Way of the Wolf (10 page)

‘
Tikaani!
’ Beck howled. He took a step forward to help, and checked himself. He could see what had happened immediately. He was standing on solid ground – but it was a promontory, a bit that stuck out. The lake carried on past him, and Tikaani had been standing on that bit.

The boy had flung out his arms as he fell, and his head and shoulders hadn’t gone through. But water sloshed in and out of the dark hole in the ice and sluiced over him. The other boy opened his mouth and screamed.

‘
It’s co-o-old!
’

‘Tikaani! Get your rucksack off! Quick! And turn round . . .’

Beck kicked off his snowshoes and scrambled as close as he dared. Every instinct screamed at him to go and pull his friend out, but if he went through the ice too then they were both stuck.

Tikaani didn’t move. His mouth was still wide open, as if he was screaming. If he was, it had risen to a pitch Beck couldn’t hear. Now that the water had settled down, it was obvious that Tikaani was standing on the bottom of the lake. It was only about shoulder deep. That was a small bit of good news in a whole torrent of bad.

‘
Tikaani!
’ Beck shouted again.

Tikaani gaped at Beck, his breath coming in agonized pants.

‘Tikaani. Ditch the rucksack and turn round. You know the ice is thick back there. It’ll help you climb out . . . ’

Tikaani’s breaths were coming faster and faster. Beck could picture what was happening inside him. In many cases, the gasp reflex of the shock of freezing water made people breathe water into their lungs. At least Tikaani hadn’t done that yet. But hypothermia could set in within minutes. There was the all-consuming, mind-numbing effect of the cold. The body would lose sensation; all Tikaani’s coordination and strength would freeze at the bottom of the lake. And if he wasn’t quick, there was the risk of cardiac arrest – a heart attack, brought on by the shock.

‘Turn round,’ Beck said again loudly. Tikaani would be losing the ability to concentrate, to coordinate his movements. He had to be handled firmly. ‘
Turn round
.’

Tikaani began to turn. His fingers fumbled at the buckle of his rucksack and it fell away, bobbing in the water. Beck quickly snagged it with his stick before it could sink. ‘Good, good. Now pass me your snowshoes.’

Tikaani somehow managed to pull the snowshoes off his feet and throw them towards Beck.

‘That’s it! Now climb out – go on, climb out!’ Beck instructed.

Tikaani managed to prop his elbows on the ice and work his way forward. Soon his top half was free of the water, then his waist and his thighs. He crawled painfully forward until at last he was out of the lake. Already his sodden trousers seemed to be hardening in the cold.

‘Here!’ Beck called. ‘Over here! Quick!’

Tikaani crawled over to Beck’s promontory, and Beck reached out and pulled him to safety on solid ground. Tikaani’s face was contorted in agony. His arms were clenched to his sides and already his body shook in huge, muscle-wrenching shivers.

‘
Co-o-old!
’ he groaned.

‘’S OK . . . you’re safe now . . . come on . . .’ Beck clutched his friend and held him up as they stumbled away from the ice.

‘
Cold!
’

‘Yeah, I know. Come on, we’ll get you warm . . .’

Beck bit his lip, and looked around the snowy waste. Get him warm? How?

But he had to do it, because if he didn’t, then in just a few minutes Tikaani would be dead.

‘Tikaani, strip!’

Tikaani’s whole body vibrated with shivers and his face was contorted with pain, but his eyes went round with surprise.

‘Do it!’ Beck snapped.

‘Gee . . .’ Tikaani muttered, fumbling with numb, shaking fingers at his buttons. ‘D-d-didn’t know it . . . w-was that . . . k-kind of holiday . . .’

‘
All
your clothes,’ Beck said when Tikaani was down to his shorts.

Tikaani reluctantly obeyed. ‘OK,’ he said. His goose-pimpled flesh was rough as sandpaper. ‘Now w-w-what?’

But Beck had already started rubbing him dry with a T-shirt from his pack. He pushed the T-shirt into Tikaani’s hands. ‘Do it yourself,’ he instructed. ‘You have to keep moving and get yourself as dry as you can. Then we’ll get you warm.’

Warm!
he thought again. The ghost of hypothermia was hanging over both of them, ready to pounce; ready to freeze them, turn their blood into ice, make them one with the snowy wastes. To survive, the body slowly shut itself down, focusing more and more effort on keeping the vital organs warm and alive. Finding an external source of warmth was the only treatment.

Beck snatched up his rucksack – there would be nothing dry in Tikaani’s – and began to rummage through it. A trickle of sweat ran down his forehead and immediately he forced himself to slow down. This was the most important thing he had ever done – he had never had a friend so close to dying before – and he
had to slow down
. If he started sweating, then that damp sweat would eventually freeze – and then the hypothermia would pounce and they would be dead together.

OK, good. There were dry clothes in here that Tikaani could wear. His boots were still soaking wet – there was nothing to be done about that – but Tikaani would be dry again. That all-important layer of warm air would form next to his skin. His body would keep its heat.

For the time being, anyway. But he was still deeply chilled.

‘OK,’ Beck said. He scraped snow off a rock and left the clothes piled on top of it. ‘Put these on.’

And now came the biggest challenge. He stood up straight and looked around, hands on his hips. He had to make a fire. By themselves, clothes wouldn’t do the trick for someone who had just been immersed in freezing water. Tikaani needed an extra source of heat. He needed a fire.

A fire? Up here?

