‘I’m on it!’ said Frazer. ‘You wait here with Goldilocks and I’ll get wood and kindling.’
Frazer consciously fought the temptation to go shwiiiiiinnnng when he took the machete out of his pack.
He disappeared into the trees, leaving Amazon alone with Goldilocks. The bear woke up briefly, looked around, saw Amazon, made a contented little grunt and went back to sleep.
‘Hard work being a baby bear, eh?’ smiled Amazon. She was more determined than ever to bring the cub to safety.
Sitting by the lonely lakeside, Amazon began to get a little jumpy. She half imagined yellow eyes peering at her from the trees. A bird gave an alarm call and then flew clumsily through the branches. The noise startled her, and the relief that followed from her realization that it was nothing more than a pigeon was in its turn followed by a shiver of apprehension about what had alarmed the bird.
‘Frazer, is that you?’ she called into the darkness.
There was no reply.
And then, drifting faintly through the forest, she heard, for the second time, the long, haunting cry of a wolf.
If anything, the wolf howl was further away than when Amazon had heard it on the trail. But then she had been with Frazer, and now she was alone.
‘Frazer …?’ she called again. It was now dark enough for the trees to blend together: no longer individual trunks and branches, they were now just that mysterious collective entity, The Forest.
As a child, her parents had taught her that the traditional fairy-tale terrors were imaginary. That there were no ogres or witches, and that wolves – the first and deadliest of the fairy-tale animals – were almost never a threat to humans. But that knowledge did not seem to help her now, here in a very real forest. And somehow the fact that wolves were here meant that those other long-banished nightmare figures might also be out there. So, if the wolves did not eat her, then the witch or the ogre might.
And that train of thought took Amazon back to her parents again, and she longed to have them here, protecting her.
She had been staring with all her might into the forest when she suddenly had the strongest feeling that she herself was being watched. And yet it did not feel to her that the watcher was out there, among the trees.
The hairs stood up on the back of her neck. And then she heard it.
An almost gentle, infinitely stealthy sound.
From behind her.
In the water.
Whatever was watching her had approached from the lake. Amazon spun round, expecting to see the cougar there, ready to spring from the shallows. She was getting ready to make herself seem bigger, standing on tiptoes and holding out her arms – a trick she’d read about. She was going to scream, and possibly even run at the beast – do everything to make it clear to the cougar that she was not any predator’s idea of easy pickings.
And then she saw it. Or rather them. Two long brown snouts low in the water, and four beady brown eyes staring at her in the dying light.
‘You know, some outdoorsy types are more afraid of beavers than they are of bears.’
Now Amazon did scream. She had been so focused on whatever it was out there on the lake that she hadn’t heard her cousin return.
The scream made the two heads – belonging to the pair of beavers who had created this lake, and very much felt that they owned it and that anyone who wanted to camp there should really ask their permission – dip below the tranquil surface of the water.
‘Frazer!’ yelled Amazon. ‘Don’t sneak up on people like that. It frightened Goldilocks.’
The little bear was still fast asleep.
‘Yeah, so I see,’ said Frazer. He had his arms full of pine branches, and there were four good logs, as thick as a leg, on the ground where he’d dumped them.
‘Right, two jobs. Fire and shelter. Fire first. Let’s get this thing started before it’s too dark to see what we’re doing.’
Amazon watched carefully as Frazer made the fire. She’d seen him do it before, but it was still fascinating. Something about the almost sacred process of creating fire transformed Frazer from a kid into a man – or maybe just from a goofy kid into a slightly more serious one.
He began by arranging the four long pine logs into a cross shape, with a small gap in the middle.
That was new to Amazon, but she waited to see what Frazer would do before asking him about it. He piled smaller sticks and stouter pieces of wood into the space between the big logs. Then he used his machete to trim the bark from more pine branches. Next he cut into the exposed white wood without severing it from the branch, creating a feathery effect.
