by Bear Grylls
She shrieked and leapt away. Water sprayed out of the bottle.
“Hey!” Bear quickly grabbed the bottle off her and screwed it shut. “Careful, Sophie. Water is our most precious resource out here. We can go a few weeks if we have to without food but without water we’ll die within a few days at most.”
“I’m sorry …” Sophie gasped. She was furious with herself again. It was so embarrassing. But she was also terrified.
“What’s that?” she said, pointing at the spider. It was still crawling towards her. She took a couple of steps to get further away.
Bear leaned close to it.
“Camel spider,” he said. “Not a real spider. Not a real camel either, for that matter. More like a scorpion. It’s just after the shade, like everything else out here. Always remember – if you find a nice shady nook to sit in, chances are good that something else already has.”
“Is it poisonous?” she asked.
“Just painful. Its bite wouldn’t kill you. Not like lack of water would.”
He looked at her with a wry smile, and she blushed. Meanwhile the camel spider had reached the bottom of the tree. It dug itself a small hole in the sand and vanished.
Sophie made sure she knew exactly where it was, so she could avoid it.
“Hey,” Bear said, “here’s a couple of useful tricks for the survivor who’s travelling light. When you don’t have sunglasses or sun cream, this is the next best thing.”
He dug his fingers deep into the sand and dirt and worked them about until they were grimy. Then he smeared the paste in two splodges on his face, under his eyes. Sophie thought it made him look like a panda.
“This reduces the sun glare that gets into your eyes. And then …”
He rubbed each hand over the back of the other one to smudge the dirt onto them as well.
“This protects your exposed skin. And while you do that, I’ve got something else for your head and face.”
Sophie dug for some dirt of her own, and Bear got a cotton scarf with a colourful pattern of squares and rows of knots along each side out of his rucksack.
“This is a shemagh,” he said. “Here’s how you put it on …”
Bear showed her how to wrap the shemagh around her head so that there was just a slit for her eyes. She could lift up the front if she needed to drink or eat. Then he did the same for himself.
She looked out at the desert again through the slit. “At least out there in the sun there won’t be any giant spiders,” she muttered to herself.
Bear laughed.
“That’s maybe true. But plenty of other wildlife out there can kill us.” He paused. “Ready?”
5
WATER TRICK
“Do you have a compass?” Bear asked. His voice was muffled by his shemagh.
“Oh. Yes.” Sophie had forgotten about it. She held it up, and remembered how it had seemed to grow bigger and change. But now the dial just had the usual four directions.
She stared at it confused. Then looked up at Bear, then across to the desert.
“Did this … did this compass somehow bring me here?” she asked quietly.
Bear looked at her. “Maybe. But what I do know is that it can get us out. Just point us north by north-west.”
Sophie turned the compass.
She pointed. “That way.”
“Nice. We’ll walk a little so you can begin to get used to the desert heat and terrain. We walk slow and easy, to avoid sweating more than we have to, but we also take firm, steady steps to scare off any snakes.”
“Snakes?”
Sophie whipped her head around, staring madly at the sand in every direction. If there was one thing she hated more than spiders and insects, it was snakes.
She thought Bear was probably smiling behind his shemagh as he settled his rucksack on his back.
“Walk properly and you’ll never see them. Meanwhile, breathe through your nose, and no shouting, to stop your mouth drying out. Ready? Then, onwards!”
They set off in the direction the compass had shown.
Walking north by north-west meant that the setting sun was on their left, and the sky was lit with amazing curtains of red and orange light.
The walking was hard, though. Not like Sophie had been used to back home, where you just walk and don’t need to think about it. Here was different. Very different.
The sand was always slipping and sliding beneath Sophie. There was nothing to get a grip on – it was kind of like when she had played football on the beach.
An ache started to grow deep inside her legs. But she was terrified by the idea of snakes, and so she made sure she plonked a foot down firmly with every step.
Bear followed the low ground between the dunes, where the sand was flat, so they were in the shade. He called a halt after about ten minutes.
“Got the hang of it? Good. Now, here’s a smart trick. I learnt this from the Tarahumara tribe in Mexico.” He handed her the bottle. “Take a mouthful of water … and keep it there. No swallowing. Breathe through your nose. The water soaks into your body and the mouthful lasts a lot longer. You’ll find you really want to swallow, so at first we’ll just try it for a minute to start with, okay? And we’ll do it every half hour. With a bit of practice you’ll be holding it in for ages, like the Tarahumara do.”
He set the alarm on his watch.
“Okay … go.”
Sophie raised the bottle and a mouthful of warm water flooded her dry mouth.
“Just breathe,” Bear said, “and walk.”
Sophie almost spat the water out in the first few seconds. She had to concentrate on holding it in and walking the way Bear had told her. Whenever it sloshed against the back of her mouth it made her want to swallow but she resisted.
At least it took her mind off her aching legs.
Because the route was winding through the dunes they couldn’t stick to the same direction all the time. Bear asked her regularly to check her compass to make sure they were heading roughly the right way.
