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Authors: Sherry Shahan

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The stump was completely covered by clear icy water. Her kayak was drifting in the middle of the fjord, overturned. The stove and fuel had probably sunk as soon as the kayak capsized. Food bags and other supplies floated in the water near the bow.

A breeze whipped off the ice, cutting through Cody’s clothes. She stood shaking as her life vest bobbed a final farewell, a bright orange SOS on the rising tide. Within seconds the kayak and vest disappeared around the bend on their way toward Hubbard Glacier.

Cody and Derek exchanged frightened glances. A strained silence hung between them like an invisible hull over their drowning camp.

Cody stood ankle deep in the clear water, wobbling slightly as shock waves hit her. Kayak lost. No food. No life vest. Derek opened his mouth and gasped in the icy air. He didn’t say anything either. Their lack of words was a hundred times more deafening than if they’d screamed.

The bright sun burned through a flawless blue sky. It was actually hot, which was unusual in Southeast Alaska. The water had become like a magnifying glass, sending prisms bouncing across the fjord. Each beam was blinding in its brilliance. Blinding and burning.

Cody squinted. No sunglasses. No sunscreen. She couldn’t believe she’d left her shades behind.

Derek asked the obvious question: “Shouldn’t we go after it?”

Cody stood still, torn by the desire to rescue her kayak and the knowledge that she couldn’t swim after it. There was no chance to run it down in Derek’s kayak. Without the weight of people and gear, it was moving much too swiftly. She simply stood on the rock with water lapping her boots, gazing in the direction where her kayak had disappeared.

“We’d never catch it,” she said.

Cody raked her fingers through her hair, snagging a broken nail in her tangled curls. She slipped on No Fear and adjusted the brim to shade her eyes. “Where’s the extra paddle?”

“I think it’s in my kayak.”

“I hope you’re right.”

With only one paddle it would be nearly impossible to maneuver two people through the water. She held her breath and mentally crossed her fingers, then looked inside Derek’s kayak. There it was—in all its varnished glory—clamped safely inside.

It’s more than just a paddle
, she thought as she touched the smooth wood.
With two paddles we can make it. We have to
.

Derek pulled the bag of trail mix from inside his shirt. “I’m starving.”

She stared at him. “Was that in the tent?”

Derek nodded. “Midnight snack.”

Cody couldn’t decide if she should hug him or slug him. All the food, even the nonfood smelly stuff like toothpaste and sunscreen, had been stowed in her kayak.

Derek had watched her circle the kayak spraying Lysol. He’d even asked her about it. No food within fifty feet of our tent, she’d told him, bears are amazing sniffers.

The irony of it made her laugh so hard that tears filled her eyes. She quickly wiped them away, not wanting to add another drop to the already soggy surroundings.

Then she swore—not at Derek, but at the situation—using
the one word she never said aloud. She felt a lot better.

“Let’s hurry up and get loaded,” she said. “You carry the rest of the stuff down here and I’ll pack it up.”

Cody straddled the bow and made a mental inventory of the remaining gear: one kayak, two paddles, one tent (wet), one life vest, two sleeping bags (wet), two flashlights, two water bottles (one empty, one half full), one cooking pot, one bear horn, matches inside a plastic bag, and clothes.

Just as quickly she counted what they’d lost: one kayak, one paddle, one life vest, stove and fuel, the other cooking pot, water purifier, extra batteries, plus the smelly stuff like sunscreen, insect repellent, first-aid ointment, and Lysol. All the food, except a small bag of trail mix.

Cody tossed the tent sack in front, climbed in, and shoved it forward with her feet. Personal gear came next. The wet sleeping bags were draped over the two seats. They’d dry in no time in this heat. She wondered what had happened to all the mosquitoes and seagulls.

She finished packing while concentrating on the gurgling noise coming from the trees along the shore. The carbon dioxide-breathing plants were suffocating in the rising water. Who would have thought that trees would cry out when they were drowning?

Cody pushed a sweaty strand of hair under No Fear and looked at Derek. He was building two piles
of trail mix on a rock, counting out equal numbers of almonds and raisins and dried peas.

“We’re not shipwrecked, you know, and we won’t be on this beach forever.” Cody tossed him the lone life vest. “You wear it.”

“Why me?”

“I’m the captain and what I say goes.”

Derek sighed long and loud. He knew better than to argue with her. He’d never win anyway. He just grabbed a paddle and took his place in back. He knew without being told that his captain-cousin would demand the front seat.

Out on the water, the eight-foot craft glided easily up the fjord toward Yakutat. But the air was so hot and thick that it was difficult to take in. Cody tied a damp bandanna over her nose and mouth, and breathing became easier. Then she pulled some of her hair loose so that it covered her ears. Derek’s ears were probably already sunburned.

“Thank goodness we’re not on a sailboat,” she said, worrying why there wasn’t the slightest hint of a breeze. In the back of her mind the phrase
calm before the storm
repeated itself.

An unspoken question prodded her into the narrow seawater passage. They hadn’t mentioned the rising water since early this morning. The water level was coming up even faster now.

She felt as if she were inside a small fishbowl. Someone was carrying the bowl and water was sloshing up the glass sides, threatening to spill out. But the
sides of this bowl were rugged mountains of record height, Mount Saint Elias on the north, Mount Fair-weather on the south. Both stood in ranges thick with impenetrable forests of western hemlock and Sitka spruce. And glaciers, such a mass of frozen rivers most of them didn’t have names.

