‘You’d never guess,’ said Hal Hunt, crackling over the intercom, ‘that this is one of the oldest inhabited parts of North America. Fourteen thousand years ago the earliest Americans walked over from Siberia to Alaska, and moved down the western coast. Within a thousand years, they reached the very bottom of South America.’
‘Walked?’ Amazon had asked. ‘Isn’t there a sea in between Alaska and Siberia?’
‘Correct – the Bering Strait – but back then the world was in the grip of the last ice age. So much of the sea was locked up in the ice that a land bridge was left exposed, and those good old Siberians just walked right across.’
But they weren’t here in this remote corner of Canada to go sightseeing. Nor were they here on a conservation mission. They were here to find Amazon’s parents, Roger and Ling-Mei Hunt, whose own light aircraft had gone missing somewhere in this wilderness.
The authorities had given up on the search: there were so many thousands of square miles of virgin forest … And, as the police had pointed out, the time that had elapsed since the plane’s disappearance meant that there was really very little chance of anyone still being alive.
But Hal Hunt knew his brother too well.
‘If he survived the crash then he’s still alive,’ he’d said to Amazon, back in Prince Rupert. ‘And if he’s alive then I’m going to find him.’
‘I still don’t understand why Uncle Roger and Aunt Ling-Mei didn’t come back by themselves,’ said Frazer. ‘I mean, they could have found a ranger station, or a hunting party, or just made their own way back to civilization by themselves, couldn’t they?’
‘I think you underestimate just how much wilderness there is out here, Frazer,’ replied Hal. ‘But I don’t think it’s just that. I’ve got a feeling that either Roger didn’t want to be rescued, or someone stopped him from being rescued. Either way, the answer to this riddle is in the wreckage of their aircraft and we’re going to find it, if it’s the last thing TRACKS ever does.’
And so three separate teams of TRACKS young conservationists were out in the forests searching, while Dr Drexler, the TRACKS chief scientific officer, stayed back in Prince Rupert, coordinating their actions.
‘OK, guys, let’s focus,’ said Hal Hunt, still smiling about his son’s encounter with the wolverine. ‘We’re here to find my brother and Ling-Mei, not to horse around.’
He beckoned Frazer and Amazon to gather round, and then unfolded a map of the Canadian province of British Columbia on a low camp table.
‘We’re here,’ he said, ‘in the foothills of the Coast Range, with the heights to the west and the interior plateau to the east. Miranda Coverdale is leading a team here, further south, and Bluey’s team are up here, to the north.’
Miranda and Bluey were two members of TRACKS. Bluey, named for his bright red hair, was Frazer’s best friend. He was in his early twenties and had a PhD in marine biology, but he still looked and, at times, acted like a big kid. Miranda was the deputy veterinary officer to Dr Drexler. She was about the same age as Bluey, but she looked and behaved a lot older. She was definitely the sensible one in the gang.
‘Tomorrow morning you two take your bikes along this trail, here. That’ll take you to the foot of this hill.’ Hal jabbed his finger at the map, and then pointed to a rocky outcrop in the middle distance. ‘It’s called Mount Humboldt, but it’s more of a hill than a mountain.’
‘Humboldt?’ said Amazon. ‘You mean like the squid …?’
Amazon had recently had an uncomfortably close encounter with a horde of ravenous Humboldt squid in the Pacific Ocean.
‘That’s right,’ replied Hal, ‘named after the same guy, the great German naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt. He discovered –’
‘There’re trails?’ said Frazer, before his dad could launch into one of his lectures.
‘What? Oh yep. Not many. A few old hunting trails and maybe a disused logging road in the woods too. Rough, but should be OK for mountain bikes. It’s twelve miles away, but the trail heads straight there, so it shouldn’t take you more than two hours. Then scale Humboldt – you won’t need climbing gear, it’s nothing more than a hike, really – and see what you can see. From the top you’ll have a view over the whole area. Obviously there’s no cellphone signal out here, but we can keep in touch using the sat phones.’
‘Which way are you going, Dad?’
