by Bear Grylls
Beck dug his heels in and leant against the strain.
“Just get me out!”
The crevasse had sheer, almost vertical sides of blue-grey ice. It looked to be about thirty metres deep. Without the rope, the fall would have killed Jonas outright. Even if somehow it hadn’t, it would have broken his legs for sure, and then death would have followed with Jonas unable to move.
Jonas was dangling with his head about two metres below the level of the glacier. The loop was tight around his waist and he clutched the rope with both hands. His feet scrabbled at the side of the glacier, barely to get a purchase. He levered himself up a very short distance, his toes jammed hard into a minute crack in the side of the crevasse. His upturned face was red and frustrated.
“It’s really tight and the rope is too thin to climb.”
“Okay.” Beck could hear his laboured breathing, and it wasn’t just the effort of climbing. Hanging like he was, with the rope cutting into his torso, Beck knew Jonas would be in excruciating pain. Leave it too long and Jonas would suffocate as the rope pulled up and tight against his chest.
Chapter Twenty-Three
“Hold tight Jonas, I’ve got a plan,” Beck shouted at the crevasse where Jonas hung suspended beneath the lip.
Beck dug his heels even deeper into the snow and slowly reached to the rope that was coiled around his chest and removed it. The rope to Jonas was still drum tight from Beck’s waist to Jonas down in the crevasse, but the rest of the coil Beck carefully unravelled from his body.
Beck was panting hard and he knew that both of them were on borrowed time.
He uncoiled the last of the rope and quickly started to tie small loops in the rope every foot or so. He reckoned he had about eight metres of rope but by the time had tied a few loops into it the rope was only about four metres long. Just enough to reach Jonas, Beck calculated.
Both boys were struggling now to breath, Jonas was having the air squeezed from his lungs hanging in the rope tied around his waist and Beck’s rope dug agonisingly into his hips like a cheese wire.
Beck then coiled the rope and prepared to throw it towards the crevasse, but doing so in such an awkward seated position whilst being half pulled into crevasse himself wasn’t easy work.
He would have to throw it at least four metres and bang on target if Jonas stood any chance of reaching it.
“This is going to be tough, Jonas, but you can do it, I know you can.” Beck shouted. “I’m going to throw some extra rope. You have got to catch it then use all your strength, leg and arms to haul and climb your way up to the lip. Okay, my friend?” Beck tried to sound as calm and reassuring as he could, but he knew they would only get one shot at this before either he was dragged into the crevasse as well or Jonas became too weak to haul himself up.Beck took a deep breath, took aim and there the coil at the empty crevasse.
The rope uncoiled and flew through the air and landed just to the left of where Jonas was hanging.
Jonas bit his lip, and launched himself to the right to grab the end of it as it flicked down against the icy wall of the crevasse.
“Got it!” Jonas shouted. And with superhuman strength he placed his hand through the first loop in the rope, dug his feet against the ice and hauled himself up. With a grunt of effort, Jonas managed to get his elbow over the lip and then kick and wriggle his chest up and over as well. Then the rest of his body and he lay on the edge of the snow crevasse heaving and spluttering for air. He was out.
“Oof.” He stood slowly and flexed his arms. “And thank you.”
“Any time! Good strength Jonas. I wasn’t sure how much longer I was going to be able to hold you.”
“Let’s not have to repeat that again, Beck.” Jonas added with a smile. “Look, my legs are shaking like leaves. That’s not good for you, I am sure.” Beck smiled back and started to recoil the rope around his shoulders.
Beck pulled his gloves back on and squinted down at the crevasse, noting its direction while he shook some feeling back into his hands. Blood returned to his extremities feeling like someone was pouring hot metal down his bones. “Okay, so if we go this way, we’ll miss it. Now, let’s get off this ice.”
“Very glad to,” Jonas assured him. “Very glad to.”
And so they pressed on, testing, probing with each step.
Ironic, Beck thought, that Kolberg had wanted to dump them into the glacier in the first place. They could still do his work for him, if they weren’t careful. Vanish into a crack and not be seen again for a hundred years…
And round about now, he thought with a pang, back in England, Al was probably waking up to the news that his nephew had gone missing. For all Al knew, Beck really was at the bottom of a glacier. It made as much sense as any other theory.
I’m here, Al, he thought as hard as he could. Alive and well and on my way…
Chapter Twenty-Four
They only relaxed again when they were off the ice for good. The edge of the glacier grated against bare rock and they had to jump over a small ditch, no more than a metre wide. And then they were on solid ground.
“Rock,” Jonas said, giving the ground a relieved kick. “Not snow.”
“We must be close to the edge of the snowline,” Beck agreed. “Storkittel’s over two thousand metres high — I’d guess we’ve come down a good kilometre.”
He looked back the way they had come. There was no sign of anyone following them — and even if the woman did come this far, she would have to cross the glacier unassisted. That should slow her down.
He tapped the last of the biscuits out of their packet, one for each of them.
“Just time to celebrate with these,” he announced.
For once Jonas studied his biscuit rather than pop it straight in.
