Raven's Mountain (9 page)

I trip, fall, and run again.

The noise is getting fainter. I burst out of the woods and scream at the sky.

‘HELP! Come back! HELP!'

I yank my jacket over my head, waving it, an SOS flag any rescuers should zoom straight back for, but the
thwunk
-
thwunk
roar is already just a hum.

The helicopter is gone.

I'm going to explode.

I'm a cartoon character with a black cloud over my head and steam pouring out of my ears; I'm a volcano with boiling lava shooting out of my skull.

I'm angrier than I ever knew I could be.

Rescuers rescue people! That's what they do! They don't
just have a quick glance and disappear once they've got
people's hopes up!

‘You meanies!' I scream at the empty sky. ‘You bullies! Come back NOW!'

The sky doesn't answer; the helicopter doesn't come back.

Lost, scared, alone
. . . the words are a bunch of mean girls trying to make me cry: I didn't know how scared I
 
was till I
 
thought I was rescued. Now I'm not rescued, I can't forget how scared I still am. I don't know how I'm going to find help even once I get to the truck, because I can't drive and I don't know for sure that I
 
can find the key or move the lever for the seat so I can reach the pedals. I
 
don't know how much longer I can go on walking without food or water.

I'm screaming so loudly that I don't hear the watery murmur that's still there now the helicopter noise has gone. I'm so angry that even when I see the creek in front of me it takes me a second to understand what it is.

My body understands before I do. It throws itself down on the bank, ready to lap like a dog, because it doesn't want to die of thirst, no matter how angry the rest of me is.

You'll get sick! Use your filter bottle!
Jess fusses.

The water looks clean.

The lake looked clean too, till you saw the deer poo,
says Amelia.

I don't want to drink deer poo. Or bear poo. I scoop my water bottle into that rushing, running, clear cool water.

I'm sure the filter didn't take this long yesterday!

Drip, drip, drip . . . Done.

I drink the whole bottle, gulp after gulp, so fast that it dribbles down my chin, but it doesn't matter, there's a whole river left. It cools the burning lava of my stomach; washes down the pine needle stuck in my throat; whooshes that magic honey into every part of my thirsty body.

It's easier to wait for the filter the second time, and then the next. I drink till my stomach is so full and gurgly I couldn't push in another drop.

I imagine a message to Jess and Amelia:
Not thirsty.
Still scared, lost & alone.

No, I wouldn't tell them that. I send them a new one:

On Lost Helicopter Creek. If you see a lost helicopter
please send it back to me.

I wonder how the helicopter turned up so soon?

Maybe Mum really did get my thought message.

Maybe she loves Scott and Lily so much that she can feel they're in trouble.

I don't know if she knows exactly where we are. Scott calls it Greg's mountain, but I'm pretty sure that's not its real name.

But he showed her on the map. I remember that she laughed and said there was never much point showing her anything on a map, and he said she shouldn't under
–
estimate herself and kissed her on the nose.

The first time Scott took us on a picnic at the Cottonwood River, Lily and I went exploring, and when I went back for a drink, Mum and Scott were kissing. I turned around and shouted for Lily to come see a frog; then I had to tell her it had hopped off, because I hadn't seen a frog all day.

Then I had to think hard as I could about frogs so I could unsee the kiss.

I still feel a bit funny when I see them kissing.

Lily kissed a boy once too. His name was Jordan and he was in grade 10
 
– I didn't see her but I heard her telling Caitlyn when Caitlyn was her best friend. Then Caitlyn told everyone about Lily kissing Jordan and so Lily wasn't her friend any more, and then we moved, so now Lily's just like me and doesn't know anyone at her new school
 
– except it's easier for Lily to get new friends because she's pretty and good at things, and nobody teases her about having red hair.

15
1:28 SATURDAY AFTERNOON

I know the rescuers aren't going to come back, but I
 
still make another Inukshuk, big enough to see from a helicopter. I've been wrong about lots of other things so far.