‘I’m heading out east from here, along this valley.’ He traced the blue line of a river with his finger. ‘If Roger was lost and flying without navigation equipment, he might have been following the river to try to reach a settlement. OK, we all clear?’
Amazon nodded. Just being out here and doing something made her feel better. It gave a little room for hope to grow.
‘Yes, sir!’ said Frazer, as enthusiastic as ever, his brush with the terrible man-eating wolverine already forgotten.
‘In that case, let’s go fishing.’
‘Have you done much fishing?’ Hal asked Amazon, as they walked through the woods. They were each carrying a rod and tackle.
‘None,’ she replied. ‘Never really saw the point in standing around aimlessly holding a stick.’
‘Well, honey,’ said Hal, ‘you’ll see the point today. This isn’t English fishing for minnows; this is real North American fishing. There are lake trout out there bigger than you.’
‘Really?’ said Amazon, her eyes suddenly wide. ‘And what do they eat?’
‘Anything smaller than them. So make sure you don’t fall in!’
Amazon knew what her Uncle Hal was up to. She was desperately worried about her parents, and Hal was doing all he could to keep her mind engaged and busy so she wouldn’t dwell on the dark fears that crept back whenever nothing more engrossing was there to keep them at bay.
The trouble was that this sort of thing didn’t come naturally to Hal. Everything that Amazon had heard about him when he was younger from her own father created an image of a happy and relaxed person, able to enjoy life and, crucially, someone capable of standing back and letting others enjoy theirs.
But things had changed when Hal was in his early twenties. It was then that his own father, John Hunt, had been badly hurt in an accident. After that, the burden of running the business, and looking after his kid brother – Amazon’s father – had fallen on Hal’s young shoulders.
The spooky thing was that, although Amazon didn’t know the details, she did know that he had been in a plane crash somewhere in Canada …
Back then they ran an operation collecting animals to sell to zoos. It was Hal at first, later helped by Roger, who changed things around and set up TRACKS, with a focus more on keeping animals safe in their own environment, rather than in zoos. He’d worked himself into the ground, sometimes travelling the world, but also doing the boring work of getting funding and lobbying governments. And so the organization had grown.
But somewhere along the way Hal had lost his joy and his zest. Where once he zipped through life, now he trudged.
The brothers finally fell out over Hal’s desire to bring in ever-increasing amounts of money to pay for the TRACKS programmes around the world. Roger thought that too many compromises had been made, that TRACKS had become too close to some unsavoury governments and big corporations, which had only their own interests in mind. He thought that TRACKS had lost its soul.
And so it lost him too.
Frazer’s mother had died when he was a baby, which again had heaped the pressure on his father’s shoulders. He might have crumpled under it, but it just made him stronger, tougher. What it didn’t make him was easy to live with. He had become closed off emotionally, reluctant to speak his heart. Frazer knew that his dad loved him, but that was because he knew how to read the signs: a half-smile here, a pat on the shoulder there.
Hal Hunt was trying with Amazon, he really was. She sensed that. But he just wasn’t the person you went to when you wanted a hug and a shoulder to cry on – to lean on, yes, but not to cry on.
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br /> The trail from the campsite opened out and the crystal waters of the lake were before them. Slender pine trees rimmed the shoreline and Amazon saw a beaver lodge – an untidy mound of branches and mud – across on the far side. A single bird – a dramatic black and white Great Northern Loon – sailed serenely across the water, its wake a perfect V behind it.
The floatplane was moored close to the lakeside, near to where a spit of shingle reached out into the water like a long, bony finger. Hal led the way to the end of the spit. It was more exposed out there, with water on three sides, and Amazon shivered.
‘You can feel that winter’s coming,’ she said.
‘Another month and you’ll be able to walk across to the other side,’ said Hal. ‘But this is still a good time for the animals. Lots to eat. And I suggest we get a modest share of it!’
‘You sure there’s trout out there, Dad?’ said Frazer. He was already, in his mind, feasting on the fish, hot and white from the campfire.
