by Bear Grylls
They climbed down side by side, so that neither of them would dislodge rocks that might fall on the other. They moved carefully. The sandstone had a strange feel to it, almost greasy, and it flaked away if you held it too tight. It was an unpleasant feeling to be suspended over a sheer drop, holding onto the rock, and feeling it crumble away beneath your fingers.
Beck reached the bottom before Brihony. He looked up to check her progress. She was still halfway down, arms and legs stretched out to hold herself.
‘How are you doing?’ he called.
Very slowly she wiggled a foot across the rock face into a new crevice. Just as slowly, she moved a hand. ‘How does it look?’ Her voice shook slightly.
‘Just move one limb at a time. You’ve got four points of contact holding you up – two feet, two hands. Keep three of them steady at all times and just move one—’
‘I know that, Beck Granger, thank you very much!’ she snapped. ‘Got any handy clues for people who just happen to hate heights?’
‘ “Don’t look down” always helps,’ Beck replied teasingly.
‘Yeah, thank you again, Beck . . .’ Painstakingly, Brihony shifted one hand a little lower. ‘I don’t mind being high and looking down. Cliffs, tall buildings, aeroplanes – all fine. But I hate not having anything under me . . .’
‘You’ve got plenty under you.’ Beck spied out the cracks and ledges beneath her. In his mind’s eye he could map her way down as if it was a ladder painted on the side of the cliff. ‘Move your left foot five centimetres to the left . . . Yup, like that . . .’
With his guidance, Brihony could move a little faster, and she picked up more speed as her confidence grew. Another minute and she was down on the ground with Beck.
‘No worries!’ She beamed brightly and flexed her arms. ‘But give it a couple of minutes before we climb up again. My arms are killing me.’
He smiled, and held his hands out at shoulder height. ‘Try not to put your arms any higher than this when you climb. It’s the same level as your heart, more or less. If you stretch them higher than that, the blood drains out of them, your heart has to work harder, your muscles ache and you get tired more quickly.’
‘Got it,’ she said as they picked their way across the river bed into the shade of the gorge’s northern face. She swung her arms in circles a few times to loosen them up. ‘OK, ready for part two now.’
They had another quandong each, and more water, and turned towards the rock face they had to climb. Beck made another mark with his heel to show the spot.
Brihony reached out with her hands, then let them drop to her side again. ‘Oh, jeez.’
Beck glanced at her sideways. ‘You really don’t like heights, do you?’
She shook her head. ‘Hate ’em. It’s not having anything beneath you that does it. And not being able to see where you’re going. Not properly.’
‘Why don’t I guide you again?’ he offered. ‘I’ll wait down here at the bottom, and I’ll tell you where to put your feet and hands.’
She looked at him gratefully. ‘Would you? Thanks.’
‘Well, then, up you go. Put your hands there and there . . .’
He stepped back to get a better view as she started to climb. As before, his mind created a ladder above her – he could see exactly where she should put her hands and feet. None of the holds were more than a metre apart; she never had to stretch far.
This side of the gorge was higher than the one they had climbed down – ten metres or more by Beck’s reckoning.
‘Now,’ he called when Brihony was halfway up. ‘Just above your head, to the left, there’s a kind of ledge. You can have a rest there if you like.’
‘’Kay.’ Her voice was muffled by the rock only centimetres from her face. She reached out a hand towards the ledge, shifted her body over a little . . . and stopped.
She stayed there, unmoving, and didn’t say anything.
Beck gazed up at her, puzzled. ‘What’s up?’
‘Beck . . .’ Her voice shook. ‘We’ve got company. Up here.’ Her tone said it was not the kind of company they were after.
‘What is it?’
‘Beck, it’s a king brown, and it’s here in front of me – it’s looking right at me.’
Beck’s heart thudded. Translated, what Brihony had just said was that one of the most poisonous snakes in the world was only centimetres from her outstretched hand.