I make it out of long skinny branches: not so much an Inukshuk as an arrow.

I wish I was an arrow and could fly down the mountain.

A little way along, Lost Helicopter Creek joins a smaller one; together they're a fast, roaring river. At the top of a cliff the new river plunges, straight as a curtain, into a pool at the bottom. The spray shimmers rainbows in the sun; the pool looks as bubbly and foamy as Amelia's mum's hot tub.

It's the secret cave waterfall.

I imagine another message to Jess and Amelia:
It's
okay: know where I am!

Ha ha. I am nowhere.

Because I know where I am, but it's not where I
 
wanted to be.

And I don't feel very okay. I still feel emptied out and hollow: the only thing inside me is a black pit of exhaustion that keeps squirming into sick. I've got to climb down that cliff to find the trail we took yesterday.

The rocks are smooth and slippery from the spray.

A raven croaks what sounds like a warning, but I'm too busy to look: I'm crawling backwards, feeling with my toes, clinging with my fingers. Halfway down they're all cramping so badly I have to stop. That's when I look down.

The three bears are splashing in the spa pool below me.

Not fair, Bears! Couldn't you have got there while
I
 
was at the top? Not standing on tiptoe halfway down,
stretched between two rocks like a basketballer reaching
for a goal!

I don't know if I can climb back up again.

But I'm not stupid enough to even think about going down. Mama Bear might decide to catch me instead of a fish.

The one thing for sure is that I can't stay here. My hands are cramping and my right leg's trembling. If I
 
don't make up my mind soon I'll land on top of them. Mama Bear might not think that's quite as funny as when Hansel and Gretel landed on top of me.

I slip down the next bit of cliff. Mama Bear stops splashing to watch.

One more slide, and I land on the
Open Sesame!
rock. I take a deep breath, shake out my crampy fingers, and sidle around the ledge to the secret cave.

Yesterday, looking at a waterfall from the inside out seemed as magical as Alice in Wonderland behind the mirror.

Today it's so dark after the bright sun that I can hardly see, and it's damp and clammy. Maybe that's why I'm shaking so badly. Or because it's safe.

‘Remember how scared you were after the helicopter disappeared?' my brain asks. ‘And then you got over it so you could go on walking? Well, you're not going anywhere till those bears leave, so it's my turn now! Just so you know: you are petrified, terrified, scared out of your wits
 
– and very, very afraid.'

Plus you're getting weirder
, says Amelia. I agree.

‘So quit it!' I tell my body.

My body's too busy shaking to listen. My knees dissolve into jelly, my legs fold like an accordion, and I collapse onto the floor in a quivery, shivery mess. My teeth are chattering as fast and loud as my heart, and I'm so cold I can feel the hairs on my arms standing up straight in their goose pimples.

So pull up your hood and zip your jacket!

That's a Mum voice, and she's right.

The shaking is slowing down, and I've stopped feeling like I'm going to throw up. I wrap my arms around my quivery legs, stare out through the waterfall and try to feel as strong as my crocodile-hunter dad.

The strange thing is that even though it's a fierce sort of waterfall, the more I stare through it the calmer I feel. Sometimes it's good not being able to see. It feels like being tucked up in bed with the covers over my head, knowing everything's safe in the house around me. Maybe it's just that the water's roaring too loudly to hear all those scary thoughts, but my mind is being washed as clean as a blackboard when the day's problems are wiped off for the night.

And I'm rocking, floating in the darkness . . .

. . . flying through the forest on the back of a great black bird. His feathers are warmly smooth against my skin; I lie with my arms at his neck and my feet at his tail and feel the strong, slow beat of his wings as he flies down the mountain. Trees flash past in a blur; the raven soars over creeks and chasms, I'm nestled in, snug as a baby on a rocking horse and know I
 
can't fall.

