“Juniper, Juniper!” Cam says. “Haven’t I taught you anything?”
I smile at the mock horror in his voice. “I know, I know. Home is a thousand paths. Home is the woods and moors and valleys and streams.”
“You forget the sea,” Cam says. “You haven’t even seen the sea yet.”
Some kind of longing must show in my face because Cam points his finger at me. “You see – the sea, the sea! I knew there would be something to tempt you!”
“No! No!” I say and I laugh and he dances round me, all light and breezy. I want to say, don’t you see, I don’t need anything else to tempt me. Cam and Hester and Queenie and the ponies and all of them. They’ve woven their magic and it’s the nicest kind of magic. It’s better even than that garden in The Snow Queen because you’d never get bored, not ever. Anytime you got tired of a place, you’d move on somewhere else.
Cam laughs. “It’s OK, I get it. Ennerdale.”
“Ennerdale,” I repeat, softly at first, then louder, because maybe, just maybe, for a fraction of a second he did get me. Maybe I was wavering. “Ennerdale.”
“Your mum,” Cam coaches.
“Our mum.”
“Your father. Descendant of the ReWilders.”
I raise my eyebrows.
“I’m only repeating what Bear thinks!”
“I hope he’s not disappointed.”
Cam shrugs. “He’s got to be better than my dad. He ran off. He broke the one rule.”
“Sticking together?”
“Exactly!”
“And going south for winter,” I can’t help adding.
Cam pulls a face. “At least you’ve got your furs now. And you know how to light a proper fire, thanks to me.”
“Yeah. We’re experts now.”
“And you should take Squall, to carry your things, and Bear, when he’s tired. Everyone says so,” Cam blurts it out.
“No, no!” I say quickly. “We can’t.”
“Bear adores Squall.”
“No, Cam. She’s yours and Queenie’s.”
“We want you to have her,” Cam says. “Even Queenie.”
“Really?” I ask.
Cam laughs. “Well, she’s coming round.”
I smile. “Look, it’s nice of you, but with the mountainsides and everything, we’re better off on foot. I can just focus on Bear and…”
Cam reads my mind. “You want your cat back.”
I flush. “Maybe when it’s just Bear and I…” I stop as I realize how ridiculous I sound. Maybe when it’s just the two of us. Maybe when we really need her again, Ghost will come back.
Hester’s playing the pipes and the others sing, clapping hands and clicking in this warm happy chorus. Bear and Queenie cavort round the fire, dancing. We don’t talk about tomorrow, but I guess Hester’s told everyone by now.
Sometimes I catch one or other of them looking over at me, though when I meet their eyes they smile. There’s no place round the campfire for sadness tonight.
I’ve been studying our map by torchlight. Hester’s drawn on extra landmarks – odd-shaped rocks and hills and trees – to guide us. She reckons if conditions are right it’s just another few days, only she swears snow’s on the way.
My foot will slow us down too, she says, though it feels like it’s getting better all the time now. Sometimes I forget it even hurts.
Larch has given us a little box of butter and some herbs, and promised to wrap parcels of meat and vegetables in the morning. Only I’ve seen inside the little wagon the ponies pull. There’s barely any food left. They would all have been south two weeks ago were it not for me. They’ve shared their winter rations long enough.
I wake Bear before first light. He scowls as I shine the torch into the warm pile of furs he’s buried in. “I’m tired, Ju.”
“We have to go, Bear.”
The colour drains out of his face when he realizes what I mean. “No, Ju! No!”
“Shush, you’ll wake everyone!”
Bear looks around. The adults were drinking wine and singing songs way into the night. They’re all still sleeping.
“But why?” Bear wails. “It’s not fair!”
“Because we’re on a journey.”
“Queenie said we can go with them! We can stay with them for the winter, Ju! Hester’s going to ask you!”
“She already did, Bear,” I say flatly.
“Why are we running away then?”
“We’re not running away. We’re getting back on the journey. Our journey. Yours and mine. We’re going to Ennerdale. To Mum and Dad.”
