Way of the Wolf (19 page)

Beck’s blood turned to ice. Had he imagined—

‘Ah!’ Tikaani burst out laughing. ‘They’re so cute!’

A pair of bear cubs tumbled out from behind a bush. Their fur was brown and soft, so fine it could have been shampooed specially. Brown fur, Beck thought despairingly; that made them grizzlies. Their faces were round and friendly, each with a pair of circular ears perched comically on top. They wrestled together, somersaulting across the pine needles, nipping each other playfully.

Beck kicked himself. He had forgotten one of the prime rules. He had been too tired to think straight and distracted by the false security of assuming they were near Anakat. The prime rule was:
Look out for bears!

‘You know about bears! We’re getting out of here now!’

‘Well, yeah, but . . . they’re not so fierce!’ Tikaani protested.

And that was when something large, heavy and angry burst out of the bushes behind them. The boys reluctantly looked round.

‘No,’ Beck agreed, ‘but
she
is . . .’

The cubs’ fur was fine but the mother grizzly’s was brown and shaggy, tipped with silver. The cubs looked soft and cuddly, but muscles like steel cable rippled beneath the mother’s pelt. The cubs were just playing but the mother was seriously wired about the two little mammals daring to stand between her and her children.

The cubs were the size of a large dog. The mother reared up onto her hind legs and was suddenly way taller than a man. Two and a half metres and half a ton of bear roared its anger at the boys. And then she dropped onto all fours again and charged.

Tikaani screamed and turned to run. Beck grabbed him and held him back.

‘Lie down!’ he snapped. He flung himself to the ground and dragged Tikaani down next to him. ‘Just play dead!’

The most dangerous place you could ever be with a bear, Beck knew, was between a mother and her cubs. They do whatever they can to annihilate the threat and protect their young. With its metre-long strides a grizzly would catch even a running human in seconds. Your only hope is to play dead.

He tried to remember – how long ago had he told Tikaani about bears? It had been when they were setting off from the plane. Just a couple of days. But
so much had happened since then. How much would Tikaani remember?

Tikaani lay on the ground a metre away. The side of his face was pressed into the pine needles: it was pale, his eyes wide with fear. Beck realized he was lying on his front; he himself had curled up into a tight ball, giving himself as much protection as he could. He hadn’t reminded Tikaani of that and couldn’t take the risk now. If the bear saw him move, she would toss him about like a rag doll.

‘Even if she prods you or roughs you up a bit,’ Beck hissed, ‘don’t move. Just lie there.’ Tikaani didn’t nod but Beck saw the understanding in his terrified eyes.

Beck knew his advice was much easier said than done, but it was all they could do.

The bear loomed over them. Her shadow blotted out the sun.

A leg as thick as a tree branch crunched into the ground between them. Pine needles and insects clung onto the thickly matted fur and the animal smell was overwhelming. Then the leg was lifted up
again as the bear moved on. Beck could sense her circling round them.

Suddenly Tikaani was jerked back out of Beck’s sight. Beck bit his lip, wanting to cry out for his friend. But Tikaani stayed silent and Beck guessed the bear had only dug a claw into his rucksack to see what would happen. Tikaani was unhurt. He didn’t move and he didn’t make a sound.

The bear stepped over the prone boy and lowered her head to examine Beck.
Whuff
. Her nostrils flared as she breathed in and out again. Her breath was like a pair of bellows. Beck lay completely still. He wondered if the bear could hear his pounding heart. To him it sounded like a drum-and-bass mix.

The bear put out a claw and nudged him, like Beck would prod a spider in the bath. Beck resisted all his instincts and lay as still as he could. The bear’s lips drew back, revealing just a hint of her yellow fangs. She nudged him again with a low growl, trying to provoke a reaction. Beck determinedly played dead.

The great head darted forward and she seized
the sleeve of his jacket in her front teeth, missing his skin by half an inch. Beck didn’t move. His chest grew tight and he realized that he was holding his breath. He wondered if he could let it out and take another without the bear noticing. Then she shook her head and Beck shook with her, his sleeve still held firmly in her mouth. He couldn’t help it. He gasped, and when she dropped him he put out a hand to break his fall. Immediately, cursing himself, he lay as flat as he could on the ground, trying to be even more limp than before. Had the bear noticed him move? Would she take it as a challenge?

She put her nose to the side of his head and growled. Her breath, hot and smelling of rotten meat, washed over him. Beck closed his eyes and waited in despair for the bite.

The gale of foul breath stopped suddenly. Beck could picture the bear drawing her head back, jaws opening, preparing to lunge.

But still nothing happened. There was a sudden sense of emptiness next to him. Beck half opened one eye, then the other. The bear was gone.

She was already over on the other side of the
clearing, moving with an astonishing lightness of foot over the pine needles. She had obviously decided the boys were not a threat. She shepherded the cubs away with another growl, which Beck translated as:
What have I told you before about playing with humans?

And then mother and cubs were gone.

The boys stayed exactly where they were for a few minutes more, Tikaani taking his lead from Beck. Finally, when Beck was absolutely sure the bears weren’t coming back, he sat up. Tikaani did the same. They exchanged a look. Then, without a word, they got up and headed out of the clearing.

‘Character forming,’ Beck said after a while.