The next stage Amazon had seen before. Frazer took some strips of silver-birch bark from his pocket and used his knife to scrape at the inside lining of the bark, forming a fluffy white mass of curled shavings. He arranged this on a bed of more birch bark and small dry twigs.
‘Now the fun part. You want to do this?’
Frazer held out the pencil-shaped rod of dull metal – his firesteel – and his hunting knife towards Amazon. She’d watched him use the firesteel before, in the Russian Far East, but had never had a go herself. She took the implements from Frazer.
‘Remember to use the back of the knife, not the sharp part of the blade,’ he said. ‘And try not to cut your finger off. I could probably sew it back on with a fishbone needle and some thread made from willow bark, but my stitches are never very neat, and I might sew it on the wrong way round or something, so you’ll never be able to pick your nose or scratch your butt properly again.’
Amazon wrinkled her nose in disdain. Then, concentrating, she scraped the blunt edge of the knife along the length of the metal rod. A cascade of sparks spilled out on to the birch tinder, where they crackled and fizzed, and soon set the oil-rich bark alight. Then Frazer used the little fire to set the feathered pine branches alight. They burned beautifully with a thick oily orange flame, and it was then an easy job to get the larger pile of bark and sticks in the space at the centre of the cross made by the pine logs to catch. Together they built the fire up round the burning heart.
‘Nice work, Zonnie,’ said Frazer admiringly, once they saw that their fire was going strongly. ‘It took me about a year to get all that right. But now for the final masterstroke. You see these four branches?’ he said, pointing at the logs arranged in a cross. ‘Well, all we have to do to keep the fire going is to push them in towards the centre of the fire – no traipsing out into the forest for more wood. Should keep us going all night.’
‘Yeah, clever,’ said Amazon. ‘But doesn’t that mean that we’ll have to stay awake so we can push the logs in?’
‘Erm, well, yes, I suppose technically you do sort of, but … well, you could do that without even getting out of your sleeping bag.’
‘Hmmm,’ replied Amazon thoughtfully. ‘You mean the sleeping bags we don’t have?’
‘Ah yes,’ continued Frazer, as if this were all part of his brilliant plan. ‘I designed our shelter around that very fact. We need something to keep the rain – or snow – off our heads, and our bodies dry and away from the cold, wet ground. Combined with the fire, you won’t miss your sleeping bag.’
For the next ten minutes Frazer busied himself with the machete. He cut two stout branches, as long as his outstretched arms, each with a Y-shaped fork at the top. He used the machete to bore a couple of holes in the ground, and then hammered the stakes into them, using a stone from the lake. Then he angled two more sticks from the ground to the Y-joint. He used his knife to cut long strips of willow bark and lashed the upright and the diagonal poles together.
That part made Amazon smile – she knew very well that Frazer always had string in his pockets the way other people carried hankies or money, but he just had to prove that he could do without it.
Next he laid a thick layer of spruce branches over the stakes, forming a lean-to shelter, open on one side.
‘You are such a copycat,’ Amazon said to him. ‘You totally stole that from Makha
and Dersu.’
Makha and Dersu were members of the Udege tribe in the Russian Far East. They had helped the Trackers on their mission to save the endangered Amur leopards.
‘Amazon,’ said Frazer, his face serious to the point of being pompous, ‘among us explorers and, er, wilderness types, there is no “mine” or “yours”, only “ours”. You can’t “steal” an idea like this; all you can do is share it. But this isn’t finished yet. I told my dad about the shelter the Udege guys made, and he said it would be even better with a little addition.’
Then Frazer carried on working. He used the machete to trim more pine branches, two about the same length as the shelter, two about the same width. This time he lashed them together using thin roots from the pines, prised from the ground with his versatile machete. The poles formed a square frame the size of a single bed. Frazer then lashed more poles across the frame. Finally he put fresh green branches of spruce across the bed, piling them up thickly.
Throughout it all Amazon had helped by holding bits of wood while he bound them together, or by collecting the spruce branches. He’d done his best to make her feel as if she were a partner in the creation of their shelter. But now she stood back and said, ‘OK, Frazer, I hand it to you. This is a pretty good little house you’ve built here.’
