by Bear Grylls
‘James,’ he said, more urgently. He itched to run forward but he was still trying not to attract attention. ‘Just come away from the fire . . .’
‘It’s OK! This was going to be my surprise. Honey! It’s sweet and full of energy and it’s also a natural antiseptic for your leg. Haven’t you ever done this?’
‘Please, just back away. Slowly. Don’t make sudden movements . . .’
James waved him down. ‘It’s OK. I think it’s safe.’ To Beck’s horror he reached up above him to the nearest piece of honeycomb and snapped it off.
‘Ow!’ James dropped the honeycomb and stared at his hand. His face was twisted with pain. ‘Jeez, that hurts!’ He glared up at the comb, as if angry that the bees hadn’t read the same website as he had. ‘That wasn’t meant to—’ He slapped at his neck. ‘Ow!’
The bees had identified the threat and they were gathering, growing thicker in the air around him.
‘Just run!’ Beck shouted. It was too late to worry about attracting or angering the bees. James just needed to get away from there. But James stood there, frozen to the spot with fear, as he finally understood the danger he was in. He was only half visible through the cloud of insects.
There was nothing for it. Beck forced his aching leg to obey him and broke into a stumbling run.
James was flailing with his arms to wave the bees away, which just enraged them further. He had obviously given up on the whole honey plan. Unfortunately he was panicking now, which wasn’t helping at all. It was as if the panic had frozen his rational senses.
Beck ducked under his waving arms, grabbed him and forced him towards the river.
‘Ow! Hey, where—?’
‘Move!’
The buzzing grew louder. Beck and James stumbled towards the water, locked together in Beck’s firm grip. Insect bodies scraped against Beck’s face. He squeezed his eyes almost shut – he squinted to see where they were going. He had vivid images of the creatures tangling in his hair, or crawling down his neck and up his sleeves.
Surely they had to be almost there! The clouds of bees were so thick that Beck could barely see where they were going. Were they even heading the right way? Had they somehow missed the river? Were they heading back towards the nest?
They stumbled over the edge of the bank and toppled headfirst into the freezing cold water. The river closed over their heads.
Beck had been expecting the jolt to the system. A shock like that made you just want to gasp. He forced his mouth to stay shut. James spluttered and took in a bellyful of water. He immediately began to convulse and choke, fighting his way to the surface.
The current was too strong to fight against and it whisked them away. At first Beck tried to help James, but then he let him go. Holding on would just drown them both. They struggled to keep their heads above the surface. Water splashed over their faces and the cold almost paralysed their lungs, as if iron bands were wrapped around them.
A bee flew in front of Beck’s eyes and he ducked his head down, but he needn’t have worried. The swarm was now far behind them, and the two boys were facing an even bigger problem.
Beck parted chattering teeth to suggest that they should make for the shore again, when the current suddenly grew stronger. A wave washed over his head and he felt a new force take hold of his body. The river had abruptly changed direction and now ran between narrow rocky banks. There was no way they could swim against this force.
James was trying to face forward, but the weight of his bergen kept pulling him over. All their remaining supplies were in it – they had to keep hold of it.
Beck shouted at him: ‘Get your pack off and hold it like a flotation device in front of you. Then just try and float on your back – phlub’ – a wave filled his mouth and nose – ‘feet first, in case you hit something. I’ll try and guide you . . .’
And so the current swept them on. Beck did his best to keep them in the main flow of the river – the tongue of the rapids, as it was called. The water was smoothest there and they were clear of the jagged rocks. The moment they were through the rapids, Beck started to steer them towards the shore. The cold was leaching the heat out of their bodies. They had already been in the river for several minutes, and in water this cold they had about ten minutes max before hypothermia set in.
They had emerged into a narrow river valley. There were trees on either side and a gravel shore between those and the water. Their feet touched the bottom and they could now stand up, staggering against the force that still pulled at their legs. Finally they dropped onto the bank, dripping and shivering.
Cold, Beck thought grimly. Cold, wet, and well and truly lost. This is starting to get interesting.
Chapter 18
James hauled his bergen up the bank and sat hugging his knees. He looked as if he was about to burst into tears.
‘That wasn’t meant to happen— Ow!’ His hand went to his neck.
Beck looked around quickly – had the bees caught up with them?
But no. Looking closer, he saw the red spot on James’s skin, and the black speck in the middle. The bee had left its stinger in him. It was barbed, so it wouldn’t just fall out, and there was a small sac of venom at the end.
Beck quickly grabbed James’s hand before he could touch the sting. ‘Careful. You could just end up squeezing more poison in.’
James gritted his teeth and shivered. Beck couldn’t tell if it was with pain, or cold from their drenching, or both.
‘Can you get it out?’
Beck peered at it. ‘Have you got your knife?’
‘Sure . . .’ James felt at his side for his belt. Then he felt on the other side. His face fell even further. ‘It must have come off in the river.’
‘OK. Basically we need to scrape it out with something hard and flat.’ Beck studied his fingers. Human fingertips were the worst for this. They were too blunt and stubby and would squash the venom sac. Fingernails, on the other hand, were fine. He was glad he didn’t bite his.
