Cassidy swore. Lisa grabbed my arm—or did I grab hers? The Sea Wolf moved slowly against the low stars. How did they know we were here?
The smoke from our fire!
They must have seen it from miles away. Luckily the fire had long been drowned by the tide, and our kayaks were drawn up into the forest, hidden from the sea.
We held still. Silent. The boat rose and fell with the swells and motored slowly down the beach.
I was about to relax when it turned around, just beyond the surf, and the spotlight slid across the sand again.
But even if they wanted to, how could they land their fishing boat in this surf?
The answer soon came. They dropped anchor—maybe two soccer fields away down the beach and about half that far out—and lowered a dinghy from their stern deck. Three men climbed into it, and one manned the oars and pointed the small boat toward shore.
It bobbed through the surf, and for a moment I thought it would capsize. But whoever handled it knew what he was doing. When they were close enough, in the backwash of the rollers, all three men managed to scramble out and splash ashore. Above them, a bone-white moon floated toward the west.
I gasped. Each man held a weapon at the ready: one a rifle, the other two spearguns. Moonlight glinted off the metal.
Proof! I thought. Proof of what I had thought all along: these were bad guys. Smugglers. My whole body clenched up. How do you breathe when it feels like life as you know it is about to end?
When life, period, is about to end?
The three men stopped halfway up the beach, then split up. One of the speargun men headed down the beach; the other two came toward us.
The two men with spearguns flicked on flashlights at the same time, walking in opposite directions. The leader gripped his rifle, sweeping it side to side, sighting through an ultraviolet scope, which would make his targets glow in the dark.
Cassidy swore again, crouching down beside me. Lisa said nothing, but I could hear her grinding her teeth.
I thought of the Swiss Army knife in my pants pocket. I thought of Lisa’s pepper spray.
And I thought about how they would do against two spearguns and a rifle.
My heart raced, but time stood still.
“We have to tell our dads!” Lisa said.
“Quiet!” Cassidy said. It was a small explosion of a whisper. “No time! And the dads were kinda expecting this. They just didn’t want to scare you. We don’t want to be in this tent when those guys find it. We have to get away or we won’t be any use to our dads. We can handle this!”
“Yeah,” I said. “We can handle this!” I didn’t want to sound scared, but I was. And angry, too. The “dads” told Cassidy that they expected this, but they didn’t tell me or Lisa.
But at the same time, I felt relieved. If they expected this, maybe they were ready for it.
Cassidy had snatched his fishing knife and crawled out. He’d been sent to juvie for smashing a man’s head with a baseball bat, so I knew he wouldn’t be afraid to use it.
But I wasn’t so sure about what good it would be against three armed pirates with murder in their hearts.
“Go go go go!” hissed Cassidy, commando-style. We burst out of the tent and followed Cassidy into the woods.
Twigs snapped underfoot like the bones of small animals.
Cassidy moved silently through the brush, low and lean. I tried to move like him. As much as his attitude often bothered me, it was good to have him on your side.
“Over here!” Willie hissed. He was crouched behind a thick old cedar. “I was about to come and warn you. Follow me!”
We stepped like deer through the windfall branches, carefully, carefully. A light beam bounced down along the beach, not fifty yards away. It rippled through the trees, and we froze in our tracks.
My heart pounded, echoing the pounding of the sea. My intestines twisted into a tangle of kelp. I held my breath.
We all held our breath.
Then the beam advanced along the beach, away, and we all breathed out in unison.
A little deeper into the trees, we linked up with Roger and my dad (I was almost embarrassed at how glad I was to see him), and together we continued on toward the interior of the island.
Cassidy stopped for a moment and turned around, raising his fishing knife, like the thin blade of moonlight sliding through the trees. “If they get too close, I know what to do with this knife!”
I winced at the thought of it. Mr. Macho Man. But at the same time I felt glad again that he was right beside me, and not against me. We needed everything going for us to get out of this in one piece.
