The Mountain Challenge Read online

Page 3


  “Right,” Bear called again. “It’s ready for you!”

  Lily’s heart was pounding again, but she was ready for the challenge.

  “Coming!” she called back. She stepped off the safety of the ridge.

  She was glad she had told Bear she hadn’t done this before. It meant that Bear had set this up so that she could climb across without any experience. If she hadn’t said anything, perhaps he might have picked a harder way of doing it. She could have ended up putting them both in danger. Speaking up had been the best thing to do.

  Lily could feel all the empty air behind her. It would provide exactly zero support if she fell. They called it ‘thin air’ for a reason. Every time she reached out with a foot or a hand for a new hold, she tested it carefully before putting her weight on it.

  Soon, Lily had climbed around the curve in the cliff. She couldn’t see the ridge she had come from. But she could see Bear, only a few metres away, smiling encouragingly at her. He was sitting on the rock, rope wrapped around his body, legs braced to hold her weight if she fell.

  “Just a few more steps …” Bear said. He reached out to help her onto level ground. “And you’ve done it!”

  While Bear coiled the rope up, Lily looked around.

  They were on a spur of the mountain. It was a wide, flat ridge that wiggled and wound its way downwards. And there weren’t any more drops to deal with.

  “No more climbing!” Lily said happily.

  “Well,” Bear smiled as he put the coiled-up rope back in his rucksack, “hopefully not.”

  7

  FIRS AND FERNS

  Lily could tell Bear was talking to her as they hiked down the mountain spur, but his voice was getting quieter and quieter and harder to hear.

  Even with her helmet off, her ears felt like she had jammed her fingers into them.

  Lily swallowed and flexed her jaw. There was a long, squawking sound inside her head, and suddenly she could hear properly again.

  “Woah!” She clutched her head. “My ears popped, big time!”

  Bear smiled.

  “The air pressure inside your head was still the same as higher up the mountain. But we’ve come down about a kilometre, so the air outside your head is much thicker now. That can make your ears feel blocked.”

  “It’s warmer, too,” Lily noticed. She unzipped the front of her cagoule.

  “The temperature goes up about two degrees for every three hundred metres we come down,” Bear said, “which is why the basic rule if you’re stuck in the mountains is – get out of them as soon as you can.”

  They had been descending the spur for a couple of hours now. The ground was still steep, but not nearly as steep as it had been. They took a five-minute break every hour, as Bear had promised. Each time they ate a bit of one of the ration bars, and washed it down with water from a bottle.

  Lily remembered that Bear had said it was best to come down a spur so you could see what was coming. Being on the high ground made her feel in control, and she liked it. She could see more valleys and lakes and rivers below them. There wouldn’t be any surprises thrown at her.

  “Anyway, sorry, what were you saying?” Lily asked.

  Bear smiled.

  “Just that we’ll find a change from the ration bars in that forest.”

  They were coming to a pine forest that covered the sides and bottom of a valley, so that it looked like they were approaching a bowl of trees.

  “There’ll be berries and ferns …”

  “We’re going to eat ferns?” Lily asked in surprise.

  “They’re generally safe to eat, if you boil them,” Bear assured her. “We’ll find a stream to top up with fresh water. And berries. Blue or black berries are usually edible, white and yellow not. You can usually eat the tips and seeds of grasses too …”

  As Bear spoke, a fantastic rainbow caught Lily’s attention. It wasn’t all washed out, like the ones she was used to back home in the city. The colours were glowing and she could see the different bands very clearly. But didn’t rainbows usually come after rain?

  She was going to point it out to Bear, but she didn’t want to interrupt.

  “… and the basic rule is, don’t use more energy finding food than you’ll get back from it.”

  They reached the forest. The air was still and warm and smelled of pine. The bark on the tree nearest Bear was damaged and scratched at the height of his face, as if someone had attacked it with an axe. Bear rested his fingers on it for a moment, his face thoughtful. Lily was about to ask him about it when Bear plucked off a piece of bark and passed it to her. He took another for himself, and started to eat it.

  “You can eat all the parts of a fir tree, and also most bits of a pine,” he said.

  Lily was surprised, but she nibbled her own bit of bark as they walked on. It tasted – well, woody. But it wasn’t exactly bad.

  Soon they came to a stream tumbling fast through the trees, fresh off the mountain.

  “And now we know exactly which way to go,” Bear said.

  “Because the stream knows the way out of the valley,” Lily realised.

  Bear smiled.

  “Exactly! Follow water downstream and you always get somewhere.”

  In fact, the stream seemed eager to get out of the valley. It started to flow steeper and faster. Soon it was filling a ravine as wide as a main road back home. There wasn’t room on the narrow banks for any trees, which were just wide enough for Lily and Bear to walk along.

  They stopped for another five-minute break beside the frothing water, and Lily noticed a clump of ferns and remembered what Bear had said about eating them. They finished off the water in Bear’s bottles, and Bear filled them up from the stream.

  “We don’t know if there’s anything dead upstream, so we’ll boil it at our next stop just to make sure it’s got no nasties in it,” he said. “And we’ll treat ourselves to a proper meal then too.”

