Never Say Die (9 page)

The bear went back to rending flesh and feeding on its prize. Like a dog over a bone, it paused frequently to growl at me.

The big brownie didn't seem aware that another grizzly was coming down the bank to the river. This one was big too, and battle-scarred around the shoulders. The new bear stopped to survey the situation and smell the air, then lumbered on down.

Soon as the intruder reached the riverside, the bear on the carcass rushed it. The two rose and came at each other, roaring horribly. They met standing upright in a fury of claws and teeth.

The battle raged on, up and down the shore. Both were eight feet tall and massive, but the newcomer was more aggressive and able to draw more blood. The grizzly that had been there first finally backed away from the carcass.

After skulking for a few minutes, and feinting as if it was going to rejoin the battle, the defeated bear turned its attention to the island and the two carcasses right next to me. It waded into the river and began to swim, heading my way.

I lurched to my feet. As the grizzly came ashore, I was wading into the far channel. I plunged headfirst into deep water and let the river take me again. The current swept me past the foot of the island and into the powerful water where the channels around the island became one again. I was in a panic to get out of the river but didn't see a place where I could. Down a long straightaway, I floated past eight more grizzlies on carcasses—both sides of the river—including a mother grizzly and two small cubs.

The racing river swept me around another bend. Dozens more drowned caribou appeared, all bulls, none with bears on them. Their eyes were missing, pecked out by the birds.

A gravel bar appeared ahead, on the left side, my last chance. As poorly as my limbs were responding, I didn't think I could get there, but I had to try. The fast water alongside the gravel bar swept me halfway down its length in a frightening hurry. I swam with one last effort, out of the current and into the slowing water at the foot of the gravel bar. In knee-deep water I struggled to stand, stumbled onto dry land, and collapsed.

I was content to lie there. I wasn't shaking, and the cold wasn't painful anymore.

Something was bothering my rest.
Never say die
, I heard a voice saying. The voice was my own. Then I knew. If I didn't get up now, I never would.

I tried to rise and fell down. I tried again, staggered to my feet, and lurched into motion. I had to keep moving or I had no chance. Up and down the gravel bar I stumbled, falling down and getting up and throwing my arms back and forth, stamping my feet, slapping my sides and my legs with my frozen hands. I had to keep my heart pumping.

It would be warmer, I thought, if I could get away from the ice-cold river at least a little. I crawled up the riverbank and onto a carpet of tundra. I had been in the water longer than the first time when I was under the ice. I couldn't have started a fire even if I had trees within reach, which I didn't. With my frozen fingers, stiff as claws, it was all I could manage to get my life jacket and sopping-wet clothes off.

I was in for a bloodletting. There was only a breath of wind, not enough to keep the mosquitoes down. I hurled myself into a frenzy, jogging in place and slapping the circulation back into my limbs as I swatted mosquitoes. I couldn't take this anymore.

I stifled the urge to scream. The sound of my voice, full of fear, might bring the bears.

Soon as I'd wrung as much water as I could from my clothes, I put those long sleeves and trousers back on. The mosquitoes came at my face. Lying down on a slab of rock facing the sun with my life jacket under my head and draped over my face, I gave up. I'd done what I could do. I was going to recover or not.

Like a ground squirrel coming out of stone-cold hibernation, I came gradually back to life. It was the heat of that scorching midsummer day that revived me. All done in, bears or no bears, I fell asleep on that slab of rock.

It must have been the cooling air that woke me. My clothes were dry. I was in the shade and the daylight had dimmed. My watch said 11:00 p.m.

I sat up feeling exposed, all out in the open like I was. I looked to my right and saw nothing. To my left, no more than thirty feet away, an enormous white wolf was rising to its feet. The wolf had been lying there watching me for who knows how long. Now it was sizing me up.

My hand went to my hip. On second thought I didn't draw my hunting knife. I might provoke the animal. There was nothing threatening about the wolf's body language. Behind those staring yellow eyes, its intelligence was obvious.

Many a time Jonah had seen lone wolves take down healthy, adult caribou, even bulls. Our Arctic wolves are that big and powerful. These days, we don't see them very often. When we're out on our snowmobile in search of spring bears, we might spot a wolf. I killed one once when I was with Jonah. It ran like the wind soon as it heard us. Neither of us felt proud about running it down, but we didn't pass up the chance. Their fur makes great ruffs for winter parkas, second-best only to wolverine.

To be this close to this white wolf—standing so tall on its legs, with the wind rustling its fur, its curious eyes still taking me in—kind of shook me to the core. This was the most magnificent animal I had seen in my life. I remembered Jonah saying that nobody knows why they don't hunt us when they could, like bears do once in a while, especially polar bears. Wolves won't kill you for the meat on your bones, but they'll help themselves if they come across your dead body. Why is that?

I trusted that the wolf meant me no harm, and it turned out I was right. I even spoke to the animal, and it perked up its ears and listened. I told the wolf how hungry I was, and how grateful I would be if it would bring me something to eat, only please don't swallow it first—I wasn't partial to throw-up. I really did say all of that and more. I was half out of my mind. It kept me calm, and the wolf seemed to find it of interest.

The wolf decided it had seen enough of me. It turned and trotted off. When it turned and looked at me again, I called, “Thanks for not ripping my throat out.” The wolf trotted away, this time without looking back.

On the spot I decided I would never shoot another wolf.

I
n the wake of the wolf, I went to the edge of that shelf of tundra above the river and took a look down. The river was back down to what it had been before the big rainstorm. The deluge that drowned all those caribou had flushed on through. They should have waited before trying to cross. Like Jonah always said, they're great swimmers but don't always make good choices.

