Way of the Wolf (4 page)

Beck tugged the pilot’s map out of its compartment by her seat and went back to the others.

‘Hey, cool,’ Tikaani said when he saw the little box. He jostled Beck for a look at the screen.

Give him a bit of technology
, Beck thought with a smile,
and the boy is happy!

He handed Tikaani the map and the other boy spread it out on the ground. Beck read the co-ordinates off the GPS and Tikaani traced the lines of latitude and longitude on the map. They came together at a particular point.

‘We’re here,’ Tikaani said, pleased. The other two leaned in to look as he pressed a finger into the paper. ‘We know where we are! That’s a good start, isn’t it?’

‘It always helps . . .’ Beck agreed. Unfortunately he – and, he knew, Al – could see a whole lot that was wrong with the situation. Tikaani would be missing it.

On the map their position was just a few centimetres away from Anakat. Anakat was a square dot, the only square thing on the entire sheet of paper. The rest was curves and jagged lines. Anakat was manmade; the rest was natural. That square dot represented warmth and food and safety.

‘And look,’ Tikaani insisted. ‘We’re nearer to Anakat than to anywhere else. We could probably walk that in a day.’

‘We could,’ Beck agreed, ‘if Uncle Al could walk anywhere.’ But his finger traced the thick streak of contour lines on the map that lay between Anakat and where they were now. ‘And if it was all flat. Unfortunately there are mountains in the way.’

They all glanced up and looked westward. The mountains were clearly visible, lying between them and Anakat like a mighty wall. The peaks shone brightly in the sun. They ran from north to south, and Anakat was almost due west. The direction was very easy to fix in the mind. The only fly in the ointment was a million tons of rock between them.

‘If you include them,’ Beck mused, ‘and unfortunately we have to . . . two or three days’ walk. Minimum.’

Tikaani only looked daunted for a moment. He gave the mountains another look, which told Beck he had grasped the scale of the problem. Even two or three days’ walk wasn’t the end of the world. But throw in the ice and snow and steep slopes of the mountains and it became a whole new ball game.

‘OK . . .’ Tikaani’s voice trembled just a little and he said it again, more firmly. ‘OK. But like I said before, they’ll still come looking for us. They must be expecting us.’

‘Um,’ said Al. He suddenly sounded a little uncertain. ‘Not necessarily.’

Now both boys were staring at him. It was his turn to shrug. ‘Ours was an unscheduled flight. Lumos Petroleum’s lawyers and publicists have been on our backs ever since the whole thing began. If they knew we were coming to Anakat, they’d be there first. I wanted to slip in under their radar, film the documentary before they knew anything. It’s not a secret, of course . . . but I did sort of drop a few hints we’d be there next week, not this one.’

‘Hey!’ Tikaani exclaimed. ‘This is the twenty-first century! Planes don’t just disappear! OK, we were unscheduled but we must be on someone’s log, somewhere. And my father knows we’re coming.’

‘Anchorage will have recorded our departure, and our flight plan,’ Al agreed, ‘but they have no reason to check whether we’ve arrived. Oh, they will notice. Eventually. But it could take days. And even your father doesn’t know exactly when we were due. I didn’t tell him when we took off in case Lumos got wind of it.’

Days . . .
Beck thought. He glanced down at Al’s leg, and up again at his uncle. The leg was only the obvious external wound. How smashed up was Al inside? His uncle was still pale and his voice was weak. There could be much worse damage that he couldn’t see.

Beck wasn’t certain that Al would be able to wait.

‘Days . . .’ Tikaani voiced Beck’s thought. Forty miles off course and a three-day walk to safety. Rescue might take even longer than that to get to them. His shoulders slumped as the optimism drained away; he looked down. But then he lifted his head again and his face was set and grim.

‘So what do we do?’ he asked.

The boys climbed into the plane once more and clambered over the seats to the back where the luggage was stored.

