A Bear Grylls Adventure 5 Page 2

  Jack didn’t know much about trees but he recognised some evergreens with pine cones and dark green needles, like the ones back home. Other types he didn’t know. And there were clumps of bamboo everywhere, its tall thin shafts wrapped in green leaves.

  “We need to eat on the move if we’re going to make progress,” said Bear. “Are you hungry?”

  “Um – yes, a little, I guess,” Jack agreed. Bear took his backpack off, and Jack assumed he had some ration bars or biscuits in there.

  So he was quite surprised when Bear pulled out a serious-looking machete, with a blade as long as the distance between Bear’s elbow and wrist. Bear went over to the nearest tree and chopped off a couple of pine cones from a branch.

  “Most parts of a pine tree are edible,” Bear said. “Pine nuts are great energy, once you get them out of the cones. And you can make a decent tea out of pine needles. Full of vitamin A and C.” He chopped both of the pine cones in two and starting picking the small nuts out of the centre of one. He passed the other cone to Jack. “Try it!”

  Well, it wasn’t quite the biscuits Jack had been expecting. He took the cone carefully and started to prize the little nuts out, then nibbled on them. They tasted … well, pretty good, in fact.

  Jack kept on nibbling as they walked.

  Soon after that, Bear found a bush full of red berries shaped like little eggs.

  “Goji berries – a great find,” Bear said. He cut off a sprig for Jack and another for himself. “Cost a lot in your local supermarket, but grow here absolutely free. I think we can afford to take a quick break.”

  The two of them settled down on the ground, which was covered in a soft carpet of leaves and pine needles. Jack sat with his back to a cluster of bamboo.

  “Are we going to eat this too?” he asked with a smile. “We seem to be eating everything else.”

  Bear laughed.

  “Bamboo shoots are good if you boil them, but we won’t be doing that on the move. The rest is just indigestible to humans. Here, drink this. We need to keep ourselves topped up.”

  Bear took out a large canteen of water, and both he and Jack took long drinks.

  “At least there’s no danger of running out of this,” Jack said, thinking of the river.

  Bear nodded.

  “True –” He stopped suddenly, with his head cocked. “Do you hear that?”

  Jack listened. He could hear the wind in the trees, and the river in the distance, and birdsong, and …

  And a kind of huffing, puffing, grunting noise. It wasn’t a bird and it wasn’t the wind or the water …

  “An animal?” Jack asked quietly.

  Bear nodded slowly.

  “Definitely.”

  Jack didn’t know what kinds of animals you got around here – but he knew that one making a noise like that must be big.

  “Is it safe?” he whispered.

  Bear slowly got to his feet. His face was thoughtful.

  “Well, if it’s what I think it is, we’re going to have to tread very carefully,” he murmured.

  Jack braced himself. Would they have to make a run for it?

  But Bear jerked his head towards the noise.

  “And as long as we tread carefully, there’s no reason not to go and see it,” he said with a wry smile. “Come on. Follow me.”

  5

  BEASTLY ENCOUNTER

  Jack stuck close behind Bear as he followed the sounds. Bear seemed to know what he was doing, but Jack knew wild animals could be dangerous …

  The grunting came from the other side of a thick cluster of bamboo poles. Jack could also hear a crunching noise. And there was a definite unwashed animal smell. It smelled filthy and stinky yet also clean and healthy, all at the same time.

  Bear peered through the bamboo stalks, then gently moved a couple to make a gap.

  “Take a look,” he murmured quietly.

  Agog with curiosity, yet still nervous, Jack looked.

  “Oh … wow!” he whispered.

  It was a panda. A real, live giant panda. At first, Jack thought it looked like a big black and white teddy bear, cute and cuddly like in all the pictures. It sat with its back legs stuck out in front of it. Its front claws held on to a thick stalk of bamboo, which it chewed with powerful jaws, crunch, crunch, crunch.

  Then Jack looked closer, and he realised it wasn’t cute and cuddly at all.

