Bear Adventure

by Anthony McGowan

  He slowly turned round, scanning the forest.

  Amazon used her own sharp eyesight, gazing out again over the infinite space of the Canadian wilderness. And, as she did, her heart suddenly welled up with despair.

  ‘This is useless,’ she said, almost to herself. ‘There’s just … so much of it. How could we ever have expected to find anything? The boy … my parents … it’s all so futile.’

  Frazer let the binoculars hang from the leather strap round his neck.

  ‘Amazon, if this was futile, my dad would never have begun it. He loves his brother, but more than anything he’s a practical man. He never wastes his time. He plays the percentages. He’s got good reasons to believe that your parents are still out there.’

  Amazon had been gazing into the middle distance as Frazer spoke, trying to find the hope that she knew should live in those words. But then something closer caught her eye, on the slope beneath them. Something pale. Something moving.

  No, not one thing, but two.

  She touched Frazer’s arm.

  ‘Look,’ she said, her voice quiet, almost a whisper, despite the fact that the creatures were too far away for even a shout to reach them.

  ‘What? Where?’

  Silently, Amazon pointed down to the foot of the slope they had so recently ascended.

  It was the spirit bears, mother and cub. The mother was moving warily, but also with purpose. She seemed torn between her desire to follow some scent trail and her fear of taking the cub out into the open.

  ‘That can’t really be the same two bears we saw, can it?’ asked Amazon.

  ‘I think it must be. You wouldn’t get another two so close – they need a bigger range than that.’

  ‘What are they doing?’

  ‘Looks like she’s caught a scent. Maybe there’s an injured elk or something out there. Or some carrion. Or it could just be a blueberry bush. At this time of year they need to keep eating pretty much all the time to fatten up for their hibernation.’

  ‘Have you noticed,’ said Amazon, ‘that she seems to be roughly following the path that we took up the slope?’

  Amazon had begun that sentence without thinking through its actual meaning. But, as soon as it was out in the open, its implications were as obvious as a golden bear on a grey hillside.

  Frazer gulped – Amazon thought it was perhaps a comically exaggerated gulp of the kind a nervous cartoon canary would make at the approach of a hungry cartoon cat. But it might simply have been the gulp of a boy facing up to the reality of becoming prey.

  Still the bears came on. However, their progress was quite slow. At this rate it would take them as long as Amazon and Frazer to reach the top. Amazon asked if she could look through the binoculars. Frazer handed them over, although she could see that it took an effort of will.

  ‘Don’t drop them,’ he said. ‘They’re top-of-the-range. They have inbuilt image stabilizers and …’

  ‘Yeah, I get it,’ replied Amazon.

  The binoculars really were superb. It took Amazon a second or two to focus, but when she did she had to gasp. She had a visceral urge to flinch – it seemed as though the bears were literally an arm’s length away.

  When she had seen the bears on the lakeside, she had been so overwhelmed by both their beauty and her own fear that she had not been able to observe them in any kind of objective way. But looking at them now through the binoculars was oddly like watching them on a TV documentary. She almost imagined the narrator’s voice-over:

  ‘The Kermode bear – this rare and exquisite subspecies of the Ursus americanus – is chiefly at home in the dense coastal woodlands of Western Canada, and only ventures out into more open territory when the need for food drives it. Here we see the mother and her cub undertake –’

  ‘Zonnie,’ said Frazer, interrupting her daydream, ‘I think maybe we should get out of here. I couldn’t see any sign of any plane wreckage, or the boy. I think we should just make our way back to the campsite and wait for my dad to rejoin us.

  ‘If we skirt down the eastern ridge of this slope, we can get back on the trail without the bears noticing us. The wind will carry our scent away from them, and unless we start singing “Yankee Doodle” the mother won’t hear us. Plus, looking at it, you can see that the slope’s not too bad there, even for a novice like you, so we should be able to cruise down. This is where mountain biking really gets to be fun.’

  Reluctantly, Amazon agreed. She had imagined herself finding her parents and saving the kid, but now she realized that it was just a dream. She was barely more than a kid herself. It was time to admit defeat.