“Are you sure?” Beck shot him a quick look to check he wasn’t joking. He wasn’t. “I mean, sure I could eat the whole packet right now, but we don’t have much food…”
“No, and we’re not going to until we reach Riksliden.” Beck told him. “We’re just going to have to graze on what we can along the way. I am hoping that once we’re down in the trees, I’ll find us something. So, come on. Eat up.”
Jonas didn’t have to be told again. The biscuit disappeared in a couple of bites. They each washed their snack down with some more water before they pressed on.
There was still snow on this side, more of it than bare ground, but it wasn’t long before more dark patches of bare rock and matted grass started to appear, dotted like the spots on a giant Dalmatian. Soon, the dark patches were bigger than the snow. They really had reached the bottom limit of Storkittel’s snow cap.
It was a relief on the feet, now that they could tread directly onto something solid, and the snow was no longer sucking the warmth out of their bodies through their soles. The sunlight no longer reflected off the ice straight into their eyes like a laser. And they weren’t leaving a trail, which to Beck was the best thing of all.
Though — he had to force himself to admit it — that might not mean too much. The woman had looked like she knew what she was doing. Tracking might be another of her skills. And you track with more than just obvious snow footprints. They had to press on. They had to assume she could do almost anything.
They came to the first trees — spruces, standing alone like big shaggy Christmas trees. It wasn’t what Beck would have called a forest — more like a few trees had decided to have a get-together. The snow was almost a distant memory but patches still lingered among them. The ground underfoot turned to soil beneath a thin layer of pine needles.
“This is more like it!”
Jonas had a fresh spring in his step, as if Riksliden was just a short stroll away. He was about to walk over one of the patches of snow, when Beck suddenly called, “Wait!”
Jonas froze, one foot up.
“Va?”
“You can put your foot down, just not there…” Beck picked up a fallen branch and hurried forward. The snow Jonas had been about to walk on
was like a mound, with a dip in the ground on either side. Beck gave it a prod with the branch, and it tumbled away. The low ground on either side was a ditch, a natural hollow, and the snow had been a thin bridge across it. Jonas would have fallen about a metre — still enough for a sprained ankle or even a broken leg.
Jonas looked at it in disgust. Then he turned and looked up at the mountain peak behind them.
“Nice try, Storkittel, nice try! But that’s the last of its little tricks, I expect. Ja?”
“Hmm.” Beck pulled a face. “Maybe.”
It might be the last of Storkittel’s tricks… but there was plenty of wilderness still ahead of them. And once they were out of that, they would be in a whole new wilderness — the wrong side of human civilisation, where Beck didn’t know a whole lot more than Jonas about surviving. It would be brand new territory for both of them.
Beck was still bewildered by what had happened — questions sprang up in his mind about why the men had tried to kill them, what they were doing in Medics Around the World, and of course there was the urgent need to warn Dr Winslow and Jonas’s parents that they could be in danger. But they couldn’t discover the answers to these now. They had to keep focused on their immediate situation.
“At least, out here…” Jonas seemed to be working it out for himself. “Everything follows rules. You know how to get across a glacier. That is just knowing how to apply physics. But where we are going…”
“Where we’re going, they make up their own rules, and we have to work out what they are,” Beck agreed softly. Jonas simply nodded, nervously acknowledging the terrifying challenge that lay ahead.
The ground in front of them rose in a gentle curve so that they were actually walking up, to a shallow ridge a couple of metres higher than they were. Then they crested it, and both stopped short at the scene of destruction below them.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Jonas whistled.
They were looking down at what had been the edge of forest. An invisible force had smashed its way through the line of fir trees and carved out a trench of stripped and shattered trees a hundred metres across. It stretched downhill for a good half kilometre before the normal tree growth resumed.
They both immediately looked uphill.
“Avalanche?” Jonas asked.
“Avalanche,” Beck agreed. “Going so fast it overshot the snowline, came down here, trashed the forest — and melted.”
They made their way slowly down, picking their way between smashed trees and jagged, spiked stumps. The smell of pine resin leaking out from broken tree trunks was thick in the air.
“So we’re okay?”
Beck thought. How long ago had the avalanche happened? How long did the slopes take to regenerate? The snow had mostly gone from the ground, so it had been at least a few days, but the broken trees still smelled fresh.
“We should be ok,” he decided. There hadn’t been any heavy falls in the last week. “All the surplus snow will have gone with it and it won’t have been replaced yet — it won’t be avalanching here for a while.”
Jonas’s nose wrinkled.
“Something smells bad.”
“Hey, don’t look at me.” Beck could pick it up too. Something in the air was thick and rank. And then they saw the flash of dark red — scarlet verging on black — that stood out against the background of brown and green and white. It was — or had been — a reindeer. A real reindeer, Beck thought: a snorting, steaming wild animal, not a cartoon on a Christmas card with a glowing red nose and cuddly antlers. This was the real deal.
“Poor thing,” Jonas whispered.
It had been the size of a cow, with a pair of antlers like tree branches that would have been brutal if they were charging towards you. Its fur was dark and shaggy, and its left shoulder was a massive impact crater where dead black blood oozed and flies buzzed. Its stomach was bloated so that the fur was pressed tight against the skin, which meant it had been dead some time and its insides were filling with gas as they rotted.