  It was BIG. Sitting down, the panda was as tall as Jack. If it stood up on its back legs it would tower over him. Its black and white fur bulged with muscles under its skin. Jack reckoned it could pull him apart, if it wanted to. The claws that gripped the bamboo were as long as Jack’s fingers, and about a thousand times sharper. And those teeth …

  The bamboo stalk the panda was eating was about as thick as Jack’s arm. He wouldn’t be able to bend it even if he used all his strength. But the panda’s jaws were strong enough to crunch through it like it was made of toffee.

  The panda turned its head slowly and peered over at the two humans. Its jaws didn’t miss a beat. Crunch, crunch, crunch. Then it slowly looked away again.

  This wasn’t a fluffy teddy bear. This was a wild creature living where it belonged. Jack and Bear were the strangers here. Jack felt like he had been allowed into someone’s home – maybe a friend with strict parents. He could stay if he behaved himself and didn’t do anything dumb.

  “We’re super lucky to see this, Jack,” Bear said quietly.

  “I know!” Jack breathed. He couldn’t take his eyes off it. “I didn’t know there were many pandas still around nowadays.” “There aren’t. Giant pandas still living wild – in the whole world, I reckon there are only a couple of thousand. If it wasn’t for humans looking out for them, pandas would have become extinct years ago.”

  “Wow.”

  Bear smiled.

  “Believe it or not, it’s getting better. Just a couple of years ago, giant pandas stopped being officially ‘endangered’. Now they’re just ‘vulnerable’. It’s a small step but it’s a start.”

  Jack stared harder at the panda. He knew he would never get a chance like this again.

  “I hope they make it,” he whispered.

  “Me too.” Bear paused, then chucked slightly. “But you’ve got to feel sorry for them. They’re meant to be meat-eaters but all they know how to eat is bamboo, which is rubbish for nutrition. It’s almost pure cellulose – that’s the thing that makes plants rigid and chewy – and it’s indigestible, like I said before. Pandas can only digest the tiny bit of bamboo that isn’t cellulose, so to get enough energy, they can do little else but eat bamboo all day long to survive.”

  “So they’re not dangerous?” Jack asked.

  “Oh, they can be! Any animal can be dangerous if you provoke it, especially a wild one. A panda is a giant bear, after all. You’ve seen those claws and those teeth. If this was a mother and we got between her and her cub, we’d be in trouble. Even if you just tried to take its bamboo away, you’d probably lose an arm,” Bear said. “That’s why we’re not getting any closer than this.”

  The panda agreed they weren’t getting any closer. Maybe it didn’t like being stared at. It suddenly rolled forward to stand on all fours, and strolled away from them. As it pushed its way through the bamboo, its powerful body shoved the stalks aside like they were curtains.

  The panda took a final look back at Jack and Bear, and spat out the chewed bamboo sticking out of its mouth. Then it disappeared into the undergrowth.

  Jack realised he had been holding his breath. He let it out with a puff.

  “Well,” said Bear. “That was unexpected.”

  “It was amazing!” said Jack. He walked forward and picked up the piece of bamboo the panda had spat out. The end of it had been chewed into stringy pieces. Jack slipped it into his pocket with a grin.

  “Souvenir,” he said.

  Bear laughed. “You bet. This was worth remembering. Let’s press on … hey, Jack, watch out!”

  It was too late. Ja
ck had taken a step without looking where he was going.

  His foot plunged into something soft. The most revolting smell in the world rose up and hit him in the face.

  Jack looked down. His boot was in a pile of green, extremely smelly panda poo.

  “YUCK!”

  Jack shouted.

  He yanked his foot out of the pile in disgust. But as he stumbled backwards, he sat down right in the middle of an even larger pile of dung.

  Bear was trying not to laugh.

  “Consider that another souvenir!”

  6

  EATING OUT

  Jack’s trousers were damp from scrubbing, and he tried to ignore the smell.

