The Ice Chips and the Grizzly Escape

by Roy MacGregor

  It was possible that Mouth Guard was just behind a bush somewhere, peeing distractedly while watching a spider spin its web or a chipmunk run up a tree. But it was also possible that he’d fallen down a slope—or come across an animal he hadn’t intended to meet . . .

  Chapter 9

  Fifteen minutes later

  “Whatever you do, don’t make a sound.”

  The words had just passed Suchai’s lips. The goalie from Anahim Lake was looking at the ground, careful not to make eye contact with the scruffy grizzly bear that had wandered into the clearing between him and his new friends.

  Mouth Guard hadn’t fallen down a slope, but he had tripped over a log. He’d hurt his ankle. Lucas had started to help him up the rock wall he was climbing, and Shayna had followed. This was the only way to escape the bear, which was now blocking their route back to the river, grunting and snorting and making its way toward them.

  Swift, who was at hockey camp only in the mornings because she had track and field in the afternoons, had missed the rock-climbing class. She didn’t know how to climb—and because her fear of heights was stronger than her fear of anything else, she didn’t want to. She was just about to try to scare the bear away when Suchai had come into the clearing on the back of his horse and said very quietly, very carefully, for them to get out of the way. As slowly as they could.

  “Shhh. Give the bear some space.”

  The kids from Riverton were now waiting to see what their cowboy—their coach—would tell them to do next.

  “Remember, we share these woods,” said Suchai, just loud enough for the others to hear. He was walking around the clearing holding the reins of his horse with the calm and precision of a trained athlete, of someone who was used to the outdoors. “You don’t want the bear here, but it doesn’t want you here, either. We don’t want to scare her. We just want to give her space so she can keep moving. And if she has any cubs, she needs to be able to take them with her.”

  “But how do we all get out of the way?” Shayna asked, looking down at Swift, who was still on the ground, and then around at the spruce trees in the grove. She didn’t want to make her friend feel worse, but the only way out of the bear’s path really was up.

  “What if you had something to hold on to?” Suchai asked Swift in a loud whisper, looking her straight in the eye. “Could you go up the rocks then? Just long enough for the bear to get by?” His dog had come through the woods, following him, but Suchai put out his hand, waving for him to stay back. He didn’t want his dog to scare the bear, either.

  Lucas reached out his hand, thinking that’s what Suchai meant by something to hold on to, but he wasn’t close enough for Swift to reach him.

  “I’m going to toss you my rope,” Suchai told Swift, his breathing even. “Once you catch it, you’re going to have to rope something that’s high up on the rock, like a small tree—but one with strong roots.”

  “Do NOT rope me,” warned Lucas, suddenly afraid of this plan. Swift had never even roped the fence post. How does he think she can do this?

  The rope was tossed and Swift grabbed it, but then she froze again. She was thinking. Out of the corner of her eye, she scanned the rock wall to see if there was anything there that she could snag. Can I do this? At least if I have the rope to hold on to, I can keep my eyes closed.

  “Imagine you’re at the Anahim Lake Stampede,” Suchai said carefully. “I know you’re a competitive person like me. Pretend it’s a competition. Try to focus on what you need to do to win.”

  Swift wrapped her hand around the loop with her index finger pointing down. She drew in a deep breath and raised the rope above her head. She spun it. Once. Twice. And let it fly toward the rock face while her other hand held on to the end. A dull thud echoed through the clearing as the rope hit the rock in front of Swift. It hadn’t grabbed anything and slid all the way back down to the ground, where it landed in a group of ferns.

  “Try again,” said Suchai, not allowing frustration to set in. “Use your instincts. The less thinking you do, the better read you’ll make—just as in goal.”

  Swift swung the rope a second time. At first it started to slide again, but then it caught a small crooked tree on the way down. The loop, still somewhat open, slipped around the small tree, and Swift pulled to make sure it was secure. She’d done it!

  “Here . . . I . . . go!” Swift called in a loud whisper as she placed her left foot in a rocky hold and started to pull herself up. She winced as her prosthetic leg rubbed against the place where it was attached, but it wasn’t as bad as she’d expected. She was going to be able to do this.

