Inga took a deep breath and braced herself against the post-storm chill before hastily stripping out of her damp clothes. The brisk air became pleasantly warm as she shifted into her polar bear form.
A few minutes of paddling and diving in the cove confirmed that the boat was not there. If it had sunk, she could have used her bear’s strength to drag it ashore. But no such luck. Alas, poor Dingboat; it could be anywhere along the coast from here to the northernmost tip of the island, if it hadn’t simply washed out into the Atlantic.
Inga scrambled ashore, shook herself off, and sat on a rock while she pulled on her clammy clothes with a few little shivers and murmured complaints. Now and then she glanced up at the sun. It was midafternoon, but with the northern latitude andlong days of spring, she still had a number of hours to go before sunset.
This wasn’t the worst place it could have happened, she reassured herself. If she hiked overland, cutting out all the many convolutions of the coast that she would have had to navigate around in the skiff, she could probably reach the old cabin before dark.
What she couldn’t do was take everything with her. She walked back to where she’d stashed her gear. Her backpack was wet on the outside, but she knew how to pack for the changeable weather of the coast, and she changed into the dry clothes she had inside and stuffed her damp ones into a bag to dry out later. Most of the contents of the cooler fit in the backpack with her personal supplies. She stuffed in as much of the camping gear as she could carry.
The one thing she did not appear to have was an emergency radio. She was almost positive there had been one in the boat, but if so, it must have been stashed in one of the seat compartments or somewhere else she hadn’t looked. She still had her phone, but it was useless with no cell towers in the area.
Inga still wasn’t too worried. She had food for days, and she was pretty sure there was a supply of dried and canned food in the cabin as well. She had gone out with the intention of spending a few days there anyway. And her friends and family knew where she was. When she didn’t come back, someone would come up the coast looking for her. If she really got lonely or desperate, she could walk back, or head inland on the island until she encountered roads.
The entire situation was inconvenient more than dangerous. The thing she felt worst about was losing the boat.
But there was no use crying over the one that got away. She tucked the gear that she couldn’t take with her, including the cooler itself, as deeply into the crevices in the rocks as she could.If it wasn’t disturbed by animals, the family could come back and get it later. She did want to take the tarp she had used for a rain shelter; it was likely to be useful if the cabin had suffered damage in the years since she had last seen it.
The griffins looked up at her reproachfully when she pulled it off them.
“I’m really sorry, guys,” she said to the bundles of glowering damp fur and feathers with four small squeaky balls of fluff nestled between them. “But let’s face it. You’re wild animals. You’re meant to be out here. Sorry about relocating you so far from your premium source of French fries and fish scraps, but you have everything you need to survive. You’ll be fine.”
The opossum griffin hissed at her.
“Same to you, buddy,” Inga said.
She folded up the tarp as well as she could and lashed it to the outside of the pack. After stuffing a bottle of water into the loop on the side of the pack provided for that purpose, she slung it on her shoulders.
The griffins squawked. One of the babies tried to waddle after her, only to be snapped up in a parent’s beak before it got too far.
“I repeat again,” Inga said, looking down at them. “You all are wild animals. I don’t care how acclimatized to people you’ve become. I’m not taking you with me.”
By the timeshe set out in earnest, the sun was lower, and she had four baby griffins riding on top of the pack. The parents swooped around her, flying ahead and detouring to scavenge. Now and then, one of them tried to land on top of the pack, creating a havoc of squawking, scrambling, and baby griffins climbing into her hair.
They simply would not stay behind. For the first half hour or so, she scouted for a likely location to leave them. Maybe they didn’t think the rock stacks looked like a good place for nesting. When Inga finally found a likely-looking little cave with some nice bushes around it, she took off her pack and relocated the babies into the cave. The parents hissed and snapped at her, but they seemed to be getting used to Inga handling their babies, at least to the point of not trying to bite.
Inga put the pack back on, while the chicks stumbled out of the cave and fluttered around her feet, flapping their useless, unfledged wings.
“I am not carrying you all the way to the fishing shack. You’re wild animals. You need to be free.”
It was very clear that they didn’t want to be free; the only free thing they wanted around here was a free ride. She took a few steps with baby griffins trailing behind her, plaintively squeaking, while the parents hissed at her like they thoughtshewas the bad guy here. Finally Inga gave up and replaced them on top of the pack, where they clung and squealed as she set out walking again.
The scenery was wild and desolate, beautiful in its lonely way. What trees grew here on the headlands were stunted from constant wind. Later in the summer there would be fields of wildflowers, but this early in the year, the landscape had just turned green, with glacial rocks thrusting up through a carpet of grass and wild plants.
The ocean was intermittently visible off to her right, a vast sweep of gray and blue water. From these heights, she could see great floes of ice floating past, far out to sea. Now and then she glimpsed a whale or a seal. Sea birds wheeled above, mostly gulls, occasionally getting into furious squawking fights with the griffins. In addition to that, the babies squabbled constantly. The peaceful hike across the island that Inga had envisioned waspunctuated with squeaking, shrieking, hissing, and occasionally a chunk of her hair getting painfully yanked as baby griffin claws got tangled in it.
One of them climbed on top of her head. Inga glared straight ahead and kept striding along.
Her fishing boots, designed to keep her feet dry, were much less suited to the job of hiking boots. They flexed uncomfortably on the rocky trail, and she felt like she might be rubbing a blister.
Next time, I’m doing this as a bear.
She veered back toward the coast when she became worried that she might accidentally overshoot the cabin without realizing it. The oceanfront in this region was a series of steep bluffs and small fast-flowing streams that mainly flowed from meltwater in the spring. What towns existed, mostly fishing outports, were scattered and small.
When she heard a dog bark, at first she wasn’t sure if she was imagining it. But the sound came again, somewhere below her, the loud deep-chested bark of a large dog, echoing off the cliffs.
“Hey, is someone down there?” Inga called.
The dog went into a flurry of frantic-sounding barks. No human voices answered her.
