Surviving Bear Island by Paul Greci Read Free Book Online Page A

in deer cabbage—those ankle-high, heart-shaped leaves about as big as your fist.
    Dad loved to kick around in muskegs. He’d shown me the tiny red sundew plants that ate insects, and said if we’d been out here a month earlier we’d have seen all kinds of flowers. And the ponds that dotted the muskegs, some of them covered with green lily pads the size of Frisbees. He talked more on this trip than he had the past three years combined. Not that my dad was ever much of a talker, but Mom could get him to talk. It’s like she had some secret key that unlocked him, and when she died that key went with her until he came back out here.
    But now. I shook my head. I stared at the blanket of deer cabbage until it turned a blurry green. My jaw felt heavy, like there was a twenty-pound weight attached to my chin. Where was he?
    On the edge of the muskeg, I found some blueberries. I ate and ate. Handful after handful of blueberries. Bush to hand to mouth to body.
    And my thoughts raced. I wanted fish. I needed fish. I’d get back to the coast on the other side of the cliffs and find a salmon stream and figure out how to catch them. That’s where my dad would go, where the fish were. I wished I had a map.
    In a kayak if you wanted to get to the end of Bear Island you followed the shore and paddled. But traveling on foot—there were lots of obstacles. Cliffs, swampy muskegs, deadfall, mountains.
    I picked more berries and put them into a Ziploc bag from one of the survival kits.
    School had to have started by now. I was registered but I was just a name on a list. Billy would call when I didn’t show, but he’d probably just leave a message and wait for me to call back. And if he came all the way out to my house, which was unlikely, he’d see the chain across the driveway and the no trespassing sign. Billy had been away most of the summer visiting his grandparents in the lower 48, so I hadn’t told him where we were going.
    As I crossed the muskeg the wet ground sucked at my boots and kicked up a smell, like boiled eggs. I worked up another sweat and my thermal underwear stuck to me like a second skin.
    On the far side of the muskeg I stopped and looked back at my soggy footprints in the blanket of deer cabbage. Trail to nowhere, that’s what my prints would look like from the sky. Like an alien had dropped down, walked across the muskeg and then lifted off.
    I was here. But here was nowhere. Stranded. My stomach burned. I pictured the worms wiggling around in there. Nowhere to go.
    I kept clawing my way up, just wanting to top this ridge and get back to the coastline. A layer of sweat covered my body, so I got chilled every time I stopped to rest or pick berries.
    Finally, I broke out of the trees. The land was still pretty steep, but without the tangles of deadfall, the walking was easier. The slope was covered with boulders—like a bag of giant marbles had been spilled from the ridge-top.
    I headed for the low point in the ridge, the way that looked easiest. The bottoms of my feet ached from walking in the thin-soled rubber boots, made more for standing in water than trekking through the mountains.
    Faint depressions in the tundra, spaced like footprints, stretched out in front of me. I turned around and noticed that the marks my boots made were similar to the depressions ahead of me. In the forest it was hard to see any kind of track unless you were right on top of it, but here, the way the land opened up I could see the fresh imprints of where someone had walked. And only one other person could’ve made those tracks in front of me. I picked up my pace and followed them. And I thought, yeah, I was right to head toward the Sentinels. Somewhere deep down, I’d knownthat’s what my dad would do too. “I’m gonna catch you Dad. Soon.”
    At the top of the ridge I stared down a steep mountainside, way steeper than the one I’d come up. The first part was