  “Just a little higher,” said Suchai. He and his horse had begun to move away, too.

  The bear, leaning back on its haunches, again sniffed the air. It made a low moaning sound and a snort, then turned to look behind it.

  From a group of bushes and ferns, there came a sound. No, sounds.

  RRRRRRuuuuh-Woooo-uuuuuuuuh!

  Woooo-iiiiiiih!

  It was as though the animals making the sounds were half dog and half clarinet. They were sad . . . but also curious.

  The large grizzly made her own sound again, and two cubs came rolling out of the bushes. They seemed to be both whimpering and laughing. They wanted their mother, but they were also playing.

  Even with his hurt ankle, Mouth Guard started to babble about the small fluffy animals, but Shayna quickly leaned down and clapped her hand over his mouth. The kids all watched as the mother bear and her cubs made their way through the clearing and back into the trees—the mother waddling slowly and the baby bears doing somersaults.

  “Are they gone?” Swift asked. She was only three feet off the ground, but she still had her eyes closed.

  “Gone,” said Lucas, breathing a sigh of relief.

  * * *

  “Are you sure you can’t walk? Or at least get up on the back of Suchai’s horse?” Lucas asked, looking down from the tree he was now climbing. On the ground below him, Suchai was looking after Mouth Guard’s ankle while the talkative winger grumbled in pain.

  Once Mouth Guard had declared that he would not get on the back of the same horse that had thrown him to the ground earlier in the day, Shayna had come up with a plan. She and Lucas would climb one of the tall evergreens in the clearing, and from the top of it, she’d make her loon call—as a distress signal—and hopefully someone would hear it.

  “My mother, grandmother, and sister are probably all still inside the cabin beading, and my dad’s off getting fuel,” said Suchai. “They might not hear you.”

  “Well, we’ve got to do something,” said Lucas, looking at Mouth Guard sympathetically. He felt bad that he’d stayed mad at his friend even after he’d discovered that Mouth Guard wasn’t the one who’d told on their group back in Riverton last season. While they were fishing, Shayna had told Lucas that Jared was the one who’d squealed on the Chips, and then he’d bragged about it to all the Stars.

  Just before Lucas had started to climb the tree, Mouth Guard pulled a four-leaf clover out of his pocket and handed it to him for good luck, making him feel even worse. The Chips’ ex-captain hadn’t given the poor guy a chance.

  “Just a little higher and I’ll make the loon call,” said Shayna, grabbing a thick branch and pulling herself up.

  “This had better work,” Lucas said nervously as the two of them, breathing heavily, neared the top of the tree.

  Leaning close enough to the evergreen trunk to hug it, Shayna checked that her feet were solid and braced herself by putting a tree branch under her armpit. Lucas held on to his branch with one hand and slipped the other through one of Shayna’s belt loops to make it safer for her use two hands. The Stars’ defender then wrapped her arms around the trunk, leaned to the side, and brought her hands together in front of her face to blow . . .

  WHO-UUUUH-UHH-UUH-UUH-OOOooo!

  WUHHHHH-OOO-OOO-OOooo!

  In the distance, they could hear Jerry’s Piper Cherokee, its engine grinding
along as it flew through the air.

  “The call’s not loud enough, and the plane is going to drown us out. The sound will never reach the house,” said Lucas. “We’ll have to do it together!”

  He’d never done it before, though. He secured himself the same way Shayna had, but when he blew into his hands, nothing came out except a gust of air.

  “The plane is going to fly over us!” Swift shouted from the ground, excited.

  Lucas looked up into the air, forgetting that the tree branch he was holding was so thin. The branch snapped and he fell forward. He missed the next limb with his other hand, but his sweatshirt snagged on a broken branch below. Now the only thing keeping him from falling to the ground was a piece of cloth—and it was slowly ripping up the middle.

  “Lucas, the plane!” Swift yelled. She could hear it growing nearer, but she could barely see what was happening in the tree above her.

