Way of the Wolf (11 page)

Beck tipped out the contents of Tikaani’s sodden rucksack to see if anything was still dry. It was a forlorn hope. The wet rope probably didn’t matter; the wet clothes very well could.

And then there were the clothes Tikaani had been wearing, which were soaked through. The water brushed off the coat easily, so at least he still had that, but he could do with a fleece as well, and they didn’t have a spare that was dry.

Beck wrung out the fleece until as much of the water was gone as possible. Then he spread it out on a rock along with the other items and went back to the fire.

‘I don’t know if they’re going to dry there, or just freeze,’ Tikaani said.

Beck grinned. ‘That’s the aim!’

He gave it an hour, until he was certain Tikaani was as warmed up as he was going to get. Then he stood up and peeled the fleece off the rock. It was a sheet of ice, frozen solid.

Beck folded it so that the ice snapped and cracked in his hands, and whacked it hard against the rock. He closed his eyes as bits of ice flew everywhere. He did this a couple more times, then shook the fleece out again for Tikaani to see.

‘It’s almost completely dry!’ Tikaani exclaimed. He ran his fingers over it to check. ‘That’s amazing.’

Beck bit back a grin. For a moment his friend reminded him of a housewife in a TV ad plugging a new cleaning product.

‘New Improved DryClothes, TM,’ he said, putting on the smooth and insincere tones of a TV announcer.

‘Now With Added Dryness!’ Tikaani added. ‘So . . . it froze, right?’

‘Yup,’ Beck agreed, ‘and once all the water is frozen, you can just bash it out.’

He gathered up the other clothes he had put out. They were icy but they hadn’t completely dried yet. ‘OK. Once we’ve got a shelter for the night we’ll leave these out and they’ll be completely freeze-dried by the morning. How are you feeling?’

Tikaani grinned, stood up, and stretched. ‘Never better!’

‘Then get your boots on and we’ll head up. Oh, and give me your water bottle. At least we can fill that up here . . .’

The ground slowly rose as they walked. Even back at the lake, high up the side of a mountain, there had been ups and downs and flat areas. Now there was no question. They were going
up
, and only up. Every step they took was fighting gravity, lifting them a bit higher. Their legs and thighs knew it and felt it. They still obeyed commands from the brain, but it was on the condition that they got all the body’s reserve strength. There was nothing left for chat between the boys. They breathed deep of the thin air and they walked.

There were no more bare rocks, certainly no more plants to burn, nothing alive or dead to eat. Just a slope of smooth, unbroken snow. Beck led them up in long zigzags, grateful for the snowshoes on their feet. Without them the boys would have plunged into thigh-deep snow with every step and the climb would have been impossible.

But even that came to an end. Above them was a valley, with the ground rising up on either side. Between the slopes, where they would have to walk, the ground was jumbled and jagged in a hundred different shades of white and grey. In fact, Beck knew, it wasn’t ground at all. It was a frozen river of ice pouring down the mountainside very, very slowly.

‘It’s going to get difficult now,’ he said. ‘This is a glacier.’

It had been marked on the map so he had been expecting it. At any rate, it meant they were still on course, still heading towards the pass through the mountains. But it was still a pain. The only way to reach the pass was straight up this valley – straight up the frozen river. After that they could carry on and be on dry land – or at least snowy land – again.

Tikaani craned his neck to follow the glacier’s course.

‘Do we go on it?’ he asked.

‘I’d rather not, but . . .’

Beck pulled the GPS out of his pocket, retrieved the batteries and reassembled the gadget. He squinted at the screen. According to the map, the mountain suddenly rose up almost vertically in a cliff – a curtain of rock a hundred metres high. Beck looked uphill and could see that for himself. The curtain rippled with frozen folds and creases. On the map, the pass came out in one of them. It was a clear area on the screen between two tightly clustered lines of contours.

‘. . . but we’ve got to,’ Beck sighed. He tilted his head back to look at the sheer peaks that were still over a thousand metres above them. Mighty geological forces had thrust these mountains out of the ground over millions of years. The same forces were very slowly pulling the mountains apart under their own weight. There were cracks in the sheer wall of rock – and that was what would help them. One of those cracks was the pass they were heading for.

‘I don’t see it,’ said Tikaani, following his line of sight and mirroring Beck’s thoughts.

‘It’ll be there.’ Beck pointed with his hand, slicing through the air straight ahead of them. ‘Thataway. Look.’ He held up the screen. ‘See how close the contours are?’

Tikaani glanced at the glowing image. ‘Uh-huh?’

‘The closer they are together, the steeper it is in real life.’

‘So . . .’

‘So our pass will be a very narrow path between two very steep bits of rock. Don’t sweat – we’ll find it but we may have to be close to see it.’

The power display on the screen was almost flat, so Beck quickly switched it off again. He could navigate by eye for the time being.

‘And from now on’ – he shucked off his rucksack and opened it – ‘we tie ourselves together.’

They each had a length of home-made rope in their rucksacks. Beck tied the two ends together and tugged hard. The knot held.

‘In case I run away?’ Tikaani asked.

‘The good news,’ Beck explained, ‘is this ice won’t break beneath you like the lake did. The bad news – there’ll be cracks in it. It weighs thousands of tons and there are huge stresses on it, so it develops crevasses, like I told you earlier. They may be covered up, so you have to look out for snow that dips a little and looks a bit darker. You fall into one of them, and it’s a deep one, you ain’t ever getting out.’

‘So if you fall,’ Tikaani said, fingering the rope thoughtfully, ‘it’s up to me to catch you and pull you up?’

‘Yeah, if you could . . .’ Beck made it sound like some small favour. ‘And I guess I’ll do the same for you.’

