Bear Adventure

by Anthony McGowan

  However, Frazer was in his element. Mountain biking was just about his favourite activity in the universe.

  ‘OK, let me run this past you quickly. I’m going to simplify this, or we’ll be here all day. The basic question is, do we want something geared up for bombing downhill at maximum speed? If we do, we need full suspension. Or do we want a bike for going cross-country, with as much up as down? If so then we need to think about cutting down on weight, and that means sacrificing the rear suspension. But then that also means getting a sore butt, especially if we do actually hit a good descent.’

  Amazon was already a little bored with the bike chat.

  ‘You decide. But I’d quite like a pink one.’

  ‘Sure …’ said Frazer, not really listening. Then he looked up sharply and saw, from the wicked smile playing at the corners of her mouth, that this was one of Amazon’s little jokes. She was not a very pink sort of girl.

  In the end Frazer settled on a hardtail, matt-black Cannondale, and Amazon on a carbon-framed Marin, with full suspension.

  It was a cool, metallic grey – not pink.

  Back in the wilderness, they were both helmeted and ready to set off. They planned to eat a lunch of trail mix – a high-energy mixture of nuts and dried fruit, and their light backpacks also contained a few protein bars, a little chocolate and some packet soup, along with basic survival equipment in case they got into trouble.

  ‘The last thing you want on a cross-country trip,’ Frazer explained to Amazon, ‘is a heavy pack. Saps all the fun out of it.’

  They were both wearing standard TRACKS expedition outfits – combat trousers, a fleece and a waterproof jacket. It was enough, Frazer had said, for the daytime, when, although cool, it never got too cold. The nights were a different matter, but they had no intention of staying out at night …

  Amazon was looking forward to the ride. But she was also a little worried. Since she had become a member of TRACKS she had been in many dangerous situations, and she knew that she had grown up and matured and that things that would have daunted her a few weeks before now seemed routine. But there was still an awful lot of wilderness out there …

  ‘OK, let’s move ’em out,’ said Frazer, and they were off.

  The first part of the ride was fairly easy. Frazer set a fast pace, but there was a good trail through the woods, and the going was pretty level. The ground was a little damp under the trees, but the heavy, knobbly tyres of the bikes bit in and gave good traction.

  There were a few sections of the trail that undulated just enough for Frazer to show Amazon how to do a jump.

  ‘You’ve got to pull her up,’ he said, ‘and make sure you land on both wheels together. The bike’ll take care of the rest. Just feel it.’

  Even though the bike was only airborne for a second and travelled at most a metre, it was still enough to make Amazon shriek with excitement. And fear. The landing was surprisingly easy, the suspension taking all the shock out of it.

  ‘Told you you’d like it,’ said Frazer, cycling next to her.

  Amazon was exhilarated, and now the two of them flew through the forest. Sunlight filtered through the branches, dappling the ground with a lovely pattern of light and shade.

  If it had not been for the seriousness of their mission, both Amazon and Frazer would have been having fun. But the reality nagged away in the back of their minds. They were searching for a missing child. They both hoped that they would find him alive. But there was a chance, the terrible chance, that they might not …

  After half an hour, the trail grew rougher. What had been pleasantly rolling terrain grew more rugged. There were a couple more jumps, each one higher than the one before. Amazon was delighted that her bike had full suspension, rather than just the front suspension that Frazer had – although it didn’t seem to bother him. He greeted each jump with a ‘Woo hoo!’, and even pulled a wheelie down one long, straight section.

  ‘Show-off!’ yelled Amazon, but she was secretly a little impressed. Impressed, that is, until he overbalanced and fell backwards with the heavy bike on top of him.

  She managed not to laugh until she’d established that he wasn’t badly hurt.

  ‘You OK?’ she asked as she picked him up.

  ‘With a helmet and a skull this thick, I think I’ll survive.’ Frazer climbed back on his bike, trying to recover his dignity. ‘Come on, we’ve work to do.’

