‘HA! HERE!’ yelled Hal Hunt from the shore, trying to get the bear’s attention. She spun to face him, pushing the cub behind her defensively. The sight of the big human made her forget the two smaller ones. He was more of a threat to her baby. Hal began to make soothing noises, and slowly walked backwards, making it clear to the bear that he had no predatory intentions towards the cub.
‘Quick,’ hissed Frazer, ‘while she’s not looking …’
Not even trying to be careful, they splashed noisily towards the floatplane. The water was now waist-deep. Amazon felt as though it were made of treacle, it seemed to grab and suck at her so. And, even though it was only a few metres to safety, she found it utterly exhausting.
Frazer made it to the plane first, and hauled himself up on to the float, which made the whole fragile aircraft rock in the water. He dragged Amazon dripping from the lake, and wrenched open the door. Amazon looked back over her shoulder, convinced that she was going to see the bear pounding after them. The mother, however, was still glaring at Hal, guarding the cub between her massive front paws.
Amazon slammed the door behind her, and suddenly felt completely safe. Something about the look of the busy console with its dials and switches, the joystick, that earlier today her Uncle Hal had gripped to guide them here, even the smell of the plastic seats, just felt so civilized. The worn and familiar interior banished the idea that it was even remotely possible that she could be killed by an angry bear in the wilds of Canada.
They both glanced out of the grimy window. The mother and cub were now tucking into the fish, looking very relaxed. Hal had retreated further, and was squatting down on his haunches, observing the scene.
‘That was pretty, er, tense,’ said Frazer.
‘Yeah, I could hardly bear it …’ said Amazon with a slight smile creeping across her face.
Frazer looked at her. ‘That is the worst joke I’ve ever heard, and hanging out with Bluey means that I’ve heard a fair few,’ he said, but his mouth was already twitching. The joke hit their funny bones like a sledgehammer, and they both started first to giggle, and then they burst out into peals of laughter.
‘If you’re so clever, you think of a better bear joke,’ gasped Amazon.
Frazer wiped his eyes on his sleeve. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘I’ve got one for you. There’s a bear and a rabbit walking together through the woods. The bear’s looking thoughtful. He says to the rabbit, “Do you have trouble with poop sticking to your fur?” “Nope,” says his little friend. “That’s good,” says the bear and wipes his butt with the rabbit.’
That set them off again, and it was a couple of minutes before they thought to look out of the window to check on the bears’ meal.
The mother and cub had finished the three trout they’d been thrown. Now the mother was sniffing the air, her nose held high.
‘Guess she’s still hungry,’ said Frazer.
And then, to their dismay, the big female began to wade out towards the floatplane.
‘This is not good,’ said Frazer.
‘Where’s your dad gone?’ asked Amazon. She’d just noticed that Hal Hunt was no longer watching them.
Before Frazer had the chance to answer, the bear reached the plane. She disappeared from their view for a moment as she clambered up clumsily on to the float and then her huge head reared up right in the window. Amazon and Frazer both managed to strangle their screams, but they could not resist the primal need to cling on to each other.
The bear shoved her nose against the window and sniffed.
‘I don’t get it,’ said Frazer. ‘We’re no threat to her or her baby while we’re in here. This isn’t usual bear behaviour at all. Unless …’
‘Unless what?’
‘Well, I suppose it’s possible that she’s not really concerned about her cub’s safety. She might just be hungry and sees us as the second course.’
‘But surely bears don’t eat people …?’
‘Nope, not usually. Mice and berries are more their thing. But there are times when a bear just decides that it wants to try something new.’
It was then that Hal came back. He was carrying his rifle.
‘Your dad’s not going to shoot the bear, is he?’ said Amazon, her face full of apprehension.
‘No! Well, I hope not. It would only be if we were in real danger.’
‘But you just said that the bear might want to eat us …’
‘Yeah, but I don’t think the bear can …’
Frazer was going to say, ‘get in here’, but then the bear started beating on the door of the plane with those powerful clawed feet.