“It must have got caught in the avalanche,” Beck said. “Didn’t have a chance.”
It was a sad end to a majestic creature. But, now it was dead, there was no point being sentimental and he could immediately see two things that would be of use to a pair of survivors. He took the knife from his pocket and began to probe at the massive shoulder wound with the blade.
“What are you doing…?” Jonas asked with fascination.
“Keeping my promise… Got it.”
Jonas gagged; Beck grimaced without humour. He had flicked away a clot of dead blood, and the flesh beneath it was crawling with maggots — white, segmented grubs, crawling and wriggling, some lifting up their heads and looking blindly around. Actions speak louder than words and Beck knew Jonas would need convincing, so he picked one up between thumb and forefinger, bit the head off, spat it out and swallowed the body.
He gulped it down whole, rather than chew it — this was a creature that had been feasting on rotten meat and he didn’t want its innards splattering into his mouth. Then he pulled a smile.
“Try some?” he offered. Jonas did nothing of the sort but watched Beck pick off another, too horrified even to give his usual “Va?”
“Jonas, we need to keep eating,” Beck told him. “We’re burning calories as we walk and even more just to keep us warm, so we need to keep topping up. We can’t eat the reindeer’s meat — it’ll be rotten by now — but maggots are excellent. They’re eighty percent protein — and if you want to compare it, beef is only twenty percent — and they’re massive on calories.”
Jonas reluctantly put out a hand when Beck passed him a maggot of his own. “You know these things are just baby flies?”
“Yeah, but they’re easier to catch this way. Take a couple,” Beck advised. He checked his watch — coming up for 1pm. “Tell yourself it’s lunch, if that helps.” He took a couple more for himself, to match actions to words. Then, while Jonas overcame his aversion to eating baby flies, he cleaned out the wound, getting as many maggots as he could and zipping them into one of his pockets.
He stepped back and looked thoughtfully at the body of the reindeer. In particular, at its coat.
“Shall we keep going?” Jonas said hopefully.
Beck ran the figures in his head again — the mental calculation of the time they had gained versus the time they would lose if they did what he had in mind, and was it worth it?
Add it all to the fact they would be spending another night outdoors, and he decided it was.
“We’re not going to get another opportunity like this,” he said, “and you need to take every opportunity that comes.”
“An opportunity for what?”
“To get a natural fur cloak that’s waterproofed with oils and about a hundred times better than the artificial rugs we brought with us.”
“They weren’t bad,” Jonas protested.
“No, but this will be even better.”
He took out the knife again. Jonas gaped.
“You’re going to skin it?”
“Yup…” Beck smiled thinly. “Have some more maggots while you wait?”
But then the smile faded, because this wasn’t a joke, this was survival. He was going to give some real meaning to the reindeer’s death and he owed it the courtesy of doing it with dignity.
“Better step back,” he advised. “This could get messy.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Beck cut an incision over the reindeer’s abdomen, very carefully, so as not to puncture the gas-swollen guts. Everything was stretched so tight that the tiniest prick would make the contents spurt out, all over him and Jonas, and also all over the fur, which he wanted to keep as dry and clean as possible.
Once he had the incision the right length, from its throat down to its genitals, he could push his fingers between skin and flesh, feeling the skin as a distinct layer over the smooth, slippery, solid mass that was the deer’s meat, ridged with muscles and bones beneath. He made
his hand into a fist and pushed it between the skin and flesh, rolling his hand as he did so. Just the pressure of his knuckles against the skin-flesh join was enough to separate the two. Bit by bit he could work his way up and down the body on either side.
Jonas helped him turn the body over when he needed to get at the other side. Finally he used the knife to cut it away from the legs and the neck — and he had the cloak that he intended. He held it up triumphantly. One side was the deer’s natural fur, the other was a pale, creamy layer of skin and fat, marbled here and there with streaks of red.
“Okay, it’s stinky, but you’ll notice the difference when we camp tonight, I promise.”
“Let’s get out of here,” Jonas muttered. He was already walking. Beck laid the fur down on the ground so that he could roll it up tight enough to go in the pack, and while he did that his eyes settled on something else.
Instinct made him glance back the way they had come — the direction the woman would approach from, if she was going to come. Or maybe it would be the direction from which they would come — she might have called up reinforcements.
There were so many unknowns. He wished he could read her mind, wherever she was — know what she was doing, what she was planning, whether she had presumed they were dead or whether she was hunting them down. Plan for the worst, he remembered.
“Hey!” he called. “Want some food that isn’t maggots?”
Jonas promptly wheeled about.
“Always.”
Beck had gone over to the nearest smashed tree and was exploring the exposed crown of roots. He snapped off a strand that was the length of his arm, slightly thicker than his finger, and Jonas’s face fell.
“So now we eat the trees?”
“Just the roots.” Beck wiped dirt off the strand and bit into the end of it. It crunched, with a texture a bit like celery, and it unsurprisingly tasted of wood. “Vital calories in these. In fact, most bits of a pine tree are edible — but the roots in particular, and we can gather up a good supply here, since the avalanche has very kindly done us the job of digging them up.”