by Bear Grylls
“Um,” Beck said. Jonas looked at him expectantly. “Do you need to… you know…” He gestured. “To pee?”
Chapter Thirty-Four
Jonas looked surprised at the question.
“No, not really. Why?”
“To put the fire out. Smouldering embers, even if you bury them, can reignite, especially with a lot of dry pine needles around. It only takes one small flicker of oxygen over hot embers to make a small flame and, bam, you have fire again — but this time we won’t be around to stop it. The best way to put it out is to — well. Kneel over it and do what neither of us wants to do.”
“Ah. That’s inconvenient.” They looked down at the smouldering needles and Jonas screwed up his face as though he was thinking deep, important, self-searching thoughts. “No. I really don’t have enough to go at the moment. But I’ll tell you who does,” he added, just as Beck was resigning himself to having to force some pee out himself.
Jonas walked off a few metres and pulled up a clump of sphagnum moss and squeezed it over the fire. Water dripped down onto the embers and quickly extinguished them.
“Some guy told me this stuff is full of water,” Jonas said happily. “Turns out he was right, too.”
Beck had to laugh.
“Okay, okay.” He kicked earth over where the fire had been, eliminating any sign that that they had passed this way. “So, let’s go.”
“So does this mean,” Jonas asked as they pressed on into the trees, “that one of us should always make sure he’s full up? Kind of like carrying a fire extinguisher at all times, only you get to take turns being the extinguisher…”
“What it does mean,” Beck said seriously, “is we’re not getting enough inside us.” He handed the flask over. “So, get half of that down.”
“Yes, mama,” Jonas muttered.
Before they refilled the flask from the lake, Beck carefully studied the far shore again for any signs of movement before he ventured out of the trees. He also looked up at Storkittel behind them, running his eyes up and down both arms of the mountain — the one they had come down, and the one he hoped the woman was taking. He couldn’t see any movement. Problem was, she hadn’t been dressed in bright primary colours like some trekkers. Her outfit had been browns and dark greens — not exactly army camouflage, but it would blend in well against the mountain background and make it very difficult to spot her at this kind of distance.
But then, he and Jonas weren’t exactly fluorescent. If he had difficulty seeing her, she would have the same problem in the other direction. So, Beck scurried out quickly to the water, crouching down below the level of the bushes, to refill.
Then the boys were on the move again.
Half an hour later, the trees ran out.
The boys stopped abruptly on the edge of the forest. For the next hundred metres or so there was a patch of flat, bare land, with more of the ubiquitous moss underfoot. On one side of them was the lake, on the other was more open land. The forest continued about a hundred metres in front of them.
It was a hundred metres they would have to get across without being seen.
Beck crept slowly out of the trees, just enough to peer back at Storkittel again. The arms of the mountain were cut off from view to a large extent by the trees. If she was still up there — coming down on either side — then he was pretty sure she would have to look very closely to see them. If they hurried.
“There’s no choice, is there?” Jonas said, guessing his thoughts accurately. “We can’t dig a tunnel or wait until dark.”
“How fast can you run a hundred metres?” Beck asked grimly.
“When there is a woman with a gun behind me, quite fast. That’s if you don’t think the fast movement will just catch her eye?”
Beck grated his teeth together as he made his mind up.
“We can spend forever second-guessing what she’s going to do — or we can just do it.”
“So let’s just do it,” Jonas agreed. “But shall we run or crawl?”
“I think we are more likely to catch her eye if we are running. Sharp movements attract attention in the wild.”
“But we will get soaking crawling through this wet moss.” Jonas argued.
“Better wet then dead.”
And that seemed to settle it.
The boys got down on their bellies and started to crawl. Like a leopard, elbow, then knee, then the other elbow and then the other knee. Pushing, wriggling, crawling, pushing. On through the damp moss, with the freezing water oozing in past their waterproof layers, and seeping through to their clothes and bodies.
The far line of trees wavered in front of them, but didn’t seem to get any closer. It was like dreams that Beck sometimes had, trying to run from some approaching danger but not being fast enough, or not moving at all.
Soon, they were over half way across. But Jonas was getting tired and their progress was so slow.
“This is crazy,” he suddenly said. “Let’s just run it from here. Come on, Beck.”
Jonas then jumped up and started to run. Beck tried to grab him and stop him, but he was gone. Beck had no choice. He jumped up and raced after Jonas.
The moss was spongy and absorbed their footsteps instead of bouncing them back, so each step forward used that little extra bit of energy to lift the foot up and move it. But they were covering the ground faster than crawling. They were almost across when Jonas suddenly let out a whelp and staggered, waving his arms for balance.
Jonas was now splashing through knee-deep water — a hidden pool in the ground, covered with the moss, which he hadn’t noticed until too late. Beck was a few metres to the side of Jonas and was also now thrashing through the knee deep moss, mud and water.
The water splashed up around both their thighs.
It only took a second, but it was enough for an alarm to sound in Beck’s mind. Moss, covering mud and water … They were warning signs.
“Jonas!” he shouted with sudden urgency. “Look out for—”
And then the ground turned to nothing in front of Beck. He pitched forward, and knew even as he fell that it was too late to save himself.
