Wild Man Island (8 page)

I
AWOKE TO A WILD WIND SWAYING
the branches that shielded the alcove. My watch said it was four in the morning. I looked around for the dog, but he was gone. I hadn't thought to pull the drawbridge up.

Get out of here, I told myself. Now, while you still can. Anyone who would live like this, you don't want to meet up close. Some variety of crazy. Get up, get going, find some real help, get home.

I snatched up one of his hide bags and stocked it with food, enough for a week if I made it last.

I was about to go when something caught my attention. The low morning light, through a sudden break in the clouds, was shining into the alcove at an angle that bounced it off the ceiling and lit some kind of pattern on the back wall.

My eyes were drawn to a pair of finger-length curves. Man-made carvings? In a flash of recognition I saw tusks on a mammoth, a woolly mammoth standing on its hind legs. I stepped closer, astounded, only to make out hunters surrounding the mammoth, hunters with spears. My hand reached out and touched. What an exquisite sculpture, all in relief, in limestone. All polished, all perfect.

I took a step back and realized there was more,
much more: saber-toothed cats, giant bison and bears, ground sloths…it went on and on.

Another step back, and I could see that all the figures were carved within a much larger pattern…a map of the Americas, but noticeably different from our modern map.

I looked closely at Alaska, high above me on the wall, almost at the ceiling. Alaska was still connected to Asia.

Then I knew. This map was of the Americas during the Ice Age, when sea level was down, way down, and Alaska was connected by land to Siberia. I was looking at the famous land bridge! Walking large across that bridge was a band of hunters: men with spears, women with tumplines across their foreheads connected to baskets on their backs, the head of a baby sticking out of one of the baskets. I could see in a flash that these were the Clovis people, named after the first discovery of their spearpoints near Clovis, New Mexico.

The figures on the land bridge were heading for a deep furrow in the smooth limestone—the famous corridor through the ice sheet, the corridor that led south through interior Canada. As they emerged from the ice, in the heart of what is now the United States, that's where the hunters were attacking the mammoth.

True enough, I thought, but that's not the whole story. It's a shame that all the archeology buffs, like the crazy Michelangelo who made this, are so stuck on the land bridge. It's all that they know.

The more I looked, the more I saw. Here was the Mississippi River, the Missouri, the Colorado…. There
was the Grand Canyon, and there were the mountain ranges: the Appalachians, the Rocky Mountains, the Sierras. Incredible.

My eyes scanned farther south, and I recognized the pyramids of the Aztecs and the Maya, a city on a mountain in South America that had to be Incan. Maybe it was Machu Picchu.

The light on the mural was dimming as clouds raced over the sun. I heard a rustle, like the sound of wings, close by in the alcove. I turned, expecting to see a bird. What I found was a giant of a man standing right next to me, little more than an arm's length away.

I was so startled I could have dropped dead. I was looking up and into the cold eyes of the wild man himself. The scar running from forehead to cheekbone was fierce enough, but not as terrifying as his eyes, staring and pale and bloodshot. “What are you doing here?” he demanded.

His voice was gravelly and powerful. It reverberated like a mountain storm, like thunder. I reeled backward, barely keeping my feet.

“Your dog…” I began. I was in shock. I hadn't heard him approaching, not at all.

The wild man was trembling, a mountain about to explode. I looked away; his raven was hopping around the hearth picking up bits of food I had dropped. “Your dog led me here,” I managed to say.

In his bark clothes and cone-shaped hat, the wild man towered over me. With his long gray hair and beard, his sheer size and musky animal smell, he was a
nightmare up close. His hands were as big as hams, and his forearms were like fenceposts. Even his face was muscled, taut and tense as a pulled bowstring. He dismissed my answer without a word; it was all in the lift of his bristling black eyebrows and the suspicion in his pale blue eyes.

“Really,” I insisted. “I think it was because I had your spear. Your dog recognized the spear. But when you weren't here, he left.”

The wild man wasn't listening. Those eyes were staring at me with an mix of confusion, disbelief, and hostility. They went to the spear at the hearth, the one he'd left for me at the cannery. “Nobody has ever found this place before,” he said slowly. “Nobody.”

“I'm sorry,” I began. He raised his huge mitt of a hand, flecked with small scars, and cut me off.