  ‘Move slowly,’ said Frazer, as they crept stealthily back down the slope to where they’d left the bikes. ‘And keep low.’

  ‘I thought bears couldn’t see very well?’ whispered Amazon.

  ‘It’s a myth. Their vision isn’t as hot as their sense of smell or hearing, but they see about as well as we do. The difference is that they use all three senses when they’re assessing prey, whereas we’ve come to rely just on vision.’

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t keep talking about us as prey,’ said Amazon.

  They reached the bikes without the bears noticing them. Then, as Amazon picked up her bike, her foot slipped on the loose ground. A few pebbles rolled down the slope. The pebbles set some slightly larger stones moving. And then, as Amazon and Frazer looked on, horrified, the trickle of rocks and stones rapidly snowballed, until it became a landslide. The whole hillside had been in a state of instability.

  ‘Jeepers,’ said Frazer, ‘that could have happened while we were climbing up. We’d have been –’

  ‘Frazer, look,’ interrupted Amazon.

  She pointed to the landslide and then at its direction. It was heading straight for the spirit bears. The mother bear seemed oblivious to the danger. She was still heading up. And then she stopped, sniffed and looked up. For a second Amazon thought that the bear was looking right at her, but later she thought that she must just have been looking towards the sound of the landslide.

  ‘Oh no,’ said Frazer, no longer bothering to keep either his voice or his body low, ‘what have we done?’

  It seemed both agonizingly slow and yet over in the blink of an eye. The rockfall – a mix of grit, pebbles, stones, rocks and now huge boulders – surged down the mountainside.

  The mother bear turned and tried to guide her cub back towards the relative safety of the trees, but it was obvious to Amazon that they would never make it.

  It seemed that the mother bear reached the same conclusion. For now she opened her great jaws and snatched up the cub. Ten metres away there was a huge boulder – too big, surely, to be carried down with the landslide, and tall enough, perhaps, to provide a refuge. The bear reached it just as the first rocks hit her. She tried to climb the boulder, but it was impossible with the heavy infant in her mouth. She just couldn’t seem to scramble up. So then, using her mighty neck muscles, she hurled the clamouring cub up on to the flat top of the boulder, and then prepared to leap after it.

  Too late.

  The surging wall of the landslide hit her, and carried her for many metres down the slope. Her body rolled and spun in the flow, almost as if it had been water. For a few hopeful moments Amazon thought that the mother was going to be OK, that she would be able to ride out the disaster. But then she was thrown against another of the big boulders that littered the slope, and a second later another huge rock crashed into her body. Rocks piled up round her beautiful golden fur, burying her beyond hope of salvation.

  For some strange reason Amazon and Frazer only registered the huge noise of the landslide because of the shocking nature of the silence that followed it. They both seemed rooted to the spot, as if lava had flowed round their feet and set them in solid rock.

  There was literally not a glimpse of golden fur to be seen beneath the rubble. And now Amazon and Frazer’s faces were as grey as the rocks. Tears coursed down Amazon’s cheeks, and Frazer’s eyes glistened.
/>   ‘What have I done, what have I done?’ moaned Amazon, echoing and yet subtly changing Frazer’s earlier words.

  ‘It wasn’t you. It was … it was … it was just rotten luck. This whole hillside was ready to collapse at any moment. Amazon, these things happen in the wild. Animals get killed all the time.’

  ‘But the baby … What can we do? We can’t leave it alone out here.’

  They both focused back on the little bear cub. It was still on top of the big rock. It was making the most heartbreaking sounds, a sort of sheeplike bleating, full of yearning interspersed with yelps that were both frightened and angry.

  ‘I guess we’d better go and see if there’s anything we can do,’ said Frazer. ‘But we can’t go down that way, and we certainly can’t ride. That whole slope could go and take us with it. We can edge our way down this ridge, trying to keep to the solid rock, and then maybe work our way across when we get level with the cub.’