Chapter 17
‘Don’t move,’ Beck called. ‘I’m coming up.’
He began to scramble up the crumbling wall of rock, as quickly as he dared.
Beck had already been through the options in his head. The snake hadn’t attacked Brihony – yet. There was no particular reason to think it would, if it didn’t feel threatened. But she couldn’t even withdraw her hand, in case it mistook the movement for some kind of threat. She couldn’t climb back down – not with a venomous snake literally hanging over her head. And she certainly couldn’t keep climbing. Even if she was only passing through, the king brown could give her a bite that could kill her very fast. The dose of neurotoxin injected straight into her bloodstream would start its work almost immediately, attacking the nerves that controlled all her movements – including her breathing and the beating of her heart. She would die fighting for breath, heart pounding out of control, paralysed and in pain.
It took him only a minute to reach the ledge, a short distance from where Brihony was. He looked along it at her pale face, and at the snake in between.
It was at least two metres long, with a body as thick as a man’s arm. Its tail was still concealed in a dark crack in the rock. It must have been sleeping in there when it heard Brihony coming. Maybe it had mistaken the vibrations for something more its own size – a lizard, or a small mammal. Maybe even a dingo with unusual rock-climbing skills. And so it had come out to investigate.
The dark-rimmed scales were like brown leather. It looked like someone had just dumped a mass of scaly coils onto the ledge. The blunt head was raised, the eyes, like small black pebbles, aimed squarely at Brihony’s face. The snake flicked its tongue, sampling the air.
It adjusted its position slightly. Glistening, smooth scales slid over one another as it tightened its coils. Beck had held many snakes before and he knew what they felt like. They weren’t at all slimy, but dry, like polished leather coated in smooth wax.
The snake hadn’t yet noticed Beck come up further along the ledge. Beck swallowed. What he was about to do was risky and could get at least one of them killed. But he had no other option. He had to kill the snake before either it struck out at Brihony, or Brihony’s arms and legs gave way and she fell eight metres to the rocky ground. Both could end up being fatal.
If he’d had the luxury of doing this on flat ground, he would have done it differently. He would have found a long stick with a bend at the end, and used it to pin down the snake’s head from a safe distance. Then Brihony could have moved past it safely.
Halfway up a rock face and with no stick, that wasn’t possible. And so he pulled out the machete, made sure his grip was secure, and breathed deeply.
‘Beck,’ Brihony whispered. ‘Be careful, but hurry. I can’t hold on much longer.’
He didn’t answer, his eyes fixed on the snake in front of him. He deliberately reached out with the machete towards the king brown.
In a flash of movement, the serpent struck out at the steel blade and its bare fangs clashed against the metal. The snake’s tiny brain couldn’t process the fact that the machete wasn’t part of Beck.
Before it could figure out its mistake, Beck slashed at a point just behind its head. Some snakes have quite thin necks between head and body; the neck of a king brown is exactly as thick and muscular as the rest of it, so Beck put all his strength into the single-handed machete blow. The blade rang out as it hit rock, drowning out the dull thud as it passed through the snake’s body. The head lay severed from the twitching coils, and the jaw opened and closed as though it was del
ivering a final dying curse.
Beck used the tip of the blade to flick the head away from Brihony and him. Better safe than sorry – even a severed snake’s head could deliver venom.
Brihony sagged against the rock face in relief. Beck grinned across at her.
‘Can you keep climbing?’
She nodded silently, and started off again, moving nervously past the twitching body of the dead snake. Beck then shuffled along the ledge and picked up the body, draping it round his neck. The tail end slid limply out of the crack it had emerged from. He resisted the urge to inspect the opening. Maybe there was another snake in there. Maybe it had laid eggs. Eggs would be good eating under many circumstances, but not now. As far as the Aboriginal peoples were concerned, the Outback owned them, not vice versa. Beck had no need to kill unborn snakes that presented no threat to him.