The whole plane began to rock from side to side again, and now it was impossible for the two young Trackers not to scream. The sound just seemed to encourage the bear. Amazon saw Hal step forward. He pulled back the bolt in the old rifle, chambering a round.
And then Frazer saw it sticking up out of the top of one of the big pockets on Amazon’s jacket.
‘Zonnie, is that what I think it is?’ he said, pointing at the protruding tail.
‘What? Oh well, I … look, it was the first time I’ve ever been fishing, and I didn’t want to give everything to the bears. I just wanted one to show …’
Frazer didn’t wait for her to finish. He just pulled the fish from her pocket and jumped into the back seat of the aircraft. From there he pulled open one of the windows. The bear’s head shot in his direction. He waved the fish in front of her nose, and then hurled it out into the lake. The bear dived straight after it, sending out a wave that rocked the little plane.
‘Now!’ Frazer yelled. ‘Run for it.’
Together they jumped from the plane and splashed to the shore. Hal ran to meet them. The little cub, still halfway up the spit, gave a fierce little roar in their direction, which brought the mother bear thundering back.
‘OK, we back off,’ said Hal, still holding the gun, ready to fire. ‘Nice and slow.’
The others didn’t need any further instruction. Staying close together, they edged away from the lake and the bears and, unharassed by the grumpy mum, they stumbled back to camp.
‘That was a lucky escape,’ Hal Hunt said later in camp as they slurped thin packet soup from tin mugs.
‘I think we had it covered,’ said Frazer.
‘I meant a lucky escape for the bear. If I’d had to then I would have shot her. And that would have made this one depressing trip.’
‘I’ve never seen bears like those two,’ said Amazon, trying to change the subject. She couldn’t stand the thought of her uncle killing the bears all because of her fishy mistake. ‘They were such an amazing colour. Are they albinos?’
‘No, not an albino. True albinos always have pink eyes,’ said Hal. ‘They’re actually a subspecies of black bear that we get here in British Columbia. They’re usually called Kermode bears, but the First Nation people call them spirit bears, which I kind of like. It’s because they look like ghosts. But it’s just a genetic mutation. They’re not at all common, and they usually live down by the coast – haven’t seen any this far inland before.’
By now the sun had set, and it was getting cold. Hal put another log on the fire.
‘You must have been up here a lot with Uncle Roger back in the old days,’ said Frazer. He was thinking that Amazon might like to hear some stories about her dad.
Hal nodded, but didn’t, as Frazer expected, launch into some funny stories about the scrapes he and his brother had got into. And then Hal cleared his throat and began to talk.
‘I never told you, did I, about how your grandfather, my dad, John Hunt, almost died? Well, it was north of here, up near the border with Alaska. You won’t like the sound of this, but we were up there collecting bald eagle eggs. No, hold your horses, it was all to help save the species. The birds had once been common all over North America, but they were down to just a few hundred pairs.
‘Scientists had found that a pesticide called DDT was making their eggshells very thin and delicate,
and so when the parents tried to brood the eggs they would break. So we were up there to try to collect some eggs for a captive breeding programme. And, if you got the eggs early in the season, the eagles would lay a second clutch, so the species wouldn’t be harmed at all. But yes, I suppose that we’d do things differently now. This was back in the days when we didn’t know as much as we do now about conservation.
‘Anyway, my dad was piloting us in a floatplane, pretty similar to the one I flew you guys here in. There was just Dad, Roger and me in the plane. We were planning to be up there for three or four days at the most. We had an incubator that would keep the eggs viable till we got back to New England.
‘We’d set off from Vancouver early in the morning. The weather was fine, no problems there at all. And then my dad noticed that the fuel gauge was almost on empty. We should have had plenty of gas to get us there and back. He reckoned that there was a leak.
