A Bear Grylls Adventure 1 Read online

  MANY WAYS TO DIE

  Olly was now shivering so much he could barely look around.

  “What’s h-app-en-ed, wh-ere am I …?” he mumbled through chattering teeth. He was still wearing the shorts and t-shirt he had put on to go to bed. The tent and everything else he knew had vanished.

  The man was rummaging through a bulky rucksack, but despite the cold the first thing he handed Olly wasn’t clothes. It was a pair of tinted goggles.

  “Get these on. There’s millions of ice crystals in the snow and they’re all shining in the sun. They’ll make you go blind if you’re not careful.”

  Olly pulled the goggles over his head, and his eyes immediately felt better. He could see clearly as the man chucked him a long-sleeved t-shirt and a fleece and a pair of trousers, all his size. The man kept rummaging until he had pulled out a waterproof jacket, and another pair of trousers, a hat and a pair of thick gloves.

  “First lesson: always have the right gear,” the man said. “It keeps you alive.”

  Olly quickly pulled it all on and straight away felt a bit warmer.

  “Th-thank you,” Olly managed to reply.

  The man smiled back. A mountain smile that made creases in his tanned face around the corner of his eyes. “Okay. Let’s see what we can do about your footwear.”

  By now Olly’s bare feet were numb with cold. The man dug out a pair of thick woollen socks, and a pair of lace-up leather boots.

  “Try these on for size. If they are a little big that’s okay. It will give your feet room to breathe, and the trapped air will keep them warmer than tight-fitting boots.”

  Olly sat on a rock, nodded blankly back at the man, and pulled the socks on. He immediately felt his feet wrapped up in soft, comfortable warmth. When he pulled the boots on, it was even better. He stood up and took a couple of steps to try them out. They came up above his ankles and gripped onto his legs. He felt he could walk anywhere in them.

  “Ankle support and a good grip for slippery surfaces,” the man said approvingly. “Just what you need. You’d be amazed how much comes down to a pair of nice, dry feet. And a decent meal, of course. I’ll make breakfast. Here.” He passed Olly a couple of empty metal flasks. “Fill these up with snow, will you?”

  It seemed an odd thing to do, but Olly did as he was asked. He scooped the snow into the flasks with his gloved hands. While he did that, the man put some oats, honey and water into a pan and started to warm them up over a portable gas stove.

  “Now screw the tops on those flasks,” the man told him, “and slide them inside your top. Your body heat will melt the snow. The air up here is very, very dry, so we’re going to need a lot of water as we go. We could stay nice and warm in our clothes but still die of thirst if we’re not careful.”

  Olly looked around at the ground and the mountains, all covered in white.

  “But can’t we just eat the snow?” he asked. “It’s just frozen water.”

  The man smiled as if he knew Olly had been about to ask that very question.

  “Exactly. It’s frozen. Your lips and tongue will end up with painful cold sores, which could get infected. There’s lots of ways to die up here, and that’s a really dumb one!” He smiled broadly and kept stirring the oats that now were bubbling nicely.

  Olly’s stomach was rumbling. The man produced a couple of metal bowls and they tucked in. Olly had missed the barbecue last night and was so hungry he got through his helping in seconds.

  Now he wasn’t going to freeze to death, or starve, it seemed a good time for an obvious question.

  “So, where exactly are we?” Olly asked. His voice sounded loud in the cold, clean air. There was no other noise. Just the whistle of the wind in his ears, which were starting to ache with the cold. He pulled his hat down and his hood up to keep them warm.

  “Thinking like a survivor. Smart!” the man commented. “Most of your body heat is lost through your head. Keep it warm and it’s half the battle won.”

  He pulled on a warm-looking hat of his own.

  “As for where we are, we’re four thousand metres above sea level.”

  Olly thought. Four thousand metres was four kilometres. Straight up.

  “That’s high,” he said nervously.