Then they came around the side of a dune and saw the way ahead was blocked. The only way forward was to go up a steep slope of sand. A massive sheer sand dune.
“Okay, we’re going to need all our concentration to get up that thing,” Bear said.
“Dunes look solid but they’re really just big piles of sand that the wind blows into shapes. There’s nothing to hold them together, and all they really want to do is fall down. As you’ll find out. Coming?”
Not sure what he meant, Sophie started to walk side by side with Bear. And walk. And walk. Loose sand tumbled down over her boots with every step.
After a few moments, she couldn’t help noticing something.
She wasn’t going anywhere.
Bear was getting further in front of her.
She started to take extra-long steps, and now she was moving. Backwards. Bear was getting even further away.
The ground slid from beneath her and she fell flat on her face.
“It moves!” she exclaimed.
“We’ll try a shallower angle,” Bear suggested, “so that the sides are less inclined to collapse under our weight.”
They changed direction so that now they were walking more along the dune, and only a little bit up. When they had reached the edge, they turned around and went the other way. And so they slowly zigzagged their way to the top.
Sophie reckoned that if this had been a hill back home, she could have run up it in a few seconds. Here it must have taken something like twenty minutes. Half a maths lesson at least.
At long last they reached the top. Sophie’s legs were throbbing with the extra effort.
“Whew!” Sophie gasped. “Will there be more like that?”
“That’s up to the desert.” Bear checked the compass over Sophie’s shoulder. “It’s a shallower slope this side since it faces into the wind. That’ll make it easier to get down.”
They started walking again, towards the last glow of the sunset. Soon that vani
shed. The sky was black and the stars began to appear. A half-moon showed above the horizon and the desert became silver with its light.
Although Sophie had been baking hot during the day, now she wasn’t. She rubbed her arms. Her skin under her shirt had goose-pimples.
“B-Bear,” she began, and stopped in surprise. Her teeth were chattering.
“Cold?” he asked. She nodded. He stooped down so that she could get into his rucksack and pull out the hoody she had been wearing when she arrived here. She put it on, but the desert air was still cold enough to bite.
Her shemagh no longer kept the sun’s heat out, it was keeping her head’s warmth in. But still she shivered.
“How can I be freezing cold in the middle of the desert?”
“Night air keeps its warmth because there’s moisture in the air to store it, or clouds to stop it radiating away into space,” Bear said. “But here there are no clouds or moisture. All that lovely heat that the air got from the sun during the day gets lost, and there’s no sun to replace it.”
“You can’t freeze to death in the middle of the desert, though …” Sophie said. “Can you?”
“A hundred per cent, we can,” Bear said seriously. “Bake your brains out during the day, freeze them solid at night. But I think I see what we need …”
6
ROCK RADIATORS
Up ahead, Sophie saw black shadows splashed across the sand like poster paint. They were walking into a field of rocks and stones from the size of footballs to fridges.
Bear flicked a torch on and the beam splashed across the rocks.
“We have to think calmly and laterally out here,” he announced quietly. “You’re cold? We get the rocks to warm you up.”
Sophie touched one of them. The rough surface was warm.
“But the sun went down hours ago!”
“And these rocks stored its heat,” Bear told her. “Like a storage heater. And we won’t let it go to waste. Here, hold this. Shine it at the base.”
He passed her the torch, wrapped his arms around the large rock and tilted it up.
“Anything underneath?”
Sophie remembered his remark about always checking shady nooks. She supposed that if crawly, snappy, bitey creatures went under them during the day to get out of the sun, they might do the same at night for the warmth.
So there might be something crawly or snappy or bitey down there now …
Her breath was coming quickly, in short pants. She didn’t want to look.
“You can do it, Sophie,” Bear said, still holding up the rock.
Sophie swallowed, hard, and shone the torch underneath.
There wasn’t anything there.
“Nothing,” she said.
“Okay. Good!” Bear grunted. He let the rock drop back, and just as he did, the torchlight caught something scuttle out from a small rock next to it.
It was a scorpion, and it was waving its claws right at Sophie.
She jumped back with a loud scream.
It was like a cross between a giant spider and a lobster, about the length of her longest finger. It had two big claws, and a sting on a tail that curved over its head to point forward. She dropped the torch in her panic.
Everything was suddenly dark. The scorpion could be creeping up on her, waving its claws, getting closer …
“It’s okay, Sophie. Just keep calm and step back.” Bear picked the torch up and shone it on the scorpion, still on the rock. “Better it’s out here and we know about it. Some scorpions are highly venomous and can easily kill you, but this is dangerous but not deadly. Still, it’s not something we want nearby while we rest.” He paused. “Remember: everything here is locked in a battle to survive – like us.”
He pulled out his knife and killed it calmly and quickly, then cut off the stinger on its tail and put the scorpion in his pocket.
“What we kill, we eat,” Bear said.
“You have to be joking,” Sophie announced.