‘This was pretty bad news. It meant that he was going to have to set us down in one of the lakes up there, and then we were going to have to trek back hundreds of miles to civilization. And we hadn’t come prepared for that kind of expedition. But we weren’t too worried. In fact, Roger and I were excited about it. It was going to feel like a real adventure, out there hundreds of miles from anywhere, having to live off the land and our wits. And with dad there too … You see, most of the time Dad just sent Roger and me off round the world on our own, so we hardly ever got to spend this sort of time with him.
‘But then, when I looked at my dad, I saw that he was worried. He was a cool character, old John Hunt. But he wasn’t cool, then. The sweat was dripping down his face. He was looking for somewhere safe to put the plane down. We went over a couple of small lakes, but there just wasn’t enough room for us to land safely. By now the gauge was reading nothing but a big red zero.
‘Your dad, Amazon, was still laughing and joking, because that was his way, but me and my dad knew better. He managed to nurse the plane over one more ridge of pines – we were so close the floats clipped the branches at the top. And there below us was a lovely long lake. Could have been made for landing a plane on. I remember it now, still and shiny as a river of mercury.
‘I saw my dad’s face relax. He even smiled, and said to Roger that we’d be fishing that evening in the lake. He couldn’t gain any height, but the prop was still turning.
‘We only had a mile or so to go when she stalled. Just dropped down the last fifteen metres and hit the trees. It felt like the end of the world. The wings got torn off, and the fuselage cracked in two like someone breaking an egg to make an omelette.
‘We’d belted up, of course, and that saved my life. I woke up later – guess it was only a few minutes – and I didn’t know what the heck had happened or where I was. I didn’t even understand what I was seeing. You see, the plane had flipped over, and I was hanging upside down. Roger was next to me, just coming round. I checked him quickly, and he seemed to be OK, just stunned by the crash.
‘And then I saw my dad, down below me on the forest floor, and I knew straight away that he was seriously injured, because of the way he was lying, all twisted up.
‘I managed to rouse Roger, and we climbed down out of those trees. We were both pretty shaken up, and it’s a miracle that we got down in one piece.
‘And then Roger saw the state that Dad was in, and that bust him up. Your father took it badly, Amazon. He was only a kid, whereas I was already a man.’
Amazon was so caught up in the story she didn’t know what to say. In her mind she was there in the crash, with Roger and Hal and old John Hunt.
‘How badly hurt was he?’ asked Frazer.
‘Dad was out cold – he’d taken a nasty crack to the head. He also had a compound fracture to his leg – his shin bone was sticking out through his torn trouser leg. Roger was panicking, freaking out. I told him to go and get two stout branches and trim them off with his knife – we were going to need them to splint the leg, but I also wanted to give him something to do while I worked on the injury.
‘A compound fracture is just about the worst thing that can happen when you’re out in the wilderness. This was a bad break, but it could have been worse. The bone looked like a broken stick, all jagged and white, but by some miracle the shards hadn’t cut through any major blood vessels so, although it was bleeding, it wasn’t, well, gushing.
‘Normally the advice is to do what you can to stem any bleeding, but then wait till the medics turn up to fix it. Most of the things an amateur could do to a compound fracture would make it worse. You shouldn’t touch the bone, because all that’ll do is damage the flesh around it more and get the whole thing infected. But there were no medics out there, so it was down to me. Luckily I’d read up on first aid, so I had a rough idea what to do.
‘We had plenty of bottled water, and a medical kit with decent supplies in it. The kit had fallen out of the plane not far from my dad. So first of all I dissolved an iodine tablet in a bottle of water and used that to flush out the wound, which was full of leaf mould and general crud.
‘Then it was time for the hard part. I knew that we had a serious trek ahead of us if we were going to get my dad out alive, and I couldn’t leave the bone just sticking out like that – the wound would never heal, and the infection would kill him.
