That’s strange, I thought, following the big fishing boat with my eyes. Fishermen usually wave back when you wave—at least on the fishing boats in Bodega Bay they do. I think it’s some kind of etiquette of the sea, or something like that.
Even with sunglasses on, it felt like he had looked right through me. I turned to Lisa, who was standing nearby. She was staring at the boat, or its captain. And she was hugging herself, as if she were cold.
Maybe he gave her the creeps, too.
Later, Roger and Willie went out fishing in the cove. Dad and I lugged our gear across the spit and found a good spot to pitch our tent. It gave us a view of the open sea to the west, yet offered us a bit of shelter back in the brush.
I joined Lisa and Cassidy on the beach. Cassidy was doing standing backflips, one after the other, like an acrobat. He was stripped to his bathing trunks, and his tattooed muscles rippled in the sun. Lisa acted unimpressed, watching only out of the corners of her eyes. She was lounging in a blue bikini, twirling her dark hair with a finger.
When Cassidy saw me coming, he dashed toward me to tackle me. I faked left and juked him. But he kept running, swooped Lisa off the sand, and threw her, shrieking, over his shoulder. Then he sprinted down the surf line with her hair hanging down and her body bouncing.
I skimmed stones and tried to act as if it didn’t bother me, but it did. Something unspoken caught like a stone in my throat. Geez, I can’t believe this was happening to me again. I thought I’d grown out of this since last year. Jealousy was an ax to my ego, and it cut me in half. Lisa was the one and only girl I’ve ever felt this way about, and I didn’t know what to do about it.
The hurt receded for a while as we all sat around eating the salmon Roger and Willie had caught. Like last year on the Green River, Wild Man Willie was the camp cook. But because of our kayaks, we had to travel light here, so he had no Dutch oven and multi-burner stand-up camp stove to work his wonders. What he did have was fresh-caught fish and a driftwood fire to cook it over. As Willie said, “Outta the sea and into the pan!”
“Yes!” Roger said. “Nothin’ seasons fish like sea salt and hard fun!”
“Everything tastes good in the outback of nowhere,” Dad said.
“This isn’t nowhere, man,” Roger said. “This is the middle of paradise!”
Lisa leaned against a huge weathered drift log beside me and let her bare shoulder, still warm from the sun, brush against mine. I swear, my heart glowed.
Dusk comes late in the northern summer, and the fire had died to coals by the time the sun simmered in the sea. Lisa wiggled her toes in the still warm sand and turned to me.
“Let’s go skinny-dipping, Aaron!” she said, her eyes shining like wet agates.
My heart did cartwheels and my mouth dropped open.
“Just kidding!” she said, and jabbed me with a sharp elbow.
That night I dreamed I was giving Lisa a piggyback ride through the surf. It was so real that I was sure it was happening, and yet I couldn’t believe it was happening. It was too good to be true.
But later I had a whole other kind of dream.
The bad kind. A nightmare.
I was alone in our kayak, lost in the fog, when a large fishing boat, shrouded in mist, came into sight. It was coming around the tip of an island. I glanced around, looking for my dad, for Roger and Lisa and the rest, but they were nowhere in sight. Then the boat was about a hundred yards away and slowly turning toward me. And standing in the bow was the man in the yellow sunglasses.
He was looking down the barrel of a rifle, aiming right between my eyes.
I woke to the sound of a wolf howling somewhere in the distance. My skin crawled like it was swarming with baby jellyfish.
In the morning, the dreams were still with me. Conflicting dreams. One good, the other bad.
But I had no time to unravel the two dreams from each other. It was time to get up, gather driftwood for the fire, eat breakfast, scrub plates and cups, roll up the sleeping bags, take down the tent. In other words, break camp and load the kayaks. Our daily ritual.
It was weird, seeing Lisa in the morning. Almost bumping into her while shoveling beans onto our plate. It’s always weird seeing someone you just dreamt about. Embarrassing, somehow.
And while I ate, I kept looking out toward the point, listening for the sound of a fishing boat (which, in my nightmare, had become a gunboat, of sorts).
Rags of mist hung in the trees around the cove as we pushed off with the ebbing tide. Bald eagles adorned the high branches like Christmas ornaments, and ravens flapped and cackled over a dead beached salmon. Just as the sun broke through the fog, an eagle swooped down and snatched the prize, scattering the ravens like tattered black umbrellas in a storm.
The day was long and hard, but never boring. We paddled by a family of sea otters—who followed us for an hour—and watched for whales and dolphins. I kept an eye out for the fishing boat from yesterday—the one in my dream—and thought about smugglers.
Suddenly Roger shouted, “Orcas!”
At first I couldn’t see them. We drifted close together and shaded our eyes.
“They’re deep diving,” Roger said. “They’ll be back up in a few minutes.”
“Killer whales!” I said, feeling fear and awe at the same time.
“Some call ’em sea wolves,” Willie said, “because they attack like a pack of wolves, surrounding schools of salmon or separating out sea lions and even whales, and workin’ together. A pack can attack and skin a blue whale alive.”
I was fascinated but creeped out at the same time.
“One time on the coast of Alaska,” Willie said, “I saw killer whales flinging sea lions like mice. They turned the water bloodred.”
“Sick!” said Cassidy.
“Ugh,” said Lisa.
“Yeah,” said Roger. “They can slither right up onto a beach, snatch a sea lion or harbor seal, and wiggle back into the surf.”
“Do they ever attack kayakers?” I asked, trying not to sound nervous.
“I’ve never heard of one attacking a kayaker,” said Roger
“Well, kayakers have gone missing,” Willie said, dipping his big flappy hat into the cold water and flopping it back on his head. “Nobody knows if they were attacked by orcas or not.”
Just then the pod of orcas surfaced, breached, and breathed in unison—great spouts bursting in the sun. They were maybe a hundred yards away, rolling straight toward us, their tall, sharp dorsal fins cutting through the waves.
Will they capsize us? I wondered. Would they eat us like harbor seals?
The orcas were maybe fifty yards away now. Forty. Thirty. Twenty yards. Ten!
The whales swam right between our kayaks, their dorsal fins slicing the surface! Shiny black-and-white monsters of the sea, beautiful and terrifying, speeding smoothly and unstoppable right through us. Their huge wakes rocked us, almost capsizing our kayaks.
Suddenly something bumped our kayak and I let out a yell. I was sure this was the end: Dinner for a sea wolf.
Our boat slammed down, and there between our kayaks rose a column of bubbles, followed by something huge and dark.
Getting closer and closer.
