Raven's Mountain (10 page)

The raven hears me. ‘Caw! Caw!' His head is cocked to one side: this is the funniest thing he's heard all day.

‘Are you laughing at me?'

He doesn't answer, so I ask again: ‘ “Are you laughing at me?” said Raven to the raven.'

Suddenly I'm the one who can't stop laughing. The only thing I can talk to on this whole mountain is another raven, and the more I say it the funnier it seems. I laugh till my eyes cry, my nose runs, and my stomach doubles up in knots. I laugh till I'm too wobbly to stand and have to skid down the next lot of rocks on my bottom.

I laugh because I'm tired, hungry, and I've been walking since yesterday morning. I'm sore, bruised, lumpy with bee stings and mosquito bites, and the only bits of me that aren't sunburned are the ones smeared with dried blood. My heart is a solid lump of ice that never melts no matter how hot the rest of me gets.

I'm so far beyond scared it's on another planet.

And somehow I have to get down the rapids around this next bend.

The creek's got bored with winding gently down the hill, making a riverbank that a baby could follow. Now it's a whirling, splashing, rushing-over-big-brown-rocks creek with drowned trees tangled against its banks.

To make things more interesting, it's rolled those shiny brown rocks into three steps of short, splashy waterfalls with a little bit of creek between each one.

The last one's a Niagara.

The cliff beside it is taller, smoother and steeper than the one I fell down when I started the avalanche. But now I've found the river I don't want to leave it. It'll take me hours to hike around that cliff.

‘Caw! Caw!'

The raven's so close I can almost feel the wind from his slow beating wings. His beak is open as if he's panting. He flies low and straight over the creek to the other side. I
 
can see a black speck in the blue, and then nothing at all. But it's enough to tell me what I need to do.

The cliff is only on this side of the creek. On the other side it's a hill: it's steep, but it has grass and trees as well as rocks
 
– I'll be able to slalom down it, even if I do some of it on my poor bruised tailbone.

And just ahead of me, where the river narrows at the first little waterfall, is a bridge.

You call that a bridge?

It looks like something built by giant prehistoric beavers who got sick of rebuilding their dam with trees and decided to fix it once and for all with a tumble of boulders. Now the lower sides of the rocks are so worn away the water flows mostly underneath. There are hardly any gaps between them, and the water splashing over the top is only a few inches deep.

The problem is that the water under the bridge is too deep to see the bottom, and swirls around in eight million different whirlpools before it gets to the next waterfall.

I can't stop staring and wondering what would happen if I jumped in. If I had a raft like in our Huck Finn play, I'd whoosh down and over the next waterfall, then the next . . .

. . . but even white water rafters wouldn't go down that Niagara.

Anyway, the bridge is easy!
says Amelia.
It's twenty
times wider than the fence!

Amelia and I used to tightrope walk my back-yard fence, dipping our legs and pointing our toes gracefully as ballerinas. By the end of summer we could walk right around the garden without falling off. The last time we did it, Amelia turned a cartwheel. She landed on her feet, still on the fence. ‘Dare you!' she said.

I'd barely brought my arms up when Mum stepped out the back door. ‘Don't even think about it, Raven O'Connor!'

‘I'll skip the cartwheel,' I promise Mum now.

The next rock's wide and flat, the same kind of reddish granite as the edge of the bank, as if it used to be part of the same piece. Stepping across the gap is as easy as stepping down from a stool onto the floor: the rock is dry, and I don't even need my arms for balance.

But the thing about prehistoric, rock-building beavers is that they've got a sense of humour.
See, you
can do it
, they tease, making sure that the next rock's nearly touching the second one, except that it's tilted on its side, and the one after that is tilted the other way. And the spray's getting splashier, running over the top of the slippery rocks.

Just like walking the fence and running through the
sprinkler at the same time.

The next rock is small and tippy, and the only way to keep my balance is to keep on going.

Don't think about falling!

