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.