Bear Adventure (2 page)

‘What are you all laughing at?' asked Frazer. ‘That thing nearly got me!'

‘What, the weasel?' gasped Amazon, in between her guffaws.

‘That wasn't a weasel, it was a wolverine. They're famously vicious.'

‘The wolverine,' said Hal Hunt calmly, ‘is, technically, the world's second biggest member of the mustelids, the weasel family. The first is the giant otter, which you may remember from your trip down the Amazon last year. And yes, the wolverine is pretty feisty, but you really weren't in any danger. Did you disturb it at a kill?'

‘Yes,' said Frazer. ‘Sort of. It had a wolf's leg in its mouth.'

‘It was just protecting its dinner,' Hal continued. ‘The wolverine's fearsome reputation has been greatly exaggerated. There's no record of a person ever having been harmed by one. You'd only be in danger if you were weak or trapped in a snowdrift.'

Frazer rolled his eyes at the lecture. He liked to show off his wilderness expertise in front of Amazon, who was a little younger than him. But there's nothing like being told off by your dad to make you feel like a little kid.

The three of them had flown out that morning from the gritty frontier town of Prince Rupert. Hal Hunt piloted the aircraft himself – a tough little de Havilland floatplane laden with the expedition gear, including two mountain bikes strapped to the outside of the fuselage. The plane had struggled to get over the white peaks and high ice fields of the Canadian Coast Mountains. During her recent adventures in Russia and Polynesia, Amazon had seen many astounding sights, with crags reaching into the heavens and valleys cutting into the earth below, but these mountains were a match for any of them. They also held a new threat: the promise of the winter to come.

They had landed on the perfectly flat waters of a small tear-shaped lake, glistening like mercury in the autumn sunshine. Circling over the lake before landing, they had seen nothing but forest, mountains and more lakes. Not the remotest sign that human beings had ever set foot in this beautiful wilderness.

‘You'd never guess,' said Hal Hunt, crackling over the intercom, ‘that this is one of the oldest inhabited parts of North America. Fourteen thousand years
ago the earliest Americans walked over from Siberia to Alaska, and moved down the western coast. Within a thousand years, they reached the very bottom of South America.'

‘Walked?' Amazon had asked. ‘Isn't there a sea in between Alaska and Siberia?'

‘Correct – the Bering Strait – but back then the world was in the grip of the last ice age. So much of the sea was locked up in the ice that a land bridge was left exposed, and those good old Siberians just walked right across.'

But they weren't here in this remote corner of Canada to go sightseeing. Nor were they here on a conservation mission. They were here to find Amazon's parents, Roger and Ling-Mei Hunt, whose own light aircraft had gone missing somewhere in this wilderness.

The authorities had given up on the search: there were so many thousands of square miles of virgin forest … And, as the police had pointed out, the time that had elapsed since the plane's disappearance meant that there was really very little chance of anyone still being alive.

But Hal Hunt knew his brother too well.

‘If he survived the crash then he's still alive,' he'd said to Amazon, back in Prince Rupert. ‘And if he's alive then I'm going to find him.'

‘I still don't understand why Uncle Roger and Aunt Ling-Mei didn't come back by themselves,' said
Frazer. ‘I mean, they could have found a ranger station, or a hunting party, or just made their own way back to civilization by themselves, couldn't they?'

‘I think you underestimate just how much wilderness there is out here, Frazer,' replied Hal. ‘But I don't think it's just that. I've got a feeling that either Roger didn't want to be rescued, or someone stopped him from being rescued. Either way, the answer to this riddle is in the wreckage of their aircraft and we're going to find it, if it's the last thing TRACKS ever does.'

And so three separate teams of TRACKS young conservationists were out in the forests searching, while Dr Drexler, the TRACKS chief scientific officer, stayed back in Prince Rupert, coordinating their actions.

‘OK, guys, let's focus,' said Hal Hunt, still smiling about his son's encounter with the wolverine. ‘We're here to find my brother and Ling-Mei, not to horse around.'

He beckoned Frazer and Amazon to gather round, and then unfolded a map of the Canadian province of British Columbia on a low camp table.

‘We're here,' he said, ‘in the foothills of the Coast Range, with the heights to the west and the interior plateau to the east. Miranda Coverdale is leading a team here, further south, and Bluey's team are up here, to the north.'

Miranda and Bluey were two members of TRACKS. Bluey, named for his bright red hair, was Frazer's best friend. He was in his early twenties and had a PhD in marine biology, but he still looked and, at times, acted like a big kid. Miranda was the deputy veterinary officer to Dr Drexler. She was about the same age as Bluey, but she looked and behaved a lot older. She was definitely the sensible one in the gang.

‘Tomorrow morning you two take your bikes along this trail, here. That'll take you to the foot of this hill.' Hal jabbed his finger at the map, and then pointed to a rocky outcrop in the middle distance. ‘It's called Mount Humboldt, but it's more of a hill than a mountain.'

‘Humboldt?' said Amazon. ‘You mean like the squid …?'

Amazon had recently had an uncomfortably close encounter with a horde of ravenous Humboldt squid in the Pacific Ocean.

‘That's right,' replied Hal, ‘named after the same guy, the great German naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt. He discovered –'

‘There're trails?' said Frazer, before his dad could launch into one of his lectures.

‘What? Oh yep. Not many. A few old hunting trails and maybe a disused logging road in the woods too. Rough, but should be OK for mountain bikes. It's twelve miles away, but the trail heads straight there, so it shouldn't take you more than two hours. Then
scale Humboldt – you won't need climbing gear, it's nothing more than a hike, really – and see what you can see. From the top you'll have a view over the whole area. Obviously there's no cellphone signal out here, but we can keep in touch using the sat phones.'

