Bear Adventure (4 page)

‘That was a lucky escape,' Hal Hunt said later in camp as they slurped thin packet soup from tin mugs.

‘I think we had it covered,' said Frazer.

‘I meant a lucky escape for the bear. If I'd had to then I would have shot her. And that would have made this one depressing trip.'

‘I've never seen bears like those two,' said Amazon, trying to change the subject. She couldn't stand the thought of her uncle killing the bears all because of her fishy mistake. ‘They were such an amazing colour. Are they albinos?'

‘No, not an albino. True albinos always have pink eyes,' said Hal. ‘They're actually a subspecies of black bear that we get here in British Columbia. They're usually called Kermode bears, but the First Nation people call them spirit bears, which I kind of like. It's because they look like ghosts. But it's just a genetic mutation. They're not at all common, and
they usually live down by the coast – haven't seen any this far inland before.'

By now the sun had set, and it was getting cold. Hal put another log on the fire.

‘You must have been up here a lot with Uncle Roger back in the old days,' said Frazer. He was thinking that Amazon might like to hear some stories about her dad.

Hal nodded, but didn't, as Frazer expected, launch into some funny stories about the scrapes he and his brother had got into. And then Hal cleared his throat and began to talk.

‘I never told you, did I, about how your grandfather, my dad, John Hunt, almost died? Well, it was north of here, up near the border with Alaska. You won't like the sound of this, but we were up there collecting bald eagle eggs. No, hold your horses, it was all to help save the species. The birds had once been common all over North America, but they were down to just a few hundred pairs.

‘Scientists had found that a pesticide called DDT was making their eggshells very thin and delicate, and so when the parents tried to brood the eggs they would break. So we were up there to try to collect some eggs for a captive breeding programme. And, if you got the eggs early in the season, the eagles would lay a second clutch, so the species wouldn't be harmed at all. But yes, I suppose that we'd do things differently now. This was back in the days when we didn't know as much as we do now about conservation.

‘Anyway, my dad was piloting us in a floatplane, pretty similar to the one I flew you guys here in. There was just Dad, Roger and me in the plane. We were planning to be up there for three or four days at the most. We had an incubator that would keep the eggs viable till we got back to New England.

‘We'd set off from Vancouver early in the morning. The weather was fine, no problems there at all. And then my dad noticed that the fuel gauge was almost on empty. We should have had plenty of gas to get us there and back. He reckoned that there was a leak.

‘This was pretty bad news. It meant that he was going to have to set us down in one of the lakes up there, and then we were going to have to trek back hundreds of miles to civilization. And we hadn't come prepared for that kind of expedition. But we weren't too worried. In fact, Roger and I were excited about it. It was going to feel like a real adventure, out there hundreds of miles from anywhere, having to live off the land and our wits. And with dad there too … You see, most of the time Dad just sent Roger and me off round the world on our own, so we hardly ever got to spend this sort of time with him.

‘But then, when I looked at my dad, I saw that he was worried. He was a cool character, old John Hunt. But he wasn't cool, then. The sweat was dripping down his face. He was looking for somewhere safe to put the plane down. We went over a couple of small lakes, but there just wasn't enough room for
us to land safely. By now the gauge was reading nothing but a big red zero.

‘Your dad, Amazon, was still laughing and joking, because that was his way, but me and my dad knew better. He managed to nurse the plane over one more ridge of pines – we were so close the floats clipped the branches at the top. And there below us was a lovely long lake. Could have been made for landing a plane on. I remember it now, still and shiny as a river of mercury.

‘I saw my dad's face relax. He even smiled, and said to Roger that we'd be fishing that evening in the lake. He couldn't gain any height, but the prop was still turning.

‘We only had a mile or so to go when she stalled. Just dropped down the last fifteen metres and hit the trees. It felt like the end of the world. The wings got torn off, and the fuselage cracked in two like someone breaking an egg to make an omelette.

‘We'd belted up, of course, and that saved my life. I woke up later – guess it was only a few minutes – and I didn't know what the heck had happened or where I was. I didn't even understand what I was seeing. You see, the plane had flipped over, and I was hanging upside down. Roger was next to me, just coming round. I checked him quickly, and he seemed to be OK, just stunned by the crash.