“How long?” the wild man demanded. His hoarse voice hit me like a club.

“How long what?”

“Since the dog was here.”

“Only a few hours, I guess.”

The wild man didn't say another word. He snatched up his spear and started toward the drawbridge.

I was thinking I'd give him five minutes, then I'd clear out. This guy was beyond spooky. I was relieved he hadn't mentioned the bag over my shoulder or looked into it.

As he was leaving, he grabbed the rope that controlled the drawbridge. He walked across the drawbridge with the rope in his hand. At the far side, he started pulling on it.

The drawbridge started going up; it could be operated from either side. He was cutting me off, trapping me in the alcove!

I ran to the edge. The drawbridge was already high above me, and the wild man was securing the rope to the tree that grew from the other side. He was also tying off the rope I had used to swing into the alcove. I yelled, “Hey! What do you think you're doing?”

He looked at me, said nothing. He wasn't going to waste the words.

The raven flew to his shoulder, settled its wings, and squawked at me. With that the wild man turned his back and started down the ledges toward the creek.

“Hey!” I yelled after him. “You can't do this!”

I heard nothing in return. I didn't shout again. I had to think. I had to figure out what was going on.

“Nobody has ever found this place before”—that's what he had said. What he meant was, he had a big, big problem now, and it was me.

The man had to be a fugitive, a very successful fugitive for a long time. He must have committed some awful crime. I should have taken that possibility more seriously. I'd turned his world upside down.

First, he was going to tend to his dog. Then he was going to deal with me.

How could he solve his problem, when
I
was the problem? If he pushed me off the cliff, or used one of his weapons on me, who would ever know?

No one. No one even knew I was on this island.

He was as cornered as I was. He was going to have
to do something about me. Waiting for him to come back would be suicide.

I judged the leap it would take to reach the ledge on the other side. It just wasn't possible.

I was frantic to get out of there. I leaned over the cliff looking for a way down. There were hardly any handholds, and it was a sickeningly far drop.

Tear his table apart and make a gangplank? The boards weren't long enough, not nearly. Shinny down the trees that shielded the alcove? Impossible. The last forty feet there weren't any branches, and the trunks were too big around to hang on to.

What about
climbing?
I thought desperately. I could climb to the limb that the drawbridge was suspended from. It might be possible to belly past the drawbridge and out onto the skinny end of the limb where it rested against the top branches of the tree on the other side.

I eyeballed it again. It was way risky, not a bit like climbing the apple trees in the orchard back home.

The cave.
It came to me like a bolt from the blue: the cave was the answer. There was too much air moving through the entrance for it to be sealed. There had to be another opening.

If I could make fire with the wild man's bow drill, I could use his torches.

I was caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. Climbing the tree was the devil. Going into the cave was the deep blue sea.

Now, choose.

W
HAT WAS
I
DOING WRONG?
I had the bowstring looped around the spindle, I was sawing back and forth with the bow. It was agony, and it was taking forever. The spindle was creating plenty of friction, but all I could manage was a thin plume of smoke. I could only hope that the wild man wasn't finding his dog and wouldn't find him anytime soon.

The base of the spindle squeaked as it drilled continuously in the socket. Heated sawdust was building up around the base of the spindle and turning black. Smoke kept rising, the cedar was smouldering—so why couldn't I make flame?

Too much breath, maybe. Too much desperation. Gently, Andy, gently.

I had seen a bow drill demonstration once at the Museum of Natural History in Denver. It had looked so easy.

It wasn't.

At last a tiny coal glowed orange and stayed orange. I gave it breath while feeding it old-man's beard, not so much as to smother it, just enough to give it fuel and opportunity.

At last, a fragile wink of flame.

More old man's beard, but gently.

Finally, fire.

With my free hand I reached for a torch, then brought its head close to the flame. That was all it took. The torch sputtered at first, then fingers of flame ran around and around it until the entire pitchy head was ablaze.

I threw the carrying strap of the hide bag over my neck and shoulder. In addition to the food, it had room for two spare torches. With a glance over my shoulder I started inside the cave. The wind nearly blew out the torch but it stayed lit. This is crazy, I thought, but I kept going.

