Where the World Turns Wild
Page 10
It’s like the Palm House only a hundred times greener, a thousand times more fresh.
That first bird’s still singing but there are different birds too, their songs weaving together. It’s beautiful. But it’s more than beautiful. It’s alive.
“It worked,” Bear says.
“We did it!”
“Not that, Ju!” Bear’s half irritated. “The ReWild. I worried it was made up.”
“Made up?”
“That nature hadn’t grown back. That it was still all dead.”
“Yes,” I say softly. “It worked. Nature found a way.”
“Look at the spiderwebs, Juniper! They’re just like your drawings!”
I stare at them. These ornate, perfect hangings. Geometry strung between branches. Some have spiders in them – these eight-legged creatures that aren’t ticks, but you’re meant to be scared of anyway.
There’s a spider still spinning. This incredible, graceful thing with long legs. Her web spirals out from the centre and she walks it like a circus performer. Like an acrobat.
“I wish I could tell Annie Rose about it,” Bear says. “And Etienne. Why did he have the GPS if he knew he could never leave, Juniper?” His nose is crinkly.
I keep my voice flat. “He hoped things would change one day. That the disease would burn itself out or maybe scientists would make that vaccine.” Or maybe if things got so bad – if it was a choice between the disease or the Institute – then Etienne would run into the Wild anyway, even though he knew he wouldn’t last out here. But I don’t say the last bit. Out here, the city feels like a bad dream.
There’s a sudden yelp from Bear. “Ow! Ju! Something bit me.” He’s wandered into a clump of green straggly plants. “I think it was a snake, Juniper! It’s burning.”
“Burning? A snake?” I say, moving towards him into the plants, reaching out for his hand.
“Juniper!” Bear says, indignant. “Do something! What if it was a tick?”
I look at his hand again, where little round pimples are rising out of his skin, and then I look at the plants and I feel a prickling on my hands too. A strange sensation I’ve never felt before, halfway between an itch and a sharp pain. “It wasn’t a tick, Bear!”
“A snake then. I felt it, Juniper. Why are you laughing?”
“I’m not,” I say, fighting to hold back my amusement at the outrage on Bear’s face. “Look, it got me too. Your snake. We’re standing on it.”
Bear looks down at the ground, all quiet and excited. “Where, Ju?”
I giggle. “I thought you were the naturalist. I thought you knew all this.”
He pulls a face at me as he looks at the green leaves around us with their little stinging hairs. He mutters the word out loud, begrudgingly. “Nettles. See! I told you something stung me.”
“Well, actually you said bit.”
“It could’ve been an adder, Juniper, and then you wouldn’t be laughing. Or something worse!” He’s wading out of the nettles furiously. “It’s all right for you with your boots. I’ve just got my school shoes! I’m stung all over my ankles as well.”
“Oh, Bear,” I say sweetly, trying to keep a straight face. “Isn’t there some leaf that’s meant to help with nettle stings? Don’t you remember, in First Aid Naturally…”
“The dock leaf,” he says slowly, like he’s talking to an idiot.
“That’s right. I’ll find us some.”
“You wouldn’t even know what they look like,” Bear says, scowling at me.
“Tell me then,” I coax. “Describe them.”
I let Bear find them – veined leaves with pinkish stems. They always grow near nettles. That’s the bit I remember – the poison and the treatment, side by side.
We sit rubbing the dock leaves on to our skin, crushing them against the rash. I don’t know if they really help, but gradually the stinging ebbs away. Maybe it’s having this moment to take it all in, that we made it out here, to where things grow and plants can sting.
There’s a flash of movement a few metres away and Bear’s up. He slips behind a tree.
“This would be the best hide-and-seek ever!” His muted voice comes back at me.
“Don’t you dare!” I cry, properly shouting. “Come back!”
Bear appears from behind the tree and looks at me strangely. “I’m just here, Ju.”