Beck instinctively braced himself for the impact but the moss parted and he just dropped straight down into a deep hole of water and mud, sticky and freezing cold. The gloop sucked him into the depths and closed off the sun and the air as it sealed itself above him.
Beck had disappeared.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Beck instinctively thrashed his arms and legs, kicking for the surface, as if he had fallen into a pond of water. And immediately he made himself stop, because he knew that in a marsh bog it was the worst thing he could do.
It was a pit of liquid mud beneath a thick layer of algae that looked like solid ground. The vile stuff clogged every opening in his head — eyes and ears and nose and mouth. The smell and taste were like water that had been used to boil something already dead and rotten. And whenever he moved he created a space in the mud, a vacuum that more mud flowed into and pulled him along with it. So if he kicked his legs, mud would flow into the empty gaps and pull him down into the depths.
But he could feel his coat and the pack on his back tugging him upwards — air trapped in them was keeping him buoyant. He risked opening his eyes and thought he saw daylight, before the mud stung so badly that he had to squeeze them closed again.
“Beck? Beck!”
He could hear Jonas, muffled by the goop in his ears. That meant that at least his head was back above the surface. He held his arms out and floated, forcing himself to keep calm.
“Stay back!” he gasped. Mud spat out with each word. “I’m ok.”
Jonas took a step forward, anxious to help, and Beck almost shouted.
“Stay back!”
Somehow Jonas had missed this hidden deep pit of mud and water. Jonas was stood next to it now, still up to his knees in the stuff.
Beck’s pack was helping to keep his top half buoyant while his legs sank down, so that h
e was slowly turning vertical. He felt his feet touch something soft and bloated. Probably the corpse of a dead animal, he thought bleakly — some poor creature that had stumbled in like him, but which didn’t have the advantage of being a human who knew how to survive bogs. It had probably thrashed about like he had wanted to, and died, frightened and lonely, its lungs choked full of mud.
He lifted his feet off the bottom. As well as dead animals, there could well be submerged roots down there, rotting like everything else but strong enough to snare him in a death grip.
The slick slime glooped and sucked around him as he turned himself to face the point where he had come in.
The one place that he knew for sure was solid was the place he had fallen in from — the last place where his feet had been supported by the ground. If he tried to get out anywhere else then he might just make his situation worse.
The key was moving slowly and steadily, and easing your limbs slowly out, so that they were as close to the surface as you could get them. Slowly Beck had extracted his legs one by one from the sucking mud and was now half lying, half-swimming on the surface of the gloop.
He ‘swam’ back to the edge with big, slow strokes of his arms, strong enough to propel himself and keep his body close to the surface, not so urgent that the mud fought back and sucked him in deeper.
Finally, his hands touched solid ground and he heaved himself out into the knee-deep water and moss surrounding the hole. He felt like a zombie that had just hoisted itself up out of its own grave. The mud felt like a hundred dead hands tugging him back, not wanting to let him go.
Jonas had carefully made his way around the bog and he reached down to help Beck up.
“Thanks,” Beck gasped. He spat again, then pulled up a clump of moss to drip water over his face and wipe it as clean as it could, to get rid of the slime. The shivers were already setting in. He was soaked through from head to foot in cold, wet filth.
For all their efforts to survive out here in the wilderness, they might as well have just fired off one of the flares in the survival pack to tell the woman where to find them, stranded out in the open for all to see.
And now he knew why there weren’t any trees growing on this bit of land — another clue he should have spotted. Trees need decent earth to put their roots down.
“Let’s just keep going Jonas. We need to get under cover,” he grated. “Just avoid the dead flat mossy bits!”
Chapter Thirty-Six
Beck didn’t want to delay any further, but once they were across and in the woods he had to strip off, despite the cold. He used more moss to wipe himself down as clean as he could get, and thrashed his filthy clothing hard against the trees to dislodge the mud.
Jonas picked up his discarded jacket, holding it at arm’s length while Beck squeezed out his jumper.
“This is horrible.” Jonas stated, grimacing.
“Tell me about it.” Beck put all his frustration into the force he used to wring out the muddy water. “This time tomorrow it’ll be dry, but for the time being I’m just glad we brought this.”
The pack was covered in bog mud but it was still dry inside. None of the slime had got through the waterproof zip. He opened it up and tipped the reindeer skin out onto the ground.
He did not want to squeeze himself back into these stinking, wet rags. It wasn’t just the smell — it was that any wet clothes against his skin would conduct all the warmth out of his body. Plus the gritty mud would just rub against his skin and groin, causing chafing and sores.
“Aarhh! This is so annoying,” Beck mumbled to himself.
He also knew he didn’t particularly want to spend the rest of the day wrapped in the skin he had taken off a decomposing reindeer, with just his underwear on underneath, either — but he reckoned that it was the lesser of two evils.
“How are you going to make your clothes dry?” Jonas asked, looking puzzled.
“When we camp out tonight, I’ll hang them up to freeze, and in the morning I’ll just bash the ice off.”