‘Which way are you going, Dad?'

‘I'm heading out east from here, along this valley.' He traced the blue line of a river with his finger. ‘If Roger was lost and flying without navigation equipment, he might have been following the river to try to reach a settlement. OK, we all clear?'

Amazon nodded. Just being out here and doing something made her feel better. It gave a little room for hope to grow.

‘Yes, sir!' said Frazer, as enthusiastic as ever, his brush with the terrible man-eating wolverine already forgotten.

‘In that case, let's go fishing.'

‘Have you done much fishing?' Hal asked Amazon, as they walked through the woods. They were each carrying a rod and tackle.

‘None,' she replied. ‘Never really saw the point in standing around aimlessly holding a stick.'

‘Well, honey,' said Hal, ‘you'll see the point today. This isn't English fishing for minnows; this is real North American fishing. There are lake trout out there bigger than
you
.'

‘Really?' said Amazon, her eyes suddenly wide. ‘And what do they eat?'

‘Anything smaller than them. So make sure you don't fall in!'

Amazon knew what her Uncle Hal was up to. She was desperately worried about her parents, and Hal was doing all he could to keep her mind engaged and busy so she wouldn't dwell on the dark fears that crept back whenever nothing more engrossing was there to keep them at bay.

The trouble was that this sort of thing didn't come naturally to Hal. Everything that Amazon had heard about him when he was younger from her own father created an image of a happy and relaxed person, able to enjoy life and, crucially, someone capable of standing back and letting others enjoy theirs.

But things had changed when Hal was in his early twenties. It was then that his own father, John Hunt, had been badly hurt in an accident. After that, the burden of running the business, and looking after his kid brother – Amazon's father – had fallen on Hal's young shoulders.

The spooky thing was that, although Amazon didn't know the details, she did know that he had been in a plane crash somewhere in Canada …

Back then they ran an operation collecting animals to sell to zoos. It was Hal at first, later helped by Roger, who changed things around and set up TRACKS, with a focus more on keeping animals safe in their own environment, rather than in zoos. He'd worked himself into the ground, sometimes travelling the world, but also doing the boring work of getting funding and lobbying governments. And so the organization had grown.

But somewhere along the way Hal had lost his joy and his zest. Where once he zipped through life, now he trudged.

The brothers finally fell out over Hal's desire to bring in ever-increasing amounts of money to pay
for the TRACKS programmes around the world. Roger thought that too many compromises had been made, that TRACKS had become too close to some unsavoury governments and big corporations, which had only their own interests in mind. He thought that TRACKS had lost its soul.

And so it lost him too.

Frazer's mother had died when he was a baby, which again had heaped the pressure on his father's shoulders. He might have crumpled under it, but it just made him stronger, tougher. What it didn't make him was easy to live with. He had become closed off emotionally, reluctant to speak his heart. Frazer knew that his dad loved him, but that was because he knew how to read the signs: a half-smile here, a pat on the shoulder there.

Hal Hunt was trying with Amazon, he really was. She sensed that. But he just wasn't the person you went to when you wanted a hug and a shoulder to cry on – to lean on, yes, but not to cry on.

The trail from the campsite opened out and the crystal waters of the lake were before them. Slender pine trees rimmed the shoreline and Amazon saw a beaver lodge – an untidy mound of branches and mud – across on the far side. A single bird – a dramatic black and white Great Northern Loon – sailed serenely across the water, its wake a perfect V behind it.

The floatplane was moored close to the lakeside, near to where a spit of shingle reached out into the water like a long, bony finger. Hal led the way to the end of the spit. It was more exposed out there, with water on three sides, and Amazon shivered.

‘You can feel that winter's coming,' she said.

‘Another month and you'll be able to walk across to the other side,' said Hal. ‘But this is still a good time for the animals. Lots to eat. And I suggest we get a modest share of it!'

‘You sure there's trout out there, Dad?' said Frazer. He was already, in his mind, feasting on the fish, hot and white from the campfire.

‘Oh yes,' Hal nodded. ‘At this time of the year the trout come a little nearer to the surface. All summer long they've been down at the bottom, vacuuming up the baitfish. But now the water's colder, the whole crowd of 'em get a yearning for the sun.'

‘How we gonna catch them, Dad. Fly?'

‘Does this look like a fly rod, Frazer?' Hal answered, holding up the stout rod.

‘Er, I guess not.'

‘We're going to use lures.'

Hal showed Amazon how to attach the lure – a miniature model of a minnow with a cluster of hooks on its tail – to the line.

Amazon really had never fished before, and she found this part incredibly tricky. She managed to cut her finger on one of the sharp barbs, drawing a
bubble of bright red blood. Hal took her hand gently in his and eased the hook out. He even had a plaster to cover up the wound.

‘You're a brave kid,' Hal said. ‘When Frazer here first hooked himself, he squealed so loud the fish came up to see what was happening. I do believe that a wide-mouthed bass asked if he could keep the noise down, as he was trying to get some sleep.'

‘Thanks, Dad,' said Frazer, rolling his eyes. ‘Got any other embarrassing stories about me? Maybe you could show Zonnie a photo of me in my diaper, sucking my thumb.'

Hal laughed one of his rare, hearty laughs. ‘OK, hotshot, you can teach Amazon how to cast. I'm going to find a quiet spot further down the shore. The person that catches the biggest fish gets to eat the eyeballs.'