The Skeleton Tree (24 page)

I hold Thursday even tighter. His wings feel brittle and dry, like old, dead plants. I start trembling.

“I'll build up the fire,” says Frank. “You'll be warm in a minute.” But I don't want to go back to the cabin. Frank helps me all the way to the skeleton tree, and beyond it to the rocky point. There we wait for dawn. I cradle Thursday in my hands.

It's early morning when I carry him to the skeleton tree. Frank has offered to help, but I want to do this by myself, even though the bear's teeth have left four punctures in my ankle, and my foot feels as though it's on fire.

With Thursday in the crook of my arm, I climb the heap of plastic that Frank gathered for a beacon. I work my way into the branches of the tree, climbing among the skeletons. I'm not sure the branches will hold me. I'm afraid of them breaking, afraid of falling to the ground, with the bones rattling down on top of me. I can't put weight on my foot without crying out in pain.

The raven feels empty, a hollow bundle of feathers. Along with the light in his eyes, he has lost whatever it was that made him a creature, a little character that could feel love and jealousy. I want to reward him the only way I can, by placing his body in the highest box, in the little coffin, where he can lie nearest to the sky, in the sun and the wind that he loved so much.

I step up from branch to branch, wincing when my wounded ankle takes all of my weight. I climb past the coffins, and for the first time I look down and see the skeletons stretched out inside them. The bones are all separated, but still in order. One more step, and I'm near the top. I peer into the little coffin and see the skull of a child looking back at me. Behind it, in the shadowed corner of the wooden box, things have been tucked away.

I think at first that they must be offerings to the child, maybe favorite toys or pretty shells. But I can't make sense of their shapes. With Thursday in my arm, I have only one hand free to reach inside.

I stare into the coffin, surprised by the things I discover.

Here's the little whistle that Thursday had found so appealing. Here's the flare Frank and I could never find. Here's a coin and a key that must have belonged to the cabin guy. And here's the body of the other raven, the marks of the wire still pressed into its body. So this is where Thursday nested. Maybe the two of them together. Warm and dry under the little roof of the coffin lid, they had watched over the bones.

I imagine Thursday had stashed the watch here as well. He hadn't plucked it from the dead man's hand to give to me. He'd chosen it just for me from all the little things he'd stolen from the cabin guy. I can see that man now, shouting with rage as his belongings disappeared one by one.

I feel foolish and sad. So much for the mysterious shifting bones and the scratchings from the coffins. All along, it had been Thursday. This is where he'd come every night, to be the caretaker of the dead, the watchman of the skeletons.

As I slide his body into this place where it belongs, I see one more thing in the box. I have to stretch to reach it.

When I see what I've found, my hand begins to shake. Still sealed in a ziplock bag is a battery for the radio.

Will it work? That seems almost too much to hope for. But I remember Frank with the child's purse, his hope for a cell phone.
“Those batteries can last forever if they're charged.”
Is this my last gift from Thursday?

I place him gently in the coffin. I return all his things, keeping only the battery and the flare, and arrange the skull as I'd found it. I climb down the tree.

In the deep shadows of the other coffins I see twigs and moss and bits of bark, all stowed away by Thursday. But I don't reach in among the bones. I'm guarding the battery in my fist as though it's made of crystal.

Frank is in the cabin. He's crouching on the floor, rearranging the stones in the fire circle. I reach over his shoulder and dangle the battery in front of his face.

He leans back to see it more clearly. Then his hands shoot out to snatch it from me. “Where did you get this?” he asks. But already he's getting to his feet. He grabs the radio from the shelf and fits the battery into place. His hands shake, and the pieces rattle, but he gets it all closed up. Then he turns it over in his hand, reaches for the dial and…

And suddenly he's just staring at me with a stunned expression.

The knob is gone.

Of course it is; we'd forgotten that. It flew off when Frank hurled the radio down in his first fit of temper. I'm afraid he's going to do it again, he looks so frustrated.

“Give it to me,” I say. My fingers are smaller than his. I'm sure I can turn the little stub that remains. Then I remember Thursday playing with bits of glass, bringing me the dial from under the bed. Where did I put it? I scan the cabin. The window!

The dial is still stuck in the boards where I jammed it in place a month ago. I pull it away and jam it onto the stub. I switch the radio on.

There's a click. There's a hum. Lights flash, glowing red and orange.

I press the transmit button.

“Mayday,” I say. “Mayday. Mayday.”

Nothing happens.

“Mayday, Mayday, Mayday!” I shout.

No sound from the radio.
It's ruined,
I think. Frank broke more than just the knob when he threw the thing. I glare at him.

“Let go of the button,” he says.

You can't talk and listen at the same time. I remember Uncle Jack telling me that. You can either transmit or receive, but you can't do both.

I take my thumb from the button. Right away, a woman's voice leaps from the speaker. “Coast Guard radio, Anchorage. Over.”

