Way of the Wolf (3 page)

The easiest part was releasing his straps. Then, as gently as they could, the two teenage boys had to manoeuvre a fully grown man out of the narrow hole left where the windshield had been.

The nose of the plane was much too small to lay Al out on and there was too much dead wood around to put him down on the ground. They had to take him out across the top of the plane. First they turned him round inside the cabin. Then, with Beck outside pulling and Tikaani inside pushing, they got him halfway through the broken windshield on his back. Finally they could fold him forwards at the waist over the top of the cabin. With more pushing and pulling, Al finally was out of the plane altogether and lying on top of the fuselage. Beck slid down to the ground near the rear of the plane while Tikaani held Al steady, then took his uncle in a fireman’s lift over his shoulders. He was still knee-high in undergrowth so he kicked his way to clear ground and laid his uncle down.

At last he could inspect Al’s wound properly.

‘
The principles of first aid are very easy to remember
,’ the instructor had said. ‘
Breath goes in and out. Blood goes round and round. Any variation on that is wrong and must be dealt with.
’

The first step was to put a tourniquet on the gash in Al’s leg. A simple bandage wouldn’t cope with the flow of blood at the moment. Beck opened the first aid kit and pulled out a length of bandage, which he wrapped once around Al’s leg above the wound. Then he tied the two ends together in a simple overhand knot and looked around for what he needed next.

Tikaani was watching in fascination.

‘I need a short stick,’ Beck told him.

Tikaani just had to reach out and grab one from
the dead wood surrounding the plane. He handed it to Beck. It was still a bit too long so Beck broke it over one knee and placed one of the short lengths, about fifteen centimetres long, on the knot of the bandage. Then he tied another knot over that. Finally he twisted the stick to tighten the tourniquet.

‘Wow. It’s like turning off a faucet,’ said Tikaani.

Beck took a moment to translate in his head. Americans said ‘faucet’; Brits said ‘tap’. ‘That’s the idea,’ he said with satisfaction. And sure enough, the flow of blood did slow right down, as if a tap had been turned off. It would need relieving from time to time – some blood had to get through if Al was to keep the limb – but it dealt with the immediate blood loss. ‘Could you hold the stick steady?’

And while Tikaani did that, Beck tied a final strip of bandage over it to hold it in place. Then he grinned up at the other boy. ‘Not squeamish, are you?’

Tikaani was a little pale but Beck could understand that. He met Beck’s gaze. ‘Apparently not.’

‘Good.’

Beck used the scissors in the first aid kit to cut
Al’s clothes away from the wound. Finally he could see the gash properly. It was a good eight centimetres long, and deep. He wasn’t sure what had made it – maybe something jagged from the shattered instrument panel. It started just above the knee and headed up from there. The blood was dark red and oozing. It was thickening, trying to coagulate and form a scab like a normal cut, but there was just too much of it.

Beck studied the cut as closely as he could without touching it. He was painfully aware that this was not a sterile environment and he didn’t have any medical gloves. The last thing he wanted to do was introduce infection into the wound.

A tinkling sound of metal on glass caught his attention. The kit included a small bottle of disinfectant and a pair of tweezers. Tikaani was dipping the tweezers into the disinfectant.

‘The wound must be clear of all debris, including dirt, dead skin and flakes of clotted blood,’ Tikaani said, as if reciting something. ‘Use tweezers sterilized with the disinfectant solution.’

‘How did you know that?’ Beck asked.

Tikaani grinned and nodded down at the box. ‘There’s instructions inside the lid. Here.’ He passed the tweezers to Beck, who took them carefully, making sure he didn’t touch the disinfected part.

‘Thanks. We’re going to need some water too.’

‘I saw a bottle inside. Wait there a moment.’

Well, I’m not going anywhere . . .
Beck thought as Tikaani clambered back inside the plane. He checked the wound again. It was fairly clear of debris but he still picked out a couple of blood clots and what looked like a bit of fabric from Al’s trousers.

Tikaani was back with the bottle of water. ‘Plus I got these,’ he said. He dropped an emergency medical blanket and one of the seat cushions onto the ground. ‘The lid says he should be kept warm against shock.’

‘Never argue with the lid,’ Beck agreed.

Tikaani slid the cushion under Al’s head while Beck carefully poured more of the disinfectant straight into the wound. Tikaani hissed and winced with sympathy. Beck felt it too. He knew how much disinfectant could sting a simple cut; this would really be hurting Al, if Al was awake. The wound was
as clean as it was going to get. He took the water from Tikaani and poured some over to rinse off the disinfectant.

‘It’ll just cause irritation if we leave it,’ he explained as he handed the bottle back.

Finally he unwrapped a piece of gauze and got Tikaani to spread antibiotic cream on one side. Then Beck pressed the gauze onto the gash, cream side down, and tied it in place with more bandage wrapped around Al’s leg. The sterile white fabric stained red immediately, but by and large the blood was now staying inside, just as the instructor had ordered.

