Never Say Die by Will Hobbs Page A

haystack—Jonah brought a small feather out from under his parka. He stuck it into the side of the breathing hole, then took his position. He crouched with his father’s harpoon in hand, and he waited. And waited. I mean, for hours.
    When the time finally came, and that feather vibrated slightly to signal the rising seal, Jonah had to be ready to strike in a split second, and he was. He struck with force and accuracy. I’ve always enjoyed seal meat, but that seal was the best ever.
    In the times before our ancestors even had dogs, Jonah told me, and they pulled their heavy sleds under their own power, there were winters when the seals were hard to come by, and the people would starve. Sometimes they went weeks without food. They had to wait. They had to be patient.
    Right now, I had to be patient and wait for my brother. If there’d been a mix-up, I was only going to make it worse by running around on the tundra looking for him.
    Exhaustion pulled me down. I slept the rest of the day. Around ninety minutes after midnight I woke to the sun rising over a ridge, got my fire going again, made more smoke. I went to counting how many days it had been. I pieced it all together by how many midnights had gone by. The accident happened on Day 1. This was the beginning of Day 5. I took out my hunting knife and made five notches on its leather sheath.
    I went back to sleep. By midmorning I had been waiting at “the first obvious place” for twenty-four hours. My stomach hurt from worry and hunger. I had remembered to keep drinking water but was getting weak and light-headed.
    As for my brother, I was fearing the worst. He got mauled by a bear, he broke a leg, he fell off a cliff. He drowned. The mountains had swallowed him up.
    Did it still make sense to stay put? No, it didn’t: too much time had passed. I decided to give him until noon.
    Noon arrived. If I stayed, I was going to get weaker and weaker until I wouldn’t be strong enough to walk out. The coast was probably still forty or fifty miles away. Once I reached the coast, I had a chance of being spotted. Now and again, motorboats out of Shingle Point came this far west.
    Once I got there, it wouldn’t be a good idea to sit and wait for a boat that might happen by. Chances would be poor, before I starved out. Better to keep walking. From the mouth of the Firth, if I headed east a few miles, I would be looking at Herschel Island. The island sat only a couple of miles offshore; I’d been there once with Jonah. The whole coast of the Yukon Territory was littered with driftwood … I could start a signal fire visible from the island’s historical park at the old whaling station.
    Better get going, I told myself. I started downriver, keeping an eye out for the raft but with no real hope of coming across it.
    Same time the next day, I put a sixth notch on my knife sheath. I hadn’t eaten a thing since that one char I caught. I was making a poor showing as an aboriginal hunter.
    Just ahead, the river ran fast and white as it dropped between walls of stone rising along the shore. I remembered Ryan saying that after the “mountain reach” of the Firth, the “canyon reach” began at Mile 40. That was where we would run the first major rapid, about halfway to the ocean.
    At least I knew where I was, for what good it would do me.
    Broad shelves of stone flanked the entrance of the canyon. I climbed the shelves on my side to their high point. Thirty feet below me, the Firth cascaded with a roar over slabs of rock heaving out of the river like whales.
    I looked downriver to the tail end of the rapid and beyond. A speck of color and a bit of movement on the other side of the river caught my eye—something bright orange atop the shallow canyon. I squinted and made out a man wearing a life jacket, walking north toward the ocean. My heart leaped.
    It was amazing what seeing Ryan did for my legs. Strength surged back into them,