time since they’d battled the assaulting waves a few hours earlier, she really looked at her cousin. His hair was a matted mess, stuck to the bloody mosquito bites across his forehead. Watery blisters covered the freckles on his nose, and sea salt had dried on his cheeks in crusty white splotches.

“You know what?” she asked. “You look like a character in an Indiana Jones movie.”

“Yeah?” Derek was shaking. Hunger. Fatigue. Low body temperature. “You look like something in a disaster movie—the disaster.”

Cody laughed, then realized her lips were as swollen as her sunburned hands. She pressed her T-shirt against her mouth so that her lips wouldn’t split open. The skin on her face felt tight too, as if she’d outgrown it. She hated being so fair, knowing she’d peel in a few days. More freckles.

She tried wiggling her toes. The intense burning in her feet had lessened to a dull ache. The water that had seeped into her boots earlier had now mixed with body heat and created a layer of insulation. “How are your feet?” she asked.

“What feet?”

She took one last look at the iceberg as the kayak slipped around a bend. They left the narrow passage with its steep-sided walls and entered a broad stretch with enticing slopes. The iceberg boomed and cracked and split into a dozen smaller bergs as if in farewell.

“Bergy bits,”
she said. “That’s what they call small icebergs. That and
growler ice
.”

Not far ahead, a crop of granite boulders crowded together on a long stretch of bank above the waterline. The rocks appeared to have stumbled off the mountain in a landslide, clearing a bus-sized spot in the otherwise dense forest along the way. The clearing looked wide enough for a campfire. There might be room to pitch the tent if they had to.

“Home sweet home,” she said.

Cody held the bowline and balanced on the mossy rocks; in the wet climate any bare rock was quickly colonized by mosses and small plants. Shivering, she passed the gear to Derek, who tossed everything into the clearing.

Neither one of them complained about hunger or aching muscles as they worked mechanically in their heavy, wet clothes.

After tying the kayak with enough rope to secure a battleship, they gathered bits of dry grass and piled it in the clearing. A stroke of luck had placed the matches in a plastic bag
and
in the day packs.

She blew on the stream of smoke rising from the dry grass. “As soon as we get this going we’ll look for something to eat.”

Warmth first, food second. Anywhere else it might be the other way around. But not this far north in Southeast Alaska, in late summer.