  “It sure is,” the man agreed. “It’s not for the faint-hearted up here. If the cold doesn’t kill you, there’s a long list of other things that might. A lack of water. Or starvation. Frostbite. Or a bad fall. There’s many ways for the unwary to die and only a few ways to stay alive.” He held out his hand. “I’m here to help you, buddy – I’ll be your guide in these mountains.”

  Olly shook his hand cautiously.

  “I’m Olly. What’s your name?”

  “My name’s Bear. So now we know each other. Okay. Let’s get started.”

  Olly looked around him, bewildered. How was all this happening? Was it related to the compass? And how on earth was he going to get back?

  But before he could answer any of these questions Bear spoke again.

  “Let’s get to it, Olly. Out here, we either get busy living or we get busy dying. There’s lots to do. First up, keep topping up the pan with snow; we need as much to drink as we can for the journey ahead.”

  “What journey ahead?” Olly replied, as he added snow to the pan.

  “Our journey to get you back safely.”

  Together, Bear and Olly boiled the water to make them each a cup of hot, sweet tea. They drank it out of metal cups. The heat warmed Olly’s whole body and the sugar pumped energy into his limbs.

  “So, Olly.” Bear grinned. “Ready for some real adventure?”

  “Not really,” Olly said honestly. Everything was all so strange, but it didn’t change the fact that he just wanted to go home.

  “Well, sometimes in life we might not want adventure, but it comes and finds us anyway. Kind of sneaks up on us when we least expect it. That’s the magic.” Bear paused. “But right now we need to get moving. There’s a storm coming and we have to get across these mountains.”

  “A storm?” Olly said in alarm. He looked up. The sky was totally blue, until he saw where Bear pointed at the horizon. If Olly squinted, he could just see a dark smudge there.

  “When that hits,” Bear said, “you won’t be able to see your hand in front of your face. Drink that tea – we need to get moving.”

  They packed the small camp up. Bear divided everything between a large rucksack for himself and a smaller one for Olly. Bear took the tent, sleeping bag and the cooking equipment. Bear’s rucksack already had several bundles of clothes tightly packed in watertight clear bags, a lot of black rope, plus a handful of gadgets that Olly didn’t recognise.

  Olly pulled a face when he realised he was going to have to carry something.

  Bear noticed.

  “Only way to do this is as a team, Olly,” he said. “We divide the effort and we work hard. Together we will be stronger and that gives us the best chance of staying alive. Got it?”

  “But there’s so much of it!” Olly said. It reminded him of the pile of stuff he had been told to bring to Camp.

  Bear smiled. “I know. Tell me about it. But the right equipment can save your life.” He paused. “Unless you’d rather freeze to death knowing you could have brought the one thing that would have saved you?”

  Olly knew he didn’t have a choice. This was going to be hard work – a lot harder than building a den. But it was stick with this guy, or be left stranded in the mountains and the storm. He shrugged his rucksack until it was comfortable-ish on his back.

  Bear gave the smudge on the horizon a final look.

  “It’s getting closer,” he said grimly. “We should move.”

  5

  WALKING ON WATER

  Together, the pair trekked along a deep valley between two giant mountains. Bear told Olly that being on a glacier meant that beneath them wasn’t solid ground but solid ice, many hundreds of metres thick.

  “When it comes to the wild mountains
you have to be prepared or you might not survive.” He looked right at Olly. “Out here we are going to fight smart, okay?”

  Olly nodded cautiously.

  Bear tied one end of his black climbing rope around Olly’s waist, and tied the other end to himself, leaving a long stretch of loose rope between them.

  “The danger on a glacier is always what you can’t see beneath you.” Bear tied the final knots. “Together we are stronger. If one of us falls through a hole in the snow into a crevasse beneath, then the other one can stop that fall being fatal.” He coiled the rest of the rope around his shoulder, ready for use if needed.

  “What’s a crevasse?” Olly asked with a sense of dread.

  “Crevasses are tears in the ice that get formed as the glacier moves around. They can be hundreds of metres deep. Dark scars carved into the glacier, constantly shifting, often hidden, and one of the biggest dangers in the high peaks.” He paused. “I was almost killed in a crevasse many years ago and it taught me a healthy respect for the mountains. That’s why we rope up. Out here you will only get it wrong once.”