Beck’s gaze roamed over the snow and ice. The nearest trees were a couple of hours’ walk away, downhill. What was he going to do? Burn rocks?

His mind went, reluctantly, to the contents of his rucksack. OK. The rest of their clothes would burn. The makeshift ropes they had fashioned back at the plane would burn. But they wouldn’t burn for long enough, and anyway, he
so
didn’t want to do that . . .

‘Hey, Tikaani. Are the mountains snow-covered all year at this height?’

Tikaani scowled up at him as he pulled on the trousers. ‘Yes. No. Well, the tops are but the lower bits are clear in the summer. Why?’

Beck was pleased to see that the violent shaking had already died down. A little. His friend’s body still shivered.

‘Because if this area is clear during the summer, there might be . . .’

He looked around again. If any plants grew up here at all, under the snow, they would be in sheltered places. He crouched down beside a boulder and burrowed into the snow with his hands.

Yes!
Beck’s fingers closed around something hard and round. He brushed away the snow. Dark, twisted wood: some kind of bush that was waiting for summer’s thaw to put out new shoots. He wrapped his fingers around it and tore it up from the earth, then scrabbled through the snow around it, clearing away more potential fuel. He snapped one of the twigs and it broke with a very satisfactory
crack
. It glistened with flakes that melted in his hand. It had spent the winter under the snow, but inside it was dry.

Beck used the knife to fluff up the bark, exposing the dry wood inside so that the twigs would catch fire more easily. For kindling he used bits of cotton wool that he’d taken from the plane’s first aid kit. He kicked aside more snow to clear a patch of ground in the lee of a boulder and used his fire iron to strike the first sparks. A fully-dressed Tikaani crouched down beside him.

‘No way,’ Beck ordered. ‘Until this fire’s going, you walk.’

Tikaani looked up at him. ‘I what? Where?’

‘You walk. Round and round in circles if you have to. Make your body generate its own warmth. Your core’s frozen – you have to give it a hand. Go on! Walk! And bring your knees up high with each step.’

Tikaani glared at him with something like hate, but he slowly began to walk round and round the fire, rubbing himself, while Beck coaxed a flame up out of the cotton wool and a few lengths of cloth that he’d cut from his home-made rope with the Bowie knife.

‘And don’t rub your arms like that,’ he said absently, concentration still fixed on the fire. ‘It draws blood away from your body core and cools you down. Wave your arms around fast instead. That will force blood into your hands and warm you up. It works, I promise.’

Tikaani stopped, glared at him, and started walking again. He wheeled his arms around as he walked now.

‘Once there was this guy called Ernest Shackleton,’ Beck told him as he trudged. ‘Went on an expedition to the South Pole before the First World War.’

He knelt and blew gently onto the fire. A tiny lick of flame was spreading across the rope. As it went, it grew. Beck finished his story:

‘One of his crew fell into the water there. They were on an ice floe – nothing to burn at all. He just had to walk round and round the floe for twelve hours. Just walk, and walk, and walk, until eventually he was dry.
Twelve hours!
But it kept him alive. No one died. They all came home again.’

The fire was taking. The flame seemed to rub shyly against the wood, as if it really wanted it to join in the fun. The wood didn’t seem to know quite what to make of it. It had been expecting a few more weeks beneath the snow before it emerged into the world again for the summer. But it let itself be persuaded. The curls of bark began to join in with the kindling. A wisp of smoke rose up into the mountain air.

Beck continued to blow until he was
absolutely
sure. It wasn’t a fluke; it wasn’t just going to burn out in a couple of minutes. Then he sat back on his haunches and sighed with relief.

‘OK – come and sit down, Tikaani,’ he said, while he stood up to search for more wood. Immediately Tikaani was on the other side of the fire, crouching down, holding out his hands to absorb the heat. This was never going to be a raging bonfire but it tipped the balance. Tikaani would live.

Beck grinned in sheer relief. Tikaani smiled back.

‘Hold your feet out as well,’ Beck suggested. ‘You can warm up from both directions . . .’

There was more fuel like the first load, buried under snow in drifts around rocks. Beck gathered as much as he could find. Then, while Tikaani thawed out, Beck stuffed his boots with more cut-off lengths of rope. They were going to be walking through ice and snow; damp boots would just suck the warmth straight out of Tikaani’s feet, asking for frostbite. Beck held them out, upside down, over the fire so that the warm air could add to the drying out.

‘I think I can do that,’ Tikaani said. He took the boots off Beck and held them out to dry himself. His voice was fully back to normal – no chattering teeth, no bouts of shivering. ‘I do have other skills apart from falling into water.’

‘Of course you do,’ Beck agreed with a smile. ‘That’s world-class holding, that is.’

Tikaani looked abashed. ‘I’ve held us up, haven’t I? I mean, you wanted to press on, get over the top before sunset.’

‘Hey, we still can.’ Beck glanced up at the peak. ‘OK, we’ve lost a couple of hours, but it stays light late. So we’ll just be walking a bit longer, that’s all.’

‘Yeah. But I’m sorry.’

‘No worries.’ Beck bit his lip. ‘It could have happened to me too.’ He added, half to Tikaani and half to himself: ‘I should have noticed the lake didn’t end there. I need to be more careful.’

He stood up, more to end the conversation than anything else. He didn’t want to dwell on this but he had to face up to it. It had been one small mistake, but they were in a land that didn’t tolerate any mistakes at all. Beck resolved there and then that he wouldn’t be making any more.