The Arctic Challenge Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  The Bear Grylls Adventures series

  Dedication

  1. Left and Write

  2. No Direction Home

  3. Go With the Floe

  4. Snow Ripples

  5. Deep Freeze

  6. Pieces of the Jigsaw

  7. Sunny Side Up

  8. Ice and Fire

  9. One Little Fishy

  10. A Lot of Bottle

  About the Author

  Copyright

  The BEAR GRYLLS ADVENTURES series

  The Blizzard Challenge

  The Desert Challenge

  The Jungle Challenge

  The Sea Challenge

  The River Challenge

  The Earthquake Challenge

  The Volcano Challenge

  The Safari Challenge

  The Cave Challenge

  The Mountain Challenge

  The Arctic Challenge

  The Sailing Challenge

  To the young survivor

  reading this book for the first time.

  May your eyes always be wide open

  to adventure, and your heart full

  of courage and determination to

  see your dreams through.

  1

  LEFT AND WRITE

  Joe laughed, excited and dizzy, as the world spun round and round. It was just like being inside a washing machine.

  He was strapped inside a huge transparent plastic bubble, with his friend Omar, bouncing around a sandy track. This was the Bubble Run, one of Camp’s many activities. Joe could see the other bubble trundling behind them, with Lily and Mia in it.

  “Bend coming!” Omar called.

  “I see it,” Joe said confidently.

  To steer the bubble, they both had to lean in the same direction at the same time.

  “And … lean!” said Omar.

  The bubble rolled around the bend, but they were going a bit too fast and it overshot, straight into a tree.

  They bounced off and Omar and Joe laughed. This was fun! But Omar spotted a problem.

  “Hey, we’re going to hit the girls! Lean left!”

  Deliberate bubble bumping wasn’t allowed. It spoiled the fun for everyone. Joe leaned.

  “No, left!”

  Joe quickly leaned the other way. Too late. The bubbles bounced off each other.

  “We’ve got to get out of their way,” said Omar. “Lean right.”

  Joe felt his brain jam up. Right, left, which was which?

  “Right!” Omar urged. “Come on, Joe, or we’ll hit them again!”

  The girls’ bubble thumped into theirs again. Omar saw where they were rolling in alarm.

  “We’re right at the top of the slope! Lean left …”

  Joe panicked. It was too late. The two bubbles were out of control.

  For a few dizzying seconds, the whole world whirled as they bounced down the slope. The bubbles stopped at the bottom with one last bump. With their heads still spinning, they unstrapped themselves and clambered out.

  Everyone was dizzy and a bit dazed, but Joe was relieved to see that no one looked hurt. Well, almost. Lily looked slightly more confused than the others.

  Joe was going to say something but then a leader came running down, a look of worry all over her face. She asked if everyone was okay, and Joe had to admit that it was his fault.

  “Omar was telling me to go right but … uh … I just get muddled …”

  Joe expected everyone to laugh, but no one did. The leader just gave a sympathetic smile. She pointed out that Joe and Omar both wore watches on their left wrists – so from now on, Omar should tell Joe ‘watch’ and ‘not-watch’ instead of ‘left’ and ‘right’. They pushed their bubbles back to the top, and finished the Bubble Run without bumping out of control again.

  But the fun had gone out of it for Joe. He just felt stupid.

  Afterwards, they were all at lunch with the rest of Camp in the meal clearing. They picked a table in the shade of a tree. Joe let the others chat while he studied his hands. He had to get this right.

  Once, for one day only, Joe had tried marking his hands, ‘L’ and ‘R’. Then someone noticed the ‘L’ and asked what it was for. He had made up some excuse, and gone straight off to the bathroom to wash the letters away. It was just embarrassing.

  ‘Watch’ or ‘not-watch’ should work. As long as he always wore a watch, and remembered which wrist to put it on. But, apart from Omar, people would just keep on saying ‘left’ and ‘right’.