The entrance passage was a long slide of loose rock. I took it sitting down. Water dripped from the ceiling. At the bottom of the slope was a large room lit with dim natural light. I stopped breathing when I saw dozens of bones and skulls. The wild man's sandals had left marks here and there. I jumped to a grisly conclusion, and my heart started jackhammering.

With the torch a little closer, I saw that the skulls weren't human after all. They were bear skulls. A few twists and turns, and I left behind the twilight zone, as cavers call the first stretch of dim natural light. From now on I would be totally blind if my torch failed. At the slightest hint it might go out, I'd light another one.

I followed the passage, always downhill, into caverns draped with stalactites, countless numbers of them hanging from the ceiling, and rows upon rows of organ
pipes. They all dripped water. There wasn't any wind that I could feel. I reassured myself that cave air slows almost to a standstill in big rooms. There had to be another opening.

The air was cold, but I was dressed in all my layers, and the pitch in the torch burned hot and kept me warm enough.

I walked around blue pools on smooth white flowstone terraces made of calcite, the mineral that forms from water percolating through limestone. Standing back from the pools was a forest of stalagmites ranging in size from baseball bats to the columns of a Roman ruin.

I entered a room bigger than the atrium inside the Hilton Hotel in Grand Junction. It was just as high and a lot wider. From the ceiling high above hung enormous white mineral chandeliers. The walls were encrusted with draperies of flowing stone, fragile bush-like mineral growths, soda straws, and delicate strands of angel hair.

My torch was still burning bright. It might last a long time. Only if I had to light the third one was I going to turn around.

The cavern almost pinched closed. To keep going I had to duckwalk under a low ceiling streaked with black from the wild man's torches, then scramble over a series of boulders.

I came into another great room with six emerald pools, like jewels in a necklace, strung the length of its floor. I threaded my way among them. The walls were
decorated with stone corals, some ribbed like radiators and some dimpled like brain coral. The pools were deep as some of the deepest hot pools in Yellowstone, and so clear I could see smooth white rocks, like giant cave pearls, glittering on the bottom.

I entered a maze, a series of passages that wound around and over and through one another like tunnels in an anthill. At one point my eyes were on some strange feathery crystals on the ceiling. When I looked down again to the floor, it wasn't a moment too soon. I was two steps from the edge of an abyss.

The pit was circular, an immense well, uncannily like the abyss in the dream I had when I was paralyzed. The torchlight barely reached the other side.

Carefully, I sat close to the edge but not too close. I leaned forward with the torch but couldn't see the bottom. The light was just swallowed up. My stomach swooned with the falling sensation from the dream.

I got to my feet and carefully made my way around the abyss along a flowstone ledge that was wider than the one in the dream, but not by much. After that the cavern narrowed and pitched downward. I passed a place off to the right where wind was whistling through a small, jagged opening not much bigger than a rabbit hole. It might have been big enough to squeeze through. The wind indicated much more cave, and the strong possibility of a way out in that direction, but it would be a worm crawl for as far as I could see into it. No, thank you; I would stick with this cavern, where I could stay on my feet.

My torch was dimming. Most of its head was gone. I lit the next one. It flamed bright and I kept going.

A minute later I came to a chamber with a long, narrow pool that, strangely, had ripples on its surface. How could that be?

I wet my fingers in the pool, then tasted my fingertips. It was salt water.

I shaded my eyes and made out a strip of faint natural light in the distance. Here was what I had been looking for, an exit, but I'd never expected it to open onto the sea. My spirits crashed. This entrance was useless. I wouldn't survive swimming out of the cave in forty-degree water.

My torchlight fell on an unnatural-looking object perched on the highest of the calcite terraces to my left. I climbed up to have a look. I was taken completely by surprise when I discovered a boat, a boat with a paddle. No, two paddles—there was even a spare.

Thank you, wild man. Finally, a break.

Here was a skinboat just like the ancient people used, made of hides pieced together over a wood frame. It was as long as a large canoe but twice as wide across the beam, just the right size to squeeze out of the cave—at low tide, that is. At high tide, the entrance would be underwater.

Was this why the wild man used the cave? To get to his boat? A boat stored where it couldn't possibly be discovered?