  Bear lay beside a pool on a rocky ledge beside the river, and carefully lowered his hands into the water as Jack watched.

  “Slow and gentle,” he said quietly. “We don’t want to spook them.”

  There were two fish in the pool. The river had obviously once risen higher than the ledge, and this pool and the fish had been left behind when the water level had receded.

  Bear lay completely still for a minute or more without moving his hands.

  “Fish are sensitive to temperature changes, so my hands have to cool down to water temperature first. To stop them seeing my hand I’m moving in slowly from behind the fish …”

  Bear suddenly flicked his hands out in a spray of water, and a wriggling, silver shape half as long as his forearm flew out and onto the bank. He pinned the fish down and, with his other hand, Bear hit the fish hard on the head with the handle of his machete.

  “The other fella’s gone over to your side, Jack,” he said. “Can you try to get that one?”

  Jack stared at him. Bear knew how he felt about water.

  Jack had managed to rinse his trousers out in a stream, because the water only came up to his knees and anything was better than smelling of panda poo.

  But this was different. He’d need to get his face really close to the water, like Bear had done. He hated water on his face.

  Then Jack remembered Bear’s advice to do it in stages. First: believe you can.

  And he could. Bear hadn’t done anything that would exactly drown him.

  “Yeah,” Jack said. “Okay.”

  “You can do it, champ,” Bear whispered.

  So, Jack crawled forward and hung his head over the side of the pool. He clenched his jaw as he glared at the water, centimetres from his face. He told himself that because he was already lying down he wasn’t going to fall in. Slowly, he lowered his hands in.

  “Remember, give your hands a little time to cool down,” Bear said.

  So Jack lay there, with his hands in the water and his breath catching in his throat.

  “Okay. So ease your arm towards the back of the fish, and slowly slide under it,” Bear whispered. “Then when you are as close to it as you can be, bring your hand up super fast and flick the fish onto the bank!”

  Jack did as he was told and he could feel his arm shaking – half from the cold and half from the anticipation.

  Jack’s hands felt like ice blocks and he was tempted just to try to grab the fish. But he held his nerve until his hand was underneath the fish.

  The fish was now near the surface and close to the bank.

  “Try it now,” Bear said quietly.

  With a burst of movement, Jack whipped his hand up, fingers splayed wide to give him the best chance of catching the fish.

  And there it was! A fish, flying through the air. It hit the rock and quick as a flash Bear grabbed it and stunned it with his machete.

  “Result!” Bear said. “Well done.”

  Jack high-fived Bear. He was puffing with delight.

  “Great job, Jack. Patient, brave, determined. I love it!” Bear looked straight at the boy. “Yep. Really great job! That’s not easy to do.”

  “I know,” Jack replied. “Especially as I don’t really like water.” He added quickly, “But I got it.”

  “That’s why it’s so impressive. You had to conquer some fears as well as hold your nerve. That takes courage.”

  As he spoke Bear turned the machete around in his hand and sliced carefully along the belly of the first fish from head to tail.

  “First thing you do with anything you catch is get the guts out,” Bear said. He hooked his finger inside the fish’s belly and pulled out a mass of slimy tubes. “They’re the first thing that will go off.”

  He did the same to the second fish, and chucked all the guts into the river.

  “We’ll make a fire to cook these,” Bear said, “but first we need somewhere to camp for the night. Come on.”

  Catching the fish had taken longer than Jack had realised. The tops of the cliffs were turning red with the setting sun as they headed back towards the woods.

  Bear picked out a spot of flat ground between two pine trees a couple of metres apart. He got Jack to sweep it clean of leaves with a branch, while he selected a large cluster of bamboo.

  “This stuff is like nature’s scaffolding,” Bear said. “You can use it to make anything you like.”

  He slashed through the base of a thick stalk with the machete.

  “But for now we’re just going to make a simple lean-to shelter, which is about the easiest kind there is,” he said. “We’re going to need vine to tie the poles together. Grab as much as you can; it should be about as thick as your finger.”

