by Bear Grylls
He still had to put the clothes on again and feel the ice chill against his skin. The frozen coat wrung a couple of powerful, involuntary shivers out of him as it clung to his body, and he knew he just had to live with it until his body heat could warm it up inside once they started moving again.
Unfortunately the ice treatment hadn’t got rid of the bog smell as well as the bog water. That was something else to live with.
Jonas began to build up the fire again, and Beck, fingers crossed, went out onto the clear ground to check the snares.
The first was empty. He pulled a face and dismantled it, tucking the wire into his pocket. It would be wrong to leave it where an animal might run into it later on and be trapped, dying slowly and pointlessly.
And the second, third, fourth…
But he puffed out a happy sigh when he saw the movement over by the fifth. A hare crouched there, poised to spring away. Its ears and hind feet were like a rabbit’s, but its grey-furred body was longer, sleeker and more muscular, and when it stood up on all fours it would be higher off the ground. The ground around it was scratched and scraped in a circle, with the hare in the middle. It had put up a fight trying to escape, but the snare held it firmly by the neck. Beck was pleased to see it hadn’t cut into the animal’s skin so it wouldn’t have been in pain.
“This will be swift, I promise,” he said gently. The hare squatted close to the ground and gazed up at him with its round, sideways facing eyes. Then it sprang into motion again, trying to get away, but the snare still held it and its powerful hind feet scrabbled uselessly at the earth. The effect was to drive its body around in a circle again while its head stayed in one place.
Beck moved quickly. He grabbed the head from behind with one hand and the shoulders with the other, and yanked back hard, twisting at the same time. The hare’s spinal column snapped with a distinct crack through the fur and its body went limp.
Beck undid the snare from around its neck and pushed the wire into his pocket with the others, then carried their breakfast back to camp.
“I realise it’s going to be a tough break from larvae and berries,” he said dryly, holding the hare up by its rear legs, “but I think we can probably get this down inside us.”
Jonas made a great effort to wipe the delight off his face.
“It will be hard,” he agreed solemnly, “but I think we will manage.”
Chapter Forty-Three
Beck gutted and skinned the hare while Jonas stoked up the fire just enough to get a small bit of heat to cook with. He laid it on its back on a log, and with a few strokes of the knife he made cuts in the skin around each hind leg. Then he sliced up from one of the cuts, along the leg, across its front and down to the cut on the other leg, careful not to puncture the stomach en route. He pulled back the flap of fur that he had created to reveal mottled, red-brown flesh underneath.
Next he cut along up the hare’s front, up from its stomach and along its breastbone, careful not to puncture the guts and spoil the meat with gastric acid and hare poo.
The hare’s guts were like a slimy grey-brown alien mass coiled inside it. He held it up by its front legs and shook it, and most of the mass simply fell out. He worked his fingers into the depths of the cavity, feeling tissues give way with sucking sounds, to find the hard lumps that were the kidneys and liver. He pulled them out to set aside on the log.
With the guts now lying in a heap on the ground, he stuck his fingers further in, next to the ribs, and felt them slide over the rubbery mass of its heart. He hooked his fingers over it and pulled it back and out of the hare’s rib cage, putting it down with the liver and kidneys.
Last of all he cut around the ridge between the hind legs, and then sliced off the head with a few deft strokes. He put the body down on the log and used the blunt end of the crowbar from the pack to dig a small hole to bury all the discarded bits.
Then he could turn his attention to cooking the animal.
Beck found the straightest piece of wood that he could and skewered the hare along the length of its body so that the wood emerged where its neck had been. He made two supports, each out of a pair of sticks tied together at one end with wire, and balanced each end of the skewer in the angle between the two. The whole thing went over the fire so that the heat and the smoke rose up into the hollow of its body. Now all he had to do was rotate the skewer every couple of minutes so that the whole thing got an even roast.
“About twenty minutes,” he said, as the first hints of cooking meat tickled his nose. Jonas didn’t say anything: his eyes already feasted on the roasting hare, and the sound of his stomach said everything. Beck chuckled and went to wipe his hands, slick with hare blood and guts, on some moss.
They kept a close eye on the fire to make sure it didn’t get too smoky. Like the day before, it meant keeping it constantly fed with smaller pieces of wood that would immediately be consumed by the blaze and not turn to smoke in the meantime.
They were crouching on opposite sides of the fire, Beck estimating in his head whether it was time to rotate the skewer again, when a sudden motion behind Jonas made him look up. The shout came instinctively to his lips even before the full impression of lurching claws and teeth of the attacking animal had even registered.
“Jonas, look out!”
Chapter Forty-Four
Jonas only saved his life, or at least prevented himself from serious injury, by leaping straight over the fire, spurred by Beck’s alarm and not even bothering to look around to see what the problem was. Beck was already scrambling back, making a landing space for his friend.
The hissing, spitting creature charging at them only paused for a moment at the fire. It was the size of a small Labrador, with a shaggy fur coat all the shades between brown and blond. Its face was bear-like, with a sharp snout, two pointed ears, and small, black eyes that glared aggression at them. But it wasn’t a bear.
