Read Online Surviving Bear Island by Paul Greci - Free Book Online Page B

I’d thought it up, built it, and then caught a fish. I wanted the gaff to work just the way it was, but knew that was impossible. Just like I wanted to have not screwed up on the day of the accident—impossible.

CHAPTER 11
    MY EYES opened, then closed again. Then opened. I saw my dad bobbing in the green waves, then his life vest washing ashore.
    Then I saw it all again. I closed my eyes tight, then opened them again and saw the gray morning light through the trees.
    Then I remembered the fish, the gaff, the hook.
    I shivered.
    My head hurt, pounded like someone was beating on it with a club.
    And my throat was dry, like it was coated with sawdust.
    A thin wisp of smoke snaked upward from a partially burnt log. I rolled the log over and stirred the coals beneath it. A few red embers glowed, holding a sliver of last night’s blaze.
    I placed a couple of small sticks on the coals, blew until the smoke started to rise, then headed for the creek.
    Small drops of cold rain dotted the cove as I squatted beside the creek, cupped my hands and drank. The peaks at the back of the bay were blocked by a wall of gray, the clouds closing in on me like a pack of hungry wolves.
    I headed back to my camp. A couple life vests, the two small survival kits, plus a fire—that was camp.
    I rubbed my hands together. If only I could’ve reached that dry bag with the sleeping bags. Then at least I’d have something to separate myself from the weather. A cocoon I could curl up in.
    I really wished I had a tent. Just a small tent—sleeping bag not included—to shed the rain.
    On the trip I’d felt cooped up when we stayed in the tent for a couple days during a storm. It had sucked. I wished it sucked like that now.
    If you don’t have what you want, what can you do to work toward what you want?
    â€œWhat do I want?” I said. “What do I want? I want to find you. I want to get off this freaking island! But right now, right now, I just want to live. I want to be warm and dry. And I want to eat—all the time.”
    My stomach growled. Eat some berries first, I figured. Then build a shelter. Then fix the gaff. And just keep moving around, that’ll help keep me from freezing. And keep searching for signs. Any signs that my dad might have left.
    On a hillside I found berry bushes, their stems stripped of leaves, a stray berry here and there. And bear scat. Big piles of bear scat speckled with purple and sprinkled with green. Those bears must eat tons, literally tons, of berries. Eating machines.
    But the island was big, too big for bears to eat all the berries. I worked my way across the hillside until I found a patch the bears had missed.
    The berry juices stung the open wounds in my mouth.
    I shoveled them in anyway, but kept my eyes and ears on stand-by.
    My dad climbed to the top of a mountain on one of his trips out here and counted nine black bears foraging for blueberries on the mountainside below him. At the time I thought the story was cool. I’d wanted to climb a peak and see that. But now, it freaked me out.
    Were any bears moving my way? Was one just out of sight behind a fallen tree? So much to worry about when all I wanted to do was eat.
    Eat.
    Eat.
    Eat.
    Not like at home where I used to read and eat, or watch a movie and eat. Eat when I wasn’t even aware I was eating.
    Especially after Mom died. For a while I just ate what I could. I mean, Dad was down, way down. I’d make him a sandwich when I was making one. And I’d do most of the cleaning up, which was good because I needed something to do.
    We had a freezer full of salmon, but he wouldn’t touch it. Mom had freezer-wrapped all of it and labeled it with smiley faces and the date, and on the freezer paper had drawn little stick figures of me and Dad fishing. And she’d done all that just a few days before she died. I know it’s stillthere because every once in a while I’d open the chest freezer