I stepped over the fallen skull, and, still shocked, stared up into the carved face of a killer whale. A weathered, ancient mortuary totem leaned toward me from the trees. Along with Killer Whale, Bear and Raven stared out at me, eaten by salt and wind and time. Just like the totems I’d seen in Lisa’s book.
I scrambled over slippery rocks toward her, and got there just before Roger. He knelt and felt her neck.
“She’s alive!” Roger said. “Help me here!”
Lisa’s alive! I thought. I looked back at the carved face of the killer whale, and I remembered what she’d said last night about killer whales saving people from drowning.
Thanks, Killer Whale! I said to myself, feeling mystically foolish.
Roger was still kneeling over her, gently feeling her neck and scalp. She was limp, unconscious. Her face white, drained of blood. The icy cold water lapped up against her.
Her blue shorts were wet, and so were one arm, half her tank top, and most of her hair.
Crows bounced around back in the shadows.
“She’s out. I can’t seem to wake her,” Roger said. “We have to get her back to camp. There’s a big knot on her head, but there’s no blood, and I don’t think anything’s broken. What I’m worried about is hypothermia. We have to get her back to a fire and a warm sleeping bag. Now! Or we could lose her.”
Lose her? Tears seared my eyes, but I forced them back. Tears wouldn’t help. Panic wouldn’t help. She needed action. I lifted Lisa while Roger cradled her head and back, keeping her spine as straight as possible.
We had no choice but to seat her in the forward cockpit of Roger’s reclaimed kayak. He carefully wrestled her into a Gortex raincoat, then adjusted her life jacket so it rode up in back and supported her head. He secured her by stuffing half-filled dry bags from the rear and forward hatches all around her in the cockpit.
Then he kissed her on her forehead and said, “You’ll be all right, sweetheart.” She looked like she was sleeping.
Roger settled into the rear cockpit and I tied the kayak Roger had borrowed to the back of it, and shoved them off. Then I climbed in mine, shoved off, and paddled out of the hidden cove.
Roger had made compass bearings, and though we’d paddled much of the day looking for Lisa, our camp was probably only about a mile away as the crow flies.
Along the gray horizon to the west spread a thin stain, the color of blood.
It was almost total dark by the time Dad, Willie, and Cassidy met us in the cove. Lisa was still out cold, and Willie—built like a barge—squatted down, lifted her dead weight out of the kayak, and carried her up to the fire.
Roger ran to his tent and came back with their sleeping bags.
“I’ll have to warm her up with my body heat so she doesn’t go into hypothermia,” Roger said, zipping their bags together. “If she wakes up, I’ll move her back to the tent.” Deep lines I’d never noticed before creased his face.
Above us the stars came out, one by one, as if from hiding. The waxing moon was well up, hogging their space. The fire crackled and the waves lapped. Willie helped Roger get Lisa into the zipped together bags, then Roger slid in beside her.
Cassidy and Dad gathered driftwood, built a big fire, and helped start dinner boiling in pots on a blackened grill. Willie rigged up a lean-to to keep the heat in.
When it was ready, I helped myself to some soup, but put it down in the sand beside me.
Roger waved away the steaming bowl that Dad held out. He jostled Lisa’s arm gently and said, “Wake up, Lisa. It’s Dad. Can you hear me?”
I was starving but my stomach had seized up, hard as a skillet.
Finally I picked up the bowl again and sipped some soup. Roger kept cooing to Lisa, “You’ll be okay, sweetheart, you’ll be okay.”
But would she?
How does Roger know she didn’t get water in her lungs? How does he know that she isn’t in a coma, dying from hypothermia?
Why doesn’t she wake up?
I remembered my dad last year in Desolation Canyon. Unconscious. Dehydrated. With a gash like a second mouth in his forehead. Now here’s Lisa, unconscious with a big knot on her forehead, right at the hairline.
After eating as much as I could, I decided to sleep near the fire, too. I unrolled my sleeping bag and climbed in.
Worry over Lisa kept me awake for a long time. Until sleep, like an ebbing tide, finally took me away.
Lisa woke in the middle of the night, moaning, and it woke me up.
You cannot guess how relieved I was!
No coma. Conscious enough to moan. Not dying. Not dead.
Willie was still tending the fire. Roger said to him, “Take a break, Willie.”
Willie crawled into his tent, next to the one where I could hear Cassidy snoring. I brought Roger a bottle of water for Lisa, and offered to help him move her into their tent. He made a tired grin and said, “I got this. We’ll go in when she’s ready. She’s tough, so it shouldn’t be long.”
I decided to stay out by the fire, and didn’t hear them get up during the night.
I drifted between islands of sleep. Sleep filled with fears—all jumbled together in a chowder of dreams.
In the morning, Lisa and Roger crawled out of their tent and joined the rest of us (minus Cassidy, who was still asleep) at the morning fire. She had bags beneath her eyes, but otherwise she was almost like new!
I asked her what happened, but Roger jumped in and said, “She left me a note but I didn’t see it!”
“I left it right on his pillow!” said Lisa, rolling her eyes.
“It got stuck down in my sleeping back somehow.” Roger shrugged.
“Sorry you all had to come after me,” said Lisa, her face turning red. “Probably wasn’t the smartest thing I ever did.”
“So what did the note say,” I asked her, not totally satisfied with her story.
She didn’t answer at first. Then she got up and said, “Let’s go for a walk.”
I followed her to a sunny spot on the edge of the beach, and sat down beside her in the sand.
