In the morning I awoke to Cassidy and Lisa whispering. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I didn’t like it. Their heads were close together and that really bothered me. I was going to say, “Good morning” or something stupid like that, but then Cassidy started tickling her, which made the raft rock.
Lisa swore and promised death to her tormentor. She hated to be tickled.
“Let me go, you freak!” she half-squealed and half- giggled.
“I thought you liked to be tickled! It’s fun. Laugh! Laugh! Laugh!”
“Cassidy!” Willie barked.
Cassidy stopped tickling her and the raft stopped rocking. “Chill, Willie! I’m just foolin’ with her.” He always called his dad “Willie.” I never once heard him say “Dad.”
Lisa sat up and slugged him on the arm, hard. But you could see a glint of amusement in her eyes—a glint that cut me to the quick.
“Kids,” Willie said with a sigh and flopped back onto his sleeping mat. Dad and Roger groaned and rolled over in their bags, and went back to sleep.
I looked around. The sun was aglow, making a halo above the trees north of Bella Bella. A bald eagle glared down at us from a shoreline spruce.
I wondered why it was called Bella Bella. I knew it meant beautiful in Spanish and Italian, but why say it twice? It sounded like an Italian guy adoring a beautiful girl, or a dish of pasta. Bella Bella!
Half an hour later the sun burst through the trees, warmed the morning mist away, and nudged Dad and Roger awake.
“Java,” Roger mumbled. He rose to his elbows and sniffed the air for coffee. He’d slept with his trademark red bandana on his pony-tailed head and, with his wicked reddish gray goatee, he looked like a sleepy, benign pirate.
Willie had already made a strong pot of coffee on his small Svea stove. Soon we all sipped the hot black brew on our first morning at sea.
An hour later we were far out in the Inland Passage—off Gunboat Pass—quietly paddling north through the island-dotted water world.
Gunboat Pass. That name put a thrill of wonder into me. There must be some reason it was called that. Maybe it dated back to pirate days. Or maybe boats smuggling drugs or refugees.
But we didn’t see any gunboats—at least, I didn’t think we saw any. We saw a couple of ships and barges, all far away.
Ice water dripped down my arms—ice water flowing down from the Arctic—but the spray skirt attached to the rim of the cockpit and cinched around my waist kept me dry below.
My back and shoulders ached, but after awhile I got into the rhythm and almost forgot about the pain. I’ve come a long way since Bodega Bay, I thought. In more ways than one.
Hey! That rhymes! I always had a pen in my pocket and I thought of writing it down, but it was too much trouble with my spray skirt on. So I sang softly to myself: I’ve come a long way/from Bodega Bay, as we sliced through the surface with our double-bladed paddles. We glided quickly enough to create a breeze, but quietly enough not to startle the nearby sea lions, who poked their heads out of the water and watched us with their huge dark eyes.
We’d be island-hopping along this hidden coast for the next nine and a half days, living largely off what we caught and gathered from the sea. We’d be going counterclockwise in a big, jagged circle: first north and west through Seaforth Channel, then south through the open Pacific, then east and back north to Bella Bella. Roger and Willie had pored over charts for weeks as they planned this trip. But weather was an unknown . . . and to me, it was all an unknown.
In late afternoon we grounded ashore in an island cove. The tide was out, and we had to haul our kayaks high above the tide line, slipping and sliding over small round stones. The shoreline here was rocky and wild. We tethered our boats to tree snags for the night and set out to scout the island.
We followed a deer path through dense spruce and cedar—Roger naming the trees—and on across a narrow spit of land, coming out on a long, white, sandy beach facing the ocean. Lisa kicked off her shoes and twirled around barefoot in the sand, her black ponytail spinning. Breakers crashed and boomed, sending up a fine spray.
“This looks like a good place to camp tonight,” I said
“Could get windy,” Roger warned.
“Keeps the bugs away,” Willie said.
“Roger that,” said Dad, making a rare joke. Or is it a pun?
I pulled off my river sandals and ran off down the beach—with Lisa at my heels. She moved like the wind with her long, slim legs, but this year I could match her stride for stride. Last year she was two inches taller than me; now I was getting tall and gangly.
Breathless, we stopped running, our feet sinking in wet sand. It was intense having Lisa at my side. I picked up a flat round stone and skimmed it across the backwash, where it smacked a breaker and flapped up like a startled bird. Lisa rummaged for a stone, wound up, and skimmed it like a pro. It bounced six times at least.
“Good one,” I said, winging another stone. “It’s awesome here. But I miss the river rafting a bit. Wasn’t that crazy fun last year in Desolation Canyon?”
“Yeah, and crazy scary, too,” said Lisa. “I could do without all that drama.” Meaning the trouble we’d had with Cassidy, and my dad’s accident. She flicked suds at me from her fingers. I danced away, and that’s when I saw the deep tracks in the wet sand.
“Wolf tracks, I think.”
“Or a very large dog’s,” Lisa said.
The tracks ran inland toward the dry sand, where they faded out. “Hey! Guys! Wolf tracks!” I yelled.
“What?” Roger yelled.
“Wolf!”
Cassidy came running, followed by the others, and squatted down. Willie stooped beside him and pushed back his big floppy hat. “Lone wolf, all right. He might be back there in the trees right now, watching us. These tracks are fresh.”
“I didn’t know there were wolves here,” I said.
“Wolves, bears, deer, raccoons. They swim out from the mainland,” said Roger.
“Cool,” I said.
“Sweet,” said Lisa. She was afraid of nothing. Me, I wasn’t so sure, really, about being on a small island with large bears and wolves.
I heard the sound of a motor and looked offshore. What looked like a commercial fishing boat was puttering by. A man stood on deck staring at us. I waved, but he didn’t wave back.
We were on a deserted island, miles from anyone else. The man was big, grim faced, brutal looking, with his hair tied in a bushy graying ponytail. His yellow-tinted sunglasses blazed in the sun.
Like the eyes of a wolf.