“I know, but…” But what do I say? That I’m worried the forest will swallow him up? He’s out here, where he was always meant to be. I can’t keep him on a lead.
“We should eat,” I say instead.
“What have we got?” Bear says coming back, interested.
“Annie Rose made sandwiches. We should eat those, before they go stale.”
“That bread’s always stale anyway. It’s like plastic.” Bear pulls a face. “I want wild food.”
“There’ll be time for that. Let’s eat what we have first.”
There’s a log, like a bench, next to where we made our tent and we sit beside each other. Nature providing, I think, like Annie Rose told us it would.
“How many miles now?” Bear asks.
“A long way. It’s almost three hundred miles, remember.”
“Is that too far?”
“It’s just how far it is.” We don’t know about miles and time. We never had any distance to walk in the city. Annie Rose said adults could walk maybe fifteen to twenty miles a day, but there’s no way Bear could manage that. She said maybe eight miles a day, on average. Working it out makes my head spin.
Even if we managed eight miles a day, that’s more than thirty days’ walking. More than a month. It will be December by the time we get to Ennerdale. Proper winter.
I can’t very well tell Bear we’ll be walking for an entire month. And that’s not even factoring in detours for water, or diverting round other cities, or getting lost.
Bear’s stopped listening anyway. He’s gulping in the air. “Sniff it, Ju! It doesn’t smell clean like in the city.”
I can’t resist smiling. “That wasn’t clean, Bear. That was disinfectant and weedkiller.”
“Oh yeah,” Bear says, opening his mouth wide to breathe in the forest. And suddenly, in that instant, I remember it – the smell of earth and leaves and bark. This flood of something wells up inside me and maybe there is a voice I remember and maybe it is Mum’s, I don’t know. But she’s all that way north and she never came back for us. I’ve got Bear now. He’s mine to take to her.
I can’t think about all that. I make myself busy rolling up the tarpaulins and the sleeping bags and the space blanket. Bear’s carrying the blanket but he’s weirdly possessive about his rucksack and insists he puts it in by himself.
“What have you got in there?”
“Nothing!”
I give him a strange look. What has he stashed away in there? What couldn’t he leave behind? It’s too late now anyway. We have what we have. “Come on, Bear. We should be on our way.”
We follow the arrow on the GPS along some old road. The surface is broken up with trees, their roots bursting through the tarmac, all covered in moss and the ferns I’ve been drawing for years.
“Juniper!” Bear’s voice is shrill. “Look!”
It’s a bird, already taking to the sky, its wings fluttering, panicked. High in the trees before I see it properly – a flash of brown and blue and white.
“Why did it fly off so fast?” Bear asks.
“Maybe it never saw anything like us before.”
“I think it’s a jay!” Bear says. “I wish we had my book.”
“You don’t need it. You know this,” I say quietly, envious of him. How he can notice everything and not just be looking for danger.
“And look! Look, Ju! It’s a squirrel!”
It’s running up the tree, fast, like it’s flying too. Grey with a white belly and flecks of red on its back. Its tail, thick and coiled, moves with it like an extra limb. There are rabbits too, brown and skittish.
The footp
rints of before are everywhere, though it’s all hidden under tangled mounds of plant life. Moss, thorns, brambles. Like when the princess pricked her finger on a spinning wheel and slept for a hundred years. Like Mary Lennox’s secret garden.
At first I don’t get what it all is, it’s just random lines of debris, but then I start to see the shapes. The markings out. What would once have been a house. What would once have been a garden. Now the separate plots are all growing back into one. The walls are crumbling down. Even the metal is rusting away. One day it will all be powder. And somewhere, in the thickness of everything, in the depths and in the shadows, there will be the ticks.
“I’m still hungry, Ju. Can I have a snack bar?”
“I don’t know, Bear. I think we should save them.”
“We’ve got loads.”
“We have to make them last.”
He pulls a face at me.