  “Maybe we could take those ferns with us?” Lily asked. She pointed. “Oh, they’ve gone.”

  She couldn’t see the ferns anywhere, which was stupid. They had been right there. Then she realised why she couldn’t see them.

  “Oh. They’re underwater!”

  The stream had swollen up behind them. It was spilling out onto the banks where they had just been walking.

  “Uh-oh.”

  Bear was looking up.

  Lily raised her eyes above the level of the trees behind them.

  The enormous mountain, which they had spent so long getting off, had vanished. The sky was a grey blur.

  “Wow, that’s a lot of rain!” Lily said.

  “Too much rain,” Bear said quickly. “And it’s all coming our way. We have to get out of this ravine. It’s a flash flood. A few more minutes and this whole place will be underwater.”

  8

  TOO MUCH INFORMATION

  Lily guessed that the only way out was down the ravine. But Bear put his hand on her shoulder straight away.

  “We can’t go that way,” he said. “It’s flooding down there too. See?”

  In front of them, the stream was already spilling over its banks.

  “But we can walk through that,” she said. It only looked ankle deep.

  “It’s still rising,” Bear pointed out. “It only takes fifteen centimetres of fast-flowing water to shift a parked car – and if it can shift a car then it can shift us.”

  The bank behind them was now completely underwater. If they couldn’t go forwards or backwards, Lily thought, then they were cut off. So the only way out was …

  She sighed and started to put on her helmet. “I guess we’re climbing again!”

  Bear smiled as he did his own helmet up, then bent down with his hands clasped together.

  “Put your foot in here, and I’ll boost you up to that ridge.”

  Lily clambered up the rocky side of the ravine, remembering the move-one-bit-at-a-time rule. Soon she was sitting on a ridge three metres up from where they had been. Bear scrambled up beside her. Lily peered down.

  “Wow!”

  The ravine was now wall-to-wall running water. The banks had vanished. A loose branch came zipping down on the surface. Lily would have had to run to keep up it was moving so fast.

  “Strange,” Bear said. “I didn’t see any of the usual signs for a storm.”

  “What are they?”

  “Well, nature knows when it’s coming.” Bear ticked points off on his fingers. “So, spiders make their webs shorter and tighter, so they won’t get washed away. Midges start to swarm. Plant smells get stronger as they open up to receive the water. And you often see rainbows before the rain, because the air is already saturated. Of course, you don’t always get all the signs, and some are harder to spot than others, but you’d expect to see a couple … Is something wrong?”

  Lily’s mouth had dropped open.

  “I, um … I did see a rainbow,” she admitted. “Earlier. But … um … I didn’t think it was worth mentioning.”

  Bear smiled.

  “It’s not your fault, Lily. I’m the one who’s meant to be guiding you. Just remember that for a survivor, there’s no such thing as too much information. If it’s true, if it’s useful, just say it. If you see something unusual, it’s always worth pointing it out.”

  After about an hour, the water had gone down enough for Lily and Bear to climb back down to the river. Soon after that they were out of the ravine and back in the pine forest. Up above, the clouds were turning red.

  “We’ve got about two hours of daylight left,” Bear said, checking his watch. “Waiting the flood out meant we didn’t get as far as I’d hoped. I’m afraid we’ll be spending the night in the forest. How are you with that?”

  Lily looked at the trees aroun
d them. How would she feel, she wondered, in the dark and away from home?

  Then she remembered.

  “I’ve just spent all week at Camp, so I think I’ll be fine!” Lily answered. “We pitched our own tents in the woods.”

  Bear smiled.

  “Great. We’ll press on and find a good camping spot.”

  At their next break, Bear and Lily picked more bark off a fir tree. Bear also gathered handfuls of the needles together.

  “We’ll boil some of this up into a tea,” he said. “It’s full of vitamin C and will give us energy. And … hello.”

  The tree also had those strange marks on the bark that Lily had noticed earlier. Again, Lily saw Bear eyeing them.

  There’s no such thing as too much information.

  “What did that?” she asked.

  “Well, that’s bear sign,” Bear said seriously. He smiled. “The animal kind. It was probably looking for insects under the bark.”

  “Bears?”

  Lily looked quickly around. How big were bears? How close could one get in these trees without them seeing it?

  “They’re unavoidable out here, but you can deal with them,” Bear assured her. “The one thing you don’t do is try to outrun a bear, because you can’t. They can climb trees faster than you, too. If it’s a brown bear – a grizzly – it will probably just be angry, because you’re in its territory or you’ve come between a mother and her cubs. So, play dead. Lie down, curl up, do this to protect your neck …” Bear clasped both hands behind his neck. “And don’t move. Once the bear has worked out you’re not a threat, it’ll move on. But this is mostly black bear territory, and unlike a grizzly, a black bear will attack because it’s hungry, so lying down is not a good option. You have to face them down. Stand tall, wave your arms, jump, shout …”

  Bear suddenly leapt forward, almost into her face. “And roar!”

  Lily jumped.

  Bear went back to his normal voice as Lily recovered from her surprise. “Like that. You really need to shout loudly.”

  “I’m not sure I could roar at a bear,” Lily admitted. “I might just be too scared.”