  Once, Joe had had an easy way of remembering directions.

  Left was the way you turned out of his house to head for town.

  Right was the other way.

  This had worked for him, until a teacher at school had tried to be helpful.

  “Your right hand is the hand you write with, Joe!” she had said with a smile.

  She hadn’t noticed Joe was left-handed.

  So now his thoughts went something like this.

  Left is town direction which is this way but that’s my writing hand and I write with my right except I don’t I write with my left and … AARGH!

  That was when his brain sort of locked up. There was just too much thinking going on up there.

  And that was how it had been for him ever since.

  “Hey, Joe.” Lily interrupted his thoughts. “Maybe you’d like this?”

  She pushed a compass across the table at him.

  Joe wondered if she was trying to be helpful, or if she just thought she was being funny.

  “Why do you think I need a compass?” he demanded. “’Cos I get lost so easily?”

  “No, it’s not that,” she said. “Really. Just consider it a gift.”

  Joe could see Lily was serious. She really was giving him a present.

  “Okay. Uh … thanks?” Joe put the compass in his pocket. Maybe it would come in handy.

  Meanwhile, Mia was still making out that basically the crash hadn’t been her fault even though it had turned out she’d not bothered to strap in properly.

  Joe fought back a sudden wave of irritation.

  He wanted to yell, “It wasn’t all our fault!” But anything he said might just remind people that he couldn’t tell left and right.

  Abruptly, Joe stood up. Omar looked up in surprise.

  “Hey, Joe, you haven’t eaten.”

  “That’s okay. You have it,” Joe said. “I just need to … go somewhere.”

  Omar looked anxious.

  “You sure you’ll be okay?”

  Joe realised his friend was looking out for him. Omar was worried Joe would get lost.

  “I’ll be fine,” he said, turning away. “I’ve got a compass.”

  2

  NO DIRECTION HOME

  Joe slouched through the trees, kicking at the leaves, hands in pockets.

  “Stupid, stupid, stupid,” he muttered.

  But he knew he wasn’t stupid. Not really.

  Joe had a friend at school with reading challenges. His friend wasn’t stupid either. Some kids found maths hard. Some kids couldn’t play a musical instrument. Joe got confused about directions. It didn’t make any of them stupid.

  The only person telling Joe that he was stupid was Joe himself.

  But it was just so annoying!

  And he was hungry. Joe’s stomach rumbled, loud enough for anyone else to hear. If there had been anyone around. There wasn’t, because Joe had wandered deep into the woods. He couldn’t hear any of the sounds of Camp.

  Joe sighed. It was stupid to be hungry when you didn’t need to be. He should make his way back. Maybe he could get there before the end of lunch.

  Joe turned around – and stopped.

&nbs
p; Which way?

  Joe set off through the gap between two trees. He had come this way …

  Hadn’t he?

  Or maybe he had come from over there, past that bush?

  Joe rolled his eyes. Yup, he had managed to get lost again.

  Normally, Joe made sure he went everywhere with his friends. They all just stuck together and he didn’t have to think about directions.

  He’d managed to get himself lost at Camp once before, and accidentally won a game of Capture the Flag. But nothing good was going to happen accidentally now, he thought glumly.

  Then Joe remembered the compass. He pulled it out and studied the dial. Four directions, one needle, always pointing north. Easy. He just had to follow the needle …

  But which direction?

  Joe groaned out loud.

  He had no idea where the meal clearing was. So, he had no idea which direction to follow.

  And he was still hungry.

  “Well, that was clever, wasn’t it?” he muttered.

  Joe put his hands on his head, and thought.

  There were paths and tracks running through the woods. There were lots of clearings. And there was a fence around Camp. So, if he just picked a direction and kept going, then sooner or later he would find something. Maybe another kid. Maybe the fence. If he found the fence, then he could just follow that and he would find the main gate.

  Joe picked a direction and started walking with a determined stride.