  Amazon was too busy concentrating on staying on her bike to fully appreciate the countryside, or notice any animals. Once she thought that she saw a glimpse of something large and brown moving lithely off through the undergrowth. A deer? Maybe a moose? It seemed too graceful to be a bear.

  Either way, no time to ponder as she pumped the pedals to keep up with her cousin.

  They stopped a couple of times to check the map. They both had watches with a GPS positioning function, so it was pretty easy to plot their route.

  Amazon hadn’t really been aware of it, but she now saw that they must have been climbing steadily. The trees had grown thinner, and now the Trackers were mainly cycling in sunlight rather than shade. And then for the first time she caught a glimpse of their destination: Mount Humboldt looming above them. They paused and looked at it.

  It wasn’t high enough to be capped with white at this time of year, but it was still a grimly impressive sight. Its sides were harsh and angular, and the grey of the rock had an almost metallic shimmer.

  ‘How on earth are we going to get up that thing?’ asked Amazon despairingly.

  Frazer took the map out again.

  ‘If you look here, you can see from the contour lines that the north face is much less steep.’

  Frazer pointed to the map. ‘The lines join together areas that are at the same altitude. What it means is that the closer they are together, the steeper the terrain. And see, here, on the side of the mountain we’re facing, the lines are close together, but they’re more widely separated on the other side. You get it?’

  Amazon nodded vaguely. She had never had to read a map in her old life, back in boarding school in Sussex.

  ‘Sure. Whatever.’

  ‘You should try to get this stuff into your head,’ replied Frazer, his voice completely lacking its usual note of playfulness.

  ‘OK, I get it,’ snapped Amazon. ‘Lines close together means steep; lines not close together mean, er, not steep.’

  Frazer rolled his eyes. He was actually quite enjoying being the sensible one for a change.

  ‘The trail we’re on skirts round the base of the mountain,’ he continued. ‘We can climb up from this point here –’ He pointed at the map. ‘In fact, it’s not really a climb at all, more of a stroll. When we’re up there, we should be able to see forever.’

  ‘I think there may be a slight problem with your plan,’ said Amazon.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Listen.’

  ‘Listen to what?’

  Amazon held up her hand. And behind the sound of the wind in the trees, and the chirruping of woodland birds, there was the distinct noise of water. Of water moving quickly.

  White water.

  They cycled on for a few more minutes and there, just as the trees gave out, they came to a narrow gorge, perhaps three metres wide, with a stream raging some five metres below. The bank they were on rose up in a sort of natural ramp, and fell away on the far side.

  ‘Drat,’ said Amazon. ‘I suppose we’ll have to scramble down there, somehow, and then get all wet and dirty crossing the wretched thing, and then have to haul these bikes up the other side.’

  Then Amazon realized that she was talking to herself.

  ‘Time to learn how to do a real jump,’ came Frazer’s voice from behind her, where he had backed up along the trail. ‘You’ll love this. Just watch what I do, then copy it.’

  Frazer began slowly, then rapidly reached full speed, and he surged up the sloping final section. At the top he sailed out and landed beautifully on the lower side of the gorge. He sk
idded round to face her with that infuriating grin.

  ‘Your turn! And make sure you land evenly on both wheels.’

  ‘B-but …’ she began.

  ‘Seriously, Zonnie, it’s not a big deal. Because this side is lower, you can’t flunk it. But, if you really want to, I’ll wait here until you’ve climbed down, swum over and climbed up again …’

  Amazon was a gutsy kid, but she did have one weakness: heights. And she felt doubly vulnerable, as she was going to be relying on cycling skills she wasn’t sure she possessed.

  It wasn’t the prospect of the climb and swim combo that decided her (the stream was more of a wade than a swim, although she guessed the water would be icy cold), but the thought of chickening out of something that Frazer had done with such ease.

  So, muttering various really quite bad words under her breath, she freewheeled back down the track, so she could get up enough speed for the jump.

