Free Surviving Bear Island by Paul Greci Page A

push to break through to another level. Rome wasn’t built in a day.
    His voice just boomed out loud or whispered in my ear with no warning. And the words weren’t always things I’d heard him say before. Was he really speaking to me?
    When I heard his voice I missed him even more.
    And then I thought about home, and if I made it off this island but never found him, just what would be my home? And what was happening at my house now? Was anyone trying to figure out where we were? Would they notice that the kayak wasn’t under the deck? Not unless they knew it was there in the first place. Had anyone even bothered to ignore the chain across the driveway and go up to the house? But even if they had, what clues would they find?
    My hands had nicks and cuts from yanking and dragging bark-covered branches. The tips of my fingers throbbed, my fingernails packed with dirt and bits of bark. My blistered feet stung with every twist, turn, and squat.
    And my shrunken stomach called out for food. I’d worked so hard, but still I had no food, no fire, no gaff. All I had was a cold, leaky shelter. A place to die.

    That night I sat perched on a life vest between two fires, still in my raincoat because of the drips and drizzles that penetrated my shelter.
    The other life vest and emergency blankets lay in a pile.
    An image of my dad bobbing in the waves invaded my brain. I took some deep, slow breaths and tried to picture Dad before the accident. Before the trip turned bad. His quiet smile. Kind of crooked on one side of his mouth. Just like mine.
    I knew he’d be proud that I’d caught a fish and built a shelter. “It’s big enough for both of us, Dad.” And that I hadn’t eaten the Meal Pack bars from his survival kit even though I thought about eating them like three-hundred times a day. And that I’d even thought of trying to go to the Sentinels. I glanced toward the bag holding the combined survival kits.
    Dad would take care of what he had. Wouldn’t waste anything. At home and on building sites he backed screws out of old boards and reused them. When he cut a tree down for firewood, he used the whole thing instead of just chucking the small branches.
    I wondered what he was doing now. Maybe he’d found some of our gear. Maybe he had some matches or a lighter or a fishing pole. Maybe he had the tent. Maybe he had some of our food. The graham crackers andchocolate bars. The marshmallows. My mouth watered and my empty stomach burned, trying to digest itself.
    I picked up the gaff.
    Make it better, I thought. Stronger.
    â€œA fish is gonna pull, and I need to be able to pull back.”
    I took a lure from the kit and threaded fishing line through the eyehole.
    I tied a knot in the line, creating a small loop, then cut the remaining line, and kept cutting and tying until I had five loops through the eyehole. With a piece of rope I tied the lure onto the gaff so the hook hung over the edge.
    I ran a piece of rope through all five loops, wrapped it around the pole and tied it.
    I wrapped another piece of rope around this rope and tied it.
    Then I took a fourth piece of rope and wrapped it around the fishing line, hoping to hold the lure in place in as many ways possible.
    I pulled on the hook—it held. I stepped outside and sunk the hook into an alder trunk just inside the ring of light, and pulled. The hook started to bend.
    I smiled, then whispered, “That lure isn’t going anywhere.”

CHAPTER 13
    THE NEXT day gray puffy clouds scudded across a blue sky. No rain, but the northerly breeze crawled up my sleeves and down my neck. Cold. Just plain cold.
    But I’d noticed something. Rain clouds came from the south and stayed until a wind from the north blew them away.
    Patterns. Weather patterns. Back in Fairbanks, who cared if it was forty below in the winter when you had a warm house to hang out in or all the right clothes to go outside if you wanted to? You