‘And then I saw my dad, down below me on the forest floor, and I knew straight away that he was
seriously injured, because of the way he was lying, all twisted up.

‘I managed to rouse Roger, and we climbed down out of those trees. We were both pretty shaken up, and it's a miracle that we got down in one piece.

‘And then Roger saw the state that Dad was in, and that bust him up. Your father took it badly, Amazon. He was only a kid, whereas I was already a man.'

Amazon was so caught up in the story she didn't know what to say. In her mind she was there in the crash, with Roger and Hal and old John Hunt.

‘How badly hurt was he?' asked Frazer.

‘Dad was out cold – he'd taken a nasty crack to the head. He also had a compound fracture to his leg – his shin bone was sticking out through his torn trouser leg. Roger was panicking, freaking out. I told him to go and get two stout branches and trim them off with his knife – we were going to need them to splint the leg, but I also wanted to give him something to do while I worked on the injury.

‘A compound fracture is just about the worst thing that can happen when you're out in the wilderness. This was a bad break, but it could have been worse. The bone looked like a broken stick, all jagged and white, but by some miracle the shards hadn't cut through any major blood vessels so, although it was bleeding, it wasn't, well, gushing.

‘Normally the advice is to do what you can to stem
any bleeding, but then wait till the medics turn up to fix it. Most of the things an amateur could do to a compound fracture would make it worse. You shouldn't touch the bone, because all that'll do is damage the flesh around it more and get the whole thing infected. But there were no medics out there, so it was down to me. Luckily I'd read up on first aid, so I had a rough idea what to do.

‘We had plenty of bottled water, and a medical kit with decent supplies in it. The kit had fallen out of the plane not far from my dad. So first of all I dissolved an iodine tablet in a bottle of water and used that to flush out the wound, which was full of leaf mould and general crud.

‘Then it was time for the hard part. I knew that we had a serious trek ahead of us if we were going to get my dad out alive, and I couldn't leave the bone just sticking out like that – the wound would never heal, and the infection would kill him.

‘Roger was back by now. He was still upset, but he knew as well as I did that we had to keep cool and sort this out. I asked him to hold tight on to Dad's shoulders, while I pulled on the foot. I managed to get the bone to slide back the way it had come, and settle more or less in the right place. If I'd messed it up, the sharp edge of the bone would have caused more tissue damage, and maybe even nicked an artery. Thank God Dad was still unconscious. It would have hurt like hell if he'd been awake. In fact,
the pain might have been enough to send him into shock and kill him.

‘We had some bandages in the med kit, so I cleaned and dressed the wound as best I could. Then I used more bandage to tie the two branches to Dad's leg. It was important, you see, to keep the leg immobile – any movement of the bone would be a disaster.

‘After that, I went back up into the trees and threw down anything useful – we had a little food and some camping gear – and a couple of guns; there was a rifle and my dad's Colt 45 that he'd had in the army.

‘By then it was too late to begin our journey back to civilization, so that night we camped by the lake. Dad woke up in the night, which was a big relief. Except that he was in terrible pain from that leg, and he didn't make much sense. He said that we should leave him up there and get back ourselves, and then send a party back for him. But we both knew that they'd find him dead, and I wasn't going to let that happen.

‘The next morning we rigged up a travois – you know, a sort of sledge made out of branches – and tied my dad to it. Then we began to walk. Every step was agony for my dad, but he never complained beyond the occasional grunt.

‘I had a map and a compass, and I was always pretty good at finding my way around. We headed for the Anchorage to Newport Road, which I
reckoned was about fifty miles away. I thought we'd be able to catch a lift from there. It took us four days. The going was as rough as it gets. There was never a time when we weren't dragging that sledge up or hauling it down – in fact, going down was sometimes harder than going up, because we didn't want to lose control and drop our dad.

‘The second night – the first of the journey – was OK. Dad was still in terrible pain, and was drifting in and out of consciousness. He had a few lucid moments, and we talked through our plans. I could tell he was proud of the way we were coping – especially Roger, who, as I keep saying, was just a kid – pretty much the same age as you, Frazer.'

