by Orr, Wendy
First published in 2010
Copyright © Wendy Orr 2010
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or ten per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.
Allen & Unwin
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Crows Nest NSW 2065
Australia
Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218
Email: [email protected]
Web: www.allenandunwin.com
A Cataloguing-in-Publication entry is available from the
National Library of Australia www.trove.nla.gov.au
ISBN 978 1 74237 465 9
Cover and text design by Ruth Grüner
Cover photo by Getty Images
Photo of Mt Rundle by Elizabeth Burridge
Set in 11.3 pt Caslon 540 by Ruth Grüner
Printed in Australia in November 2010 at McPherson’s Printing Group,
76 Nelson St, Maryborough, Victoria 3465, Australia.
www.mcphersonsprinting.com.au
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
To Kathy,
because sisters are forever
W.O.
Contents
Prologue
1 THURSDAY AFTERNOON
2 THURSDAY EVENING
3 12:10 FRIDAY AFTERNOON
4 2:23 FRIDAY AFTERNOON
5 2:31 FRIDAY AFTERNOON
6 3:39 FRIDAY AFTERNOON
7 3:58 FRIDAY AFTERNOON
8 4:05 FRIDAY AFTERNOON
9 4:32 FRIDAY AFTERNOON
10 6:00 FRIDAY EVENING
11 6:48 FRIDAY EVENING
12 8:05 SATURDAY MORNING
13 9:09 SATURDAY MORNING
14 12:05 SATURDAY AFTERNOON
15 1:28 SATURDAY AFTERNOON
16 3:09 SATURDAY AFTERNOON
17 ABOUT 4:10 SATURDAY AFTERNOON
18 SUNSET, SATURDAY EVENING
19 SOMETIME SUNDAY MORNING
20 A LITTLE LATER SUNDAY MORNING
21 STILL SUNDAY MORNING
22 MAYBE LUNCHTIME, SUNDAY
23 EARLY SUNDAY AFTERNOON
24 LATE SUNDAY AFTERNOON
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Prologue
‘You’ll love the mountains,’ Mum says.
For one sweet hold-my-breath minute, when Mum said they had a surprise for us, I thought they meant something good, like a puppy, or a horse.
They meant they’ve bought a house in Jenkins Creek, where Scott grew up. We’re moving. Leaving Cottonwood Bluffs and driving right across the country, over the mountains to the other side.
I’ve never even heard of Jenkins Creek.
‘No one’s heard of Jenkins Creek,’ snarls Lily.
Mum and Scott are both talking at once, about every good thing they can possibly think of. An avalanche of words thuds over us: house of our own, camping and hiking, new start for our brand new family.
All I hear is that I’m leaving where I’ve lived my whole life. I’m leaving Gram, Jess, Amelia and everyone else I know. Leaving the gentle flatlands of Cottonwood Bluffs. Leaving the only place my real dad might ever come back to look for us.
It feels like stepping off a footpath onto ice. The world is skidding out from under me.
1
THURSDAY AFTERNOON
The service station has bear paw prints running up the wall to the roof. I know they’re just painted, but they give me the creeps. I can’t help looking to see if there really is a bear up there.
But it feels good to get out of the truck and stretch. We’ve been on the highway for two hours – and really we’ve been driving for three days because we left Cottonwood Bluffs early Monday morning and only got to Jenkins Creek yesterday afternoon.
The moving van unloaded the beds and boxes and everything, and we slept in our new house last night. So today Lily and I should have started at our brand new schools where we don’t know one single person – my first day of being the ginger new kid.
But Mum said that since we’d already missed the first day of term, another couple wouldn’t matter. Partly because Scott’s bursting to show off his favourite mountains, and partly because this trip will take three days and we’d have to wait till next summer if we didn’t do it now. By the next long weekend it’ll be too cold. But mostly because they think that Lily and I will be happy about moving here once we stand on top of a mountain.
So now we’re on the way to the great family adventure. Except that all the way up the highway, Scott’s been worrying that his special campsite might have been turned into something so fancy it won’t be much of an adventure.
And Mum isn’t with us, so we’re not actually a family. The Coffee Corner called and asked her to come in today because one of the waitresses was sick, and she said she couldn’t say no to her new boss before she’d even started.
Maybe she thought climbing a mountain would be harder than Scott said.
Scott fills the truck, and buys some chewing gum because our ears are popping. We’re still about half an hour from the lake, and the mountains are getting higher.
‘Anything else you want, you better get it now,’ he says. ‘I don’t know what’s going to be there.’
What I want is to be home with Jess and Amelia. If I had a phone I’d send them a message: Help! At the end of civilization! About to be eaten by bears!
I’m not stupid enough to ask Lily to borrow hers – even if she wasn’t sending her friends today’s one-millionth text: middle seat sux. She wants me to see it so I’ll feel bad, but it’s not my fault we couldn’t swap for two hours. I didn’t even like the window seat much. People say mountains are pretty, but that’s when they’re on a postcard. Up close they lean over you like bullies in the playground. After a while I’d taken my glasses off so the shapes were softer and blurred.
