Wild Man Island (12 page)

“J
UST 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 next,” 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.

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.”

“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.