  Her legs pumped frenziedly as she ground up through the gears. A low branch brushed against her helmet, but not enough to put her off or slow her down.

  The edge of the gorge came closer, closer.

  She imagined herself flying.

  She imagined herself falling.

  Crushed and crumpled among the rocks in the stream thousands of metres below.

  Amazon jammed on the brakes just a couple of metres short of the jump. It was almost a fatal mistake. The bike skidded and slid right up to the lip. The front wheel was half over the edge. Had Amazon stayed on the bike, they both would have tumbled down the gorge. As it was, she managed to nimbly leap off the bike, keeping hold of the handlebars with one hand, so that it didn’t fall.

  Frazer had been watching, horrified.

  ‘You OK, Zonnie?’ he cried.

  ‘No thanks to you,’ Amazon huffed back. She was a little winded, and her knee hurt, but she was basically fine.

  Frazer cycled further down the trail on his side and, without pausing, made the much more difficult jump back across the gorge. He had to drag the front wheel of his bike up by sheer might and main, and even so only just made it.

  ‘You shouldn’t have come back,’ said Amazon, as he helped her back on to the bike.

  ‘The Trackers never leave a comrade behind,’ he replied and, although Amazon checked for any trace of irony, she found nothing but sincerity. ‘We’ll climb down together. It won’t be that bad.’

  ‘Huh?’ replied Amazon. She pointed to the stream coursing below them: ‘Down there is the way of the wuss. I’m jumping this one.’

  Frazer grinned back at her.

  ‘I didn’t doubt it for a second. We’ll do it together.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Seriously.’

  And so this time they went back together along the trail, turned and, without another word, pedalled like fury to the lip of the chasm and flew together in perfect synchrony. Their tyres hit the ground at exactly the same second.

  ‘If only there’d been someone to film that,’ said Frazer, ‘it’d be a YouTube hit for sure.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Amazon. ‘Then there wouldn’t be enough room in the whole of Canada for your ego.’

  The going around the base of the mountain was good, and it only took them half an hour of rapid cycling to reach an area where, rather than being confronted with a near vertical wall of gunmetal-grey rock, they found a broken slope, made of fractured shale and loose boulders.

  It may have been less steep than the cliff they had just bypassed, but it still looked like a pretty forbidding obstacle to Amazon. And there was something loose and shifting about the crumbly rock that she didn’t at all like the look of.

  ‘Are we really going to climb up there?’ she asked. ‘It looks kind of … unstable …’

  ‘It’s the highest point around. If we want to find that kid and maybe, just maybe, your parents …’

  The thought that they might by some miracle find her parents was always there in the back of Amazon’s mind.

  ‘I know, I know. It just looks so, well, hard.’

  ‘Since when were you ever afraid of hard, cuz? Heck, you’ve stared down big cats and bigger sharks. Not to mention –’

  ‘OK, I get it. Where shall we stash the bikes?’

  ‘I was thinking about that. Walking up a hill is always pretty hard work. But then so is walking down a hill – that’s actually when most people fall. But riding down a hill …’

  ‘You are kidding …?’

  Frazer grinned a grin so wide that Amazon thought the top part of his head might drop off.

  ‘OMG. You’re not kidding, are you?’

  ‘Listen, Zonnie, I’ve been looking for a downhill challenge like this all my life, so there’s no way I’m going to leave my bike at the bottom of this hill. If you like, you can leave yours down here, but I’m pushing mine up that slope and cruising down in style. I’ll wait for you back here, if that’s what you want.’

  Amazon looked at him, shook her head and started to push her bike up the side of the mountain.

  What followed was, measured purely in terms of physical effort, the hardest two hours of Amazon Hunt’s life. The slope was too steep for them to be able to push their bikes straight up, so they had to laboriously zigzag their way, traversing back and forth. Although the sky was grey and the temperature getting chilly, they were soon drenched in sweat, and both stripped down to their T-shirts, which clung clammily to their backs.