Bear stares at me. He’s got tears in his eyes, but he gets to his feet. “Why can’t we say goodbye?”
I shrug. “I’m sorry, Bear. I’ve just had enough of goodbyes.”
It doesn’t take long to pack our things. I take out the picture I drew last night. It’s all of them, the whole group sat round the fire, singing. I sketched me and Bear in too, so they can remember us. I put it next to where Hester’s sleeping and I write two words on the bottom. Thank you.
A little body steals out of one of the tents. She’s been watching us.
“You’re leaving,” Queenie says, accusing.
“We have to,” Bear says. “We’re going to find our mum and dad.”
“Are you taking Squall?”
I shake my head. “No. Queenie. Squall’s yours.”
Queenie nods silently. She takes off her necklace – a white pebble with a hole all the way through it where a pink ribbon is threaded – and places it round Bear’s neck.
“Take this. It’ll keep you safe.”
“Queenie,” I protest. “You love that stone.” She’s always playing with it – sticking her little fingers through the hole, or looking through it, screwing up her eye, like the stone’s a lens to a whole new world. She found it on a beach in the south of England.
“He’ll need it where you’re taking him,” Queenie says. “I was swallowed up to my neck once in one of those valleys. There’s proper sinking mud in the bogs.” She puckers up her cheeks and makes this loud sucking noise.
Bear shudders.
Queenie nods solemnly at him. “Just make sure she goes first,” she says, pointing at me, and she goes to hug him tight. Bear’s eyes meet mine over Queenie’s shoulder. She’s the first friend his own age he’s ever had.
The hills turn into mountains and the air gets colder, fiercer. Even the trees change – they’re gnarled and twisted like claws.
Sometimes it feels like we’re walking along corridors of stone.
“Are we going the right way, Juniper?” Bear’s voice trembles. He’s clasping Queenie’s stone round his neck and without thinking I reach round mine for the GPS. But it’s gone – dead at the bottom of my rucksack. There’s just Mum’s map now, and even with Hester’s guide marks nothing’s looking like it should.
“Yes,” I say, worried I’m back in the business of lying again. Leading Bear on. Painting everything brighter than it is. But the highest mountains are still ahead and those are what we’ve got to get past. Ennerdale’s somewhere on the other side.
It always seems like there’s light on the horizon – a sort of luminescence – only it’s teasing us, like the will-o’-the-wisps from the old stories, because whenever we get to where the light was, it’s always gone.
The bogs are real, the ones Queenie warned us about. That’s the problem with the valley floors and sometimes we scramble across the mountainsides instead.
My injured foot’s weak and it keeps slipping, turning, and I feel Bear’s eyes pressing on me anxiously every time I wince.
There’s no one else left in these mountains. No one. You know it from the black jagged rocks and the bogs and the cold. The rawness of everything. The bleakness. No one else would be this crazy.
Bear’s eyes have lost their gleam.
“Hester says they go to Ennerdale in the spring. We’ll see them again, Bear,” I say, desperately trying to cheer him.
> Bear stares at me silently, accusing. After a while he says in a wavering voice, “Will there be other kids in Ennerdale, Ju?”
I nod. “Cam says there are. He’s seen some playing.”
“What if they don’t like me?” The words tumble out of him and I look at him, shocked.
“Bear! Of course they’ll like you! Of course they will!”
“None of the kids at school did. Not one of them. Not ever.”
I stare at him. His shoulders have drooped. He’s playing with Queenie’s stone round his neck.
I sigh. “They just didn’t understand you. And they weren’t shown any better,” I say, thinking of everyone in the city. How they’re all shut up in the dark in their own jack-in-the-boxes too. What chance did anyone have in that place? “It’ll be different in Ennerdale, Bear. I promise you.”
“Why?” Bear asks.
“Because they know what it is. To be wild.” I pause. “And because you’re different too.”
Bear raises his eyebrows.