And so he kept climbing, with the dead snake hanging round his shoulders like a grisly scarf.
Brihony was sitting on the ground at the top, legs drawn up so she could hug her knees. Colour was returning to her face but she grimaced when she saw him. ‘That gives me the creeps, Beck.’
Beck smiled. ‘Good energy, though.’ He held up the severed end and let it drop again. ‘Lean protein. Low fat and easy to digest. Meet our supper!’
She pulled a face. ‘You’re not going to carry that around all day!’
‘No, and I don’t need to,’ he said gratefully. He turned to what he was pretty sure was their destination, and took another direction reading with the sun. Sure enough, it was almost due north-east. ‘We’re almost where we saw the guy. We’ll stop and cook the meat there, in the shade.’
‘I thought you shouldn’t eat too much when you’re low on water. It just uses moisture digesting it.’
He looked at her with respect. ‘You’re right, but we won’t eat much now,’ he said. ‘We’ll cook it and carry it with us to eat this evening. But we don’t want to be moving about in the midday heat. We’ll carry on searching when the day starts to cool down again. That’s assuming Pindari’s not just sitting waiting for us anyway.’ He held out a hand. ‘Coming?’
Brihony let him pull her to her feet, and they set off on the final stretch.
The bluff they had been heading for was gently rounded and they simply walked to the top, their boots gripping the bare rock.
There was no one there. Whoever it was they had seen with the bullroarer, that person was gone.
Beck shrugged the snake off his shoulders, leaving it lying in the shade of a bush. He stood with his hands on his hips, gazing out across the scrubland, eyes peeled for anything that might be another human being. He was just looking at more Outback. Miles and miles and miles, reaching out to the horizon in all directions. The air shook and shifted in the heat; it would have been hard to focus on anything smaller than a tree.
If there was someone out there, he would have to be tracked the old-fashioned way.
‘So where to now?’ Brihony asked.
‘First, water.’ Beck handed over the bottle and they each took another swig. ‘And then we start looking. This is definitely the place. We need to find his tracks.’
‘So we just look at the ground?’
‘It’s not just footprints. There could be signs in the vegetation – leaves bent towards the way he went . . . things like that – but yes, looking at the ground is a good place to start. Watch very carefully where you put your own feet.’ He looked around to get his bearings. ‘Right. You go and stand by that bush there, at the edge of the rock. And I’ – he raised his voice to call across to her as he headed for a bush on the other side – ‘will go over here. OK. Now, you walk slowly towards that tree over there – you see the one?’
‘Uh-huh.’ The tree he was pointing at was about thirty metres away, dead ahead of Brihony.
‘Walk over there, keeping your eye on the ground for any footprints that aren’t ours. When you get there, turn round, take a step to your right, and come back to the edge here. And I’ll make for that bush there, then I’ll take a step to my left, so . . .’
‘Bit by bit we’ll search every square metre of the ground.’ She nodded to show she understood. ‘I’ve got it.’
‘Let’s do it!’
Beck had spent several weeks with Pindari. The first week and a bit had just been failure after failure, because he hadn’t learned to concentrate. But in the end he had got the feel for it.
All other thoughts had to go to the back of your mind: what you were going to eat next; did you want to go to the toilet; what were they doing back home; even the harmless little tune you wanted to whistle – it all had to go. Tracking required total concentration and great stamina. If you watched nothing but dry earth scroll past your eyes for five minutes, the temptation was to start taking short cuts and jumping ahead. You looked over the next bit of ground quickly because you assumed it would be just the same – but that could be where the clue lay. Every square centimetre of ground had to get the same level of concentration, and that level had to be one hundred per cent.
It was enough to make your brain overheat and your eyes sting in a very short time.
And it was Brihony who found the first trace, ten minutes later. She waved him over. ‘Ta-dah!’