  But after a while he had to walk around some bushes and then he couldn’t see where he had come from.

  Joe carried on, a bit more hesitantly.

  Then he had to take a detour to cross a stream.

  Now which way had he been going?

  Joe felt his heart and breathing start to speed up. What if he just went round and round in circles in the woods forever?

  The compass could help him head in a straight line!

  Joe shot another look at the dial.

  “Oh, what?”

  So much for that idea. The needle was just going round and round. And instead of four directions on the compass, there were five.

  “Fine, great, whatever,” Joe muttered through his teeth. He stuffed the compass back into his pocket.

  “So, next idea?”

  Joe stared at the nearest tree, like it might make a helpful suggestion. Once, he’d heard someone on TV saying that trees could help you tell your direction.

  But he couldn’t remember how.

  Joe turned a slow circle and tried to remember what it was about trees and directions. It just wasn’t coming to him.

  “Stupid trees,” Joe groaned.

  He stopped moving, but now he was dizzy and it felt like everything was spinning around him.

  “Aargh!” Joe shouted in frustration.

  He stumbled, and suddenly realised that it didn’t just feel like the trees were spinning. They really were spinning. Round and round and round. The ground underneath him was shifting and spinning.

  Joe dropped dizzily to his knees, before he fell over. A freezing wind blasted its way through the wood. Joe yelped and clutched his arms. He was only wearing a t-shirt, and his bare skin had turned rough with goose pimples. Joe shivered and his teeth chattered.

  He realised he wasn’t kneeling on earth and leaves.

  He was kneeling on … ice?

  Joe looked up.

  He was on a slab of floating ice, in the middle of a river. Other lumps of ice jostled and bumped each other as they slowly drifted downstream. The river was wide and swollen. Trees on either side looked like Christmas trees, covered with snow.

  The slab wobbled under Joe. It was longer than a grown-up’s height, but it was only as wide as his outstretched arms.

  There was no sign of Camp, or the woods that Joe had just been walking in. And his shivers were getting uncontrollable. If something didn’t happen soon, he might just shiver to death.

  “Hello,” came a voice nearby. “Over here!”

  Joe’s head whipped round. A man was running along the snow-covered bank.

  3

  GO WITH THE FLOE

  The man was dressed in warm, padded clothes, with a fur-lined hood. He wasn’t far from Joe either, near enough that he didn’t have to shout. At least, he wouldn’t have had to shout if there wasn’t an ice-packed river flowing between them.

  The man stopped by a small tree. A blade flashed in his hand as he hacked at a slim branch.

  “You can’t swim in water this cold,” he called. “You’ll have to push yourself over to the bank. Take this.”

  The man jogged along until he was level with Joe, then threw the branch like a javelin. It hit the ice just in front of Joe.

  Joe’s numb fingers struggled to hold onto it. He tried to stand up. The ice wobbled again and he quickly dropped back to his knees.

  “Don’t stand,” the man called. “Stay just as you are. You need to keep your centre of gravity low. Just push gently. Make sure not to push yourself off the ice.”

  Joe nervously put the branch into the water. The ice started to tilt, but he felt the end of the branch touch the bottom. He put all his strength into his arms. The ice moved, the end of the branch stayed where it was, but soon Joe was leaning right out and the ice was tilting. He quickly pulled the branch back in. The ice splashed back to being level again.

  Bit by bit, Joe pushed his piece of ice towards the bank. The movement warmed him up – a little. His teeth didn’t chatter so much and his shivering had slowed down. But he still couldn’t feel his hands.

  “You’re doing really well!”

  Joe didn’t dare look up, but it was good to know the man was still there, encouraging him.

  At last the ice bumped against the bank. The man was right there. He held his arm out.

  “And, jump!”

  The ice started to rock again as Joe stood up, and he jumped without any delay. The ice shot away backwards, but the man grabbed Joe and swung him to dry land.

