Tourists wave, cameras raised.
“You’d think they’d never seen a canoe before,” Mama says, then picks up her paddle. “Well, we’d best get home.”
“I don’t want this to end,” Leni whines.
Mama’s smile is unfamiliar. Something isn’t quite right. “You need to help him, baby girl. Help yourself.”
Suddenly the canoe tilts sideways so hard everything tumbles into the water—bottles, thermoses, a day pack.
Mama somersaults past Leni, screaming, and splashes into the water, disappears.
The canoe rights itself.
Leni scrambles to the side, peers over, yells, “Mama!”
A black fin, sharp as a knife blade, comes up from the water, rising, rising, until it is almost as tall as Leni. Killer whale.
The fin blots out the sun, darkens the sky all at once; everything goes black.
Leni hears the gliding of the orca, the splash as it emerges, the snort of air through its blowhole. She smells the decaying fish on its breath.
Leni opened her eyes, breathing hard. A headache pounded in her skull and the taste of blood filled her mouth.
The world was dark and fetid-smelling. Putrid.
She looked up. Matthew hung in the crevice above her, caught between the two rock walls, suspended, his feet hanging above her head, stuck in place by his backpack.
“Matthew? Matthew?”
He didn’t answer.
(Maybe he couldn’t. Maybe he was dead.)
Something dripped onto her face. She wiped it away, tasted blood.
She struggled to sit up. The pain was so violent, she vomited all over herself and passed out. When she came to, she almost puked again at the smell of her own vomit splattered across her chest.
Think. Help him. She was Alaskan. She could survive, damn it. It was the one thing she knew how to do. The one thing her father had taught her.
“It’s a crevice, Matthew. Not a bear cave. So that’s good.” No brown bear would be ambling in, looking for a place to sleep. She moved inch by inch around the entire interior, her hands feeling the slick rock walls. No exit.
She crawled back onto the saucer rock and looked up at Matthew. “So. The only way out is up.”
Blood dripped down his leg, plopped onto the rock beside her.
She stood up.
“You’re blocking the only way out. So I need to get you unstuck. The pack is the problem.” The added width had him pinned. “If I can get the pack off you, you’ll fall.”
Fall. That didn’t sound like a great plan, but she couldn’t think of anything better.
Okay.
How?
She moved gingerly, wedged her numb hand into the waistband of her pants. She slid/fell off the saucer-shaped rock, splashed into the squishy mud. A sharp pain jabbed her in the chest, made her gasp. She dug through her bug-out bag and found her knife. Biting down on it, she crawled to a place directly below Matthew’s feet.
Now all she had to do was get to him and cut him free.