And then it was flowing around the flames towards them.
The boys pelted in different directions, each with one thought in his mind — get up a tree.
Beck grabbed a branch above his head and swung his legs up onto it all in one smooth movement. A pair of small but very powerful jaws snapped just inches below his backside.
“That is a järv,” Jonas shouted, and Beck finally understood.
“It’s a wolverine!”
Beck had never seen a wolverine outside a zoo — but that one had been at feeding time, and he had seen those jaws bite clean through a piece of bone like it was wood. They were small but hugely powerful, designed by nature to chew through the frozen carcasses of dead animals in the Arctic. A wolverine was essentially a twenty-five kilo weasel, with the teeth, razor sharp claws and bad temper to match.
He quickly pulled himself up onto the branch so that he was sitting astride it, rather than hanging from it, and worked his way along towards the trunk. The wolverine rose up onto its hind legs and snapped at him again. Beck jerked his dangling feet away, and then lunged back with a kick at the jaw, angling his foot so that the teeth wouldn’t be able to fasten on it.
“They can climb trees too,” he called, “so if it tries — kick it!”
The wolverine dropped back onto all fours and prowled around the fire, every now and then shooting a dirty look at the two boys. It didn’t seem interested in the cooking hare. It probably preferred raw meat to cooked, and the heat would be repelling it.
“So, what did we do to upset it?” Beck demanded.
“They don’t like intruders,” Jonas suggested. “Very territorial. It thinks we’re trespassing.”
“Well, I suppose I’m glad it’s only just worked that out,” Beck said with feeling. If it had attacked them while they were sleeping under the tree, that would have been very different. No fire to distract it, no room to get out of its way. “Do you know how to get rid of them?”
“We, uh, wait for it to get bored?”
“We don’t have time for that,” Beck grated.
“I don’t
think he cares.”
They watched the wolverine in tense frustration. It still circled the fire, not getting too close, which made Beck think.
“We’ve got flares in the bag.” The pack was lying, discarded, over on the other side of the camp. “If we can get to them, we can maybe scare it off.”
“Okay.” A pause. “How do we get to it without losing a leg?”
“I’m — uh — working on that.” Beck shifted on his branch, which immediately got the wolverine’s attention and it came padding over, snarling and teeth bared. Beck drew back his foot for another kick if it tried its luck. Okay. Maybe Jonas could move about, dangle a foot, attract it over there, and Beck could make a run for the pack and get up another tree… very, very quickly…
And then, just as everything seemed about as bad as it could get, it got worse.
“Flares, you say?” said a new voice, and Beck’s guts turned to ice as, rifle cradled in her hands, the woman emerged from the trees.
Chapter Forty-Five
“Found you at last! What were you thinking? Didn’t you hear me shouting? And destroying that bridge…”
She seemed to be the only one who wasn’t thrown by the new turn of events. Instead she had a whole list of complaints to run through — and with the boys each stuck up a tree, a wolverine on the ground and a rifle in her hands, she had all the time she needed to run through them.
Beck tensed, perched on his branch, his mind turning over a thousand different scenarios per second — how to get away from her, how to avoid the deadly mass of claws and teeth on the ground — and coming up with nothing. Jonas was probably thinking similar. His eyes were fixed on her and his mouth hung open with dismay.
“And then, did you deliberately try to throw me off by sending me the wrong way…?”
The wolverine didn’t know quite what to make of it either. It bared its teeth and snarled, and she raised her rifle. But then it didn’t seem to want to turn its back on the boys in case they got away, and it paced back to Jonas’s tree.
“We will talk about this later,” she said firmly. “Now let’s get rid of our furry friend.”
Without lowering the rifle, she sidled over to where the pack lay against a log. The wolverine patrolled back and forth a few metres away, keeping an equal distance between all three of them. She crouched down, keeping the rifle pointed at the wolverine with one hand, and fumbled inside the pack with the other to pull out one of the flares, a metal tube about the length of Beck’s forearm.
Then she abruptly slung the rifle over her shoulder, unscrewed the top of the flare, pointed it at the wolverine and pulled the tab at the top.
Bright light and thick red smoke erupted with a hiss and a roar. The wolverine recoiled in surprise. The woman advanced, holding the flare low, aiming it at the creature’s head while the tube’s contents spurted out. The wolverine made a half-hearted snap at her but the sparks and heat and smoke and sound were all things it could never have encountered before.
At long last, it decided that enough was enough, and hurried off into the undergrowth.
She stood still, pointing the flare at where the wolverine had been, until the flare sputtered out. Then she looked up at Jonas and Beck.
“So, are you coming down?”
And Beck realised there was absolutely no point in staying up in the tree. She could already have shot them, if she wanted to, and she could do it just as easily whether they were up where they were or down on the ground.
Her rifle was over her back, he noted, possibilities still whizzing around inside his head. There were two of them, him and Jonas, and if she made a hostile move then they could probably take her down between them. But they would need to be on the ground to do it.
He still had no intention of trusting her.
“Who are you?” he demanded. She slid a hand inside her coat and pulled out a black wallet which she passed up to him.