  “Brilliant!” he said, smiling. “You handled that so well. Now let’s get you warm!” He pointed to a clump of trees nearby. “My camp’s back here.”

  Joe’s arms and feet were going numb as they hurried through the pine trees to a clearing. There, Joe saw the most beautiful sight of his life. A small fire, crackling away, with a steaming metal pot hanging over it.

  Joe crouched next to the fire while the man pulled things out of his rucksack.

  A warm, padded coat and a pair of thick trousers. A thermal hat. Gloves. Thick socks. Fur-lined boots.

  Joe tried to pull everything on over the clothes he was already wearing. His fingers were so numb he couldn’t get a grip.

  “Here, let me help.” The man held the coat while Joe slipped his arms into the sleeves. “Every second counts when you’re fighting hypothermia.”

  “Wh-what’s that?” Joe stammered through chattering teeth.

  The man helped Joe do the coat up.

  “It’s when your body core gets so cold, it can’t warm itself up again. Don’t worry, you’ll be okay. We acted quickly.”

  The man set the hat on Joe’s head.

  “It looks like I’m your guide out of here,” he said cheerfully. “My name’s Bear. Are you ready for some real adventure?”

  “I g-guess s-so.” Joe’s teeth still chattered. He pulled the hood up. Now he was thoroughly wrapped in warm clothing. He wasn’t getting colder, but there was still a chill deep inside him. “Thanks. I’m J-Joe. And I’m still c-cold.”

  “Let’s run on the spot,” Bear suggested. He demonstrated, and Joe ran with him. He felt a very faint flicker of warmth deep down inside his body.

  “And do this.” Bear started to wheel his arms around like a windmill. “It looks a bit odd, but it’s a great way to drive the blood back into your limbs.”

  Joe swung his arms like Bear had shown him, for about a minute. His fingers started to tingle with pins and needles, but soon he was feeling almost back to normal.

&n
bsp; Meanwhile, Bear poured him a drink from the pot over the fire.

  “Fancy a cup of hot pine-needle tea?” he asked. “It’s full of energy and vitamins. It’s just what you need!”

  “Thank you.” Joe took it gratefully. He didn’t care what kind of tea it was, as long as it was warm. The heat from the cup soaked in through his gloves and warmed his hands. They sat on logs either side of the fire, and Bear poured a cup for himself. Joe sipped at his tea and felt the glow inside him growing stronger.

  “Thank you for helping me,” Joe said. “But, um, where are we, exactly? I was trying to follow a compass but I think I’ve got really lost.”

  “Compasses won’t work up here in the Arctic,” Bear agreed. “They point to the magnetic north pole, but we’re so far north we’re almost on top of the magnetic pole anyway. A compass would just go in circles.” Bear sipped at his tea. “I was trekking to the coast when an ice dam broke and the river flooded. It blocked my path. Having to find another route has added a good twenty-four hours to my journey.”

  “Couldn’t you get across it?” Joe asked.

  Bear smiled as he shook his head.

  “You’ve got the survival spirit, Joe! It’s always important to explore your options. Water’s really powerful, even when it’s slow. A river like that one, flowing at seven miles per hour, could wash a house away, so I wasn’t going to try it. And the cold would be too much. So I’m heading for an abandoned hunting lodge to spend the night in. It’s by a lake, a few hours walk from here.”

  “It’s lucky for me you were here, then,” Joe said thoughtfully.

  Bear smiled.

  “Well, that’s true! Good things often happen when we least expect them to. I’d only stopped for a rest and a hot drink, but it was the right time and the right place to meet you.”

  Bear and Joe both took another sip of tea. Joe felt the warmth inside him. Bear smiled and said, “We’ll be doing this a lot. We need to be hydrated and warm, and daytime temperatures here can be down to minus twenty. I’ve got some provisions – but, of course, I only brought enough for one person and for a shorter trek! We can forage off the land. Survival is about finding ways of using nature, not fighting it. But I should warn you …”