  Amazon saw that this was a good plan. But it was one destined never to be put into operation. Through her bleary eyes, she caught another glimpse of golden fur. Not quite the perfect pale honey of the spirit bears, but lovely nevertheless. For a moment she thought that somehow the mother bear had survived the fall and shrugged off her shroud of rocks and rubble. But this new vision was too far down the slope – right at the treeline.

  Another bear? Perhaps a friend of the other two? Would it adopt the cub?

  Frazer now saw it too.

  ‘Oh, jeepers,’ he said, filling the silly word with dread and sorrow.

  And now Amazon could see that this was no bear. No bear ever moved with that lithe, sinuous grace. No bear was ever made like this, of nothing but bone, sinew and muscle. No bear was ever quite so intent on one thing and one thing only: killing.

  ‘Cougar,’ said Amazon, even though she’d never seen a live one before.

  The grace and intensity of the animal reminded her of one of the two big cats she’d seen so recently in Russia – the Amur leopard. And this cougar seemed bigger than the leopard she had come to know. Not as heavily set, perhaps, but taller and longer.

  And the cougar could only be after one thing. The cub still bleated on his rock, and the puma stalked it.

  ‘That’s it,’ said Amazon, her eyes suddenly dry, and her face set as hard as the rock that the tiny bear stood on. ‘I’m going to go and save that cub.’ She clamped the helmet down on her head, picked up her bike and stood with one foot on the pedal.

  ‘Amazon, you’re nuts,’ said Frazer. ‘Don’t you realize how dangerous a cougar is to us? It could easily kill a human. And that’s without taking the chances of a landslide into account. I can’t let you do this, cuz. My dad would never forgive me if –’

  ‘You can’t stop me, Frazer,’ she said, shrugging off his hand. ‘I thought the point of being in TRACKS was to save animals? Well, I’ve already killed one, and I’m not going to stand aside and watch another die. If the mother was still alive, that old cougar wouldn’t dare bother the cub. I’d never forgive myself if I didn’t at least try.’

  And then, without giving Frazer another chance to argue her out of it, she pushed off down the murderous slope.

  Frazer, stunned, watched her go.

  This was a nightmare.

  It was also the chance to go for it like he’d never gone for it before. With a long-suppressed cry of ‘Woo hoo!’, he kicked off after his cousin.

  If Frazer enjoyed the crazy ride down the mountain, Amazon certainly did not. The long cycle through the forest didn’t require any real mountain-biking skill, and even the terrifying jump over the gorge demanded more nerve than ability; but this was different. She had to use every particle of her being to keep from falling off – a fall that she knew might easily break her neck or set off another landslide that would finish her off, along with the baby bear, the cougar and probably Frazer as well.

  She had to use all her natural balance to compensate for the constant sliding and skidding of the wheels; all her strength to keep the frantically bucking handlebars in line; all her intelligence to pick out the best route as she hurtled down the slope; and all of her nerve to keep the disabling waves of panic at bay.

  Her eyes constantly flickered in a triangle, the three points of which were the bear, the cougar and the section of mountain right in front of her.

  Twice she almost fell, but both times a well-placed foot kept her upright, at the cost of a few more millimetres of sole worn off her trainer.

  Amazon was vaguely aware of Frazer behind her. Partly it was the uncanny sixth sense that she had developed for knowing his whereabouts. But mainly it was because of his constant insane whoops and yells.

  She was getting close to the big rock on which the bear cub stood. But so was the cougar, approaching it from the other side. And it was now that Amazon realized the flaw in her plan. Well, not so much a flaw as an oversight. She just hadn’t given any thought as to what she should do when she reached the rock.

  Would the baby bear meekly submit to her grabbing it? How could she face the cougar? And, if she did manage to somehow mount the rock, save the bear from the big cat and climb back down to her bike, how on earth was she supposed to cycle the rest of the way down carrying a bear that, although a baby, weighed as much as a sack of potatoes?

  Amazon was almost at the rock now. She’d gained enough confidence as a mountain biker to make a perfect sliding stop right in front of it. She glanced back at her cousin, hoping that for once he might have done some thinking.