“You’re free now.”
He shrugs, but maybe something lights up inside him because soon he starts bounding on ahead.
He finds us pinecones. Queenie showed him how to dislodge the little seeds inside and he hands some to me to nibble on as we go. “When will Ghost come back?”
I turn round, scanning the mountainsides for her familiar form. “I don’t know, Bear.”
“When it’s time to bring our tea?”
“Bear!” I say, rolling my eyes. “Is food all you think about?”
The air rifle’s back over my shoulder and we’re looking for rabbits, only the land’s still and barren. Eventually we find some mushrooms that Larch showed me were safe – wood blewits. A fairy ring of them, each with bluey-lilac gills like the thin papery sheets of a book radiating out from the central stem. We fry them up for tea with the butter and herbs.
Bear blows into the bottom of the fire and smiles proudly when the flames flare up. “I’m a dragon, Ju! Look at my fire breath.” I laugh, and the heat from the fire is inside me too as I know Bear’s forgiven me.
We’ve got hot stones warming our sleeping bags, but we stay sat by the fire for ages even though it’s just the two of us. We’ve got used to late nights.
Bear plays with his animals and I sketch. I draw Hester, Cam, Larch and Queenie. After a while, Bear comes and snuggles next to me. “What about Ghost, Ju? You haven’t drawn her yet.”
“I did. Back in the cave.”
“Can I see it?”
I flick back in the sketchbook. My fever had only just broken, I’d only started sitting up, but the urge to draw Ghost had been so strong. She’d been with me the whole time I was ill and I’d learned her face by heart.
The snow comes overnight. Hester’s forecasting was right. White covers over everything, over Bear and me too, hidden under our tarpaulin.
The stones are ice-cold at the bottom of my sleeping bag. At some point in the night, Bear climbed in with me like he always used to back in the city. This time it wasn’t because of bad dreams – it was to stay alive. All the words there are for cold – bitter and freezing and frosty and icy and raw – but none of them describe this feeling that’s a lack of feeling altogether.
I force myself out of the sleeping bag and breathe warm air on to my fingers to make them work. I fix my mind on the little gas stove that Hester made us take. One of their precious few that they keep for emergencies.
I somehow get it going on a rock – this miraculous flame in the middle of all the snow.
“Bear, Bear!” I nudge him to get him to wake.
“It’s too cold, Ju,” he murmurs sleepily.
“Open your eyes, Bear! Look! The Snow Queen came. In the night.”
Bear forces his eyelids open and gazes at the white world around us, the blue shadows of everything. He blinks a few times and rubs his eyes, then reaches his fingers over the stove.
“Hester saved us again,” I say.
“Hester would save us from anything,” Bear says fiercely.
Our water bottles are frozen solid but I melt us some snow to drink and fry up some of the mushrooms from yesterday. To defrost us from the inside.
That’s when we see the wolves.
Eight of them, a whole pack, running across the mountainside, just across the valley from where we are.
Bear and I sink into the rock and the snow, right into it. We barely even breathe.
Cam’s advice runs through my head – to be loud and big, to bang pans, to look strong. We don’t do any of that. We just watch them. One after another, trekking through the snow like it’s powdered sugar.
All the stories we’ve read about wolves – the dark shadows of the forest, in grandmother’s clothes, puffing down pig houses and chasing children across snowy lands in the dead of winter – none of that conjured up creatures quite this beautiful. They’re not just grey – they’re mottled with browns and yellows and reds and white.
Only May got it. May, in the Warren, who had never seen any of the Wild.
For one awful moment one of the wolves looks in our direction. One of the younger ones. Maybe that’s why it doesn’t stop. Maybe it doesn’t have the experience to know, to believe its yellow eyes. Or maybe Bear and I have been out here so long we’re of no interest. We’re part of the Wild now. We’re indistinct from it.
We don’t talk after the wolves have gone. We sit around Hester’s tiny stove, staring silently at the flame and the winter landscape all around us. Neither of us has the energy to suggest moving on yet.