  Jack found vine growing everywhere, in strands several metres long. It wrapped around the trees, and covered the ground, and grew in thick layers over the walls of the gorge. It didn’t take him long to gather what they needed.

  Bear used some of Jack’s vine to tie a bamboo pole horizontally between the two trees at shoulder height. Then he tied the top ends of more poles to the horizontal one and rested the bottom ends on the ground, until he had a whole row of sloping poles. He started to tie more horizontal poles along them.

  Bear was making a bamboo grid.

  “We’re going to need leafy branches to plug the gaps …” he said as he worked.

  So Jack took the machete and got busy on the trees and bushes around them, lopping off small branches with plenty of leaves so that Bear could weave them into the grid.

  Soon the shelter had a thick layer of bushy branches on the top.

  “Good work, Jack,” Bear commented. “Let’s add some more branches on the ground as well to keep us warm from below and then we’ll be good for the night.”

  In what seemed like no time they had made themselves a shelter! It faced away from the wind, and its sloping roof trapped the heat of the fire that Bear then built in front of it.

  The survival duo had a meal of cooked fish and pine needle tea, which Bear boiled up with river water in a metal mug from his backpack.

  After a long day, Jack could feel his eyes grow heavy and he thought it would be a good idea to lie down. But a moment later he was wide awake again as Bear dumped a load of leaves and branches over him.

  “Hey!”

  “Keeps you warm,” Bear said with a wink. “They trap a layer of air against you that your body can warm up. Sleep tight.”

  Jack was about to protest that he was perfectly warm without half a tree on top of him, but his eyes were heavy again and he thought he would rest them just for a moment.

  He woke up the next morning to the smell of fresh fish cooking, and felt more relaxed than if he had slept in the tent back at Camp.

  Then Bear looked up from the fire. He smiled, but somehow Jack sensed it was a nice way for Bear to deliver bad news.

  “Morning, Jack,” Bear said. “You okay?”

  “I thought all this was a dream and I would wake up back at Camp.” He paused. “I guess not then?”

  “You’ll make it back. But first we have some work to do.”

  Bear sipped his tea and then passed a mug across to Jack.

  “So, while you were sleeping, I had a look along the gorge. We’ve got a choice coming up. The good news is that the river’s a lot sl
ower and calmer than it was. The bad news is that about half a mile from here the shore disappears. No more walking space. The sides of the gorge come right down to the water.”

  Jack’s face dropped. His heart began to thud.

  “So,” Bear said. “We can choose to be in the water, or we can choose to be on it.”

  7

  BAMBOO BUILDING BLOCKS

  “That’s our raft,” Bear said a couple of hours later. “It just doesn’t know it yet.”

  Jack and Bear were looking at two rectangles side by side on the ground. Each rectangle was made from bamboo, measured about a metre wide, with eight or nine poles in it, and about three metres long.

  Bear had cut down the thickest poles they could find: he had wrapped his hands around them and if his fingers touched, then the poles were too thin.

  Jack stared in horror.

  That’s all? Jack thought. That’s all that will be between us and the water?

  Bear saw his face. “Remember …” he began.

  “I know,” Jack said reluctantly. “Stage one: believe.”

  Okay, he believed bamboo could float.

  “And stage two,” Bear said, “is prepare. That’s what we’re doing now.”

  “Why are there two layers?” Jack asked, trying to force himself to concentrate on the plan.

  “The poles of the top layer will fit into the gaps between the poles of the bottom one,” Bear told him, “and together they’ll keep it rigid enough for a man and a boy to sit on.” He paused. “Two layers means we will be much more buoyant. That’s going to be good for us in this river.” Bear tapped the knobbly ridges that lined the poles. “Bamboo has natural watertight compartments, so it floats very easily. Right, let’s measure it.”

  They both sat on the top layer. It wasn’t q quite wide enough for Bear’s liking, so he added a few more poles.