“Oh.” Jonas looked impressed. “Clever. But…”
And then Jonas began to remove his own top.
“Hey, what?” Beck asked in surprise.
Jonas shrugged his coat and outdoor trousers off. Underneath he had a sweatshirt and jeans, and under those he had a t-shirt and boxers. He pulled the sweatshirt and jeans off and threw them over to Beck, then began to pull the coat and over-trousers back on.
“If I’m wearing two dry-ish layers and you’re wearing two wet ones, isn’t it better for us both to have one dry layer each?” Jonas said reasonably.
“I suppose… yeah. Thanks,” Beck said sincerely. Even though the reindeer skin would have kept the trunk of his body warm, he hadn’t looked forward to going barelegged and bare armed, through the forest. The sweatshirt was a size too big and a bit damp from the crawling, and he had to do Jonas’s belt up to its last hole to keep the jeans up, but he felt immediately better with at least one layer of half dry clothing on.
They didn’t have the resources to tailor the skin into proper clothing, but after some thought, Beck had simply cut a hole in the middle for his head, so that its front and back draped down him on either side. The smell of fur and dead deer was almost as strong as the smell of mud — pungent and powerful.
“If she doesn’t see or hear us, her nose will do the job,” he muttered. He tied a length of rope around his waist as a belt to draw the dangling skin in, and wondered what kind of sight he presented — still filthy, despite the best he could do with the mud, and dressed in a dead animal.
“You know—” Jonas looked him up and down. “There are night clubs in Gothenburg where that would be the dress code.”
“Ha ha. Life in the big city, eh?”
They folded the rugs so that the waterproof layer was facing out, and stuffed them and the damp, muddy clothing into the pack. Beck gave a final look back the way they had come, through the trees and across the tree-free bog land. No sign of anyone — but if she was good, a proper hunter, there wouldn’t be.
“I’ve held us up long enough,” he stated. “Come on.”
They pressed on into the trees — modern city boy and wild boy of the woods.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
They had set the pattern for the rest of the day — walking, occasional rests for water and grazing on berries or the last of their snacks, constantly checking their direction. Beck resolutely set his eyes on the way ahead and tried not to feel cold. The reindeer skin stopped him from freezing, but that was all. Proper winter clothing would leave layers of air just the right size for body heat to warm up, but the reindeer skin flapped about too much even when he tied it tight, so that fresh, unheated air would always get in around the edges.
His consolation was that the skin itself was waterproof and weatherproof, and when they eventually stopped for the night, he would be able to wrap it tight around himself and be as snug as if he was in a sleeping bag — just smellier.
Until then, he had to trudge on wearing the skin, and Jonas’s borrowed too-large clothes. Plus underwear and boots that were still wet and muddy.
After an hour they came to the end of the lake, which gave pause for thought. Whichever way the woman had come down the mountain, they were now all on the same side of the water. They pressed on eastwards because there was nothing else to do.
There were more clear areas, patches of grassy and mossy meadowland. They weren’t suspiciously smooth so Beck guessed they were genuine, not more hidden bogs — but even so, they stayed clear of them, going round the edges if had to get from one side to the other. The trees offered cover, and that was the most important thing they had.
Walking in a straight line through a forest was impossible, and so the boys were constantly stepping aside to go around one tree or another, which immediately meant they were heading the wrong way. Unless they very carefully checked their resumed course, they could quickly end up off track.
There was no snow down here
, but moss tended to grow on only one side of the trees and the rocks on the ground. It liked the darker, damper north side of objects, so usually a quick glance was all you needed to know which way north and south were, and then work out where east lay.
And there was always the sun on a clear day like this. To provide an absolutely reliable direction you had to check with Beck’s watch.
It was the sun, beyond halfway down, that was on Beck’s mind now. The light was turning more orange and the shadows of the trees were stretching out longer.
They had been on the move since around 7 a.m. Sunset was around 6 p.m., and Beck was just glad that if they had to do this, they had to do it at the start of the month and not at the end of it. This close to the Arctic Circle, at this time of year, sunset times changed quickly: within just a couple of weeks sunset would have got earlier by two hours. With an average human walking speed of four kilometres per hour, those two hours would have cost them eight kilometres of distance covered.
That morning, Beck had estimated forty kilometres to Riksliden, maximum. So, that same average speed meant they could have got to Riksliden in ten hours. But Beck knew that had been unrealistic over this sort of terrain in these conditions. Already most of the day had in fact involved getting down off Storkittel — climbing across ice faces, crossing glaciers, scaling precipitous drops to throw off trackers, picking their way through forests. And of course, Beck thought sourly, falling into bogs.
But even so, he guessed they must have covered almost half the distance. The next day, on this flatter terrain, they would make Riksliden, if there were no further emergencies and in particular if no one caught them.
“Two hours to sunset,” Jonas said.
“Yup.” Beck made the decision. There was no point blundering around after dark. Their camp for the night had to be prepared carefully, because if the weather got bad and it couldn’t shelter them properly then it was just a waste of time. Some daylight hours would have to be sacrificed. They wouldn’t be losing much if they called a halt now.