  Olly looked down at the knot tied to him and pulled it extra tight.

  * * *

  It was hard going when they set off, and Olly’s legs started to get extra tired, extra quick. The snow was about ten centimetres deep, so he had to lift his foot right out of the snow with every step before he could move it forward and put it down again.

  Even though there was a storm coming, they only made their way slowly along the valley, plod, plod, plod. Bear also had a long, carbon-fibre pole and he prodded the ground in front of them with every step.

  Olly looked back over his shoulder to check the storm’s progress, and promptly fell flat on his face as his boots hit a buried rock. His knees stung from scraping against it. “Careful, champ.” Bear helped Olly up. “Try to keep looking ahead. We always look forward – in body and mind. It’s also why I use the pole. You never know when there’s something beneath the snow. A hole, crevasse or rock could all break your leg. Try to follow where I walk.”

  “Shouldn’t we be hurrying?” Olly asked.

  “No. The air’s so thin up here that you’d just collapse because your lungs wouldn’t be getting enough oxygen. And hurrying makes you sweat, then the sweat turns to ice on your skin, and you catch hypothermia. Two more ways to die! So we don’t hurry. We’ll do better if we just keep going, slow and steady.”

  “What’s hypothermia?” Olly asked as they pressed on.

  “Well, your body always tries to keep itself at the same temperature, thirty-seven degrees. It’s called your core temperature. Hypothermia is when your core drops below thirty-five degrees, and your body has to start pulling in blood from your arms and legs to try to keep your brain and core organs warm. It means your hands and feet stop working properly. And if you still don’t get warm, and your brain starts to cool down, you then lose the ability to make good decisions, until eventually… well, you get the idea.”

  Olly thought about that while they walked in silence for a while. Every step was still an effort, though Bear made it look so easy. He tried to copy the way Bear walked, constantly checking out the ground ahead. He walked with a kind of rhythm. Step and lift foot, step and lift foot, step and lift foot …

  Because Olly was concentrating so hard it took him a moment to notice Bear was leading them over to the left-hand side of the valley, instead of heading straight down. He snuck another frustrated look back at the storm. It felt like this guy was determined to make them go slow.

  “Why are we going this way?” Olly asked. ‘Isn’t it quicker to go straight?”

  “The quickest route isn’t always the straightest,” Bear told him. He pointed saw that, near the top, the sides didn’t slope. They went straight up – and then, in places, they started to slope outwards.

  “Can you feel the wind?” he asked Olly. “It’s blowing against the right-hand side. That means it carves out the snow on that side of the valley, so it overhangs. When the overhang gets too heavy, it falls. Then you get a thousand tons of snow dropping on your head from five hundred metres, and, well, then it gets messy.”

  “Let me guess,” Olly said, “another way to die?”

  “You’re getting the hang of it!”

  Soon they left the overhang behind them, but the valley was getting narrower. Eventually the steep walls were only about thirty metres apart, and the ground in between was smooth and flat.

  “This is good,” Bear told Olly. “We’re off the glacier and back on solid ground. The forest will be down ahead of us now.”

  Bear carefully untied the rope from Olly and re-coiled it, and then the pair kept moving.

  Just when Olly felt they were making good progress down and away from the mountains, Bear suddenly stopped and held up his hand.

  “See that?” he asked.

  Olly peered ahead and tried to see something different.

  “Snow?” he said.

  “Yes, but it’s completely flat. All the snow we’ve walked on so far has had bumps in it because of the ground underneath. Whenever I see something different I get suspicious. I want to know what’s changed. Wait here.”

  Bear walked forward slowly, prodding the snow with his pole as he went. Olly stood where he was. He felt the cold seep into his boots and tramped on the spot to warm his feet up. He just wanted to be moving again. Bear knelt down and brushed the snow away with his glove. Then he beckoned to Olly. “Come and look, but carefully. Only step in my footprints.”

  Olly walked forward curiously, carefully putting his feet exactly where Bear’s had been. Where Bear had scraped away the snow, Olly saw smooth, grey ice.