Frazer guessed that there would be a sting in the tail. There was.
‘A pretty good house for one, that is. Or are we all supposed to squeeze in there?’
‘It’s the only way to keep warm,’ replied Frazer, looking just as unhappy with the situation as Amazon. ‘We can keep Goldilocks in the middle to act as a living hot-water bottle. But seriously, Zonnie, even with the fire it’s going to get cold tonight, real cold, so desperate measures are called for. Right, let’s see about supper.’
They emptied their packs to see what they had left. As well as a few handfuls of trail mix, they had four protein bars, two bars of chocolate and the packet soup.
Frazer tried to put on a brave face. ‘We’ve got fire, we’ve got shelter, we’ve got food, sorta, and we’ve got water. That’s a recipe for three happy campers.’
There was a tin cup in Amazon’s pack. She filled it with lake water. She was thirsty now, despite the cold, but Frazer warned her against drinking the water straight from the lake.
She looked sceptical, saying, ‘But surely there’s no pollution out here? We’re in the middle of nowhere.’
‘Beaver fever,’ he said ominously.
‘Huh?’
‘It’s a bacterial disease you can get from drinking lake water. It’s carried in beavers’, ah, urine …’
‘Eew!’
‘The chances are we’d be OK, but it’s probably best to boil it.’
Frazer rigged up a tripod arrangement with three sticks, and dangled the cup over the flames, putting that string of his to good use. They used the boiled water to make up the soup, and then boiled some more to fill up their water bottles.
With the fire burning brightly and some food inside them, Amazon and Frazer both felt a little more cheerful. It helped that they hadn’t heard any more of the wolves.
Goldilocks had emerged from her slumbers by this stage. She ate everything they put in front of her, which cemented the love between the bear and the two Trackers. But her real bond was with Amazon.
‘Looks like she sees you as her mother now,’ said Frazer, as the bear snuggled down in Amazon’s lap. ‘We’ll cycle out of here tomorrow and be back at the camp by tomorrow afternoon. My dad’ll give us some serious grief about this, but when he sees the spirit bear we’ve rescued he’ll forgive us everything.’
And then, as if to show up Frazer’s words as nothing but hollow optimism, they heard the howling of a wolf. And this time it was closer. And a moment later it was joined by other wolves, their voices filling the night sky with banshee wails.
The bear cub on Amazon’s lap pricked up its ears, and then squirmed even further into her midriff, as if it were trying to lose itself entirely in her.
Frazer stood up and approached the treeline.
‘What are you doing?’ Amazon hissed. ‘Come back by the fire.’
‘They’re a long way off still,’ Frazer replied. ‘And we need more wood.’
He went into the forest again, and Amazon heard the swish and hack of the machete.
‘It’s a bit green,’ he said, when he came back, ‘but I think we need to build the fire up as much as we can.’
Seeing Frazer take the wolf situation seriously was both a relief and a shock to Amazon. She’d secretly hoped that he would laugh at the wolf threat, thereby showing it to be a figment of her imagination.
Well, clearly he wasn’t laughing. But having him calm and resolute in the face of this new danger was a comfort. Of sorts.
Frazer loaded most of the wood on to the fire. But there was one long straight piece that he held back. As Amazon watched, he used his knife to strip off the bark. Then he sharpened the end of the stick, and finally rotated it slowly in the fire.
‘Spear,’ he said, quite unnecessarily.
‘Really?’ replied Amazon. ‘I’d never have guessed. I thought it was a toothpick.’
That made them both laugh, which broke the tension. But then something caught their attention, silencing them again.
It was Goldilocks that heard it first, pricking her ears: the unmistakable sound of something moving through the undergrowth. Frazer gave Amazon the machete, put his knife in his belt, took his spear and stood in front of the fire. In the flickering firelight he looked strangely timeless to Amazon. Standing there with the spear and the knife, he wasn’t a modern boy from Long Island any more, but a Native American brave, or an Ancient Greek, or an aboriginal hunter.