Bear’s looking oddly into the twisted tree we found shelter under last night. He shakes one of the branches and snow falls into my face.
“Watch it, Bear!” I spit snow from my mouth.
“A patrin!” he cries.
“A patrin?”
He points to a bundle of twigs tied together in a white rag.
“That’s what Queenie called them. She showed me how to make them while you were sick.”
“A forest-folk sign,” I whisper.
“I know what this one means, Ju!” Bear’s voice quivers with excitement. “The white rag. It means a safe place. Ennerdale! It must be Ennerdale, Ju! It must mean we’re close.”
It’s impossible to say how many times I’ve imagined walking into Ennerdale. In my dreams, and in my nightmares too. Sometimes there’s this bustling village with wooden houses and smoke pouring from the chimneys and a crowd of people, a surge, coming forward to welcome us. Sometimes the people are hostile. The village is walled and they fire arrows. We can’t get close enough to explain that we belong here, or did once. Sometimes the village is burnt to the ground or there’s nothing, simply nothing, and there never was.
We reach the Liza two days after we see the wolves. We find it early in the morning and we follow the river for most of the day, through hazel, aspen, birch and oak. There are pine trees too and Bear still hasn’t kicked his habit – he picks up the cones and stashes them in his already full pockets.
There’s this other tree too. This bushy, spreading tree with needles and tight blue berries, dusted with snow. Bear points them out to me.
“What are they?”
“You should know, Ju!”
“Juniper?”
Bear nods and I reach out my hand. The needles are prickly and there’s a sharp scent of spice. This is what Mum named me after. It really is everywhere.
There are other things that make this valley different too. Things that make you think you’re entering somewhere vaguely habited. It’s little things – slight trails, and places where maybe a tree or two has been cut down, not just broken up in a storm. Then we see the cows Cam told us about. Big black ones, shaggy. Like if you were to imagine a mountain cow. A cow built to survive.
Cam said they trade their wares for beef from these cows. He said it’s food for kings.
“Are you scared?” Bear asks.
“A little. Are you, Bear?”
He nods and pus
hes his hand into mine.
As soon as we see the lake in the distance, shining, we start to see the houses. Little slate huts dotted under the trees, camouflaged against the grey crags of the valley sides, with wisps of smoke reaching up to the sky.
There’s a woman at the side of the river. She’s breaking the ice with a stick and collecting it in a bucket. She’s whistling and she swings the bucket as she walks.
It’s the strangest sight after the bleakness of the mountain. A woman in a loose swirling skirt and a green knitted hat, with red hair flowing out of it like fire, whistling as she collects ice. She’s not seen us and for some reason I can’t open my mouth. Bear and I stand in silence.
But maybe we make a tiny sound, or maybe the woman feels us watching, because she turns and looks right at us. I see her profile in full. Her contours. The curve of her belly.
She puts the bucket down and walks towards us, slow at first and then faster, so fast she’s running, despite the baby in her tummy. “Bear? Juniper? It is, isn’t it? It’s you!”
Bear runs forwards a couple of steps, before stopping, uncertain. “Mum?”
A shadow passes over the woman’s freckled face.
“No, Bear,” she says gently. “I’m not your mum. I’m Willow.”
It should be our turn to speak, I know that, but I can’t. I can’t even move.
“You got here! You made it.” The woman’s smiling in astonishment, but there are tears swimming in her eyes.
“Is our mum here?” I ask. It’s just a couple of seconds but that moment tells me everything. It’s the most crushing silence I ever heard.
I know then – the woman doesn’t need to say anything – but Bear, my astute, perceptive little brother waits bright-eyed beside me for the right answer.
“She’s dead, isn’t she?” I shouldn’t say it like that, not in front of Bear, but some things you want over with, for everyone to have already been told so you can just stop hoping. I can’t stand that moment of waiting. The agony of that tiny bit of hope you still have left.
Where the World Turns Wild Page 20