  “Oh, it’s terrifying,” Bear agreed. “So you have to ask yourself some simple questions. Do I want to be a bear’s meal? No! Am I going to be a bear’s meal? No! So am I going to act like a bear’s meal? No! When you have the right feelings inside you, they come out in the way you act.”

  “Right,” Lily said thoughtfully.

  “But don’t worry too much. If we just walk naturally, and keep talking to let them know we’re coming, they’ll probably stay away in the first place.”

  “Right,” Lily said again, louder than usual, peering into the trees. “Let’s do that!”

  9

  FACE DOWN

  Bear didn’t want to make a camp somewhere they knew a bear had been. They trudged on through the trees and up the side of the valley, until he felt they should be well out of its territory.

  “This looks like a good spot,” Bear said at last.

  Halfway up the slope, a tall pine tree had toppled over. It lay at an angle, held up by other trees. Its roots had torn out of the ground and left a pit at its base, making a natural shelter.

  “That’s handy,” Lily said. “It’s done most of the work for us.”

  Bear smiled.

  “And it’s in a perfect position. It’s south-facing, so it’s had the sun on it for most of the day to warm the ground up. We’re about thirty metres above the valley floor, so cold air from the mountains will sink past us. The soil’s dry because all the water has drained downwards. There are a couple more touches we can do and then it’ll be perfect.”

  First they cut branches from nearby trees with a machete Bear produced from his rucksack. Lily was the right size to get in close to the trunks through the needles, and find the best branches.

  “Make them slim,” Bear said, “about as thick as your arm, and a metre long.”

  They put the first branches down on the floor as insulation from the cold ground. The fir tree branches were flat, so Bear and Lily could lay them one on top of the other. Then they made a roof, propping overlapping branches between the ground and the tree roots. The needles grew close together, so the shelter was now windproof and waterproof. Lily remembered the first day of Camp, when everyone had made shelters out of what they could find in the woods. She would certainly have won a prize if she’d made something like this!

  Lily and Bear climbed into the pit to investigate their work from below. Lily looked proudly up at the covering. Everything was warm and piny and full of green light.

  “This’ll do nicely.” Bear smiled. “And now, for our last job, we can make a fire to cook on.”

  “Fantastic!” said Lily. The ration bars had kept them going, but after a day of walking, she was more than ready for some hot food.

  Just then, a deep, throaty growl made her leap out of her skin, and a powerful claw tore through the roof. Branches tumbled down into the pit on top of Bear.

  A massive bear covered with dark, shaggy fur glared down at them through the hole in the roof. A gale of hot breath hit Lily in the face as it roared. It stank of rotting meat.

  Lily stood, petrified, rooted to the spot.

  “Lily! Black bear! Make yourself big!”

  Bear was struggling to get up through the branches. In a couple of seconds he would be free but Lily knew they might not have a couple of seconds.

  This bear meant business.

  What had Bear said about black bears?

  Face them down.

  So Lily pulled together every scrap of courage and shouted louder than she’d ever shouted before.

  “I am not going to be your meal!”

  The bear reared up onto its hind legs. Its front paws were still raised, like a boxer’s hands. A boxer with claws as long as dinner knives. “Lily!” Bear was heaving a branch off his leg. “Stand tall! Shout!”

  So Lily jumped up to the edge of the pit. She leapt as high as she could, and she flung her arms out as wide as they would go.

  “Ra-a-ah!”

  The bear roared back at her. Its teeth looked like they could tear through steel. Lily’s heart pounded. This animal could bite her in two without trying.

  Lily always liked to stay quiet. But now, for the first time in her life, making herself heard had become a matter of life and death.

  So she screamed louder than she had ever thought possible.

  “RA-A-A-AH!”

  The bear wavered on its back legs.

  Lily wasn’t finished. She ran forward, waving her arms and screaming her lungs out.

  The bear grunted. It turned and dropped down to all fours. Then it mooched away. It shot her a final, grumpy look before it disappeared into the trees.

  Bear had pulled himself out and was right behind her.

  “Wow!” he gasped. “You nailed it, Lily. You were absolutely terrifying!”

  Lily grinned. “Thanks!” She was panting hard, but she felt good about herself. She had spoken up and faced down something really scary.

  “You really found your voice, Lily. That was such awesome work. But maybe we’ll pick a different spot for a camp,” Bear added.

  Lily looked sadly at the remains of their shelter. They had put a lot of hard work into it and it seemed a shame to leave it. But it would seem even more of a shame to be eaten by a hungry bear.

  Bear’s rucksack was still buried in the wreckage.

  “I’ll get it,” Lily said. “I’m smaller.” She would be able to duck under the fallen branches more easily. Besides, she was feeling so much better. Now all that fear she’d been carrying around with her had gone, she felt so much lighter.

  Lily jumped down and crouched under a branch. The rucksack was just out of reach, so she started to crawl.

  Suddenly she tumbled forward. The ground vanished in front, just like when she had arrived on the mountain.

  This time, Lily didn’t hit solid stones, and she didn’t roll very far.

  “Hey, Lily, get a move on! I need to get out too.”