And now I found myself on Ryan's side of the river, the western side. I tilted my head back and scanned the slopes above, treeless here. He wasn't up there. Ryan had said to look for him at the first obvious place for him to get down. This wasn't it—far too steep and rugged. I had to go farther downstream to find the place where he would come back to the river.

I got going, with no choice but to cross slopes that fell steeply into the river. Sometimes I had to crab-walk across tongues of loose, sliding rock in order to continue. One thing was for sure: I wasn't going to swim the river to get back to easier walking on the other side.

Midmorning the next day, the mountains finally pulled back from the river. I walked the falling spine of a ridge onto flat ground, a bright green tundra bench that sat just above the river. There was one just like it across the river from me. Here was that “first obvious place” for us to get back together.

There I waited, out in the open with my bright orange life jacket draped on top of a lone, spindly spruce. Maybe Ryan had already swum the river, like he said he was going to, to get back to “my side.” If so, he would easily spot the life jacket and me over here.

As the sun made its big circle around the sky, I gathered firewood, made a fire, and laid on lots of green branches. Might as well make sure he doesn't miss me, I figured. My smoke signals didn't reel him in. I thought of moving on but decided that would be a huge mistake. Without a doubt, this was the first obvious place.

You have to be patient
, I could hear Jonah saying, and I remembered the time we went out on the sea ice together to hunt seals the way the ancestors had, and his father still did when Jonah was young. I was only nine, still a hyper kid, but I loved hunting. Jonah had been taking me out with him since I was five.

We didn't have a dog team like my great-grandfather did to get us out onto the Beaufort Sea—we went on Jonah's snowmobile—but we did make an igloo three nights in a row. Instead of netting the seals under the ice or stalking them with a rifle from behind a white blind like we do these days, Jonah was going to try to take one at close range like it used to be done.

When we finally found a breathing hole—small and glazed over, as difficult to locate as a needle in a haystack—Jonah brought a small feather out from under his parka. He stuck it into the side of the breathing hole, then took his position. He crouched with his father's harpoon in hand, and he waited. And waited. I mean, for hours.

When the time finally came, and that feather vibrated slightly to signal the rising seal, Jonah had to be ready to strike in a split second, and he was. He struck with force and accuracy. I've always enjoyed seal meat, but that seal was the best ever.

In the times before our ancestors even had dogs, Jonah told me, and they pulled their heavy sleds under their own power, there were winters when the seals were hard to come by, and the people would starve. Sometimes they went weeks without food. They had to wait. They had to be patient.

Right now, I had to be patient and wait for my brother. If there'd been a mix-up, I was only going to make it worse by running around on the tundra looking for him.

Exhaustion pulled me down. I slept the rest of the day. Around ninety minutes after midnight I woke to the sun rising over a ridge, got my fire going again, made more smoke. I went to counting how many days it had been. I pieced it all together by how many midnights had gone by. The accident happened on Day 1. This was the beginning of Day 5. I took out my hunting knife and made five notches on its leather sheath.

I went back to sleep. By midmorning I had been waiting at “the first obvious place” for twenty-four hours. My stomach hurt from worry and hunger. I had remembered to keep drinking water but was getting weak and light-headed.

As for my brother, I was fearing the worst. He got mauled by a bear, he broke a leg, he fell off a cliff. He drowned. The mountains had swallowed him up.

Did it still make sense to stay put? No, it didn't: too much time had passed. I decided to give him until noon.

Noon arrived. If I stayed, I was going to get weaker and weaker until I wouldn't be strong enough to walk out. The coast was probably still forty or fifty miles away. Once I reached the coast, I had a chance of being spotted. Now and again, motorboats out of Shingle Point came this far west.

Once I got there, it wouldn't be a good idea to sit and wait for a boat that might happen by. Chances would be poor, before I starved out. Better to keep walking. From the mouth of the Firth, if I headed east a few miles, I would be looking at Herschel Island. The island sat only a couple of miles offshore; I'd been there once with Jonah. The whole coast of the Yukon Territory was littered with driftwood … I could start a signal fire visible from the island's historical park at the old whaling station.

Better get going, I told myself. I started downriver, keeping an eye out for the raft but with no real hope of coming across it.

Same time the next day, I put a sixth notch on my knife sheath. I hadn't eaten a thing since that one char I caught. I was making a poor showing as an aboriginal hunter.

Just ahead, the river ran fast and white as it dropped between walls of stone rising along the shore. I remembered Ryan saying that after the “mountain reach” of the Firth, the “canyon reach” began at Mile 40. That was where we would run the first major rapid, about halfway to the ocean.

At least I knew where I was, for what good it would do me.

Broad shelves of stone flanked the entrance of the canyon. I climbed the shelves on my side to their high point. Thirty feet below me, the Firth cascaded with a roar over slabs of rock heaving out of the river like whales.

I looked downriver to the tail end of the rapid and beyond. A speck of color and a bit of movement on the other side of the river caught my eye—something bright orange atop the shallow canyon. I squinted and made out a man wearing a life jacket, walking north toward the ocean. My heart leaped.

It was amazing what seeing Ryan did for my legs. Strength surged back into them, and I broke into a trot on the tundra. What was he doing on what had been “my side” of the river? Hadn't he planned to wait for me on this side? He said he was going to swim over to the east side, but wasn't that after we met up again?

I gradually closed the gap, but by the time I drew even with him across the river, he was angling away from the canyon rim. Ryan was moving slow, and he stumbled. I hollered and hollered, but over the sound of the river he didn't hear me. He disappeared behind a huge mound of rock that rose above the river.

I couldn't lose him again. One of us was going to have to swim the river—and it might as well be me.