I grin at Franklin; he grins at me, and it's just like our first day in the cabin. I press the button and babble into the radio, “We were on a sailboat and it sank, and now we're in a cabin but I don't know where we are. We need help. My name's Chris. I'm here with my brother.”

For many years I lived in Prince Rupert, a small city on the northern coast of British Columbia. From the hilltop house where I looked after a radio-transmitter station, I could see the mountains of Alaska in the distance, capped white all year with snow.

I spent my summers sailing, with my wife, Kristin, and a little dog called Skipper. At three knots, or less than five miles an hour, we traveled through southern Alaska and northern BC.

The coast was surprisingly wild. Within miles of the city, cell phone service disappeared. The VHF radio became useless in the high-sided fjords. We went days without seeing another person. But animals were everywhere, and they had no fear of us. We watched wolves lope across meadows and roll on sandy beaches. We laughed at ravens playing with the wind at the tops of tall trees, and traded sounds back and forth as they mimicked the ringing clang of our metal cups. We saw killer whales hunting, and dolphins leaping, and sea otters floating hand in hand.

That world of mine became the world of Chris and Frank. Like them, we drank from ice-cold streams, ate fish pulled straight from the sea and gathered grass and berries. It seemed idyllic in the daytime. But at night, when the sky filled with stars and the land disappeared, it could feel heartbreakingly lonesome.

One day, all alone, I anchored off an island where a Wildman was said to live, a savage, hairy giant. I rowed a line to shore and tied it to a tree to keep the boat from swinging. Then I barbecued a salmon and sat to watch the sun go down. Until then, I hadn't given a thought to the Wildman. But as shadows darkened around me, as the trees loomed closer in the darkness, I remembered the gruesome stories of people torn apart. When I heard things moving in the forest, I fled to the boat. From there I couldn't see the land at all. The shoreline stretched away into blackness. But every time the boat lurched in the currents, every time it tugged at the line, I imagined the Wildman clutching that rope and pulling the boat hand over hand toward shore.

It doesn't matter if the things that come in the night are mostly in our minds. The ones we create on our own are maybe the most frightening of all.

I was afraid of the bears.

Skipper had a special sound she made when she sighted one. She was just a tiny lapdog, but the awful growl that came from deep inside her gave me gooseflesh. I would turn to look where she was looking, and I would see a bear plodding along the beach or stepping out from the forest edge.

There was no real danger. We never had trouble with bears in all the years we spent in that part of the coast now known as the Great Bear Rainforest. The one time we ever met a grizzly, little Skipper chased it off.

As Chris says in this story, the world is not really all that empty. Here and there we came across campsites and shelters, even little cabins like the one the boys discover. Most seemed sad and forgotten, but one had an eerie wildness about it, and I couldn't shake the feeling that something terrible had happened there. I could never find that place again. I remember only that it's somewhere in Alaska, and it was very much in my mind as I wrote this story. That part is true.

So is the skeleton tree.

Everywhere we went along the coast, we kept finding signs of ancient people. Huge hollows in the forest showed where their houses had been. Strange patterns of stones on the shore marked their old fish traps and clam gardens. Enormous cedar trees, maybe two thousand years old, were still scarred from the harvesting of planks and bark. It was as though the people had gone but the land remembered them.

We saw the burial tree on one of our early voyages. It was a gnarled old thing with tangled branches, growing on a little island in a big harbor. It held three or four coffins of different sizes, their cedar boards split and silvered by the sun, their corners blackened by rot and lichen. The highest one was very small.

According to the American author Charles Hallock, tree burials were once common in Alaska. He wrote about them, rather flippantly, in a book called
Our New Alaska, Or, The Seward Purchase Vindicated:
“Tree-burial is more in vogue in the interior than on the coast, a dry goods box, shoe box, or even a cask obtained from some trader, being a good enough coffin for the defunct remains.”

The website North American Nations (
nanations.com
) says burial trees, or scaffolds for the dead, were used throughout America. On the coast, important people were sometimes laid to rest in whole canoes mounted high among the branches.

There cannot be many of those burial trees left standing. On the West Coast, trees live a long time, but none lives forever. I feel fortunate to have seen one.

If stories were people,
The Skeleton Tree
would be Oliver Twist. Off to a bad start, it got a couple of whippings along the way, but turned out all right in the end. At least,
I
think it did. I'm very pleased with this story, and thankful to everyone who helped it along. Especially, I'd like to thank Kate Sullivan, senior editor at Delacorte Press. She's my Mr. Brownlow, the man who found an ailing Oliver and set him on the right path. But I'm grateful to many others as well: my agents, Danielle Egan-Miller and Joanna MacKenzie; Françoise Bui, my editor for many years; Kathleen Larkin of the Prince Rupert Library; Dr. Thomas Uhlig of Twin Cedars Veterinary Service; Beverly Horowitz and everyone else at Delacorte; my partner, Kristin Miller; my friends Bruce Wishart, Sheila Brooke, Darlene Mace and Joelle Anthony; my sister, Alysoun Wells; and everyone else who may have helped without knowing it, just by answering my many questions. Thank you, all of you.