“Elin Svedmar, Tullverket.”
“Tullverket?” Jonas exclaimed in disbelief, as Beck tried to remember where he had heard that word before. He opened the wallet up. It contained an identification card, very official looking, with her photo and name, and a shield with a lion and a crown and a portcullis. Then he remembered. Jonas had said his dad worked for Tullverket — Swedish Customs.
He chucked the wallet over to Jonas, and slowly climbed down from the tree.
“And why should we trust you?” he asked, still poised to jump her if she so much as fingered the rifle strap. She looked surprised.
“Why shouldn’t you?”
Jonas said a few toneless words in Swedish: Beck heard the words ‘Kolberg’ and ‘Eriksson’ and ‘Granger’. He saw the penny drop for the woman at the same time as he realised Jonas was repeating the conversation they had overheard as they lay in hiding near the van.
She looked at them with new respect.
“You heard that? You were nearby, listening? You’re better than I thought.”
Then she laughed, and sat down by the fire.
“Okay. I can see why you were nervous to trust me — and bearing in mind what you had gone through, I can’t blame you. But no. I was after Kolberg, not you. We knew the kind of people he worked for, and we suspected they were going to try something at the lodge. We were waiting for them to incriminate themselves, then we would strike — and then all three of you disappeared. Thank Anna-Britt. She remembered one last task to set you, so she went to your room last thing before bedtime and found you both gone.
“If she hadn’t then you wouldn’t have been missed until you were late for work yesterday — you’d have had a few more hours start on me and we might not be talking now. Anna-Britt raised the alarm — but of course she only told the lodge manager, who is the one member of staff to know about our mission, so he told me and I took over.
“We looked for anyone else who might be missing from our suspects, and turned up Kolberg’s name. We tracked his phone signal and I found the van, with one dead man and no boys, live or dead.
“I thought he must have already killed you — he wouldn’t take you for any other reason — but there was no sign of you, and meanwhile… Meanwhile, I was thinking, Beck Granger? Where have I heard that name? So I looked you up.”
Chapter Forty-Six
It was a sad fact that, back home, he had become quite well-known. Because of his mis-adventures over the years, he had been in newspapers, on TV, and been written about in magazines. A lot of people had wanted a piece of the boy who kept surviving. Beck had always taken it in his stride, but if truth be told, he had never really liked it.
Sure, it was a nice feeling sometimes to think he had people all over the country that seemed to know and like him — it was kind of like he had a lot of friends that knew him but who he didn’t know. He could never work out if that was a good thing or just a bit weird.
It was also true though, that the further he went from home, the less famous he was — thanks goodness. But apparently, somehow, his exploits had reached Sweden.
Sitting down, she looked distinctly unthreatening and Beck knew he had to start trusting. He slowly sat down across the fire from her, and she smiled at him.
“And when I read about you, I realised I had been wrong. I had thought two boys, alone on the mountain, must be dead by now… except that one of them is Beck Granger, who is perfectly capable of being alive still. So I looked around, and guess what, I found two sets of tracks leading away. So I tracked you instead. And by the way, you did a very good job of confusing me, Beck.” At this she smiled at him warmly.
But Beck wasn’t really in the mood to accept compliments. He was still pretty confused and this was just making everything else more complicated.
“So, who are these people?” he demanded. “Why were they after us?”
She shrugged.
“I was hoping you could tell me. The only reason they would do something that desperate is if they thought they were about to be exposed, and silencing you was the only way to
guarantee their safety. Do you know why they might have thought that?”
“No idea,” Beck said truthfully. “All we’ve done is collect weather data. We never met any of them until two days ago.”
“We thought…” Jonas began. He had climbed down to sit with Beck. “Well, I thought it might be — you know, something to do with my dad? To punish him?”
“No.” She shook her head firmly, which made Jonas smile in relief, but which only increased the frustration for Beck of not knowing. “Whatever it was, I am sure it’s to do with what is going on at the lodge right now.”
“Which is what?” Beck asked.
“Drugs?” Jonas guessed.
“Child smuggling.”
“What?” they exclaimed together.
“Child smuggling,” she repeated distinctly, in a low voice. Every shred of good humour had vanished from her expression. “Sometimes a family that is desperate for money will sell their child. Sometimes they will sell or give the child away because they think it will have a better life that way. Sometimes the child just gets stolen. Either way, the refugee camps are rich pickings for these smugglers. There are a lot of desperate parents and a lot of available children.”
Beck listened, open-mouthed. He remembered wondering how desperate you had to be give up everything for a chance of a new life north of the Arctic Circle. How much more desperate did you have to be to sell your own child?
“But,” Jonas said, “you can’t just turn up and ask if anyone has a child to sell?”
“No, of course not. They are more subtle than that. They like to hide in a genuine organisation that does good work — in this case, Medics Around the World.”
Beck stood up abruptly.
“Look, we should get back. Our families will be worried to death about us both by now — I know what it’s like, not knowing where people you love are at. And there’s Anna-Britt, she’ll be worrying too — plus we’ve got to warn Dr Winslow what kind of people he’s working with.”