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low priority right now. So few people come way out here. A few kayakers in the summer. Occasionally a hunter motors out in the late fall, or early winter. Someone who’s willing to spend the money on gas.”
    I grabbed the end of a two-by-four and it crumbled in my hand, like scrambled eggs.
    â€œTwenty years ago you’d get a handful of people out here in the summer, and during hunting season. Not anymore. And where we’re headed from here, it’s even more remote. New territory for me. The exposed side of Bear Island. No one goes out there, but after that crossing, I think you’re ready.”

CHAPTER 8
    THE NEXT day I walked south along the coast—the salty smell settling into my nose—with my dad’s vest slung over one shoulder. The rocky beach turned into a cliff and I had no choice but to head inland if I wanted to continue south toward the Sentinels.
    I glanced back at the fallen tree with the ten-foot-long rock arrow I’d made on top of it pointing south. And just behind it, a seven-foot-tall stick I’d dug into the ground, piled rocks around its base, and then attached the yellow spray skirt at the top.
    â€œDad. You’ll see the arrow, right? You’ll know what it means, right?”
    But if he didn’t see it, at least I’d tried. I mean, I’d searched to the north, and then I’d found his vest to the south. I couldn’t just wait here, hoping. I had to go and just hope he was going in the same direction. He could’ve kept swimming around this cliff and then came ashore.
    But here I was—with or without him—stuck on this island. At home with my zombie dad I’d felt isolated, but this was true isolation. Just me and the rocks, the trees, and the rain. No town just ten miles down the road. No school to go to five days a week where I could see people. No phone. No food. No people. No nothing.
    I don’t think my dad really cared if he ever saw people, but me, the main thing I’d been looking forward to after the first week of the trip was seeing people. That, and taking a shower.
    I turned, and clawed my way through the belt of alders that separated the forest from the beach. Stiff branches crisscrossed every which way. It was like working your way through a web of steel cables. But once I broke through, I was in the old growth. My dad loved that phrase. Oldgrowth. To me it sounded kind of nasty. Made me think of my fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Harper, who never clipped her fingernails. They were long and grayish. My back used to crawl, like an army of spiders were moving up my spine, every time she’d set one of her hands on my desk.
    But in the forest, old growth meant big. And green. And wet. Like you were in a giant terrarium. I recognized skunk cabbage, and the palm-shaped leaves of devil’s club springing from their thorny stems, two of my dad’s favorite plants. And blueberry bushes. But the rest of the plants, I didn’t have a clue about. Maybe there were more things to eat, there had to be, but I didn’t know. There was so much I didn’t know.
    I knew the names of the trees towering above me. Mostly Sitka spruce and Western hemlock.
    Spruce have square needles and hemlock have flat ones.
    And from some of the tree branches this light green-yellow, lacy stuff hung, draped like tinsel on Christmas trees. Strands of it two and three feet long.
    The northernmost rainforest. The jungle of the north, that’s what Dad called this place.
    We’d vanished—that’s what it’d look like. I don’t even know if Dad had told anyone where we were going. He put the chain across the driveway with the no trespassing sign on it when we left. And after the four hundred mile drive to Whittier, Dad hid the truck in an abandoned boat yard to avoid paying the hundred bucks it cost to park in the lot. And instead of using the boat dock—didn’t want to pay for that either—we hauled all