  “Your shirt is ripping!” Shayna shrieked, scrambling to grab Lucas’s waist with one arm and pulling him toward her. As she did this—holding Lucas, saving him—the four-leaf clover Mouth Guard had given him fell out of his sweatshirt pocket and fluttered to the ground.

  “That could have been me,” Lucas said breathlessly, his eyes wide. Thanks to Shayna, his feet were secure again. He held on to the tree with one hand and put the other in his pocket to make sure nothing else fell out.

  “You have to get Jerry’s attention, Lucas! If no one helps us, we’ll never get Mouth Guard out of these woods!” Swift cried out, somehow thinking that the loon call could reach the plane, which it couldn’t.

  “Should we try again?” Shayna asked, just as Lucas, his hand still in his pocket, wrapped his fingers around an object. Nolan’s invention! Slowly, Lucas pulled out the puck with the LED lights. Nolan had told him that it shone brightly when you pushed a little button on its side—so bright that everyone could see it.

  “Do it!” Shayna said with a giant grin.

  Chapter 10

  They heard the horses before they saw them, their hoofs patting the needle-covered forest floor as they stepped.

  “Is everyone okay?”

  It was the voice of Suchai’s mother, Lynda. She was coming through the trees on a horse and was pulling another horse along at her side.

  “You found us! How did you find us?” asked Mouth Guard, shocked that the plan—the trick with the glowing hockey puck—had actually worked.

  “We’re hunter-gatherers. You don’t think we know how to find something in these woods?” Lynda said with a laugh before explaining what had really happened.

  When the Piper Cherokee plane had swept by overhead, Lucas had held Nolan’s bright, beaming puck up as high as he could. The plane had circled after a bit and whooshed by again, but then it had turned in another direction—maybe toward the airport—and was gone.

  Lynda explained that Jerry had called her from the airport, asked where the kids were, and said he’d seen a blinking light past the little island.

  “I thought someone might be in trouble, so I came out here—just in case,” she said, looking down at Mouth Guard, who was still clutching his ankle. Her son was at his side.

  “We saw a grizzly!” said Lucas, thinking she’d be as shocked as he was.

  “Ah, we saw her yesterday—with her cubs,” Lynda said, getting off her horse and taking a look at Mouth Guard’s ankle. “She probably won’t stay around here long.”

  “Is it broken?” asked Swift, looking worried.

  “I think it’s just a sprain,” said Mouth Guard, offering a guilty smile. He felt bad that he’d ruined the fishing trip and put everyone in danger by getting so close to the bear. He did know some things about the woods—things he’d talked about on those hikes with his father—but there was always more to learn. If only he hadn’t guzzled so much water and then run into the trees alone.

  “That’s great if it’s just a sprain,” said Lucas, relieved. “And don’t feel bad. You’re the one who gave me that lucky clover. It could be that luck that saved my life!”

  “Well, or Shayna,” said Swift, rolling her eyes.

  Lynda was bringing over her second horse, patting it on the side of its head. This one was around the same small size as the one Mouth Guard had ridden before, but it looked calmer, safer. Maybe even a little sleepy.

  Shayna took one of Mouth Guard’s arms and Suchai took the other. They were going to try to hoist him up onto the horse. All he’d have to do is sit up in the saddle and hold on. Lynda and Suchai would then lead him home while the other kids walked behind them with the dog.

  “Are you still mad at me?” Mouth Guard asked Lucas before he let the other kids lift him off the ground. Suchai’s horse, looking sideways at the talkative Ice Chip, snorted.

  “No. I’m sorry. I was . . .” said Lucas, feeling awkward. “It’s my fault that Jared found out we had secrets—and I know he’s the one who told.”

  Mouth Guard shrugged and smiled.

  Lucas smiled back. “You’d better marshmallow and get up on that horse. Suchai still has to get to his practice.”

  The hockey player’s mom, hearing what the kids had been calling him, stifled a quick laugh before turning toward home.

  * * *

  Back near the cabin, Lucas was using a fishing rod made by Kayla, Suchai’s little sister, to practise his zigzags in the water. Shayna was there helping him, guiding him, even though the “rod” he was using was just a thin branch with a thick yellow fishing line tied to the top of it. Suchai had said he’d “pulled a lot of nice rainbows” out of Corkscrew Creek while enjoying the quiet, and now Lucas was determined to get at least one fish before leaving—even if it was a tiny one.