  The ground itself was treacherous, and several times one or the other would lean on their bike only to find it sliding away under them on the loose gravel.

  ‘You want to rest?’ Frazer asked at one point when, although they felt like they had been travelling for hours, they seemed to have made almost no progress.

  Amazon shook her head wearily. She feared that if she stopped then she’d never be able to carry on, and all the work so far would have been for nothing. So, without even pausing, she reached behind her, took the water bottle from her pack, swigged and put it back.

  On they trudged, slipping and sliding, grazing their knees and barking their shins, but never pausing. More than once, their steps set off little landslides that rolled down the mountain behind them.

  Soon they stopped even trying to look up at their destination, but just plodded on, heads down, like penitents on a pilgrimage to atone for untold sins.

  And then Amazon did look up, more in despair than hope, and let out a shout of joy. Suddenly, in that unexpected way in which the seemingly impossible becomes real, they found that they had almost made it: the topmost ridge was just above them. They found the energy within themselves to run – well, perhaps it was more of a rapid stagger – up the final few metres. Just before the summit they found themselves on solid, jagged rock and had to leave the bikes behind, but that gave them renewed vigour. Without the weight of the bikes, they felt like spirits of the air, and leapt to the top like mountain goats, yelling with delight at each bound from boulder to boulder.

  And the moment they reached the very top something miraculous happened. All the way up the skies had been a solid grey, matching almost exactly the grey of the rock. It was a joyless sky for a joyless hike. But now there was a transformation. It was as if the grey were a huge dark curtain that was suddenly thrown back, letting the glorious sun shine into a long-abandoned room.

  Now the sky was a dazzling, radiant blue, made more intense by the few wispy white clouds that clung on, like the last tufts of hair on a bald man’s head.

  Amazon and Frazer stood on a flat slab of rock. Behind them was the relatively easy slope of the broken moraine field they had just ascended. In front of and below them was the great, almost vertical cliff they had skirted. The view was truly astounding. Although the mountain was modest by the standards of the Canadian Coast Range, of which it formed an outcrop, it was the highest point for many, many miles.

  From up here the two Trackers could see what looked like an endless sea of trees, broken only by the upswelling islands of other mountains. T
he trees were mainly the same conifers through which they had cycled – Douglas firs and pine trees. However, in the valley bottoms there were patches of broadleaf trees – ash and oak – and they were now in their full riotous autumnal glory, exploding in orange and yellow and bronze. In the distance the much higher peaks of the Coast Range snapped at the sky like the teeth of a giant wolf.

  Amazon and Frazer gazed around them, and then looked at each other, entirely lost for words. In theory they were there to look for the little lost boy, but Amazon was hoping she just might catch a glimpse of a campfire burning below somewhere, a fire that might lead her to her parents. But there was nothing but trees and rocks and glistening ribbons of water. There was no sign of human life, but the view was still sublime.

  Finally Amazon managed to say: ‘Do you think it would look this heavenly if it hadn’t been such hell to get here?’

  ‘What I think,’ said Frazer, ‘is that this is a heck of a good place for a picnic.’

  All they ate was the trail mix and a shared chocolate bar, but it was the greatest meal either of them had ever eaten. The beauty of the setting, the ravenous hunger they had built up, and that sense that they had thoroughly earned it all combined to make each mouthful a culinary joy.

  When they’d finished and stashed away their rubbish in their packs, Frazer balanced his neat little Leica camera on a pile of stones and put on the self-timer. They goofed around for a few shots. Then Frazer took some panoramic photos, covering 365 degrees.

  ‘I’ll put these up on the TRACKS Facebook page when we get back to civilization,’ he said.

  But those very words brought back to them what they were actually supposed to be doing.

  ‘Right,’ he continued, ‘let’s see what we can see.’

  He took out his binoculars – a fine pair of Swarovskis that his father had given him for his eleventh birthday.