They walked a bit further up on firm land before stepping onto the ice. The glacier curved at the point where they were approaching it, and Beck knew that the outside bend is often where crevasses are found. It is the area where the strains on the ice are at a maximum.

‘Stay a few metres behind me,’ Beck instructed. ‘Don’t let the rope drag on the ground. Walk in my footprints, and every step you take’ – he jabbed, hard, at the ice in front of him with his stick – ‘test it first.’

‘Even if you’ve just walked on it?’ Tikaani asked.

‘Even if. For all you know, I’ve just weakened it so it’ll collapse under you!’

‘Well, sure.’ Tikaani shrugged. ‘What else are friends for?’

They moved onto the ice, slowly at first, then with increasing confidence. Fortunately it was still covered with a layer of powdered snow that crunched and compressed beneath their feet. Later in the year, when all the snow had gone, they would have been walking on bare ice, slithering and sliding everywhere.

Beck headed for the middle of the glacier before turning uphill again. Crevasses were also common at a glacier’s edge, where it dragged against the hard rock of the mountain. The middle should be flowing more smoothly.

They came to their first crevasse about twenty minutes later, a few hundred metres further up. After all their precautions, it wasn’t hidden and it didn’t swallow either of them up without warning. But it was still dangerous. It stretched right across the valley, from edge to edge. A gaping crack in the ice, about thirty metres deep and three across. Sometimes there was a thin span of ice across it; mostly it was just open to the sky. Beck guessed that the valley floor pushed up beneath the glacier at this point. It had put a stress on the ice that made it open up here.

‘You know,’ Tikaani said thoughtfully, ‘I bet I could jump that. We throw our rucksacks over first, then we remove our snowshoes and take a run-up . . .’

Beck shook his head. ‘You don’t know how solid the edges are. The far side might just crumble beneath you. We need an ice bridge.’

Tikaani looked at him. ‘And I bet you know an ancient Anak method for making one of them?’

Beck smiled and shook his head again. ‘Nature makes ’em; we just use ’em. This way.’

They walked slowly along the edge of the crevasse to the nearest of the bridges. It was about three metres long, from one side of the crevasse to the other, and about a metre wide. It sagged in the middle, which didn’t fill Beck with confidence. He poked it with his stick. Immediately it split and tumbled into the crack.

‘Not that one,’ he said as the fragments hit the bottom and shattered into a million pieces.

They tried several more of the bridges. Not all of them crumbled, but . . .

Some of them were too narrow. Some Beck just didn’t like the look of. He wanted good thick ice – several centimetres of it at least – that didn’t sag. He wanted it to form an arch with the ends thicker than the middle. That way it would give itself extra strength.

None of them were exactly perfect. But time was ticking away – time to save Uncle Al and, more immediately, to get over the mountains.

‘After you,’ said Tikaani politely, not taking his eyes off the thin bridge that was the best contender. It was thicker than the rest and it didn’t shift when Beck poked it.

‘Yup,’ Beck agreed.

Tikaani peered into the depths. ‘If you fall, I’m really not sure I can hold you . . .’

‘Nor am I,’ Beck agreed again, to Tikaani’s obvious surprise. ‘So take your pack off . . .’

The layer of snow on top of the glacier was a couple of feet deep. The boys scooped out a hole and buried Tikaani’s rucksack. They then tied the rope to it. Now the rope stuck out of a pile of churned-up snow. The end was wrapped round Beck’s waist.

‘It’ll never hold,’ Tikaani said sceptically a few minutes later. ‘It’ll
never
hold!’

‘You reckon?’ he said with a grin. He hadn’t believed it himself when he’d first seen this done. He passed the rope to Tikaani. ‘Back off a couple of metres and give it a tug. Go on.’

Frowning with doubt, Tikaani took the rope and pulled. And pulled again. The buried rucksack stayed exactly where it was. He looked up at Beck, baffled.

‘Snow’s like that,’ Beck told him. ‘It’s loose, it’s fragile, it crumbles easily – but if you apply force to it, it can jam solid. You could pull the sack straight up, but you can’t drag it through the snow.’

Tikaani looked from the buried pack, to the rope, to the crevasse. ‘I still . . . can’t
completely
believe it,’ he admitted.

‘And that’s why I’m going first!’

Beck took off his snowshoes and moved out onto the bridge on all fours, with the rope round his waist, while Tikaani paid it out through his fingers behind him. If Beck had been standing, then all his weight would have been concentrated on his feet. On all fours, his weight was distributed.

The first time he put his hand down on the bridge, there was a very slight pause and then something gave way beneath him and his hand moved another couple of centimetres. Beck froze, convinced the bridge was about to collapse. Then he realized it was just like when he walked on the snow. The topmost layer was frozen and it put up the tiniest resistance before his weight broke through to the softer snow beneath. He forced out a very brief laugh and kept crawling, trying not to think of all the thin air the other side of this very thin bridge . . .

It was over very quickly – he only had to crawl a few metres, after all. All that fuss for such a short distance seemed silly until you remembered the alternative – dying in a frozen mass of broken bones at the bottom of the crevasse. He stood up and dusted himself down, then turned back to Tikaani with a big smile on his face.

‘Your turn!’

Tikaani took off his snowshoes and dug up his rucksack on one side of the crevasse while Beck tied the rope around his own on the other and buried that. Tikaani tied his end of the rope around his waist, then dusted the snow off his pack, slipped his arms through the straps so that it was settled securely on his back, and crawled out over the bridge with much more confidence than Beck had done.

‘
Whoa!
’ Tikaani stopped almost at once, poised just past the edge of the crevasse. ‘I felt something go.’

‘Just keep going steadily,’ Beck called.

Tikaani looked up at him anxiously. ‘That’s just—’

Suddenly the bridge crumbled and Tikaani vanished from sight.