Cody’s shoulders started throbbing with a dull ache that pulled at her muscles. She set the paddle across her lap for a minute and watched water drip off the blade. Without sunglasses she couldn’t look at them too long; the drops were blinding in the bright sun.

She lifted the corner of her bandanna and took a single satisfying tug on her water bottle. The water felt cool in her dry throat and helped fill the void in her stomach. Last night’s macaroni and cheese was long gone. Trail mix tasted like gravel in the heat and made her thirsty. Being in a kayak surrounded by water they knew they couldn’t drink made most people wolfishly thirsty.

“It’s like we’re in a swimming pool,” Derek said. “Someone is filling it with a fat hose cranked up full blast. And it’s gonna overflow if someone doesn’t turn it off.”

Derek had read her mind again, picked up on her thoughts about the fishbowl. She hated it when he did that. Patterson did it too.

Well, she couldn’t tell someone to pull the plug.

Cody’s light strokes were suddenly challenged by a strong current, and she dug her paddle in deeper. “Push!” she shouted back. “Harder!”

It felt as if some invisible force were pulling them backward, away from Yakutat. She concentrated on deep even strokes. Push, pull. Even breathing. In, out. Even, steady. Push, pull. Breathing timed with strokes. Derek followed her lead.

The bandanna slipped from her face. She didn’t stop to retie it. Sweat dripped into her eyes. She blinked away the stinging salt. The paddle was slick with sweat and water. Like wet feet, wet hands caused blisters. She sacrificed a few seconds to wrap her sweatshirt around the slippery handle.

She figured that the current should have been pushing them forward, in the direction of Yakutat and the beach near the boggy trail that climbed uphill to the pickup. Instead, it was fighting them. Then she realized that all the beaches were buried in a watery grave, as the shoreline plants were. They’d probably have to swim through the forest to the truck.

The Tide: that was how Cody thought about it—with a capital letter. It should be receding. Ebb and flow and gravitational pull. She’d studied it in science class. The moon and sun controlled the surface level of oceans, bays, gulfs, inlets, and fjords.

But the water in Russell Fjord was intent on rising, with no signs of slacking off. The current was using all its muscle to fight the two paddlers, pulling on them from the open sea as if it would never let them go.

“We’re hardly moving,” Derek said. “I’ve been watching the same clump of trees for half an hour.”

Cody studied the mountains and forests through the early-morning glare. A landscape that should have
been passing slowly to the side and rear of the kayak, passing behind them as they skimmed forward.

Derek was right: Everything stood in place.

Her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth and she swallowed hard. She didn’t remember the outfitters mentioning a tide that refused to fall.

She thought about the history of the fjord. Eight hundred years ago a massive glacier had filled both Disenchantment Bay and Yakutat Bay and extended into the Pacific Ocean. Russell Fjord had been blocked by a dam of ice and could only drain into the ocean along one channel, called Old Situk Creek.

The answer came as clear as the freshwater layer on top of the seawater.

“I know why the water is still rising,” she gasped.

"I don’t get it,” Derek said after she’d explained it.

“What do you mean Hubbard surged?”

Cody thought of another word for
surge
. “It advanced.” She remembered the outfitters talking about Hubbard Glacier one night after she’d crawled into her tent. They had used simple terms:
advance
and
retreat
. To advance meant to move forward. To retreat meant to move back.

Their conversation came back to her: 1986 was the last time Hubbard Glacier had surged. More than seventy miles long, the river of slowly moving ice had slid across the mouth of Russell Fjord, sealing off Disenchantment Bay and forming the world’s largest glacier-formed lake.

“Are you sure?” Derek asked.

“All the streams and rivers are draining into the fjord.” She shouted over the wind, which was picking up. “All the water that usually flows out to sea on the tide doesn’t have anywhere to go.”

“No way out.”

She silently finished his thought:
Just like us
.

She gripped her paddle as a fist of wind rumbled down the passage, smacking them in the face. The
kayak lunged another foot backward. This wasn’t good at all. It was as if Yakutat were intent on pushing them away.

A wind like this usually brought foul weather. An old Alaskan saying jabbed at her: “If you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes.”

Until now she hadn’t fully understood what it meant. But in just the past five minutes the sky, so transparent that you felt you could reach up and touch the sun, had disappeared.
Whammo
, everything had fallen into darkness under bruise-colored clouds.

The wind was driving hard from Yakutat, pushing ahead of a storm like a warning.

Cody handed Derek a rain slicker over her shoulder. She tied the bandanna over No Fear to keep it from blowing off and snapped the rubber skirt around her waist. Earth and water. Now wind. It seemed as if the entire universe were against them.

We can find some kind of shelter
, she thought,
even if it’s only under a rocky ledge. Tie up and wait out the storm. Then turn around and battle the current back to Yakutat
. That’s what she told Derek. But she knew storms like the one coming were unpredictable.

No food. No fresh water
pounded at her. And
No one knows we’re out here
.

She checked her watch. She knew they wouldn’t be missed until Mom and Aunt Jessie returned from Juneau. The plane wasn’t due in until the next day, weather permitting. Small planes were grounded during storms.

Her mother wouldn’t find the note she’d left—scrawled
on a used envelope and taped to the milk carton inside the fridge so that Derek wouldn’t see it—until she came back to the cabin.

BOOK: Frozen Stiff
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