‘So, what have we got . . . ?’ Beck murmured.

One of the bags had their packed lunch in it – Beck knew that because he had been the one to pack it. It seemed like a long time since breakfast. He passed it back to Tikaani, then knelt down to have another look around. His eyes lit on a plastic toolbox, and he opened it up and rummaged inside. Among the wrenches and screwdrivers was a sheathed Bowie knife. He pulled it out and held it up so he could appreciate it.

The knife had a wooden handle, and a curved and pointed twenty-centimetre blade. It was a knife
designed for the wilderness, equally good for cutting up meat, removing the skin from a carcass, or straightforward slicing of anything that needed it. ‘Excellent,’ Beck murmured.

He heard a grunt of approval from Tikaani.

‘I had one of those,’ the other boy said. ‘I used it for show and tell at school and the teacher confiscated it. It frightened the city kids.’

Beck smiled to himself at the way Tikaani said
city kids
. However much Tikaani wanted to be a city kid himself, he couldn’t quite shake off his heritage.

He tucked the knife in its sheath into his belt and looked around some more. Aha! A tarpaulin, folded and tucked away. He tugged it out and handed this back as well.

‘Let’s go,’ he said. Behind him, Tikaani turned to climb out of the plane again. Beck tucked the toolbox under one arm and followed him.

Tikaani had asked: ‘What do we do?’ Beck broke the answer down into short term and long term. Short term: make a shelter, make a fire, find food and water. Make themselves as secure and comfortable
as they could. Long term . . . well, he would see how the short term worked out. In the long term, rescuers might show up.

They could have used the plane for shelter, but the pilot was still in there and they couldn’t have lit a fire without the risk of igniting the fuel. Besides, Al wouldn’t be able to get in and out without help.

A boulder jutted out of the tundra a short distance from the plane, carried there by ice thousands of years ago and dropped when the ice retreated. With a bit of grunting and heaving, Tikaani and Beck moved Al carefully off the plane’s wings; they carried them over and propped them up against the rock, overlapping so that no breeze could get through the space between them. That was the shelter.

With Beck’s right hand linked with Tikaani’s left, and arms around each other’s shoulders, they formed a makeshift cradle and carried Al over to install him in his new home.

‘Very nice.’ Al lay back on the ground beneath the wings. They had covered it with fir branches and a layer of clothes to keep him off the tundra. ‘Very nice indeed. The best house a man could ask for.’

‘It’s a traditional Inuit home,’ Tikaani murmured ironically, looking at the wings. ‘Aluminium is what we always use if we can’t get caribou skin.’

Making the fire wasn’t hard. They were surrounded by dry dead wood. Tikaani gathered up a pile of small, breakable bits of wood for kindling while Beck went looking for water and some other essentials.

Luckily, he didn’t have to go far before he came across a tiny stream racing merrily through the wilderness. The water was cold and clear and Beck filled the two water bottles that he and his uncle always travelled with.

‘What’s that?’ Tikaani asked a little while later as he dropped his kindling onto the ground. At the entrance to the shelter, Beck was making a heap out of what looked like wispy, grey-yellow hair.

‘Old Man’s Beard,’ Beck explained. He cheekily held up a piece next to Al’s face. ‘See?’

Al swatted his hand away. ‘Less of that!’ he exclaimed.

‘It’s moss,’ Beck explained. ‘Not the wild clematis that we know as Old Man’s Beard in England. Grows
on trees, grows on rocks, burns very easily.’

Beck put a layer of Tikaani’s kindling on top of the small pile, followed by a few larger pieces of wood. Tikaani looked on as he pulled out a bootlace hanging round his neck. Two bits of metal – a small rod and a flat square – dangled on the end.

Beck saw him watching. ‘It’s a fire steel,’ he explained. ‘I take this everywhere. You strike the rod with the scraper . . .’ He demonstrated, and Tikaani flinched away from a shower of sparks. ‘And, sparky, sparky. One thing I can do anywhere is set a fire.’