  “There’s a frozen lake under us,” Bear said. He waved a hand at the flat snow in front of them. “That’s why it’s so smooth.”

  Olly glared at the ground. “Is it safe?’ he asked nervously Suddenly he was afraid to move in case it cracked open beneath him.

  “Grey ice like this is usually old and thick,” Bear said. “If it was dark, that would mean it was thinner. If it’s at least five centimetres then it’s safe.” He stood up and rapped on the ice sharply with his pole, three times. “So this should take our weight. Okay. Time to rope up again.”

  Bear reattached the rope to Olly, this time with a little more distance between them. Then he studied the smooth snow in front of them carefully.

  “It’s never ideal to have to walk on any ice, but there’s no other way around. We’ll stick close to the side, where the ice is stronger. We’ll go steady – just walk exactly where I walk.”

  And so they began to make their way carefully along as the rocky mountain faces towered overhead. Every few steps, Bear jammed his pole through the snow to feel the ice underneath. Then he put his foot exactly where the pole had been. He took short steps so that Olly could put his feet in Bear’s footprints.

  Now that Olly knew he was walking on thin ice, he thought he could feel it. It trembled and creaked and groaned, like it might be about to snap. Or was that just his imagination? He couldn’t tell. He just knew he would be very glad to get off it.

  Up ahead, about twenty metres away, the snowy ground started to go up. That must be the shore of the lake, Olly realised. Once they were there, they would be safe. Olly fixed his eyes on it, watching it get closer, step by step. His legs still trembled at the thought of the fragile ice underneath.

  Soon the ground was five metres away, the other side of a few rocks sticking up through the ice. Olly grinned in relief. They were going to make it!

  But once again, Bear wasn’t heading straight for the shore. He was walking around in a wide curve. The shore was just metres away. How long was he going to keep them out here?

  Bear had said stick to the edges, and they were at the edge. Olly decided to make a break for it. He took one, two, three steps. There was a loud crack.

  “Olly!” Bear shouted in alarm.

  Then the ice gave way.

  Olly screamed as he plunged into
the freezing, dark water.

  6

  DEADLY UNDERWEAR

  It was the coldest thing Olly had ever known. It was agony. The cold was chewing his bones like an animal. It was a million times worse than when you turn the shower to cold by mistake.

  He tried to scream again but the freezing water was like bands of iron around his chest that paralysed his lungs. It was all Olly could do to draw another breath.

  The water was shallow and Olly’s head and shoulders were still above water. Bear grabbed the rope between them and pulled hard on the slack until it went taut. He then rapidly dropped onto the ice and wrapped the rope around his body.

  “Use the rope to pull against, Olly,” Bear shouted. “Wriggle like a seal and get yourself out back onto the ice. Work quick, Olly, come on!”

  But Olly couldn’t do it. He was floundering about in shock and numbed by the cold. He could hardly even keep himself from slipping beneath the water.

  Bear saw that Olly was struggling and reacted fast. He flung himself flat, rope in one hand, holding Olly in tight against the edge of the hole and the other arm outstretched towards him.

  “Grab my hand!”

  Olly reached out, but he was shivering so hard that he had to force his hand to go towards Bear’s. Shock, cold and fear were stopping him.

  Bear’s strong fingers closed around his wrist and he pulled Olly up and out of the hole. Then he started dragging him away from the danger and towards solid ground. Bear then quickly started unlacing Olly’s boots.

  “You need to get this wet gear off!” Bear ordered.

  “But I’ll die!” Olly howled.

  “You’ll die if you don’t,” he replied. “Wet clothes will steal the heat away from your body fifty times faster than dry clothes. You need to get them off. Now move it!”

  Olly started to peel off his boots and clothes, all the way down to his shorts. He noticed his hands weren’t working so well and were shaking frantically with the cold. The material clung to his body like wet plaster, and the freezing air on his skin gave him goose pimples. Bear rapidly pulled a man-sized shirt out of his rucksack and threw it to Olly, along with dry shorts.