  She saw that he had.

  But it wasn’t the kind of cool, rational thinking she’d been hoping for.

  Frazer had, in fact, been giving serious thought to exactly these problems as he carved his way down the mountain. The fact that his brain hadn’t come up with any kind of ingenious plan vaguely disappointed but didn’t especially surprise him. But, all along, his body – or perhaps just a deeper, barely conscious part of his brain – knew what had to be done.

  Ten metres before the rock – at about the same point that Amazon had begun to apply her brakes – Frazer performed a trick he’d done a hundred times on his old BMX, but never once on a mountain bike. He threw all his weight on to his hands, levered back and up, and got his feet on to the crossbar. He was still steering with his hands, but it was tricky – no, it was impossible – on the mountain. But he didn’t need to stay like this for long. Because now it was time.

  He jumped with all his might, making sure he put enough sideways pressure on the bike to send it round the rock. The rock that he was now sailing towards in mid-air.

  He landed on top of it and went straight into a forward roll. But, at the same second that he leapt up on to the rock from his bike, the cougar made its leap towards the little bear too.

  The cougar, intent upon its prize and partly blocked by the big rock, had failed to notice the approach of the two humans. It was therefore a little surprised to find itself sharing the rock not only with the helpless bear cub, but also with this bizarre flying human.

  That surprise was the only advantage Frazer had – and he knew he only had a second. He did not pause, but carried straight on from his forward roll into a run. He stooped, picked up the little golden bear and jumped straight down from the rock. As he’d hoped, his bike had come to rest almost exactly where he landed.

  ‘Amazon, if you want to live, get here now!’ he hollered.

  A moment later and she was at his side.

  To her astonishment, he thrust the now squirming and protesting cub into her hands.

  ‘Get this thing into my backpack, NOW!’

  ‘There’s no room!’ she cried back.

  ‘Dump it all.’

  Behind them they heard the outraged scream of the cougar. It had been too startled to react immediately, and now it was surveying them from its vantage point up on the rock.

  Humans.

  It usually feared and shunned this animal. The first time it had seen one it was curious, and came to see if it was
good to eat, but there had come a noise like ice cracking, and the cougar felt a pain like the snapping jaws of a wolverine, and from then on the cougar had only one ear.

  And here were two of them. But these, it saw, were juveniles. Cubs, like the bear. Its bear. Its meal. Its prize.

  Stolen.

  Well, they would all pay the price.

  Somehow, Amazon managed to thrust the writhing, mewling cub into Frazer’s backpack. The tight fit of the pack miraculously seemed to calm the little creature, like swaddling clothes do a human baby, and it instantly settled into the pack, with just its nose resting on Frazer’s shoulder. It would have been rather a pleasant sensation had Frazer not known that something infinitely sharper and more deadly than the cub’s wet nose might soon be sinking into the back of his neck.

  Amazon looked back towards the screaming cougar, and saw it properly for the first time. She knew enough about animals to be very aware of the fact that it makes no sense to think of any animal – even a cunning and powerful predator such as the cougar – as evil. Evolution has shaped all animals to be efficient at obtaining nutrition, at evading predators, at passing on their genes. Animals were incapable of malice, of cruelty, of vengeance. These were all human failings.

  But, as well as being a naturalist, she was also a thirteen-year-old girl, and what she saw before her terrified her. The snarling mouth seemed to betray a boundless appetite for death. The superbly lithe form had the grace of a samurai sword, made for dealing death.

  And it was getting ready to spring at her now.

  ‘Frazer, we’ve got to –’

  ‘GO!’ he yelled, and four wheels spun on the loose gravel; spun and then gripped. Not a second too soon. The cougar landed in their tracks. The small stones thrown up by the spinning tyres momentarily blinded the cat, and the pause generated was enough to give the Trackers a few metres’ head start. But then the cougar bounded forward again, each long-legged leap covering three metres. It ate up the ground between it and the frantically careering bikes.