I tossed the hide bag inside. “I'm out of here,” I heard myself say, and the echoes said it three more
times. I propped the torch where it would keep burning and dragged the boat down the terraces to the water. I climbed in and paddled for the exit.

As I approached the jagged opening, the water got rough, so rough the boat struck the rocks as it was jostled from side to side. The wind had been blowing hard that morning, and now there must be a storm raging outside.

Maybe this isn't so smart, I thought, as swells surged through the opening and pushed me back. The tide was coming in, and I had only so much time before the opening closed. As it was, I was going to have to duck if a swell lifted me up. What I really needed was a helmet, or to have arrived here an hour earlier.

Suddenly the water level dropped—a trough between swells—and I shot out of the cave into the open air, clawing at the last with my hands. I ducked my head and began to paddle as a swell lifted me up and almost tossed me back against the rocks.

Through sheets of rain I could make out tall cliffs on both sides. I was at the back of a V, a shallow V in the cliffs that provided almost no shelter from the gale. The sky was purple black and the strait was all whitecaps and waves breaking toward me. This skinboat would capsize out there, no doubt about it.

No hope. No chance. For the time being it was all I could do to keep off the cliffs. I had to get back inside the cave, and quick.

I managed to get the boat turned around and pointed back toward the cave. The entrance was looking
awfully small. I didn't know if I was going to be able to wedge back through it.

In between waves, I rushed the entrance. The bow bounced off one side and I stroked hard, twice, and got it aimed inside. A wave pushed me sideways. I paddled hard on the other side and got it pointed inside again. A wave lifted me up and suddenly I was higher than the entrance and being pushed right into the cliff. I fell onto my back, or my head would have been crushed.

The boat was wedged inside the opening and was taking a beating. I got up on my knees, tried to claw with my hands, and succeeded only in bashing the top of my skull as a swell rose from underneath.

Whether it was my doing or the weather pushing from the outside, I squeaked into the cave. The top of my head was pounding. I touched it gently and my fingers came back bloody.

Somehow I had banged my right shoulder as well. Great, just great.

Back where I'd started, I dragged myself out of the boat, retrieved the burning torch, sat down. All I could feel was pain, the deep, dull pounding of my skull and the wrenching ache in my shoulder.

What now? Drag the boat above the high-tide line and wait for low tide to come back?

Well, that's what I was going to have to do. Wait for hours and pray for the weather to calm down.

I waited. Time dragged so slowly it was torture. Seconds were like minutes, an hour felt like a day. My second torch was dimming when I spied light flickering
off the walls back in the cavern. My breath caught short and my heart skipped a beat. As I rose to my feet I saw the silhouette of the wild man coming down through the cavern, holding a torch aloft. He was moving quickly.

I had to do something quick, and suddenly I knew what it was. I grabbed up the bag and ran in the wild man's direction. The rabbit hole I'd passed was near. I might be able to squeeze my skinny hips through that tiny opening if I was very lucky.

Suddenly every depression in the Swiss-cheese wall on my left looked like my rabbit hole. I wasn't going to find it in a panic. I had to get myself under control. The wind, I remembered, had made a sound rushing through it. I closed my eyes and heard a faint whistle. The rabbit hole was still ahead of me.

As soon as I got there, I shoved the bag and my life jacket through. A glance over my shoulder, and I saw the wild man closing in on me, almost running. He could see what I was about to do. There was something different about him…. He'd exchanged his bark clothing for leather.

Too bad, I thought—I could have lit him on fire.

I don't know if I would have, could have done such a thing. I was so frightened, I don't have any idea what I would have done.

Torch in hand, I squirmed and crawled, scratched and kicked my way into the hole. For a second I was wedged tight as a cork, but with a twist of the hips I scraped through.

I kept wriggling forward. The wild man had weapons
and I wanted to get out of reach fast. I kept pushing until the twists and turns led me to a room where I could stand up. Hollering reverberated from the direction I had come but I couldn't make out a word.

I didn't answer. He couldn't touch me here.

I put my life jacket back on. I lit my third torch and I breathed easier. It wasn't possible for the wild man to squeeze through that hole. An anaconda would have an easier time getting through a garden hose.

I was safe, in a manner of speaking. Now I had to find another way out before my last torch failed.

This was insane.