‘Oh yes,’ Hal nodded. ‘At this time of the year the trout come a little nearer to the surface. All summer long they’ve been down at the bottom, vacuuming up the baitfish. But now the water’s colder, the whole crowd of ’em get a yearning for the sun.’
‘How we gonna catch them, Dad. Fly?’
‘Does this look like a fly rod, Frazer?’ Hal answered, holding up the stout rod.
‘Er, I guess not.’
‘We’re going to use lures.’
Hal showed Amazon how to attach the lure – a miniature model of a minnow with a cluster of hooks on its tail – to the line.
Amazon really had never fished before, and she found this part incredibly tricky. She managed to cut her finger on one of the sharp barbs, drawing a bubble of bright red blood. Hal took her hand gently in his and eased the hook out. He even had a plaster to cover up the wound.
‘You’re a brave kid,’ Hal said. ‘When Frazer here first hooked himself, he squealed so loud the fish came up to see what was happening. I do believe that a wide-mouthed bass asked if he could keep the noise down, as he was trying to get some sleep.’
‘Thanks, Dad,’ said Frazer, rolling his eyes. ‘Got any other embarrassing stories about me? Maybe you could show Zonnie a photo of me in my diaper, sucking my thumb.’
Hal laughed one of his rare, hearty laughs. ‘OK, hotshot, you can teach Amazon how to cast. I’m going to find a quiet spot further down the shore. The person that catches the biggest fish gets to eat the eyeballs.’
‘Your dad gives you a hard time, doesn’t he?’ said Amazon, after Hal had walked the length of the spit and disappeared behind a fold in the shore.
‘It’s just his way,’ replied Frazer, not looking back at his cousin.
Before Amazon had the chance to ask him any more questions, he pulled the rod back over his shoulder and sent a cast out fifteen metres into the deepest part of the lake, the lure sailing over the water in a perfect arc.
‘Sweet!’ said Amazon, genuinely impressed.
Frazer quickly reeled in the line, jiggling the rod so that the lure would imitate the random movements of a fish.
‘Your turn,’ he said, when the lure came back empty.
He showed Amazon how to hold the rod and operate the reel. She tried to copy his cast, but the lure refused to budge from the end of her rod.
‘You forgot to let go of the release button, here at the back of the reel,’ Frazer said, smiling. ‘Unless you do that, it won’t, er, release.’
She tried again and managed a decent cast. She began to reel it in, again imitating Frazer’s style.
‘I think it’s stuck on something,’ she said, when the lure was halfway back. ‘I –’
‘It’s not stuck,’ Frazer yelped. ‘You’ve caught something. Quick, strike – I mean, give it an upwards yank, before it slips off.’
Amazon did just that, and felt the weight of the fish on the line.
‘I don’t believe it,’ smiled Frazer. ‘On your very first cast! OK, just reel it the rest of the way in, nice and slowly.’
When the fish was almost at the shore, Frazer showed Amazon how to raise the rod, lifting the lure clear of the water. And there, caught on one of the hooks, was a glistening fish, perhaps fifteen centimetres long.
Amazon let out a squeal of pure joy.
‘I never thought I’d catch one in a million years!’ she said, and she would have done a little fish dance if no one had been there to watch.
Frazer showed Amazon how to take the hook out of the little trout’s mouth. Then she held the fish in her hands for a few seconds, taking in the perfect, speckled beauty of it.
‘Hate to tell you this, Zonnie,’ said Frazer, ‘but we’ve got to throw that little fella back.’
‘No! Why?’
‘Too small.’
‘Really?’ Amazon’s shoulders sagged a little, but another part of her was pleased to be able to let the beautiful creature go.
‘Can’t believe you hooked him with that big lure. Got to give them a chance to spawn. But now you’ve got the hang of it there’ll be no stopping you.’
Frazer was right. In half an hour they’d caught three decent-sized trout. Frazer’s was the biggest – almost as long as his arm – but Amazon had two that stretched from her hand to her elbow. She held one up and Frazer photographed it.
‘One to show your mum and dad,’ he said, ‘when we find them.’
