Bear Adventure (7 page)

The going around the base of the mountain was good, and it only took them half an hour of rapid cycling to reach an area where, rather than being confronted with a near vertical wall of gunmetal-grey rock, they found a broken slope, made of fractured shale and loose boulders.

It may have been less steep than the cliff they had just bypassed, but it still looked like a pretty forbidding obstacle to Amazon. And there was something loose and shifting about the crumbly rock that she didn't at all like the look of.

‘Are we really going to climb up there?' she asked. ‘It looks kind of … unstable …'

‘It's the highest point around. If we want to find that kid and maybe, just maybe, your parents …'

The thought that they might by some miracle find her parents was always there in the back of Amazon's mind.

‘I know, I know. It just looks so, well,
hard
.'

‘Since when were you ever afraid of hard, cuz? Heck, you've stared down big cats and bigger sharks. Not to mention –'

‘
OK, I get it. Where shall we stash the bikes?'

‘I was thinking about that. Walking up a hill is always pretty hard work. But then so is walking down a hill – that's actually when most people fall. But
riding
down a hill …'

‘You
are
kidding …?'

Frazer grinned a grin so wide that Amazon thought the top part of his head might drop off.

‘OMG. You're not kidding, are you?'

‘Listen, Zonnie, I've been looking for a downhill challenge like this all my life, so there's no way I'm going to leave my bike at the bottom of this hill. If you like, you can leave yours down here, but I'm pushing mine up that slope and cruising down in style. I'll wait for you back here, if that's what you want.'

Amazon looked at him, shook her head and started to push her bike up the side of the mountain.

What followed was, measured purely in terms of physical effort, the hardest two hours of Amazon Hunt's life. The slope was too steep for them to be able to push their bikes straight up, so they had to laboriously zigzag their way, traversing back and forth. Although the sky was grey and the temperature getting chilly, they were soon drenched in sweat, and
both stripped down to their T-shirts, which clung clammily to their backs.

The ground itself was treacherous, and several times one or the other would lean on their bike only to find it sliding away under them on the loose gravel.

‘You want to rest?' Frazer asked at one point when, although they felt like they had been travelling for hours, they seemed to have made almost no progress.

Amazon shook her head wearily. She feared that if she stopped then she'd never be able to carry on, and all the work so far would have been for nothing. So, without even pausing, she reached behind her, took the water bottle from her pack, swigged and put it back.

On they trudged, slipping and sliding, grazing their knees and barking their shins, but never pausing. More than once, their steps set off little landslides that rolled down the mountain behind them.

Soon they stopped even trying to look up at their destination, but just plodded on, heads down, like penitents on a pilgrimage to atone for untold sins.

And then Amazon did look up, more in despair than hope, and let out a shout of joy. Suddenly, in that unexpected way in which the seemingly impossible becomes real, they found that they had almost made it: the topmost ridge was just above them. They found the energy within themselves to run – well, perhaps it was more of a rapid stagger – up the final few metres. Just before the summit they
found themselves on solid, jagged rock and had to leave the bikes behind, but that gave them renewed vigour. Without the weight of the bikes, they felt like spirits of the air, and leapt to the top like mountain goats, yelling with delight at each bound from boulder to boulder.

And the moment they reached the very top something miraculous happened. All the way up the skies had been a solid grey, matching almost exactly the grey of the rock. It was a joyless sky for a joyless hike. But now there was a transformation. It was as if the grey were a huge dark curtain that was suddenly thrown back, letting the glorious sun shine into a long-abandoned room.

Now the sky was a dazzling, radiant blue, made more intense by the few wispy white clouds that clung on, like the last tufts of hair on a bald man's head.

Amazon and Frazer stood on a flat slab of rock. Behind them was the relatively easy slope of the broken moraine field they had just ascended. In front of and below them was the great, almost vertical cliff they had skirted. The view was truly astounding. Although the mountain was modest by the standards of the Canadian Coast Range, of which it formed an outcrop, it was the highest point for many, many miles.

From up here the two Trackers could see what looked like an endless sea of trees, broken only by the upswelling islands of other mountains. The trees were mainly the same conifers through which they had cycled – Douglas firs and pine trees. However, in the valley bottoms there were patches of broadleaf trees – ash and oak – and they were now in their full riotous autumnal glory, exploding in orange and yellow and bronze. In the distance the much higher peaks of the Coast Range snapped at the sky like the teeth of a giant wolf.

Amazon and Frazer gazed around them, and then looked at each other, entirely lost for words. In theory they were there to look for the little lost boy, but Amazon was hoping she just might catch a glimpse of a campfire burning below somewhere, a fire that might lead her to her parents. But there was nothing but trees and rocks and glistening ribbons of water. There was no sign of human life, but the view was still sublime.

Finally Amazon managed to say: ‘Do you think it would look this heavenly if it hadn't been such hell to get here?'

