Great Bear Rainforest (12 page)

The cliff face

We pushed further down the river and came to a massive set of boulders grouped along the shore. Climbing the largest of these boulders gave us a good, high view of the area.

That’s when we found him.

The sight of his body was shocking. My heart fell into my stomach. A lump rose up in my throat, nearly choking off my air. I tried my best to hold it together. The tears came anyway.

There he was, my twin brother, lying on his stomach in a shallow pool near the river’s edge. His face was impacted in the mud. Rapids washed up and over the rocks that separated the river from the pool. Any more rain would bring the water up higher and carry him away.

I closed my eyes and cried.

“You did everything you could,” Alu said, placing her hand gently on my shoulder. “Gannon knows that.”

I couldn’t bring myself to speak.

As we moved down the bank toward Gannon’s body, I glanced up at him and could have sworn I saw his arm move ever so slightly. I rubbed my eyes and then locked them on Gannon, desperate to see him move again.

Had it really happened?

Suddenly, Gannon lifted his head from the mud. He looked around and put his head back down.

“Did you see that?” I yelled to Alu. “Please tell me you saw that!”

“I did!” she said. “He’s alive!”

He was alive! He lifted his head again. This time he looked in our direction. I saw his face. It was bruised and swollen at the eye. Blood poured from a gash on his forehead.

“We’re coming, Gannon!” I yelled. “Hang in there! We’re coming!”

Gannon wasn’t out of danger. Far from it. I was afraid he might be paralyzed or bleeding internally. We had no way of knowing the extent of his injuries. Assuming he was disoriented from the fall, I was also afraid he’d roll over and be swept away by the rapids. We had to get to him right away.

I was climbing as fast as I could up and over the boulders that lined the shore, when I felt something tugging on my jacket.

“Wyatt!” Alu yelled. “Stop!”

“What’s the matter?” I said, impatiently.

“Look!” she said, pointing down the river, not far from Gannon.

There, moving in his direction, was a pack of wolves.

“What should we do?” I asked.

As they came nearer to Gannon, the wolves, six in total, worked themselves into a frenzy.

“These wolves will attack if we get in their way,” Alu said.

“But we can’t just stand here! They’ll tear my brother to pieces! We have to do something!”

I picked up a rock and threw it at them, but we were too far away.

“Let’s get closer and try to run them off,” I said.

“Be careful,” Alu warned. “They won’t be scared away easily, and they could spring on us in an instant.”

I tried to stay hidden behind the fallen tree trunks as we moved down the bank. The wolves continued to close in on Gannon. I picked up a rock the size of a baseball and threw it at the smallest of the wolves. The rock missed. I immediately picked up another and threw this one even harder. The rock found its target, hitting the thin male on the shoulder of his hind leg. Startled, the wolf yelped and turned to us. Half of the pack responded to the wolf ’s cry and began moving in our direction. The wolf I’d hit with the rock led the pack, hobbling slightly. The remaining wolves were nearly on top of Gannon.

An angry wolf closes in

My intent had been to scare them off, but I had only made the situation worse. There was nothing left to do but defend ourselves. Alu and I threw as many rocks as we could, one after another. Ignoring this hail of stones, the wolves moved closer. They were snarling. Howling. Just ripping mad. Their fangs like razors.

We were facing a gruesome end. There was no way to back them down. I looked around frantically for anything I could use as a weapon, when all of a sudden, something in the forest caught the packs’ attention. The wolves’ ferocious howls turned to whimpers and they started to back away, cowering as they moved lower along the bank of the river. There was something coming through the trees above us, and whatever it was terrified the wolves. Alu and I looked up the hill to see what had them so scared. Standing atop a boulder, like the king of the rainforest, was a bear. A beautiful, white bear. So rare are sightings, I couldn’t believe my eyes. Nevertheless, there it was.

A spirit bear!

The wolves finally scampered off into the forest, and we ran to Gannon’s aid. He had rolled over on his own power and was semi-conscious when we got to him, but he still managed a smile when he saw my face. Seeing his smile changed everything for me.

We’ve moved Gannon away from the river and are waiting for him to come to. Once he’s alert, we need to do a more thorough assessment of his injuries. In the meantime, I think I’ll go ahead and collapse.

How I survived that fall, I’ll never know. I guess someone was looking after me. The spirits of the rainforest maybe. At least that’s what I like to think. I mean, the last thing I remember was sliding off that huge cliff and crashing through a bunch of trees and after that my mind pretty much went blank. Maybe the trees broke my fall or maybe it was the water and mud where I landed that softened the impact. Who knows? It’s all a total blur. What I remember most clearly is the sound of the wolves howling. How it got louder and louder as they came closer. The other thing I remember is the white light coming through the trees. It started out small and then got bigger, intensifying until all I could see was this beaming white light—like some kind of passage to the afterlife. There was no question in my mind:
I was dead!
On my way to that far-off place in the sky! Good-bye, world! Then, next thing I know, I’m lying next to a campfire all wrapped up in a wool blanket with Wyatt and Alu standing over me.

“Where am I?” I asked.

“Princess Royal Island.”

“Still?”

“Yes,” Wyatt said with a smile. “Still.”

Trying to figure out how badly I was injured, Wyatt and Alu asked all kinds of questions and I went about describing what hurt and how bad. I felt kind of dizzy, but I wanted to get up to see how well I could move around, and asked Wyatt and Alu to help. They supported my back and neck as I sat up, and this crazy pain shot through my ribs like a lightning bolt and my entire body seized up, making even the slightest movement so painful I could hardly stand it. The only thing that didn’t hurt was my left arm and that’s because I couldn’t feel it at all. It was all wrapped up below the elbow in some sort of makeshift tourniquet.

