Way of the Wolf
Authors: Bear Grylls
MISSION: SURVIVAL
LOCATION: The Alaskan mountains
DANGERS: Blizzards; grizzly bears; white-water rapids
A fatal plane crash. A frozen wilderness. The world’s youngest survival expert is in trouble again . . .
Beck Granger must find help across the mountains – but even if he survives the deadly cold, can he escape the hungry wolf that is on his trail?
The second book in an explosive adventure series from real-life survival expert Bear Grylls
Contents
To my eldest son, Jesse.
Such a special boy.
Beck Granger
At just thirteen years old, Beck Granger knows more about the art of survival than most military experts learn in a lifetime. When he was young he travelled with his parents to some of the most remote places in the world, from Antarctica to the African Bush, and he picked up many vital survival skills from the remote tribes he met along the way.
Uncle Al
Professor Sir Alan Granger is one of the world’s most respected anthropologists. His stint as a judge on a reality television show made him a household name, but to Beck he will always be plain old Uncle Al – more comfortable in his lab with a microscope than hob-nobbing with the rich and famous. He believes that patience is a virtue and has a ‘never-say-die’ attitude to life. For the past few years he has been acting as guardian to Beck, who has come to think of him as a second father.
David & Melanie Granger
Beck’s mum and dad were Special Operations Directors for the environmental direct action group, Green Force. Together with Beck, they spent time with remote tribes in some of the world’s most extreme places. Several years ago their light plane mysteriously crashed in the jungle. Their bodies were never found and the cause of the accident remains unknown . . .
Tikaani
Tikaani belongs to the Anak, one of the Inuit peoples native to Alaska, although he has started to forget the ways of his people. As a boy his father sent him away to Anchorage so that he could learn the ways of the modern world. These days Tikaani is more interested in iPods and the delights of the modern world than he is in the oral tradition and culture of Anakat.
The small plane crawled across the landscape like an insect over a tablecloth.
Beck Granger peered out at the patchwork of Alaskan wilderness thousands of feet below. It was spring and the thaw was all but complete. Not long ago it would have all been a smooth white, a land of ice and snow. Now he could see fir trees, grass, moss. Streams and rivers ran with crystal-clear meltwater. Endless shades of green, all tied together with fine silver threads.
Beck pressed his face to the window. He could just see the blur of the single propeller. The plane was a Cessna 180. Beck’s Uncle Al, sitting in front next to the pilot, had told him it was the workhorse of the far north. It had a streamlined body like a plump fish
suspended beneath its single wing. The cabin had a grand total of six seats, but at the moment there were only three passengers, plus the pilot. The back of the plane was stuffed with their bags and equipment.
Like everyone else on board, Beck was wearing large padded earphones. Without them the noise of the engine would have made talking to anyone impossible. Even with them on, the vibration rumbled like a tumbledryer in his guts.
A burst of static in his ears meant that the pilot had switched on the intercom.
‘I’m adding an hour to the journey, guys.’ She was a cheerful woman, middle-aged and stocky. You could see that she was descended from people who had made a home in this wilderness. ‘There’s bad weather ahead over the mountains and I intend to go right round it. It’s way too much for this little plane.’ The static went away again, and at the same time the plane began to tilt.
‘OK,’ Beck called, but he hadn’t switched on his own intercom and his voice was lost in the roar of the engine.
The plane turned and brought the mountains into
view through the side windows. Beck looked out at them with respect. The thaw only reached part way up them. Maybe it never got higher. The trees grew part way up too, and then stopped abruptly in a ragged line, as if the mountains had shrugged them off as they burst from the ground. After that there was just grey rock clawing at the sky from beneath a thin white sheet of snow and ice.
The storm sat on top of the mountains like a wild creature feasting on the peaks, which were lost in a dark, whirling cloud. It was quite literally a force of nature: Beck could see why the pilot didn’t want to risk her little plane against it. It was like coming across a bear in the wild. You didn’t push your luck – you just took another route. That way everyone lived happily.
More static meant that the pilot was going to speak again.
‘The good news is, the storm’s not coming towards us. It’s heading away but I don’t want to catch it up. We’re going to be a bit delayed doing this detour. I sure hope Anakat’s worth it.’
‘It will be,’ Uncle Al promised. ‘Trust me.’
Anakat, their destination, lay on Alaska’s west coast, looking out over the Bering Sea.
‘I’ve stopped over there a couple of times,’ the pilot continued. ‘You know, the elders there have an oral tradition that goes back centuries. They can recite their entire history at the drop of a hat. They know this land inside out and back to front.’
‘I can’t wait to meet them,’ Uncle Al agreed. He twisted round in his seat to wink at Beck. Beck smiled back. They both knew this wasn’t just a pleasure trip.
Uncle Al didn’t really make pleasure trips – all his travels had a point to them. To the rest of the world he was Professor Sir Alan Granger, anthropologist and TV personality with a keen interest in
environmental matters. When they were alive, Beck’s parents had taken him all over the world in their travels on behalf of Green Force, the environmental direct action group. Now Al was determined to carry on the good work of his younger brother, Beck’s dad.
‘With all due respect to the National Curriculum,’ he had once said to Beck, ‘you’ll learn a lot more this way.’
That, as Beck recalled, had been as they flew out to the Australian Outback to live with a community of Aboriginals . . .
He gazed back at the landscape outside. It looked very different to the baked desert of Western Australia but in some way it was very similar. This too was a world where Mother Nature ruled. Her word was law. An unprepared human being would be swallowed up and never seen again. It looked beautiful, but it was harsh and hostile.
But a
prepared
human being . . . ah, that was very different. A prepared human being could live in harmony with nature down there and never want for anything. The Inuit – the people who lived up here in
the northern latitudes – spread from Alaska to Greenland; they had been managing it for thousands of years. That was why things like the oral tradition and culture of Anakat were so important. You could never learn it through books or off the web. You had to
live
it.
Beck and Uncle Al had flown from London to Seattle in a brand-new, wide-body airliner. Seattle-Tacoma International Airport was like a small space-age city, sparkling and modern. Then they had caught a plane to Anchorage, smaller and more crowded. And finally they had been picked up by the Cessna for the four-hour flight out here, across a landscape that hadn’t changed in thousands of years. With each stage of the journey, Beck had felt he was shedding something he didn’t need; one more layer of the twenty-first century.