“It’s embarrassing,” she said. “My note said I woke up before sunrise and couldn’t get back to sleep. That I was going to explore one of the nearby islands I’d read about, look for totem poles. That I’d be back by noon. We were supposed to hang out all day anyway, remember? Willie said we would head for the open channel after sunset. So I figured I had plenty of time. Didn’t figure I’d slip and knock myself out.” Lisa rubbed her forehead. “Stupid, I know.”
“Yeah, totally stupid,” I said. “You scared the crap out of us!”
In a flash, Lisa’s expression shifted from embarrassed to irritated. “Look, Dad already scolded me, so I really don’t need to hear it from you. I’ve been kayaking for years—I know what I’m doing. I didn’t want to wake anybody up. And I needed some space. I wanted be on my own for the first time on this trip. I knew you and Cassidy would make fun of me if I brought you along—for geeking out about the totem poles and stuff.”
“I wouldn’t have made fun of you,” I told her. “I think totem poles are really cool.”
Lisa beamed. That’s all the forgiveness she needed to launch into telling me all about it. “It was totally awesome, Aaron! Paddling over to the burial island, by myself, in the early morning light. So peaceful. And when I got there it was so cool, checking out the totem poles, seeing in person what I’d been reading about. It was amazing! I totally lost track of time! So when I realized how late it was, I ran back to my kayak and the tide had started to come in by then, and I slipped. Must have banged my head. I don’t remember anything after that.”
“You’re lucky you didn’t drown when the tide came in!” I said. “And you’re lucky you rolled over on your back, or your head would’ve been down in the water!”
Lisa just rolled her eyes at me and jumped up. “I’m hungry,” she said, and started back toward the campfire.
When I got back to camp, Lisa was leaning against the log wrapped in her sleeping bag again. I poured her a cup of hot cocoa and held it out to her.
She looked at me for a moment, then took the cup from my hands. “Thanks,” she said, and gave me a smile that flew right through me, like a laughing loon.
I went and got myself some hot cocoa, then came back and sat beside her.
“Thanks for finding me, Aaron.” She rubbed the bump on her head, now buried in a mess of hair as shiny and black as a raven’s feathers. I wished Dad had heard her say it, but he was off fiddling with our kayak.
My heart swelled with pride anyway. “Better thank your dad and . . . and Cassidy, too,” I said.
“Cassidy?” she blurted. Then she lowered her voice. “Cassidy is the main reason I wanted to be on my own in the first place! He was bugging me to go swimming with him the other night, and I didn’t want to. He was a jerk!”
A kingfisher darted by, on a date with a fish.
I was about to feel all bent out of shape about Cassidy when, right on cue, he crawled out of his tent and said, “Did I hear my name?”
“Yeah,” said Lisa. “I said you’re a jerk. Drop dead.”
“Ouch!” He clutched his chest and mock died, collapsing to the ground. He lay there, sprawled out, dead.
Then he sprung up and walked on his hands, which isn’t easy on uneven ground all littered with branches. And he turned that into a back spring and landed back on his feet. “Boom!”
Lisa couldn’t help but laugh. And though I felt that usual bee sting of jealousy, I had to laugh, too, which only made it worse.
Now that Lisa had gone exploring on a burial island, I wanted to go, too. But Willie said we’d have to hide out from the Sea Wolf all day, then paddle north up Hunter Channel, under cover of dusk, and find another hidden cove.
Meanwhile, it was a rest day. A day to kick back, chill, and maybe even have some fun.
We munched gorp, read our books, and played cards, but the Sea Wolf was always on our minds.
I jotted a few things in my journal—a habit that had begun last year in Desolation Canyon. But I stopped when I saw Cassidy watching me.
He’s not a bad guy, I kept reminding myself. He’d certainly proven that last year. As the saying goes, “you can’t tell a book by its cover.” I’d learned that last year, too. But he doesn’t make it easy. Not for me, and not for Lisa. At least this year he was a little easier on my dad.
A little.
When it wasn’t Dad’s turn to stand lookout, he and I went fishing in the cove from our kayak. We didn’t speak much and just enjoyed the glitter of the sun on the wavelets, and the shadows of eagles sliding over us, and the distant boom of the surf.
And after half an hour I hooked a big, long lingcod, which felt as heavy as a boot filled with mud. In fact, I was sure a boot is what I’d hooked, until I finally pulled it up, and the cod hung there above the water, as long as my arm.
It hadn’t put up much of a fight, but it was still a struggle to haul in. Dad said it would make a fine dinner for all of us. But it wasn’t much praise for such a big fish.
Lisa said, “Sweet!” when she eyed the big cod I’d caught. But we’d have to wait to eat it. Willie didn’t want any fires. He didn’t want to draw attention to our little camp on the island.
To keep it alive, I left the lingcod on the stringer and tied it off to the back of our kayak, where it dangled in the shallows slowly swishing its tail and working its gills.
Cassidy said, “Hey! Let’s play football!” and grabbed at Lisa. She spun away and almost stifled a laugh, but said, “Let’s not but say we did.”
I don’t know what he had in mind to use for a football, anyway. Maybe my head. Or a skull from the burial island.
I tried to clear my mind of such morbid thoughts. But it wasn’t easy. The Sea Wolf was out there, and it wasn’t going to let us forget.
We broke camp, loaded the kayaks, and set out just as the sun dropped off the edge of the world.
As darkness descended, we heard the scream of an eagle . . .
. . . and the distant roar of a motor.