“You think it’s broken?” I asked.

“It was bent between the elbow and the wrist,” Wyatt said. “I’m no physician, but yeah, I’m pretty sure it’s broken.”

I didn’t need to hear anymore.

Needless to say, the fall banged me up pretty good. There is positive news, though. I can walk. I mean, I need lots of help to do it, but I can walk. My right leg is really sore and I think it might be fractured below the knee because I can’t really handle much weight on it, but my legs work, they move, and that’s no small miracle.

Wyatt and Alu’s examination took awhile and totally wore me out and throughout the whole thing their voices seemed to get louder and louder and all of a sudden the pounding in my head got so bad it felt like someone was hammering on my skull with a pickax.

“I have a splitting headache,” I said.

“Probably has something to do with the gash on the side of your forehead,” Wyatt said. “We patched it up the best we could with a butterfly bandage.”

“How big is it?”

“Three, maybe three-and-a-half inches across. And deep. It’ll definitely need proper stitches as soon as we can get you to a doctor.”

The thought of stitches made me lightheaded. I hate needles, especially when they’re being stuck into my skin.

“I need to rest for a minute,” I said, my head woozy.

While Alu piled up wood for a fire, Wyatt put the blanket back over me and propped my head under a rolled up fleece and I closed my eyes and took long, deep breaths and the pain in my head eased up a little and I was actually able to relax. When I opened my eyes there were flames coming off the wood and Alu added some more sticks and the flames grew big and hot and felt really good as they warmed my cold, aching body.

“How’d you get this fire going when everything is so wet?” I asked Alu. “Did you bring fire starters?”

“No,” she said, showing off that beautiful smile of hers. “There are other ways. I’ll teach you sometime.”

“I would love that,” I said, almost blushing.

“But for now, you must rest.”

Alu cooked a salmon she’d grabbed from the river and passed steaming chucks of pink meat to us, while Wyatt told the crazy story of my rescue and how a spirit bear had suddenly appeared out of nowhere and saved my life.

“That explains the white light I remember seeing,” I said.

“Here’s what I don’t understand,” Wyatt said. “A spirit bear, no matter how big, is no match for a pack of wolves.”

“That’s true,” Alu said.

“So why did the wolves back away when the spirit bear appeared?”

“I can’t say for sure. Some people believe the spirit bear is the guardian of the forest. A protector of all things good and righteous in the Great Bear. Maybe it is true.”

Wyatt quietly pondered what Alu had said.

A spirit bear, up close and personal

Now, my brother is the kind of person who needs a scientific explanation for everything. Fact is, a pack of wolves could kill a spirit bear, so why didn’t they? Here’s the problem: mythical explanations, like Alu’s, can’t really be proven, scientifically speaking, so Wyatt’s always quick to dismiss this kind of stuff as untrue. That’s why it’s so strange that he didn’t. With his own eyes, he’d seen something unexplainable, something magical. Crazy as it sounds, I think for the first time in his life my brother could be open to the possibility that some things might just be greater than science.

2:37 PM


The FIFTH LAW OF EXPLORATION is the most important of all the laws. It states, simply: Live to explore another day.

We’ve almost broken this law several times since arriving in the Great Bear. That being said, we’re still alive. I believe my parents are still alive, too. Maybe they got lost somewhere on the island, like us. Maybe they were captured by the gunmen and are being held at the camp. Whatever happened, one thing is for sure, they’re in need of rescue.

Like a mantra, I keep repeating the fifth law in my head. We need to be smart. Poor decision making has put us in danger, and it’s only luck that has kept us alive. It’s my fault for making decisions without considering all of the possible outcomes. But I learn from my mistakes and I’m not about to let us take any more unnecessary risks.

We thought about sending Alu back to her boat so she could get to the Pacific Yellowfin for help but decided it’s best we stay together. We also considered trekking back into the interior of the island to look for my parents and returning to Gannon before nightfall, but even with Alu to guide us, that wouldn’t be smart. She’s confident she could track our parents and I’m sure she could. Finding them isn’t what concerns me. My concern is the gunmen.

If we’re going to take them down and find my parents, we need the help of professionals. We need the Canadian Coast Guard!

I’ve begged and pleaded for Wyatt and Alu to leave me here and go find our mom and dad or get back to the ship and bring help because every minute counts and we can’t just sit here doing nothing, but they won’t listen to me. They think it’s best we all stay put and try to signal for help and I’m outvoted, so I guess that’s that.

Alu got the campfire going again with all kinds of leaves and branches and a real dark smoke started floating off the fire and while I was lying there watching her toss sticks onto the flame, this crazy dream I had after my fall came rushing back into my brain.

In the dream, Wyatt and I were on the island, somewhere deep in the forest and we were building a fire, just like Alu, and for some reason I insisted that we add a specific type of tree branch to the flames. Not sure how, but I knew exactly what I was looking for and soon found the tree, a smallish type evergreen, no taller than me. With Wyatt’s ax, I chopped off several branches thick with pine needles and went back to the fire saying something to Wyatt about the branches being poisonous and warning him not to inhale the smoke or he would get dizzy or nauseous or worse. After tying bandanas over our noses and mouths and moving upwind, we threw the poisonous branches on the fire. A thick and potent smoke rose off the flames and drifted into the forest.