I know what I have to do. I should have done it last night. I should have set the trap – let it work while we slept. It’s not the trapping that bothers me, it’s what comes next. It’s the palm under the rabbit’s chin, the pressing back of the neck. It’s the snap. That’s the bit I’m not sure I can do.
The meat we ate back in the city wasn’t ever alive. Not really. It was grown in a lab somewhere.
“Let’s walk for a bit, Bear,” I say, stalling. “Then you can have a snack. And tonight for tea we’ll catch something. Some meat. That’s what you need to fill your tummy.”
I thought it would feel different out here. I’d assume another kind of identity – bolder, stronger – only I still feel just like me. Every time I see a rabbit I get this chill on the back of my neck.
It’s worse because they don’t seem afraid of us. Not really. They’re curious, friendly even. They’ve forgotten what people can do.
“Can I hold the GPS, Ju?” Bear pipes up.
I shake my head.
“That’s not fair! You get to do all the good stuff. I won’t break it, I promise, Ju.” He makes his eyes all big and tugs at my hand.
“I know that.”
“Then?”
“It has to be high, to get the best signal. So it finds the best route to the satellite. Remember? Like Etienne said. And I’m taller.”
Bear moans, but he kind of accepts it. My lie.
Am I worried he’ll break it? Maybe. But it’s more than that. I need it next to me, right up against my chest, this thing, this device that’s going to lead us to Ennerdale.
Bear’s ahead of me, picking up sticks, ignoring me when I say it’s too early in the day to be collecting firewood.
There was this old jack-in-the-box in the Emporium. You wind the handle on the tin box and a monkey pops out at you on a spring. That’s what Bear’s like. In the city, his lid was closed and he was shut up in the dark. All this light and space, he’s sprung right back out. He’s wired.
It should make me happy and it does, but I’m worried I’ve lost control of him. He could spring right away from me.
I’m calling him back – we don’t know the land yet, it’s not safe – when I notice we’re being watched.
It’s the yellow eyes I see first. I think it’s a fox, a big one, but it’s not.
“Bear,” I whisper urgently.
It’s a cat. Sort of brown or golden with black spots, leopard-like, and black tufts on the tops of its ears. Its paws are big and furry, like it’s wearing boots, and its neck is furry too – collared like a ruff, like long-ago queens.
“What is it, Ju?” Bear asks, stopping. “I don’t recognize it.”
“I don’t know, Bear. Just come backwards to me. And don’t turn away from it.”
Never turn from a predator and run. They can’t help it, you can’t even blame them. It’s their instinct to give chase.
Bear’s still like a statue so I move instead, forwards, towards him.
I should be more scared. The cat’s not taking its eyes off us. Though it could have pounced on Bear already, if it wanted to. It’s not quite as tall as he is, but it’s strong, you can see that. I grab a stick and hold it up like a warning – get my brother and I’ll come for you.
The tufts on the cat’s ears are up and there’s a flick of its little bobtail, but it doesn’t move. It stands there on its long legs, watching us, watching both of us, shifting its eyes between us as if studying our connection.
I stretch an arm out for Bear to bring him closer. Together we’re bigger, stronger.
“It could’ve come from a zoo,” Bear’s saying. “It could’ve escaped all the shooting. Some animals must have done.” He’s not scared at all, only curious and annoyed that he can’t identify it. Like his books have failed him.
Then suddenly I know. School taught me something useful after all.
“It’s a lynx. The ReWilders released some.”
“A lynx.” Bear says the name slowly. You didn’t get them in books about British wildlife. Lynx were long gone by the time those books were written. We’d already hunted them to extinction hundreds of years before.
“They weren’t meant to come over, they were outlawed, but the ReWilders brought them anyway. They brought them from Russia.” They needed something – something more organic than guns, something that would still be here after the ReWild – to keep down deer and rabbits, otherwise their numbers would have exploded and with all those plant-eaters the forests could never regrow. Of course, on our Education Board syllabus, lynx cats were another example of the ReWilders’ irresponsibility – letting dangerous predators loose on an overcrowded island.