Amazon responded with a warm smile. It was a smile that Frazer hadn’t seen her unleash before.
And then Amazon stopped smiling. For a moment Frazer thought it was because he’d mentioned her parents, which had brought back bad memories. Then he realized that Amazon wasn’t even looking at him, and that her expression could only mean one thing: there was something extraordinary just behind him, standing on the narrow spit of land, right between the two of them and the safety of the shore.
He turned and there before him was a sight that filled him in equal parts with wonder, awe and terror.
It was the sheer beauty of the creature that first struck Frazer. During the years he had been travelling the world with TRACKS, he had seen many bears – polar bears in Greenland, black bears and grizzlies in America, and their Asiatic cousins in the Russian Far East. He had seen sloth bears in India, greedily shovelling wasp larvae out of a nest. He had seen spectacled bears in Peru, and sun bears in Burma; but he had never seen anything like this.
Well, that wasn’t quite true. The shape was familiar – the rounded back end, the lack of an obvious hump between the shoulder blades, the long face and the alert ears. But the colour was astonishing: a lovely pale yellow, like a jar of honey held up to the sunlight.
Just for a split second the pale colour fooled Frazer into thinking that this might be a polar bear that had somehow strayed far from its frozen homeland. But the colour was a shade too dark, and the general shape of the bear just plain wrong.
No, this was a black bear, for sure. It just wasn’t, well, black.
Had the bear been on its own, Frazer would have been wary, but not scared. It was the creature behind the big bear that made him rigid with fear.
The baby.
The cub was even more enchanting than the mother: a fluffy, roly-poly ball of energy and joy, the same lovely honey colour as its mother. As Frazer watched, it tripped over its own feet, let out a little roar, looked around to see who had noticed its mishap and then ran up to snuggle at its mother’s ample behind.
Cute.
But this was the one situation that all naturalists feared most: a mother bear with her cub. It transformed a relatively harmless creature – most species of bear would much rather hunt mice than men – into a potential killer.
‘DO NOT MOVE!’
The voice that rang out was so full of authority that it seemed that even the mother bear obeyed it. Frazer looked up and saw his father further along the shore. Hal’s face appeared quite calm, but Frazer saw – or sensed – the tension beneath his skin, and he realized just how worrie
d his father was. That in itself was enough to raise Frazer’s fear factor by a couple of notches.
‘All she wants are the fish,’ said Hal Hunt, his voice now soft and soothing. Frazer realized how hard he was trying to maintain that veneer of calmness. ‘Throw them towards her, and then wade out to the plane and get in. Stay there till the bears leave. Got that?’
Frazer nodded. He checked out Amazon. He was expecting to see her face frozen in terror, but in fact it was shining with a radiant light.
‘They’re so beautiful,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know that there were bears that colour …’
‘OK, Zonnie,’ said Frazer, ‘we can wax lyrical about those guys when we’re safe. For now, we give them our dinner and get the heck out of harm’s way. One swipe of that paw and we’re as dead as that big trout you’ve got there.’
Amazon snapped out of her trance. The three trout they’d caught were at her feet. She picked one up and threw it towards the mother bear. It flopped on to the ground in front of her, and she took a step towards it and sniffed. Frazer threw the other two fish. The bear squatted down, put her big paws on the spotted flesh and began to gorge. The little one emerged from behind her and joined in with the feast.
‘Right,’ said Frazer, ‘just follow me.’
The floatplane was moored five metres off the spit, at a point opposite where the bears were now busy eating. Frazer’s plan was to circle round to the far side of the aircraft and get in. He knew, as did his father, that they’d be safe in there.
He took Amazon’s hand, and together they backed into the water, not taking their eyes off the bears. The water was soon up to their knees, and they began to edge their way round to the plane.
And then Frazer stumbled on a submerged tree branch. He splashed into the cold water and let out an involuntary gasp. The mother bear leapt to her feet and emitted a harsh bark, almost like a dog. She began to bustle towards the two Trackers, as Amazon helped Frazer back to his feet.
Bear Adventure Page 2