And then a second noise was added to the sound of the creature moving heavily through the forest. And it was a sound that made Amazon’s blood run cold. It was a high, haunting, heartbreaking sound. It did not sound to Amazon like any living creature, any animal that she had ever seen or heard or read about. She had been stalked by killer bears and tigers in Siberia, and hunted by sharks in Polynesia, but she had experienced nothing like this. It seemed not to belong to the realm of nature at all. It was the sound of a soul in torment, a ghost, or a ghoul.
As she looked, she saw the courageous and resolute Frazer first take a step back and then retreat behind the fire, putting its flames between him and whatever wretched, bloodsucking, soul-stealing being it was that was approaching them.
And then the high keening sound became clearer and they heard it for what it was.
‘I WANT MY MOMMY!’
‘What the …?’
Frazer and Amazon exchanged baffled glances, and then looked back to where the voice was coming from. A moment later, a tiny figure stepped – or rather staggered – into the circle of flickering light cast by the fire.
It was a child – a little boy of perhaps six years old. His blond hair was matted and filthy, his face smudged with dirt and tears, and his clothes hung from him in shreds. He was wearing a single shoe.
They both knew straight away who it was.
‘Ben?’ said Amazon, rushing towards him. ‘Ben Waits?’
The little boy’s face was filled with emotions too complex to read – certainly too complex to belong in the face of a child so young. There was hope and fear and, the topmost layer, a sort of anger or outrage. It was an expression that screamed out the child’s sense of injustice, that overpowering feeling that something had happened that just wasn’t fair.
‘You’re not my mommy! Where’s my mommy?’
Without another word, Amazon swept the little boy, who was, indeed, the lost Ben Waits, into her arms and hugged him.
The child fought against her for a few seconds, kicking out with his one good foot, and pummelling Amazon’s back with his tiny fists. But then he subsided into heart-rending sobs, as Amazon comforted him.
‘We’re going to take you to your mummy,’ she said. ‘You’ll see her soon. And your da
ddy.’
‘You talk funny,’ said the little boy. ‘You say “mommy” all wrong.’
‘Tell me about it, kid,’ said Frazer. ‘She’s from some rainy little island next door to Europe, where they haven’t learned to speak proper American. Now come on, little guy, and get warm by the fire.’
They sat on the platform that Frazer had made, and gave Ben some trail mix and a chocolate bar, which he ate first with suspicion and then in a frenzy.
The child was clearly traumatized. He wouldn’t let go of Amazon as he munched. She tried to ask him about where he’d been, and what had happened to him, but he would not answer. In fact, he seemed unable to even hear what she was saying.
They had almost forgotten about Goldilocks, but the baby bear woke at the smell of the chocolate. She was still trapped in the tight embrace of the backpack, but she squirmed and snuffled and grumbled, and made her presence felt and heard.
Ben looked up and saw the cub, ghost-pale in the dim light. The effect on him was instant. He went rigid with fear, and then tried to scramble away.
Frazer grabbed him. At the same moment he realized what must be going through the little boy’s mind – the report had said that his party had been attacked by a spirit bear. The sight of even this tiny specimen had brought back what must be terrible memories.
‘Hey, it’s OK, little man. This is just a baby we’re looking after. He’s on his own as well, like you.’
Ben appeared to calm down a fraction, but still he stared intently at the bear cub as Amazon let her lick at the smears of chocolate on the wrapper. Her antics were so cute and amusing that the boy’s look soon softened, and the first hint of a smile tugged at the corners of his mouth.
‘Do you want to hold her?’ asked Amazon, thinking that it might help to cure his fear.
Ben shook his head, and was about to say, ‘Nah.’ But the decision was taken out of his hands, as Goldilocks finally escaped from her prison, and jumped into the boy’s arms. After a second of shocked silence, Ben exploded into giggles.
Bear Adventure Page 8