Beck looked at what she had found. A shallow depression in the rock was filled with red earth. In the centre was a single footprint. Whoever made it had been barefoot: the five toes were clearly visible. It was stamped into the earth, the sole broad, the toes massive – someone who had never worn shoes but had spent decades walking about the Outback on feet that were as tough as leather.
‘So . . .’ Beck said. ‘Where are the rest? Was he hopping?’
Brihony frowned and looked about her. The earth around the footprint was completely clear of any other disturbance for at least a metre in all directions.
‘That’s nuts!’ she exclaimed. ‘He must have really tried hard to leave just one print. What’s his game?’
Beck squinted thoughtfully. They still didn’t know for sure that it was Pindari they had seen. But if it was, he was pretty sure he knew what would be going through Pindari’s mind.
‘I think it’s a test,’ he said. ‘It’s his way of saying, “If you want to find me – start here.” ’
Chapter 18
The thought that Pindari might be close made Beck’s heart pound. He could tell that Brihony felt the same way. They both wanted to go and find him now.
But it was noontime in the Kimberley, the heat was merciless, and Beck was uncomfortably aware of their water situation. He held the bottle up to the light to check its contents. It was still over half full – they were OK for water for the time being. But they wouldn’t be going straight back to the river. From now on, water was a precious resource and had to be conserved. And that meant they had to sit out the hottest part of the day or they would just end up as food for the dingoes.
So they made a temporary camp in the shade of a eucalyptus tree a short distance away from the footprint. The shade wasn’t much – the leaves hung vertically, letting some sun through – but it was enough to keep the worst off. Brihony built a fire and used Beck’s fire steel to light it, while Beck set to work on the snake.
First he made a shallow incision at the tail end with the machete. He sliced his way up the snake’s belly to where its head had been, then put down the machete and worked his finger under the skin by the severed neck. After that it was easy to peel it back. He held the neck with one hand and the skin with the other, and slowly stripped it away as if peeling a banana. He cut it off at the end, where he had made his first cut. The skin was now completely separate from the carcass.
Last of all Beck needed to remove the guts. He made another slit along the belly, this time into the flesh. The snake’s innards were conveniently arranged in a tight roll, so he just had to work his finger around it and pull. Out came a glistening, grey-blue mass almost as long as the body itself.
‘That is the most disgusting thing I ha
ve ever seen,’ Brihony declared.
‘More disgusting than a boy wearing his undies on his head?’
‘Nah, that’s just weird.’ She looked at the skinned snake. ‘This is going to be delicious!’
‘It will be, when we eat it,’ he reminded her. ‘Which isn’t now.’
‘Oh. Yeah. That whole dehydration thing . . .’
Brihony wound the gutted carcass around a stick to hold over the fire, while Beck dumped the skin and guts a good distance away from the camp. They would attract ants anyway, so they might as well do so far from any humans they might want to bite.
Then they sat with their backs to the tree, cooking the snake and enjoying the shade.
‘Aren’t we taking it a little too easy?’ Brihony asked. ‘The guy could be miles away by now.’
‘He will be miles away by now,’ Beck corrected her.
‘OK, even more miles.’
‘We’re following footprints, and the best way to see prints is when the light comes at them from a low angle. It casts shadows so that the print stands out more. At noon, when the sun is right on top of us, the light shines straight down and the shadows disappear. So do the footprints.’
‘So the best times for tracking would be early morning or late afternoon?’
‘Exactly. But we won’t wait till late afternoon or it’ll be dark before we get anywhere. We’ll give it another hour.’
An hour later they were ready. Beck allowed them a single piece of snake meat each. It had almost no taste apart from the smoke of the fire. It was stringy, light and quite chewy, and it had almost no fat on it.
Then they cut into strips as much as they could carry in their pockets for later, and reluctantly left the rest behind.
Then they went back to the single footprint they had found – the one that Beck had said meant Start here. Beck logically started to look in the direction that the footprint was pointing. There was nothing for a few metres, but then he came across another print. The ground was too hard for a regular trail, but soon after that, he found another. And then another.
