Wild Man Island Read Online Free PDF Page A

herky-jerky and out of control, like my limbs. I didn’t know why I was laughing. It was crazy to be laughing.
    The eerie stillness of the forest immediately absorbed the sound, swallowed it up.
    I tried to get warm by jogging in place. Before long I could tell it wasn’t working, not nearly enough. My insides were deadly cold. Without a fire I couldn’t last. I had to get some body heat back somehow. If not fire, what else? My eyes cast wildly around for possibilities. How, how?
    I couldn’t see an answer. I lost precious time stumbling around looking for one. All I could see was trees. The trees better be the answer, I thought. There is nothing else.
    A hole in a tree? Find a tree with a hole in it and crawl into the hole?
    Not warm enough. Not warm enough to pull me back.
    My eyes fell on a gigantic spruce that had fallen over long ago. Its bark was gone and it was nothing but a spongy, decaying mass with ferns growing along its mossy length, farther than my eye could see.
    Get inside that thing, I told myself. Somehow, get in it, or get under it, or something.
    What I had in mind sounded crazy. I needed a digging tool. What? What?
    A digging stick, a jabbing stick, any sort of stick.
    I tore at a branch from a small downed tree. The trunk was so rotten, the branch pulled right out of its socket and I fell over backward. The branch was still sound. It had come out with a thick knot at the end that tapered down like a spearpoint. I could dig with it just the way it was.
    I ran along the length of the giant spruce and found a place where it had fallen across a dip in the ground. Daylight was showing under the tree. I attacked the underside and it shredded easily. The wood was so punky it really wasn’t wood anymore, just pulp. The pulp was dry, which was good, and it weighed nothing.
    Insulation, I thought. Insulation might be my only chance.
    I speared and dug and hacked until I had made a burrow in the underside of the rotten log. Like an animal going into hibernation, I crawled in and pulledthe pulp up against myself until only my face was open to the air. I had a thick layer of dry shreds under me, and I felt like I was packed inside a cocoon. Now I could only hope that my skinny body was still producing some amount of heat. If it was, my cocoon might keep me from losing it.
    If I was lucky.
    It took awhile, but at last I wasn’t vibrating like a power sander. Maybe the rotting tree was generating a little heat. Whatever the reason, gradually, very gradually, the shaking turned to shivering and at last even the shivering quit.
    That was when I turned to worrying about what came next.
    I pulled my left arm free and looked at the bombproof sports watch my mother had given me at the airport in Grand Junction. It was still spitting out numbers just fine. 3:15 P.M. , July 26. What were Monica and the others doing? Were they back in Sitka, or had the windstorm and the rain kept them in Cosmos Cove? Had the floatplanes been able to pick them up?
    Monica, the group, the floatplane pilots…it was so embarrassing to think about, I couldn’t stand it. What did Monica think when she first discovered me and the kayak gone? When the windstorm struck, what did she think then?
    Monica must have been sick, just sick about it. Julia too. What were the people in the group saying? My mother…what would she hear, and what would she think?
    I couldn’t believe I had done this to her. Of course she would find out, and before very long. Maybe even tonight. It would kill her, just kill her.
    Maybe the floatplanes had been delayed, I thought. Maybe nobody but the group knows, even now.
    There had to be a way to erase all of this, like it never happened.
    The kayak! Maybe I could recover the kayak, and the paddle too. When the tides changed, the current would run in the other direction. I could paddle all the way back to Cosmos Cove, maybe even get there before a search even gets started.
    I was about to