Move fast, jump over foaming white water, onto the last rock. It's flat and solid and now there's just one more giant step to the other side. Take a deep breath . . .

. . . into the world's splashiest, scariest, back belly flop.

The river thumps me hard between the shoulders. It whacks the breath right out of me; I'm gasping, gurgling, and going under, blind in the frothing water. The whirlpool is dragging me wherever it wants; I can't tell which way is up and I can't go on fighting . . .

No! No, no, NO! I don't want to die!

Kicking and thrashing, I fight my way up. My fingers hit rock. There's still no air; my lungs are going to burst.

I'm upside down!

I somersault and kick off from the rock. This time I
 
break through the surface into fresh air. I gasp it in, spit out water and sick; my lungs hurt as if they've already forgotten how to breathe.

Tread water, keep your head up!

I'm trying, I'm trying
, but the creek's swirling me down towards the next waterfall . . .

. . . and over it, tumbling under the water again, spinning in the whirlpools, kicking through spray.

I'm only two metres from the shore. If I could just catch my breath . . .

Too late.

That was the last little fall before the Niagara, and fighting my way up again has taken my last bit of air. I'm whirling like a leaf; the bank is still only a couple of metres away, but it might as well be a hundred. The current's never going to let me go.

I take a deep breath: I'm going over the edge.

17
ABOUT 4:10 SATURDAY AFTERNOON

I'm under the water, spinning like a rag doll in a washing machine . . . ‘OOF!'

Someone's thumped me in the stomach. Grabbed me and hauled me out.

Black spots dance in front of my eyes.

I can't see or think or hear. Can't do anything except throw up. I've swallowed litres of river, and every drop of it is shooting back up again. Stuff's spurting out of my nose too; my stomach's cramping and the rest of me feels like a giant's punching bag.

And I'm alone. It's a tree that saved me: a dead, fallen-over tree with its roots on the bank, its branches in the river, and me slumped across its trunk in between.

I must have pulled myself up when I hit it. I don't know how.

But I'm still in the river, at the top of the Niagara waterfall.

The scariest thing of all is that wiggling a couple of metres along a log is the hardest thing I've ever done. I
 
never knew that you could be truly too tired to do something that you desperately needed to do to save your life.

But finally
 
– wiggle, gasp, rest, cough, spit, rest, wiggle, gasp, rest
 
– that poor soggy rag doll flops out of the washing machine onto the bank.

I've caught hibernating sickness from the bears.

I don't know how long I've been lying here, with my face against a rock and my feet still in the water. Every time I try to get up I go back to sleep again before I
 
can move. Most of me is clammy and cold, shivery and achy, my head's as fuzzy and light as fairy floss
 
– but the back of my tee shirt is almost dry and my neck is hot.

‘You nearly drowned!'
says Jess.

‘But you didn't!'
says Amelia.

They sit beside me so I can go back to sleep.

Time to get up!

Jess and Amelia are gone. I've got to get out of here
 
– what time is it anyway?

My watch is smashed. The whole face is shattered away.

Not my watch too! How am I supposed to tell the time
with a dead watch?

Quick: unthink the word dead.

The watch doesn't matter. It doesn't even matter what time it is, as long as I get to the lake before dark.

No time to waste: that's the only time that matters.

I'm shivering again, but my jacket's gone. That's what happens when you fall into a river with your jacket on your head.

You'll warm up when you get moving.

The three bears are on the other side of the creek; I
 
wonder how long they've been watching me sleep.

I wonder if they could see Jess and Amelia.

Hansel and Gretel stand up, waving. More likely they're chasing butterflies or bees but I wave back, and for just a second I don't feel so cold and alone.

Mama Bear stops grazing to stare at me.

I think it's a friendly, ‘Glad to see you got out of the river alive!' stare, but it could be, ‘Glad we've saved you up to eat for dessert!' Whichever it is, I'm glad it's from the other side of the creek, and I'll be even gladder when it's, ‘What's that speck in the distance?' I love Mama Bear when I can't see her but she's scary when I can.