“Not at all. The desert can kill you but it can also provide. Now let’s get to it, Sophie – step one is to build a camp. Shine the torch over here …”
Sophie shook her head in half disgust and half shock, but together they started to make the camp.
With Sophie lighting the ground, Bear built a low, U-shaped rock wall. They studied each rock from every angle in case of any more scorpions. Then Bear laid down a groundsheet inside the wall so they could sit on the sand. To Sophie’s surprise, he also started to build a fire.
“Where did that come from?” she asked.
“The palm tree at the oasis. It’s just dry wood that fell off. In survival we always look around for stuff to use. Most people walk past the simplest of things that could save their life.”
Sophie thought back to where she had met Bear.
“That was an oasis?” she said. Her local swimming bath was called the Oasis. It had lots of pools and chutes and fountains, and water everywhere.
“Sure,” he said with a chuckle. “How do you think the tree managed to grow? There was water below the sand. That’s where I filled the bottle from. I’ll show you tomorrow.”
Bear pulled a couple of bits of metal from a chain on his neck and struck them together. They sprayed sparks onto the wood, and soon the smallest of flames caught the dry husks of the palm tree.
Within seconds a small fire was crackling away.
Bear pulled out the remains of the scorpion from his pocket and placed it on the end of his knife. Then he held it over the flames and it started to sizzle.
“First scorpion, I imagine?” he asked Sophie.
“Um. Yes. It’s not exactly on my normal supper menu.” Sophie looked a bit worried.
“It’s like most things we fear,” Bear said.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that the taste isn’t too bad actually. It is just our fear that tells us it will be awful. Same with most other things,” Bear told her. “When we face up to the thing we are scared of, we often find it isn’t so bad.” He paused. “Here, try it!”
“Really? I don’t think I can.”
“Well, just try. Let’s have half each. It’s only tiny but it will warm us up, give us a small hit of protein and go some way to helping you over your fears, maybe.”
That makes sense, Sophie thought.
“I guess,” she said.
“We’ll eat it at the same time,” Bear said as he handed Sophie half of the remains of the scorpion’s body. “One, two, three …”
To her surprise the scorpion didn’t actually taste much different to the burnt sausages at Camp. She smiled at Bear and kept chewing.
“Well, it’s not great … but it isn’t too bad, I figure.”
“Good for you, girl!”
They drank water and ate a couple of ration bars as well as the scorpion, and the air around them grew warm as the fire’s heat reflected off the inside of the U-shaped wall.
Although she was exhausted from walking, after the freezing cold of the desert at night, Sophie felt like she had just had a hot bath …
Sophie didn’t remember going to sleep, but she woke hours later, curled up on the groundsheet. The sky was grey but the horizon was lit up with yellow and red light. Sunrise in the desert.
The fire had gone out, as the last of the wood that Bear had carried his backpack had run out. It was cold. But not as cold as it had been in the middle of the night. The dawn was coming and with it the heat would soon be upon them.
Bear was sat on the ground, staring calmly out into the desert.
“Morning,” he said cheerfully. “A quick bite of breakfast and then we push on. We can do another three, four hours before it gets too hot.”
7
FALSE WATER
Sand, sand, and, oh look, more sand, Sophie thought as they walked.
They were doing the hold-the-water-in-your-mouth thing again. The water mixed with her spit and turned warm and sticky.
But she kept it in.
&nb
sp; “Five minutes,” Bear said eventually. “You can swallow now.”
They had started out holding the water in their mouth for a minute and they were now progressing. She was getting better at it. Sophie gratefully gulped it down.
After that they walked in silence. Talking just used up moisture.
When Sophie had arrived in the desert the day before, it was the late afternoon. Even though it had been amazingly hot the day had been getting cooler.
Now the desert was warming up, like someone was turning up the dial on an oven.
Yesterday they had walked in the shadows of the dunes. Today they still kept to the low ground, but as the sun got higher it shone directly on them. The air ahead began to shimmer in the heat. Sophie could feel the sun battering against her clothes and the shemagh over her head.
But even though she wasn’t exactly cool, she didn’t overheat. Air flowed between her clothes and her skin, like Bear had said it would.
Just then, a streak of white light flashed in front of her eyes. There was a clear silver band stretching across the horizon.
“A lake!” she exclaimed. She’d never felt so happy to see water in her life – they must be nearly out of the desert.
Bear was already shaking his head.
“Keep looking,” he said.
Sophie blinked in surprise as the silver band shrivelled into silver spots, and then vanished.
But in its place there was something real. It looked like a pile of fur rugs lying in the sand. It looked sort of familiar, but Sophie couldn’t say what it was. She ran its shape through her head, trying to match it with something.
It wasn’t until they were right up close that she finally realised.
“Oh, gross!”
It was a camel. A dead one. Long dead. Its dried-up flesh had shrink-wrapped itself around its bones. Its hair had fallen off in thick, dirty clumps and there were gaping holes in what was left of its body. And one of those holes seemed to be moving …