  Kayla, who was probably around six, was outside playing with one of the dogs and giggling at Mouth Guard and Swift. They were over by the horses again, trying to figure out some rodeo tricks.

  “I bet Jack could do some amazing tricks with this rope,” Mouth Guard said as his toss missed the post and his loop dropped to the ground.

  He’d put some ice on his ankle and it was feeling better, but that hadn’t done anything for his throwing style. Swift had already roped the post a couple of times. She was improving, but she still needed practice.

  “Try tossing it a little higher,” Suchai said as he passed by the corral wearing his eagle feather in his black cowboy hat. He was carrying his hockey bag, stick, and goalie pads over to the pickup truck to take them to the airport.

  Swift hadn’t enjoyed learning these tricks in the beginning; she was used to being immediately good at the sports she tried. And of course, she didn’t just want to be good—she wanted to be great.

  Suchai’s trips to Williams Lake had reminded her that becoming a professional hockey player takes a lot of work and commitment—and she definitely hadn’t been doing that this summer. She’d been slacking. Maybe she was already better than a lot of kids in Riverton, but if she was going to make an Olympic or Paralympic team or hold her own in front of a net in the NHL, she was going to have to really stand out. And to do that, she’d have to put in the work.

  “You gotta be willing to practise—to do things that other people don’t want to do,” Suchai had said. “Go over everything in practice so you can let your instincts take over when it counts.”

  Be better than the best, Swift repeated in her head, thinking about what she should do when they got back to Riverton.

  “I found something for you!” called Suchai, interrupting her thoughts.

  Swift hung her rope on the post and walked over to the truck, where he was loading his equipment into the back. If Suchai was leaving, the hockey players from Riverton should probably be going soon, too.

  “Wait—you don’t use a composite stick?” she asked, surprised, looking at his equipment.

  Suchai shrugged and smiled, again showing his dimples. The radio in the pickup truck was playing some analysis of the 1997 draft picks and clips from a Montreal Canadiens game from earlier that year. At that moment
, to Swift, a rink in Montreal felt a million miles away.

  “Well, this is my favourite stick right now,” Suchai said confidently. “I’m careful to tape it the way I like it—a goalie stick is personal, but you’re probably like that, too. You don’t want to see what I found?”

  From his back pocket, the kid pulled out a second silvery eagle feather. He said he’d found it when he was helping Lucas get his fly rod set up by the water.

  “Is that for—” Swift started, just as his mother and grandmother came out of the house to get his sister and her dog.

  Suchai handed the Chips’ goalie the feather and nodded.

  “We’re going down to the new water filtration plant, to see how the construction’s going,” said Lynda. Getting this plant, she explained, hadn’t been easy, but now it was going to make sure that the people living in Anahim Lake had clean water.

  Shayna looked at Lynda with an understanding, sympathetic smile, but no one else saw it.

  “Maybe you can get a rink here, too, eventually,” Lucas called over from the side of the river.

  “What we really need is a healing centre—to help the people in our community. Hopefully one day, the chief and the council will make that happen,” said Lynda with a smile, showing where Suchai got his dimples. “For a rink . . . well, we’ve got the rivers and lakes.”

  “My cousin’s village doesn’t have a rink, either,” said Shayna. “She’s part of our band in Ontario—and we’ve kind of got an arena—but her village is a bit farther north. They’ve been trying to raise money for one, like we do for our rink improvements, but that takes a long time.”

  “I hope their fundraising works,” said Suchai. His dad was already in the truck, and the young goalie from Anahim Lake now had his hand on the door handle. “It’s great to be able to play on a team—even if you have to work for it.”

  * * *

  When everyone who lived at the cabin was gone, Swift said they should probably walk a little farther down the river to see if they could stumble upon the wormhole that had sent them flying through space and time. She explained to Shayna that that’s how they usually travelled back to Riverton. None of them knew if it was luck or magic, but so far they’d made it back every trip.