‘No offence,’ he said as he got to work, ‘but that was really, really stupid. You know we could have been killed?’
He put his little finger next to the sting and slid the fingernail under the venom sac. It took a couple of tries, but eventually the sting came out, venom sac and all. Beck flicked it away. ‘So please, please check with me first? Anything involving animals or . . . well, basically, anything!’
‘If it has more than two legs, or wings, it’s Beck’s department,’ James promised. ‘Fine by me.’
Beck checked where the sting had been. A red mark surrounded the tiny puncture, but he had got everything out. ‘We need to wash this . . .’
‘Right.’ James snorted, still shivering. ‘Because what I could really do with right now is more water.’
Beck tugged the bergen open and pulled out a drenched but clean T-shirt. He used it to dab at James’s neck. ‘Running water washes away dirt and germs.’ He sat back and surveyed his work critically. ‘You’ll be OK. I’d like to put a cold compress on that to take down the swelling, but . . .’
‘What would work?’
‘Oh . . .’ Beck had to grin at the ludicrous idea. ‘Coconut meat is a good one.’
‘Great. Coconuts.’
‘Or mix mud and ashes together . . .’
‘Plenty of mud,’ James said, looking around.
‘You need the ashes too. For sterilizing. Otherwise you’re just putting dirt back into it.’
‘I don’t think we’ll be making fires anytime soon.’ James shrugged. ‘I can bear it.’ He jumped to his feet and held out a hand to help Beck up. Suddenly he gave an abrupt laugh. ‘I know where we could get coconuts, though. There’s this island . . .’
Beck had to grin as he clambered up. ‘This island’ was where he and James – and James’s mother – had been washed up after Abby had managed to sink the ship they were on. Like so many Lumos plans, that wasn’t quite what was meant to happen. It seemed to run in the family . . .
&nbs
p; Suddenly Beck’s head felt very light. He stumbled forward, and James had to catch him.
‘Hey, you OK? You looked like you almost passed out.’
‘Just . . .’ Beck looked down at his injured leg. ‘Everything.’
‘OK. Well, you sit down and rest, OK? And we need to get out of these wet things or we’ll just get hypothermia. Right?’
Beck nodded wearily. His thoughts were dazed. Hypothermia could strike quickly – like, if you were submerged in ice-cold water – or it could just creep up on you – like, if you stayed in wet clothes. It was your body’s way of conserving heat. It took warmth from the extremities first – the hands and feet. But if you didn’t take care, pretty soon your whole body would start shutting down. Your mind got confused and ultimately your vital organs would pack up.
James shook Beck back to reality. He found Beck a sheltered spot to lie down, out of the wind and facing the sun. He stripped Beck down to his base layer of clothes and spread the garments out to dry on a piece of rock. James, also in his shorts, laid everything else from the bergen out in the sun. Sunbathing in Nepal, Beck thought drowsily. Not what I ever expected to be doing . . .
He sat up abruptly. No, stuff this. He wasn’t going to get stronger by sunning himself. He wasn’t a plant.
What he needed – what they both needed – was protein.
He got up, put on his boots, leaving his socks to dry, and limped towards the river.
James looked up in surprise. ‘Where are you going?’
‘I’m going to find food,’ Beck said firmly. ‘We mustn’t get lazy.’
Chapter 19
Beck headed a little further downstream, where the river turned away from him. The outside bend of a river always tended to be shallower as grit piled up there. The current was also more gentle. Fish often rested there, in slower water.
The water was clear and Beck could easily see the rocky bed. The first thing he looked for was a pool where fish might have saved him the bother and trapped themselves. There was no point in making life harder than it had to be.
But no – no pools. He was going to have to work a bit harder.
A metre from the bank a pair of stones stood clear of the water, about half a metre apart. Beck waded out to inspect the two rocks, wincing as the icy water rose up to his knees. The water ran quickly between them like a miniature version of the small canyon he and James had come through earlier. Perfect – that was the start of the trap.
Over the next half-hour Beck worked slowly and carefully in the shallows. The whole point of this was to catch a fish, preferably more than one. The fish was for eating, to restore his strength. There was no point in burning more calories than he was going to get back.
Downstream of the two rocks he built a small corral out of stones, to catch anything that went through the gap between them. He lugged the stones there one at a time. Each was big enough for his needs, small enough that he didn’t wear himself out. Eventually he had a small semicircular enclosure. The stones were rough and didn’t fit together perfectly, so he plugged as many gaps as he could with smaller rocks and gravel. It didn’t matter that water could still get through the smaller holes. All that mattered was that fish couldn’t.
Next, on the upstream side of the rocks, Beck built two miniature walls that reached out from the gap. One went from the gap to the bank, blocking off that route for any fish that came this way. The other went as far out into the river as he could get, before the current grew too strong and the water too deep. He liked to think of these walls reaching out from the entrance like a warm, friendly embrace.