Or we’d get out of this in several pieces.
We all hid inside the burnt-out base of a giant red cedar and sunk into ourselves, into our shells, as quiet as turtles. No one spoke. We just listened.
The sound of the surf, muffled by trees. The sound of our breathing.
Barely.
Lisa was pressed against my side, but my mind hardly registered it. It, too, had dwindled down to a pinpoint of fear. A pearl of terror.
The tentacle of time stretched slowly around our throats, and squeezed.
But nobody came. No light burst into our little womb in the tree. Our cedar cave. No gun blasted the night wide open.
After an hour, or three, we crept back out, through the trees and to the edge of the beach.
The Sea Wolf was gone.
The moon shone down.
“‘A vast radiant beach, and a cool jeweled moon,’” Dad said.
“Shakespeare?” Willie looked at the moon.
“Jim Morrison,” said Dad. “The Doors.”
“Dad and his ‘golden oldies.’” I rolled my eyes. Dad was always quoting rhymes from dead singers or poets.
We were exhausted from lack of sleep, but Willie wanted to embark at dawn. “We have to get out of here,” he said. “The crew of the Sea Wolf coming after us with weapons is proof that they’re smugglers, or at least up to no good. They’ll be back.”
There it was. All spelled out. My thoughts exactly!
Willie’s plan was to start early and head south along the coast of Goose Island and to round the southern tip before the wind picked up. This would be our one run in unprotected ocean, and once we rounded the southern tip, the beginning of our return northeast, back toward Bella Bella.
We all pitched in and did what Willie told us: we gathered dry wood with no cones or needles attached for Willie to make a smokeless fire.
Dad and I stooped down and grabbed the same chunk of driftwood at the same time. We held each end in a tense silence. We looked into each other’s eyes and it was as if I transmitted my feelings of betrayal to him for trusting Cassidy with the truth and not me. I could see in his eyes that Dad knew he had hurt me, but also that he didn’t know what to do about it.
Dad let go and I brought the wood to the fire Willie had started. He put the kettle on.
When it was ready, we drank hot coffee and waited for the sun to rise.
“Man!” said Cassidy, breaking the silence. “That was pretty sick, playing commandos versus smugglers.”
“It’s no game,” Dad said. “They’re dead serious.”
“Well, mate,” said Roger, “you could call it a game of cat and mouse.”
“I’d rather be a cat than a mouse,” said Lisa.
Dawn rose out of the east. Soon it was time to break camp and get underway.
Just before we set off, Roger found a green glass ball washed up on the beach. He said it had come from a Japanese fishing boat that had lost its net or capsized in a storm at sea. The glass ball was beautiful, in an antique sort of way, but it struck me as a bad omen.
Probably because I couldn’t get the image of a capsized Japanese fishing boat out of my head.
Just as the sun pierced the clouds to the east, we set off through the breakers and paddled out—in the direction of Japan—then turned south. Dad and I were almost perfectly synchronized. I’d learned to twist my torso with each stroke, bracing my legs against the hull and my feet against the bottom, putting my whole body into it, rather than putting all the strain on my arms and shoulders.
At first the sea was relatively calm, but the wind picked up early, and soon we were riding the deep swells of the open Pacific Ocean. It was an awesome feeling, slowly rising and sinking, on the rising and falling chest of the ocean.
Within the hour we were hit by offshore boomers—waves breaking unexpectedly far out at sea. With the waves towering over us, we almost lost each other in the valleys between swells. We’d rise to the crest, shout and wave and get our bearings, then slide back down to the bottom.
WHAM! We were slammed by a gray wall of water.
Then we rose up and careened down the face of a big roller, rose up again, and slid back down another white-crested mountain of thunder. My stomach rose to my mouth as we plummeted down yet another wave.
At the top of the next peak, Roger pointed toward shore.
“Head further in!” he shouted.
His words were snatched away by the next crashing wave—and within seconds . . .
. . . Dad and I were flipping over.
We were capsizing!