‘What I think,' said Frazer, ‘is that this is a heck of a good place for a picnic.'

All they ate was the trail mix and a shared chocolate bar, but it was the greatest meal either of them had ever eaten. The beauty of the setting, the ravenous hunger they had built up, and that sense that they had thoroughly earned it all combined to make each mouthful a culinary joy.

When they'd finished and stashed away their rubbish in their packs, Frazer balanced his neat little Leica camera on a pile of stones and put on the self-timer. They goofed around for a few shots. Then Frazer took some panoramic photos, covering 365 degrees.

‘I'll put these up on the TRACKS Facebook page when we get back to civilization,' he said.

But those very words brought back to them what they were actually supposed to be doing.

‘Right,' he continued, ‘let's see what we can see.'

He took out his binoculars – a fine pair of Swarovskis that his father had given him for his eleventh birthday.

He slowly turned round, scanning the forest.

Amazon used her own sharp eyesight, gazing out again over the infinite space of the Canadian wilderness. And, as she did, her heart suddenly welled up with despair.

‘This is useless,' she said, almost to herself. ‘There's just … so much of it. How could we ever have expected to find anything? The boy … my parents … it's all so futile.'

Frazer let the binoculars hang from the leather strap round his neck.

‘Amazon, if this was futile, my dad would never have begun it. He loves his brother, but more than anything he's a practical man. He never wastes his time. He plays the percentages. He's got good reasons to believe that your parents are still out there.'

Amazon had been gazing into the middle distance as Frazer spoke, trying to find the hope that she knew should live in those words. But then something closer caught her eye, on the slope beneath them. Something pale. Something moving.

No, not one thing, but two.

She touched Frazer's arm.

‘Look,' she said, her voice quiet, almost a whisper, despite the fact that the creatures were too far away for even a shout to reach them.

‘What? Where?'

Silently, Amazon pointed down to the foot of the slope they had so recently ascended.

It was the spirit bears, mother and cub. The mother was moving warily, but also with purpose. She seemed torn between her desire to follow some scent trail and her fear of taking the cub out into the open.

‘That can't really be the same two bears we saw, can it?' asked Amazon.

‘I think it must be. You wouldn't get another two so close – they need a bigger range than that.'

‘What are they doing?'

‘Looks like she's caught a scent. Maybe there's an injured elk or something out there. Or some carrion. Or it could just be a blueberry bush. At this time of year they need to keep eating pretty much all the time to fatten up for their hibernation.'

‘Have you noticed,' said Amazon, ‘that she seems to be roughly following the path that we took up the slope?'

Amazon had begun that sentence without thinking through its actual meaning. But, as soon as it was out in the open, its implications were as obvious as a golden bear on a grey hillside.

Frazer gulped – Amazon thought it was perhaps a comically exaggerated gulp of the kind a nervous cartoon canary would make at the approach of a hungry cartoon cat. But it might simply have been the gulp of a boy facing up to the reality of becoming
prey
.

Still the bears came on. However, their progress was quite slow. At this rate it would take them as long as Amazon and Frazer to reach the top. Amazon asked if she could look through the binoculars. Frazer handed them over, although she could see that it took an effort of will.

‘Don't drop them,' he said. ‘They're top-of-the-range. They have inbuilt image stabilizers and …'

‘Yeah, I get it,' replied Amazon.

The binoculars really were superb. It took Amazon a second or two to focus, but when she did she had to gasp. She had a visceral urge to flinch – it seemed as though the bears were literally an arm's length away.

When she had seen the bears on the lakeside, she had been so overwhelmed by both their beauty and her own fear that she had not been able to observe them in any kind of objective way. But looking at them now through the binoculars was oddly like watching them on a TV documentary. She almost imagined the narrator's voice-over:

‘The Kermode bear – this rare and exquisite subspecies of the
Ursus americanus
– is chiefly at home in the dense coastal woodlands of Western Canada, and only ventures out into more open territory when the need for food drives it. Here we see the mother and her cub undertake –'

‘Zonnie,' said Frazer, interrupting her daydream, ‘I think maybe we should get out of here. I couldn't see any sign of any plane wreckage, or the boy. I think we should just make our way back to the campsite and wait for my dad to rejoin us.

‘If we skirt down the eastern ridge of this slope, we can get back on the trail without the bears noticing us. The wind will carry our scent away from them, and unless we start singing “Yankee Doodle” the mother won't hear us. Plus, looking at it, you can
see that the slope's not too bad there, even for a novice like you, so we should be able to cruise down. This is where mountain biking really gets to be fun.'

Reluctantly, Amazon agreed. She had imagined herself finding her parents and saving the kid, but now she realized that it was just a dream. She was barely more than a kid herself. It was time to admit defeat.

‘Move slowly,' said Frazer, as they crept stealthily back down the slope to where they'd left the bikes. ‘And keep low.'