The road we’ve turned onto isn’t sealed, and it’s even steeper and windier than Scott said. It’s got a cliff on one side and nothing on the other. There’s a creek a long way down at the bottom of the nothing.
I’m not crazy about the Beware of Falling Rocks signs either.
Nor is Lily. ‘Great! If we don’t get smashed falling off the rocks, we’ll get crushed by rocks falling on top of us.’
‘It’s more about watching out for a heap on the road,’ says Scott. ‘You’d be unlucky to get hit by one falling that instant.’
‘That’s supposed to make me feel better?’
‘Yup!’ says Scott.
The road flattens out and twists away from the creek. Scott gets excited about a faded sign of a galloping pinto at the end of a long driveway. ‘That was my buddy’s grandparents’ ranch!’
I can’t see any horses now. Scott thinks the ranch was sold to developers after the grandparents died.
And then the road ends. There’s still no sign for a resort.
Scott keeps on going, down an almost-disappeared track through the forest. Long grass swishes at the doors and branches tickle the windows. The truck jolts and thumps. Lily glares when I bump her.
A raven flaps across the track, so low and close to the windscreen it makes us all jump.
‘You’re thinking that’s just an ordinary old raven,’ Scott whispers, ‘but that’s Raven, the old trickster who created the world . . . and he’s thinking, Here�
�s one of my people!’
Lily rolls her eyes so hard I think they’re going to fall out. I can’t see what she’s typing this time, but I can guess.
There’s no reception; her message won’t send.
‘Nobody told me we were going into the wilderness!’ she snarls.
‘That’s the general idea,’ says Scott. He’s cheered up now it doesn’t look like we’re heading towards a resort.
Mum says she named me after a bird because when she was pregnant, I turned and somersaulted so much it felt like wings tickling her insides.
So she called me Raven.
But it was my dad who flew away.
There’s no resort. No campground. Nothing. Not even a toilet. Just a lake with mountains all around it, layers and layers of them, every way you turn. Ours is the biggest. Right up under the clouds there’s a knobby peak with a slit of mouth under a big hooked nose, and snowy eyebrows and hair. If mountains have faces, this isn’t a friendly one.
‘Are we really going to climb that?’
‘Sure are,’ says Scott.
The only thing that’s changed since Scott’s olden days is a giant rock wall sprawling across the grass and up through the forest. It looks like the mountain burst open, popping off trees like buttons and spilling its guts.
‘Could be why there’s no resort,’ says Scott.
‘So it’s not safe to stay here!’ Lily says.
‘Look at the grass and moss around it – that rockfall happened years ago. The mountain’s not lying in wait for us so it can do it again!’
2
THURSDAY EVENING
When I was little, Lily was my hero. On my very first day of school she knocked down the big boy who kept rapping me on the head and calling me a redheaded woodpecker. Some nights she’d climb into bed with me and tell me stories. But ever since she turned thirteen, my sister has been Queen of the Putdown. She doesn’t have to say anything: just rolls her eyes, sniffs, and looks away . . . and I realise I’m the stupidest, most immature being on earth.
Amelia thinks she’s been possessed by aliens, but Jess says we should make our own pact: We won’t be mean when we turn thirteen.
The air is fresh and piney. The breeze blows tiny rippling waves across the lake, and cools the backs of my sweat-sticky legs. I want to run through the long grass to the lake and splash.
But Scott says no one’s running anywhere till we’ve learned how to use the bear spray. ‘Just like Lily said, we’re in the wilderness. You’ve got to be prepared for anything. So this goes on your belt, not inside your pack. If you need it, you’ll need it fast.’
It looks like fly spray, but you can’t just spray it around your tent to keep bears away – you have to wait till one’s charging before you spray it in the face.
‘No way am I getting close enough to a bear to spray it!’ Lily exclaims.
‘I’d run!’
‘You can’t outrun a bear!’ Scott snaps, and gives us the bear lecture again, plus the cougar one. He shows us the safety catch and makes us practise using the spray, as much as you can without actually letting it off.
Lily says that because Scott has never had kids before, he has to try extra hard to be a good parent and warn us about every possible thing that could ever go wrong in every possible universe. There’s no way we’d be on this mountain if he and Mum really thought we could get eaten by a bear.
Part of the fun of camping out is fishing for our dinner. That’s what Scott claims. I tell him I don’t like fish.
‘You would if you caught it yourself!’
He shows us how to control the line with our left hands and cast with the right. I don’t exactly want to catch a fish, but I can’t wait to see Scott and Lily’s faces when I pull one in my first go.
First I tangle the line on a log; next I nearly wrap it around Scott’s neck, and the third time the hook flies back into the toe of my sneaker.
Scott doesn’t argue when I say I’m done with fishing for now.
Lily’s standing on a rock with the sun setting behind her. The light’s so bright that she looks shadowy; tall and mysterious, with a kind of golden halo around her. Her fishing line arcs smoothly into the lake.
After about five minutes she gets bored and sits down to paint her toenails. If she’d stayed there one more minute the fish probably would have jumped right onto her hook the way they were supposed to.
