Surviving Bear Island Read Free Page B

asked.
    â€œWhen you get your own place you can rot your brain however you want.”
    And no computer—at least not one that could get you on the Internet. And games in our house, they took place on a board, not a screen. That didn’t really bother me when Mom was alive. Then I had someone who’d actually play something with me. We didn’t even have a microwave. Walking into our house was like walking into the 19th century. Our porch railing looked like a hitching post for horses.
    On the beach, I approached the stream. Partially eaten, rotting salmon corpses lay among the rocks on the shore. Eyeless heads attached to backbones with strips of shriveled gray skin clinging to the skeletons. Nasty stuff all around.
    But in the creek was a wall of pink salmon. You could see their humped backs breaking the top of the water. Pinks—Humpies is their other name because of their humped backs—are mostly what’s in Prince William Sound, according to Dad.
    Grab ’em like the bears do.
    I glanced around. Gave my head a shake. The voice sounded so real. Like he was talking into my ear. Maybe that was a good sign. Maybe it meant that he was close by.
    I waded into the stream, but everywhere I walked fish swam away from me, hundreds of them. Before I could even get my hands in the water, they were gone.
    So then I stood still in the water. In my mind I saw it. I’d scoop my hands under a salmon and just sweep it onto shore. Easy.
    Easy.
    Easy.
    Easy.
    But the fish wouldn’t come. Wouldn’t come near enough for me to even try to grab them.
    I walked out of the stream and sat on the beach.
    I pulled the survival kit out of my pocket and inhaled the other meal pack bar.
    Still hungry, I faced the stream and felt the dead-salmon-stink hit my face.
    My stomach growled.
    â€œNo. No way will I eat those.” I shook my head and looked away, but my eyes kept coming back to the carcasses. Like my stomach had taken over for my brain and was calling the shots.
    Then I saw movement across the stream. I stood up. A black bear stood on four legs on the opposite bank just a football field’s distance upstream. A distance a charging bear could cover in seconds. I wanted to run but knew that was the exact wrong thing to do. You don’t give a bear something to chase. You don’t make yourself a running target. Any idiot knew that.
    I took a step backward, my heart pounding like a jackhammer. We’d seen a bear the second day of the trip. We stood at the edge of the forest as it nosed around in some tide pools. “Just stand still and watch,” Dad had said, his hand resting on his pepper spray. No gun. Dad didn’t even own a gun. My best friend, Billy, his dad had, like, five guns. He kept them locked up but Billy said he knew where the key was. I wished I had one now.
    The bear walked into the stream. I didn’t even know if it saw me. Or if it did, it didn’t seem to care, like it was thinking, “Yeah, Tom, what are you gonna do?”
    The bear lunged forward and swatted the water with its powerful front paws, splashing water every which way. It plunged its head underwater, then surfaced with a fish bending side to side, flexing with all its might to return to the stream.
    The bear settled into the beach grass and dropped the fish. The fish flopped, but the bear just put a paw over it, like a dog does with a bone. It tore into the live fish just below the head, eating one side of it while it was still flopping. With its mouth, the bear flipped the fish over and ate the other side. I watched that bear catch and eat five more fish like it was no big deal. Probably did it all the time.
    And for a few minutes I actually forgot that I was hungry, forgot that my dad was missing, forgot that I was stuck on an island in Prince William Sound sixty miles from the nearest town. Yeah, it was all about the bear, and how it lived. How it ate things that were still flopping. Still