‘We can’t just leave him on the ground,’ Tikaani pointed out. He waved a hand around. ‘This is tundra. There’s permafrost a few inches down. He’ll freeze.’

‘Yup.’ Permafrost meant that the soil was at zero degrees or below all year round. It wasn’t something to lie on for any length of time. Beck looked about and his eyes settled on one of the plane’s wings that lay nearby. ‘But we can do something about that . . .’

The plane’s wings were quite light. Between
them the boys could pick them up and lay them side by side. They made a platform to lay Al on – not very comfortable, but dry and solid; better than the icy ground.

Finally they worked Al into his coat and covered him with the blanket that Tikaani had found. Beck sat back on his haunches and looked at his uncle. He had done everything he could for the man. For the moment.

‘So now what do we do?’ Tikaani asked.

Beck sighed and stood up. ‘Now we try and get out of this mess,’ he said.

They fetched their coats from the plane and set out to explore. It didn’t take long.

North of here, Beck knew, the wind would be too harsh and the soil too icy for large plants like trees to grow. There would be nothing but tundra – a treeless plain of tough, scrubby grass and moss and lichen – all the way to the snow and ice of the North Pole. But here they were just far enough south for clusters of trees to gather together as if making a united, heroic effort to fight back the cold. They could stick their roots down through holes in the permafrost and survive.

The plane had come down right on the edge of one of those clusters. A few more metres and it would have crashed right into the firs
and they would all have been smashed to pieces.

‘So they’ll come looking for us, right?’ Tikaani asked as they walked. ‘How long do you think it will take?’

‘They don’t know where we are,’ Beck pointed out. ‘We changed course.’

‘But I heard the pilot do a mayday!’

‘Yes,’ Beck agreed, and repeated, ‘But we changed course. I didn’t hear her say that bit.’ And he had no way of knowing if anyone had heard the mayday at all . . . Though he didn’t say that to Tikaani.

‘Well . . .’ Tikaani looked thoughtful, but only for a moment. ‘They’ve got satellites and’ – he waved a hand vaguely – ‘things. Haven’t they?’

‘Yeah, they have,’ Beck agreed. And for all he knew Tikaani was right. Someone at Anchorage might have noticed the moment their plane vanished off the radar and the rescue services might be on their way as they spoke.

There again, they might not.

‘We need to make ourselves easy to find,’ he told Tikaani. ‘Let’s gather stuff together. Rocks. Bits of
timber. Wreckage. Look, the plane’s half buried – they may never see it from the air. We’re going to mark out a huge great SOS, here on the ground . . .’

‘Letters on the ground will just look tiny,’ Tikaani pointed out.

Beck shrugged. ‘So we make ’em
big
!’

And so they marked out an SOS with letters six or seven metres high. It took a good half-hour.

‘They should see that, shouldn’t they?’ Tikaani asked with satisfaction.

‘Uh-huh . . .’ Beck cast an eye up at the sky. There was no sign of anyone looking for them yet . . .
But it’s still early days
, he told himself. ‘OK. Next we . . .’

And that was when the thought that had been lurking at the back of his mind ever since the crash – ever since
before
the crash – finally saw its chance and thrust itself forward. It chose its moment well. It smashed through his defences and brought him to a standstill.

Was it like this for Mum and Dad?

All Tikaani would have seen was Beck trailing off and gazing into the distance.

‘Beck?’ he asked anxiously. A pause, then again. ‘Beck?’

But Beck barely heard him.

Had they survived the crash in the jungle? Had they done everything he was doing? But all for nothing, because they had vanished into the wild, never to be seen again—

‘
Beck!
’

Tikaani’s call brought him back with a shudder, and he vowed he wasn’t going to do that again. There was no point trying to second-guess the past. It had happened and couldn’t be changed. What mattered was the future, and what you did with it. Besides, in order to survive you needed to keep your spirits up. You needed good morale. You did
not
obsess over what
might
have happened.

‘Next we find out exactly where we are,’ he said decisively. ‘There’s a GPS in one of the bags. I make sure Uncle Al never travels without it.’

As they walked back to the plane, they could see something was different. Al had woken up. He had propped himself up on his elbows and was looking about.

‘Hey, Uncle Al!’ Beck and Tikaani ran forward.

Al’s teeth showed white as he smiled up at them. ‘Beck! And Tikaani too. Well done, both of you.’ He spoke cautiously, occasionally stifling a grunt. Beck guessed he was in more pain than he wanted to admit. ‘How’s the pilot?’

The boys crouched down next to him and Beck explained the situation. Al didn’t say much, though Beck knew he must understand how bad it was. There wasn’t any need to say it out loud.

‘There’s a GPS—’ Al started to say.

‘I know. Hang on.’ Beck climbed back down into the cabin and made his way to the rear of the plane. He rummaged through the bags until eventually he found what he was after.

Beck held a plastic box the size of a large phone. It could easily have been mistaken for a computer game. He switched it on and the flat screen glowed into life. The box held a silent conversation with satellites hundreds of miles overhead, fixing its position on the surface of the earth.