“Why’s it watching us, Ju?”
It’s watching us intently, like it’s curious. Its eyes are beautiful and outlined in black, like eyeliner, like kohl. I shrug. “Maybe it never saw a person before.”
“Here, pussy, pussy.” The words sound familiar in Bear’s mouth, though he just learned them from stories.
“Bear!” I whisper, aghast. “It’s not that sort of cat.”
“It wouldn’t hurt us.”
“We don’t know that.”
“It could be our friend.”
“It’s wild, Bear.”
Bear frowns. “Wild’s good, isn’t it?”
“Not always.” The cat is blinking slowly but its body is completely still. Someone’s got to make a move. I start to back away, pulling Bear after me. “Come on!”
“Bye bye, pussycat,” Bear says. “Should we still be walking backwards, Ju?”
“I think so. Until it can’t see us any more. Come on, we need to find water and then somewhere to camp, and it has to be away from anything that might eat us, OK?”
I’ve been aware of a river for miles now, from the GPS and from this sound just a few trees away. This watery murmur. But I’ve been scared somehow of what we might find. We can’t wait any longer though and we start walking towards the water.
Before the ReWild, the rivers were running brown and orange and polluted. Chemical waste from landfill, from the clogged-up land, had found its way in. There were rivers that gave chemical burns if you touched them. There were rivers that would set alight if you struck a match. Annie Rose said that one of our most essential pieces of camping kit is the little tin of strips that test for clean water. She showed us how to use them before we left. I didn’t have the heart to tell her the water from our kitchen sink made the strips turn orange, meaning unsafe to drink.
The river water doesn’t look like it will show up blue on the strips either. It’s dark, murky.
“Can I do it, Ju?”
We’re standing on the bank, the tin of strips in my hand. “I don’t know. Maybe. But I think it’s too steep here.”
The incline down to the water is thick with roots and brambles. If we tripped, we could fall right in. It’s hard to tell how deep it is, but we can’t see the bottom and we never learned to swim. The pool in the city was too disgusting to think about. This oily lacquer clung to the surface, this scum – disinfectant and human secretions combined.
The plants are high here and close together. There must be ticks everywhere. This is their perfect terrain. Ticks are like vampires – they drink blood and hate the sun; they like dark damp places best. Somewhere with thick vegetation where they can wait unseen for something with warm blood to pass. Questing, that’s what it’s called.
“Blackberries! Like you got at the North Edge, Ju!” Bear squeals.
He’s right. It’s the same plant – the bramble, studded with little black fruits.
“We can be hunter-gatherers!” he says, already with juice around his mouth. Any doubts he had about eating them are long gone.
I pick too, for the rush of it on your tongue. The sweet and the sharpness together. The berries here are different to the North Edge though – they’re a dull black and there are no small firm ones waiting to ripen. These are the last this plant’s got. They’re OK, but there’s a cloudiness, like the beginning of rot.
“I could go through here, Ju.” Bear’s at a parting in the undergrowth. Something’s been here before us. Some animal, going down to drink. Maybe that lynx cat.
“OK,” I say warily. “Go steady, OK?” The ground’s slippery and we have to put our hands down on to the bank to stop ourselves sliding too fast. Does the river come this high sometimes? Or perhaps it rained recently. We have no idea about weather outside the city.
I hold on to Bear’s shoulders as he walks ahead, his flat soles slipping on the bank. The moment we reach the water’s edge he swings round to face me. “I want to do it, Ju! You’ve got Etienne’s GPS! It’s my turn now!”
I hand over a strip slowly. “You have to hold it in the water for ten seconds, OK?”
I get this urge to shut my eyes, or look up to the sky and will the strip to show the same colour. To wait for Bear to call out the word. Blue.