I start picking up sticks at the edge of the woods. Lily helps build a fire on the gravelly beach when her nail polish is dry.
‘Look!’
A silver trout is dancing on the end of Scott’s line; it would be beautiful if it weren’t fighting for its life. Scott takes it a long way around the lake to kill and clean it, so there’s no smell for bears to follow. Lily and I are glad because we don’t want to watch.
‘I could never do that,’ I say. For once, Lily agrees with me.
We light the fire and wrap the fish in foil, and the potatoes and corn on the cob we’ve brought from home. When the flames die down but the rocks are hot, we put the potatoes, then the corn and then the fish, into the ashes to cook.
The potatoes are crunchy and the corn’s a bit black, but the fish is crispy and doesn’t look anything like a fish swimming in a lake. Turns out I was hungrier than I thought.
At bedtime we drag our sleeping bags out of the tents, Lily and I on one side of the fire and Scott on the other. The ground is lumpy, frogs are croaking and mosquitoes whining, but we’re too smeared with Insect-Off for them to touch us. After a while it starts to sound like a weird kind of music. When I take my glasses off the stars go blurry bright, and the Milky Way is so solid and near I feel like I could swim in it. I keep thinking: ‘I’m sleeping under the stars!’
The sky and lake are still end-of-the-night grey when I wake up. Then the first edge of the sun starts creeping over the mountains, and suddenly the sky and lake are early-morning blue, and I still didn’t catch the exact minute when the night turned into day.
Scott’s already up; the fire’s glowing and flapjacks are sizzling. I’ve got a feeling today isn’t going to be just a good day, it’s going to be one of those days – like the first time I ever rode a horse – that’s like a picture framed with light. I know I’ll remember it for the rest of my life.
Finally we’ve packed, tidied and locked the last bit of stuff into the truck. The hike can officially start. My watch says 8:25 am.
‘Wouldn’t it be easier to call it 7:25 like the rest of us?’ Scott asks. ‘You can’t stay on Cottonwood Bluffs time forever!’
But if I change my watch I’ll know I don’t live there anymore.
The forest is all around us, thick, dark and cool. It’s the same heavy quiet feeling as Gram’s living room, as if you’re not really supposed to be there.
I concentrate on stepping one foot in front of the other, silently as a native hunter. It’s not easy when you’re climbing over logs. A branch slaps my face. ‘Ow! Sorry.’
‘It’s not a library,’ Scott says. ‘You’re allowed to talk.’
‘But that’ll scare the animals!’
‘That’s what we want to do!’ says Lily. ‘It’s not like we’re hunting.’
‘We just don’t want to surprise them. If you’re not hunting, you don’t want to be hunted.’
‘Do you ever go hunting?’
‘Not anymore.’
‘How come?’
‘Because when I killed a bear I finally got it. One minute he was a happy, healthy animal moseying along, minding his own business, and the next he was gone – all because of me.’
There’s a deer grazing just below us. My first real, live, wild animal.
Lily reaches for her camera. With one leap, the deer disappears.
Two seconds later a smaller deer bounds past us.
‘Her teenage daughter,’ says Scott.
Lily and I get the giggles. But I keep wondering how the daughter deer is ever going to find her mother in that thick dark forest.
We open our packs of almonds and raisins on top of a rocky cliff. It’s warm out in the sun; I wish we didn’t have to go back into the trees. There’s just as many of them above us as below; you can’t even tell where we’ve been except for a splash of turquoise, way down at the bottom, that must be the lake.
I still don’t see how we can climb all the way to the top and down again in one day.
Scott points down at a valley on the other side. ‘Remember I showed you my buddy Greg’s ranch? We used to ride all through those hills.’
‘Could we have a horse now we live in the country?’ Lily interrupts.
‘You’d have to ask your mum.’
When Lily and I argued about moving, Mum came up with all sorts of excuses – but even when I cried she never said, ‘We could have our own horse.’
‘You could get one,’ I suggest to Scott. ‘And we could ride it.’
‘Like I said, it’s up to your mum.’
I didn’t really think it would work. But Lily grins at me – it was worth a try.
Scott’s given me the compass because I got that Girl Scout badge. The trail zigzags, but the top of the mountain is due south from the lake; I line the needle up while we’re out in the open.
Except now he’s got the map out because he wants to detour east to show us the most special thing in his special place. ‘I promise it’s worth it.’
It better be. You’d think going across would mean the ground was flatter, but mountains don’t work like that; it’s still hills going up and down, and the woods are nearly as thick as they were at the start.
But there’s a rumbly kind of highway noise, up here where no highway can be. Luckily I realise that before I say it.
Louder and louder; the noise is like thunder. I never knew a waterfall would be so loud. It crashes over a cliff in a solid white wall of water. A pool at the bottom swirls and bubbles like Amelia’s mum’s hot tub.
‘Take a picture for your mum,’ Scott asks Lily.
‘She should have come with us like she said!’ Lily says, but she takes a picture anyway. She wants to send it to her friends.
We squat on the fat rocks to catch the water in our filter bottles. The spray splashes over us, as if someone’s turned a sprinkler on. It’s so hot it feels good.