Last of all, he closed the gap up a little. He took a pair of stones and positioned them on either side, to reduce the width of the entrance by about a half. It had the added advantage of speeding up the water that flowed between them. Fish would swim into the trap but they would be disinclined to turn and swim out again against that current. They wouldn’t realize that they had strayed into a little rocky pool with no other way out. Fish were easily pleased. They could happily just coast about in their little space thinking secret fishy thoughts. Hopefully the last of those thoughts would be: Hey, why am I suddenly leaving the water?
Beck’s hands and feet were numb with cold, but the rest of him was comfortably warm from the exercise. He sat on one of the big stones and gratefully let the warmth reach his extremities. He could sit here and wait. Or he could speed up the process a little.
‘Hey, James!’
James had managed to get a small fire going, with sticks and one of the matches they had waterproofed. He looked up suspiciously. ‘What?’
‘Want to throw some stones together?’
James stood up, puzzled. ‘Eh?’
‘I’ve made a fish trap, but I need you to drive the fish down towards it. Just keep throwing stones to make a splash!’
James started to walk along the bank, tossing stones into the water. He soon got into his stride and was soon pelting the water with them, as if venting all his pain and loss and anger on the river.
Meanwhile Beck crouched on one of the rocks at the entrance to the trap and waited.
And there it was! His first customer of the day. A flickering shadow beneath the surface. Slowly Beck slid his hand into the water . . .
Chapter 20
James came running down the bank. ‘Any luck?’
‘Uh-huh . . .’
Beck kept his eyes on the fish. He could feel the water taking the warmth out of his hand again. His fingers felt like they were slowly turning to ice. That was good. Fish were very sensitive to temperature. His hand was cooling down to the same temperature as the water . . .
Slowly his hand and the fish moved closer to each other. The fish didn’t seem unduly worried, though it could have shot away with one flick of its fins. Its body was sleek and streamlined, about thirty or forty centimetres long. Beck guessed it was probably a species of trout, which made it all the better.
He slowly wiggled his fingers and slid his hand under the fish’s belly, imitating the flow of water. Then, before the fish could react, he curled his fingers and scooped it out. The fish flew through the air, wriggling, and landed on the bank. Its silver scales glistened and flashed in the sun as it twisted and writhed around. Beck leaped after it before it could flop its way back into the water again, though his injured leg protested. With one hand he dug his fingers into the gills, the only place to get a grip on its scaly body. He grabbed the tail with the other hand so that its body was curved, and sank his teeth into its spine just behind its head.
Cold, fresh juices spurted into his mouth – water and blood and the natural oils of the fish, all mingled together. The flesh was firm, just chewy enough to make it worth biting.
This was better than instant noodles! He could feel the fish scales and blood covering his face but he didn’t care. He chewed his way down one side of the fish’s muscular flanks, stripping away the flesh but leaving the guts, which would just taste foul.
James was staring at him, slightly pale. ‘Um . . . uck?’ he murmured.
Beck grinned and James flinched. Beck quickly closed his mouth again and wiped his teeth with his tongue.
‘The other half is yours,’ he mumbled between chews. He laid the fish down on a stone and moved a little way along the bank, well away from the trap, to splash water on his face. Being downstream, none of this would fall into the water and scare other fish away from the entrance.
‘Come and have a go!’ Beck called. ‘You’ll pick it up easily if you take your time.’
James was a quick learner and only lost one fish: at first, rather than flinging it onto the bank, as Beck had done, he had tried to hold onto it. It slithered and wriggled in his hands as he danced about on one of the rocks and tried to keep a grip.
‘Whoa . . . whoa . . . oh-h-h . . .!’ With a loud splash, both James and the fish were back in the river.
The second one he managed to land on the bank. He grabbed it and held it up triumphantly, though it
wriggled hard to escape. His thumb and forefinger were dug into its gills to stop it getting away.
‘And now you bite it,’ Beck said. ‘Make sure you bite through the spine. That’ll kill it at once.’
James pulled a face. ‘I didn’t go to all that trouble to eat sushi, thanks. I’ll take my fish cooked.’
‘Your choice.’ And with that, Beck picked up his half-eaten fish and carried on munching. Blood, flesh and scales refuelled his tired and injured body.
Chapter 21
Beck felt a lot better with a good-sized fish inside him – even one eaten raw. He had to admit that the smell of James’s fish cooking on the end of a stick was also pretty good. Maybe he should catch another . . . No, no need. Beck always knew when enough was enough. You caught and ate what you needed – that was all. There would be plenty of chances later to cook food.
By now everything was dry again and they could get their trousers and shirts back on.
James insisted on checking Beck’s leg wound one more time. ‘How does it feel?’
‘Meh.’ Beck shrugged. Truth to tell, it still throbbed in time with his heart. That wasn’t going to go away. The gash from the bear’s claw had clotted over so there was no more blood, but the skin around it was still red and raw.
In short, it was far from perfect, but it was as good as it was going to get.
‘Just wrap it up again,’ he said. ‘It’ll be fine.’
James looked doubtful, but he unfurled a fresh strip of bandage and tied it in place. Beck filled up the water canister and they packed their few possessions into the bergen, which James insisted on carrying. Beck didn’t like to feel he was being nursemaided, but he was glad he didn’t have any more weight for his leg to carry.
‘So.’ James looked at him expectantly. ‘Which way?’