‘Roger was back by now. He was still upset, but he knew as well as I did that we had to keep cool and sort this out. I asked him to hold tight on to Dad’s shoulders, while I pulled on the foot. I managed to get the bone to slide back the way it had come, and settle more or less in the right place. If I’d messed it up, the sharp edge of the bone would have caused more tissue damage, and maybe even nicked an artery. Thank God Dad was still unconscious. It would have hurt like hell if he’d been awake. In fact, the pain might have been enough to send him into shock and kill him.
‘We had some bandages in the med kit, so I cleaned and dressed the wound as best I could. Then I used more bandage to tie the two branches to Dad’s leg. It was important, you see, to keep the leg immobile – any movement of the bone would be a disaster.
‘After that, I went back up into the trees and threw down anything useful – we had a little food and some camping gear – and a couple of guns; there was a rifle and my dad’s Colt 45 that he’d had in the army.
‘By then it was too late to begin our journey back to civilization, so that night we camped by the lake. Dad woke up in the night, which was a big relief. Except that he was in terrible pain from that leg, and he didn’t make much sense. He said that we should leave him up there and get back ourselves, and then send a party back for him. But we both knew that they’d find him dead, and I wasn’t going to let that happen.
‘The next morning we rigged up a travois – you know, a sort of sledge made out of branches – and tied my dad to it. Then we began to walk. Every step was agony for my dad, but he never complained beyond the occasional grunt.
‘I had a map and a compass, and I was always pretty good at finding my way around. We headed for the Anchorage to Newport Road, which I reckoned was about fifty miles away. I thought we’d be able to catch a lift from there. It took us four days. The going was as rough as it gets. There was never a time when we weren’t dragging that sledge up or hauling it down – in fact, going down was sometimes harder than going up, because we didn’t want to lose control and drop our dad.
‘The second night – the first of the journey – was OK. Dad was still in terrible pain, and was drifting in and out of consciousness. He had a few lucid moments, and we talked through our plans. I could tell he was proud of the way we were coping – especially Roger, who, as I keep saying, was just a kid – pretty much the same age as you, Frazer.’
Amazon looked at her cousin and tried to imagine her dad at the same age. It made her smile, despite the grimness of the story.
‘I checked Dad’s leg,’ continued Hal. ‘The bandages were caked with dried blood, and it must have hurt like hell when I peeled them off. The wound di
dn’t look too bad, but I thought I caught the smell of something … well, something not good. I flushed it with iodine again, and Dad made a sort of deep animal sound in his throat, and he punched at the ground, and Roger tried to hold him still.
‘The trouble started the next day. We heard wolves howling in the night, but we never thought too much about it. We knew that there were almost no cases of humans being attacked by wolves in modern times. It just didn’t happen. Bears, yes, but not wolves. Also, well, Dad was always a big wolf guy. There were always wolves back on the farm, then, and we just didn’t think about wolves as being anything other than our friends.
‘But we hadn’t reckoned on a couple of things. It was spring, after a long, hard winter, and the wolves had cubs, so they needed food. A lot of food. And my dad, well, the wolves could sense that he was sick.
‘They are magnificent hunters, but there’s not a single predator out there that doesn’t prefer to chow down on something that’s already on the way out.
‘Anyway, the wolves tracked us all that day. We never saw them once, but we knew they were there. They didn’t howl on the chase, but there was something about the forest that just screamed out wolves.
‘That night they howled again. We built the fire up and I think that kept them away. Dad was hot. Despite the iodine, an infection had taken hold and he was getting feverish. He’d stopped making much sense. He talked a lot about our mom, which he never did normally. She’d died when we were little kids. And it wasn’t just that he was talking about her – he was talking to her. And, well, that was pretty tough for Roger too …
‘Day three we saw them. A line of seven big timber wolves up on a ridge. The leader was as black as night. In fact, it looked like a wolf-shaped chunk of night had broken off and slipped into the day. And it looked at me. Right at me. It was too far off for me to see its eyes, but I knew it was looking at me. It was looking into my soul, to see if I had the courage and the will to protect our burden. And when the wolf looked at me I knew I’d be bringing Dad home or I’d die trying.
Bear Adventure Page 3