‘I thought bears couldn't see very well?' whispered Amazon.

‘It's a myth. Their vision isn't as hot as their sense of smell or hearing, but they see about as well as we do. The difference is that they use all three senses when they're assessing prey, whereas we've come to rely just on vision.'

‘I wish you wouldn't keep talking about us as prey,' said Amazon.

They reached the bikes without the bears noticing them. Then, as Amazon picked up her bike, her foot slipped on the loose ground. A few pebbles rolled down the slope. The pebbles set some slightly larger stones moving. And then, as Amazon and Frazer looked on, horrified, the trickle of rocks and stones rapidly snowballed, until it became a landslide. The whole hillside had been in a state of instability.

‘Jeepers,' said Frazer, ‘that could have happened while we were climbing up. We'd have been –'

‘Frazer, look,' interrupted Amazon.

She pointed to the landslide and then at its direction. It was heading straight for the spirit bears. The mother bear seemed oblivious to the danger. She was still heading up. And then she stopped, sniffed and looked up. For a second Amazon thought that the bear was looking right at her, but later she thought that she must just have been looking towards the sound of the landslide.

‘Oh no,' said Frazer, no longer bothering to keep either his voice or his body low, ‘what have we done?'

It seemed both agonizingly slow and yet over in the blink of an eye. The rockfall – a mix of grit, pebbles, stones, rocks and now huge boulders – surged down the mountainside.

The mother bear turned and tried to guide her cub back towards the relative safety of the trees, but it was obvious to Amazon that they would never make it.

It seemed that the mother bear reached the same conclusion. For now she opened her great jaws and snatched up the cub. Ten metres away there was a huge boulder – too big, surely, to be carried down with the landslide, and tall enough, perhaps, to provide a refuge. The bear reached it just as the first rocks hit her. She tried to climb the boulder, but it was impossible with the heavy infant in her mouth. She just couldn't seem to scramble up. So then, using
her mighty neck muscles, she hurled the clamouring cub up on to the flat top of the boulder, and then prepared to leap after it.

Too late.

The surging wall of the landslide hit her, and carried her for many metres down the slope. Her body rolled and spun in the flow, almost as if it had been water. For a few hopeful moments Amazon thought that the mother was going to be OK, that she would be able to ride out the disaster. But then she was thrown against another of the big boulders that littered the slope, and a second later another huge rock crashed into her body. Rocks piled up round her beautiful golden fur, burying her beyond hope of salvation.

For some strange reason Amazon and Frazer only registered the huge noise of the landslide because of the shocking nature of the silence that followed it. They both seemed rooted to the spot, as if lava had flowed round their feet and set them in solid rock.

There was literally not a glimpse of golden fur to be seen beneath the rubble. And now Amazon and Frazer's faces were as grey as the rocks. Tears coursed down Amazon's cheeks, and Frazer's eyes glistened.

‘What have I done, what have I done?' moaned Amazon, echoing and yet subtly changing Frazer's earlier words.

‘It wasn't you. It was … it was … it was just rotten
luck. This whole hillside was ready to collapse at any moment. Amazon, these things happen in the wild. Animals get killed all the time.'

‘But the baby … What can we do? We can't leave it alone out here.'

They both focused back on the little bear cub. It was still on top of the big rock. It was making the most heartbreaking sounds, a sort of sheeplike bleating, full of yearning interspersed with yelps that were both frightened and angry.

‘I guess we'd better go and see if there's anything we can do,' said Frazer. ‘But we can't go down that
way, and we certainly can't ride. That whole slope could go and take us with it. We can edge our way down this ridge, trying to keep to the solid rock, and then maybe work our way across when we get level with the cub.'

Amazon saw that this was a good plan. But it was one destined never to be put into operation. Through her bleary eyes, she caught another glimpse of golden fur. Not quite the perfect pale honey of the spirit bears, but lovely nevertheless. For a moment she thought that somehow the mother bear had survived the fall and shrugged off her shroud of rocks and rubble. But this new vision was too far down the slope – right at the treeline.

Another bear? Perhaps a friend of the other two? Would it adopt the cub?

Frazer now saw it too.

‘Oh, jeepers,' he said, filling the silly word with dread and sorrow.

And now Amazon could see that this was no bear. No bear ever moved with that lithe, sinuous grace. No bear was ever made like this, of nothing but bone, sinew and muscle. No bear was ever quite so intent on one thing and one thing only: killing.

‘Cougar,' said Amazon, even though she'd never seen a live one before.

The grace and intensity of the animal reminded her of one of the two big cats she'd seen so recently in Russia – the Amur leopard. And this cougar
seemed bigger than the leopard she had come to know. Not as heavily set, perhaps, but taller and longer.

And the cougar could only be after one thing. The cub still bleated on his rock, and the puma stalked it.