He dips low into the dark forest, so that branches whisper and tickle. I'm starting to be afraid, starting to choke with fear . . . until a path opens like magic, guiding us to a clearing, safe and sunny. Mama Bear follows, with Hansel and Gretel tumbling behind her like twin acrobats in a circus. As we reach the clearing the two cubs stand up straight.

‘It's okay,' says the white one, and turns into Lily.

For a minute I'm still so deep in the dream that I'm not sure if my sister is Lily or the white cub. I can't help looking around.

At the back of the cave there's a deeper nook with a shallow ledge. Neatly arranged on that rock shelf are a long, straight white feather with a black tip, the polished prong of an old antler, and a shiny black tooth, exactly like the fossilized shark's tooth in Mrs Thomas's science display.

Curiouser and curiouser
, says Jess.

I imagine a shark swimming in here, chasing an under
–
water dinosaur, or whatever prehistoric sharks chased, millions of years ago when this mountain was at the bottom of the ocean. The cave feels old enough. Even the antler is so smooth and white it could be hundreds of years old.

But I don't think a deer would have ever come into this cave, and neither would an eagle.

Something from the sea, the land and the air . . .

They're good luck charms,
Jess explains
. The tooth
will keep you safe along the creek, the antler will guide
you through the forest, and the feather will make you fast
as an eagle!

I feel as if I'm still dreaming as I hold each charm in my hands, letting the magic of the animals they came from flow into me. I'm swimming with the tide, galloping through the woods, and flying high above the mountain, seeing my way clear below me . . .

This time I come out of the dream feeling calm and sure: even my bee stings are soothed. My legs have remembered that they're made out of bones instead of jelly and my twisted ankle feels straighter.

I put the three things back on the shelf exactly where they were. I have a feeling it might be bad luck to take charms that someone else has arranged as carefully as if they were on an altar in a church.

But I can still ask them for help.

‘Please, please, let me get home safe and get help for Lily and Scott. Please don't let it be my fault that the rockfall started. And please just make everybody safe even if it was.'

I peer cautiously out of the cave: the bears have finished their fishing and disappeared. It's time for me to go too. There's only one way I'm going to get out of this forest, and it won't be on the back of a great black bird.

The dream feeling stays with me just long enough to get to the bottom spa pool and check if the bears have left me any fish for dinner.

They haven't.

I could kill and clean a fish myself now if I caught one. I know that for absolutely sure. I could even eat it raw. Maybe I'm turning into a real raven.

One of Scott's jokes:
‘What's worse than finding a worm
in your apple? Finding half a worm.'

Gross!
groan Jess and Amelia.

Which just goes to show that my brain's turned into applesauce, because a worm in an apple doesn't sound gross at all right now.

16
3:09 SATURDAY AFTERNOON

Jess wrote a river play for us last year: she was Huck Finn; I was Tom Sawyer, and Amelia was Becky. Amelia's actually the best at canoeing and swimming, but she hates being a boy in Jess's plays, and since we were doing it in her back yard, the swimming part didn't matter much.

‘What should I do now?' I ask them. ‘Find the track we came up on, or follow the creek?'

A creek has to end up at the lake
, Jess says.

You'll never find the trail again on your own
, says Amelia.

‘Thanks guys. I couldn't do this without you.'

I hate to tell you
, says Jess,
but we're actually just in
your head.

The other good thing about staying out in the open means I can see Mama Bear or any of her uncles or brothers before I bump into them.

But it's hotter too. When I came out of the cave, I
 
knotted my jacket around my waist to let the sun go right through me. Now my arms are red and my face is burning; if I stay out here any longer, it'll blister and peel.

I put on my jacket hood and wrap the sleeves around my head with a big knot in front. The ends droop over my eyes like a thick green fringe.

Oh, Raven
, I hear Amelia saying, in her best snooty lady's voice,
wherever did you get such a fabulous hat?

‘I made it myself,' I answer out loud.