Beck struck the fire steel again next to the small pile of kindling. Sparks settled on a couple of strands of Old Man’s Beard and they started to burn, more a red glow than a flame. They twisted and writhed as the glow consumed them. A few seconds more and the dead moss was all but gone, but a thin flicker of flame licked against the kindling. A piece of wood snapped, another crackled as the fire took hold and gradually spread out. Now Tikaani grinned and crouched down with his hands held out to the heat.

‘How’s the leg?’ Beck asked his uncle.

Al shifted himself towards the fire and looked thoughtfully down at the bandage. ‘You did a good job, Beck. Thanks. Get more of the gauze ready. I’m going to release the tourniquet . . .’

Beck nodded and fetched the first aid box. The tourniquet had to be released eventually because a limb with insufficient blood supply will just go rotten. But if the wound hadn’t sealed itself, blood would simply rush into the leg and out of the gash and it would need rebandaging.

‘Could you . . . ?’ Al asked. Beck held the stick steady while his uncle released the knot holding it in place. He loosened the tourniquet by half a turn and grunted, teeth clenched. All three of them looked carefully at the bandage. After a minute it obviously wasn’t getting any redder.

Beck breathed out; Al refastened the tourniquet in its new, looser position.

‘Give it another twenty-four hours and I’ll take it off,’ he said. He smiled with an effort at the boys. His face was white and drawn with pain but he seemed determined to be cheerful. ‘Now, lunch?’

Lunch was a frugal meal of cold meat and biscuits. It did the job, but . . .

‘This isn’t going to last us for a few days,’ Tikaani said unhappily.

‘Hey, we’re surrounded by food!’ Beck told him.

Tikaani looked around. ‘Yeah. Yummy grass followed by fir-tree dessert.’

Beck reached for the toolbox that lay nearby. He tipped out the contents and stood up with the empty container. ‘Come on, I’ll show you.’

Five minutes later they were in the woods. The boys crouched by a fallen log that was slowly disintegrating with age. Beck poked aside the layers of rotten bark with the knife tip and they fell away to show a cluster of brown, lens-shaped mushrooms, smooth and silky beneath the dirt.

‘This is deer mushroom,’ Beck told the other boy. ‘It grows on dead wood and it’s perfectly safe to eat.’

‘Paluqutat,’ Tikaani said unexpectedly. Beck looked up at him in surprise, and he shrugged. ‘Hey, I used to help my grandma gather it up. It’s just never been a main meal before.’

‘OK . . .’ Beck pried the rest of the deer mushrooms off the log and dropped them into the box. ‘Well, we need plenty of this and also . . . Aha!’

He pushed aside the leaves of a nearby bush and Tikaani saw a cluster of berries. They were black and half the size of plums.

‘These are bearberries,’ said Beck. ‘They’re very easy on the stomach and they fill you up, so . . .’

‘What are you?’ Tikaani asked as they set to stripping the bush of its load. ‘Some kind of expert?’

‘Expert?’ Beck paused a moment. He didn’t want to brag. ‘I know a thing or two. I spent a month with a Sami tribe in Finland once – Mum and Dad were doing research there. It’s not too different to this place.’

‘So you’ve done this before? I mean, actually had to survive in the wilderness?’

‘The wilderness? No.’ Beck straightened up from the bush and looked around for more. ‘The jungle . . . well, yes.’

‘Hey? When?’

‘Look around for more mushrooms,’ Beck instructed. ‘I’ll see if I can find some more berries. When? Um . . . a couple of months ago . . .’

And so, while they gathered food together, Beck found himself telling Tikaani about his recent time in Colombia with his friends Christina and Marco. Uncle Al had been kidnapped, and they’d had to get through miles of inhospitable, humid jungle to rescue him. As well as finding food they’d had to negotiate waterfalls and bullet ants and jaguars and a poisonous snake . . .