Amazon looked at her cousin and tried to imagine her dad at the same age. It made her smile, despite the grimness of the story.

‘I checked Dad's leg,' continued Hal. ‘The bandages were caked with dried blood, and it must have hurt like hell when I peeled them off. The wound didn't look too bad, but I thought I caught the smell of something … well, something not good. I flushed it with iodine again, and Dad made a sort of deep animal sound in his throat, and he punched at the ground, and Roger tried to hold him still.

‘The trouble started the next day. We heard wolves howling in the night, but we never thought too much about it. We knew that there were almost no cases of humans being attacked by wolves in modern
times. It just didn't happen. Bears, yes, but not wolves. Also, well, Dad was always a big wolf guy. There were always wolves back on the farm, then, and we just didn't think about wolves as being anything other than our friends.

‘But we hadn't reckoned on a couple of things. It was spring, after a long, hard winter, and the wolves had cubs, so they needed food. A lot of food. And my dad, well, the wolves could sense that he was sick.

‘They are magnificent hunters, but there's not a single predator out there that doesn't prefer to chow down on something that's already on the way out.

‘Anyway, the wolves tracked us all that day. We never saw them once, but we knew they were there. They didn't howl on the chase, but there was something about the forest that just screamed out
wolves
.

‘That night they howled again. We built the fire up and I think that kept them away. Dad was hot. Despite the iodine, an infection had taken hold and he was getting feverish. He'd stopped making much sense. He talked a lot about our mom, which he never did normally. She'd died when we were little kids. And it wasn't just that he was talking
about
her – he was talking
to
her. And, well, that was pretty tough for Roger too …

‘Day three we saw them. A line of seven big timber wolves up on a ridge. The leader was as black as night. In fact, it looked like a wolf-shaped chunk of
night had broken off and slipped into the day. And it looked at me. Right at me. It was too far off for me to see its eyes, but I knew it was looking at me. It was looking into my soul, to see if I had the courage and the will to protect our burden. And when the wolf looked at me I knew I'd be bringing Dad home or I'd die trying.

‘The next night I built up a fire so big you could have seen it from space. And I did something else. I stayed beside it all night. I didn't want the wolves slinking down to the tent, with me inside. So I sat there with the Colt 45 in my hand. The rifle – it was this same one here – was, as you can see, a single-shot, bolt-action gun, and I needed something that could shoot a lot faster than that. Plus, the range was going to be close, so I didn't need the accuracy of a rifle.

‘Anyway, I sat with my back to the fire. I heard Roger talking to Dad, trying to soothe him to sleep, and I watched the stars come out, and then the moon rise, but it was only a sliver, like a fingernail held up to a candle. I was wrapped in a blanket, and had the gun on my lap.

‘And, although I was determined to stay awake, I fell asleep. One second I was awake, the next, dreaming. I don't know what it was that woke me up, maybe an owl hooting – well, whatever, but whatever it was it saved my life. Because there, right in front of me, was the leader of the wolf pack – the big
black wolf, like something out of a fairy tale or a nightmare. And he was so perfectly still, had it not been for the last of the flames from my fire reflected back from his eyes, making them look like the red eyes of a demon, I would never have seen him. And I reached down and picked up the Colt 45, and I pointed it at the wolf.'

‘Did you shoot him, Dad?' asked Frazer, his eyes wide and glimmering in the light of the fire.

Hal was silent for a few seconds, and then he continued. ‘I pointed the gun at the wolf and I pulled the trigger. But I hadn't taken off the safety. Schoolboy error. It hardly made a sound – the pistol, I mean – when I tried to fire it with the safety on. But somehow it startled the wolf, and it leapt away.

‘I don't know why, but I have a feeling it had been there for a long time, watching me, trying to figure out who I was. It could have killed me pretty easily, I guess. And the fact that it could have killed me, and didn't, and that I tried to kill it, and failed, well, that changed me. From that day to this I've never killed another animal, except for a fish for the pan.