I check the bear spray on my belt: the lid's cracked but still on, and there's only a small dent in the can.

My emergency whistle is somewhere at the bottom of the river. I liked having it too, but so far I've had an awful lot of emergencies and not much good from the whistle. Next time I'll bring a Rescue Whistle.

A raven's feather, black and shiny. I've been lying on it all this time.

It's a sign: my very own good luck charm. The bears have said goodbye, and now my raven is showing me the way. Maybe it was the raven who pulled me onto the log.

I weave the black feather through the snarl of wet hair that used to be a braid, and start down the hill.

If I wasn't so tired, my head so woolly and my jeans and socks so saturated; if I wasn't hungry, lost, scared and hurting, this wouldn't be a horrible walk. But I am, so it is.

And it's steep. Bumpy-on-my-bottom, burning-on-my-hands steep; jamming-my-toes-against-the-fronts-of-my-boots, aching-fronts-of-my-legs steep when I
 
stand up again. If the mountain had to fall down I
 
don't see why it couldn't have got a bit flatter at the same time.

But if I follow the river, every steep step is taking me closer to the lake.

‘Because I'm
not
going to get lost!' I shout.

At the bottom of the hill, the river crashes onto another heap of boulders, but this time the rocks are in the middle and the river splits to flow around them.

Now it's two creeks separated by a tongue of land.

I'm not crossing it again. I'll stick with the creek on my side.

I just wish it wasn't starting to ramble away out of sight of the main creek
 
– but it's still flowing, it's still got to end up at the lake. I'm definitely getting closer: already the ground isn't so rocky and the forest is getting thicker, the way it was when we started out.

I spy with my little eye something beginning with T,
I
 
imagine to Jess and Amelia.

Tree,
they say together.

I spy with my little eye something beginning with M.

They're stumped.

More trees!
I tell them.

I'm going crazy.

The alder trees are crowding and whip-you-in-the-face springy; tangling and laughing because I'm trying to get around a steep bit of cliff, and now I can't tell which way to turn to get back to the creek. I don't know if it's in front of me or behind
 
– or maybe I'm going around in circles: I
 
don't know.

‘Stop it! You can't lose a creek!'

The forest is shocked into silence. Then birds start chirping; a branch rustles . . . and under the quiet everyday life of the woods, I can hear the murmur of running water. The creek's reminding me that I can't hear it when I'm screaming, but that if I calm down and listen, it will call me to it.

‘I'm not leaving you again,' I tell it when I've finally pushed my way through the maze.

The creek doesn't care. It's even forgotten how impatient it was to get to the lake; it's getting slower and lazier.

And wider. I'm wading in water up to my ankles: the creek is spreading out and turning into a marsh. I must be getting closer.

The grass at the campsite was springy and green. The water at the edges of the lake was so clear and shallow you could see every pebble, but as it got deeper the colour did too; in the middle it was as turquoise as the Navajo ring Scott gave Mum. Diamonds danced where the sun hit the ripples. When I waded into it the water was cool, and the pebbles rolled under my toes.

Mud squelches under my feet, sucking at my boots. Mosquitoes scream because there's not enough room on my face for all of them at once.

I can't pretend any longer. I'm standing in a marsh. There's a small pond in the middle, but the rest of it is about the marshiest marsh I've ever seen.

It's nothing like the lake we camped on.

My legs fold. I hit the ground.

I don't understand.

I've made it all the way down this mountain, all by myself, with nothing to eat or drink and no one to look after me; I've fallen off a cliff, wrestled with bears and nearly drowned in rapids. I don't even know if I'm me anymore.

None of it makes sense if it's not the right lake.

If I squint I can see across the pond, and the marsh. I
 
can see the tall reedy grass with its roots in the mud and its spears above the water, and the floating clouds of white scum around my feet.