‘Trouser staining,’ said Tikaani with feeling.

Beck picked up a small fallen branch and whacked it hard against the nearest tree. ‘Coming through!’ he called into the woods. ‘Just ignore us!’

And so, talking loudly and making plenty of noise as a warning to any unsuspecting bears, they headed on towards Anakat.

‘I’d do the same,’ Tikaani said suddenly, about half an hour later.

Beck looked at him quizzically. ‘The same as what?’

Tikaani jerked a thumb back over his shoulder. ‘The same as Ma Bear back there. Like, that clearing was her kids’ playroom. Wouldn’t you be ticked off if two strangers just came into your home?’

‘I’d express my irritation,’ Beck agreed with a straight face.

‘It’s her home,’ Tikaani pressed on. Then, more quietly and with a hint of wonder, he repeated: ‘It’s her home. Who has the right to just walk into someone’s
home
?’

Beck looked at him with respect. This wasn’t just chatter. He sensed anger behind Tikaani’s words. He wondered if it was aimed at Lumos Petroleum.

He hadn’t thought of the petrol company in days. They’d had other things on their mind, like survival. But ultimately, none of this would have happened if it wasn’t for Lumos. As they got closer
to Anakat, the company was making a comeback into his awareness.

‘No one,’ he said.

‘No one,’ Tikaani agreed. And again he repeated it, to himself. ‘No one.’

They saw no more bears, but at one point Beck did see something else through the trees – a fleeting shadow, hugging the ground, loping along easily, parallel to their route. He almost laughed. ‘So you made it too . . .’ he murmured to himself.

Their old friend the wolf phantom had rejoined them.

Or was it their old friend? Maybe this part of Alaska was just full of wolves that liked to trot along on their own. It didn’t seem likely, though it was more probable than a wolf following them all the way from the plane crash – including fording the river, crossing the mountains, spending the night in a blizzard and following them on a raft. But Beck couldn’t shake off the feeling that the wolf was making a journey too.

‘Say again,’ Tikaani responded.

Beck decided his friend was hardened enough to the wilderness, so he pointed. ‘I could have sworn—’

He stopped. The wolf had gone and Tikaani was looking at him very strangely.

‘Nothing,’ Beck muttered. ‘How much further to Anakat?’

‘We’re here,’ Tikaani said, and without any warning the trees parted.

It took a moment to sink in.

They were beside an inlet that wound its way in from the sea, with steep slopes of earth and rock. It opened out into a wider bay, and there, further down the slope, on the shore, was Anakat.

Beck wasn’t quite sure what he had expected. The way Tikaani spoke of it, he had almost imagined a community of traditional caribou-skin tents and campfires. Anakat wasn’t
quite
that far behind. You could keep to traditional ways, Beck reckoned, and still have a reasonable degree of comfort. If a wooden house kept you warmer than a skin tent or an igloo, then you lived in a wooden house. If electric lights were easier to see by than burning oil lamps, then you used electric lights. The Anak picked and chose from the modern world, but they didn’t let it rule them. They took only what would best help them live their traditional life at this high, cold latitude.

Anakat was a scattering of wooden buildings. They looked a little like giant toy houses – simple rectangles with steep, pointed roofs to shed the snow in winter. They were built on low stone pilings to keep them off the cold ground and painted in weathered shades of red and green and blue. That was the only ornamentation. This wasn’t the kind of village where you bothered to keep up with the neighbours. The roads between them were dirt and gravel. By the water’s edge, Beck could make out the dark silver forms of fish hung up on smoking racks. The community’s boats bobbed at a small jetty and Beck could see a couple of canoes cutting their way through the waves.

The boys trudged down the slope towards the village. A strange roaring in Beck’s ears made him put his head on one side thoughtfully. What was that? It wasn’t the wind. It wasn’t the sea lapping against the rocks. It wasn’t any mechanical sound, or any sound of the modern world . . .

And then, as they approached Anakat, he realized. It wasn’t any modern sound. It wasn’t any sound at all. No motor cars. No music. No aircraft. It had been just the same in the wilderness, of course, but Beck was used to leaving all that behind when he returned to civilization.

Not this time. Anakat was a scene of timeless peace. Apart from the battered station wagon parked outside one house – and the satellite dish on the side – it could have been any time in the last two hundred years.

‘That’s the airstrip,’ Tikaani said, pointing across the inlet. On the far side, at the end of a wooden bridge, the land was flat and an orange windsock billowed in the breeze. ‘Where we
would
have arrived. And this . . . is home.’

Home was the house with the wagon and the dish. It was another of the giant toy houses, plain and unadorned – no kind of porch or balcony. The steps that led up to the entrance were a pair of concrete blocks. The door was firmly shut and the windows sat squarely in their frames. It might have been made of wood, using techniques a couple of centuries old, but Beck was prepared to bet the house was less draughty and more snug than many modern homes further south.

The door opened and a woman stepped out. She wore jeans and a red check coat. She was talking frantically to someone behind her, still in the house, and not looking where she was going.

‘Tell him to keep trying on the radio . . .’

She turned round and stopped when she saw them, shock stamped onto her broad face.

‘Hey.’ Tikaani suddenly seemed abashed. His hand twitched in a half-wave. ‘Hi, Mom.’