Raven's Mountain (6 page)

You never know, someone might be hiking up here right this minute. Maybe a whole group of families has set up camp at the lake, like when Jess's family goes camping with her aunts and uncles and cousins. They'll have cars, and phones, and lots of people to help go back up the mountain and rescue Scott and Lily.

I've got to mark the way, so they'll find the cave, even if I never get down.

Jess has two grandfathers and grandmothers, eight uncles, six aunts, fifteen cousins, two sisters, one brother, a mum and a dad.

Amelia has one real grandfather and grandmother, one exstepgrandfather and grandmother, and one stepgrandfather; four stepbrothers and one stepsister, more step aunts, uncles and cousins than she can count
 
– and one mum, one real dad, one ex-stepdad, and one now stepdad.

Until Mum married Scott I had two grandmothers, one aunt and uncle who live in Florida, one sister and one mum. And one real dad, but I'm only counting people I've met.

I'm the only person I know who's never even seen their real dad.

If there aren't any campers, I'll drive the truck till the phone works.

The plan must have been growing, all by itself at the back of my mind ever since Lily said there were no houses on the road to the lake. Now I've pictured it, it seems real. I can see me in the truck's driver's seat, bumping down that dirt road.

Why not? On those long two days driving from Cottonwood Bluffs to Jenkins Creek, Lily and I took turns going with Mum or Scott. Riding in a truck is different from sitting in the back seat of a car; you notice more about what the driver's doing.

The truck has gears. You have to put in the clutch to change the gears. There's a picture of the gears on the gear stick.

The clutch is the left pedal and the brake is the middle one.

The spare key's hidden just above the left back tyre
 
– Scott said there was more chance of losing the keys on the hike than of someone stealing the truck. Of course he didn't know he was going to be lost instead of the keys.

He left his mobile phone too, in the spare esky under the bag of garbage.

All I have to do is get back to the lake, find the truck and drive till I get to where the phone works so I can call Mum.

The furthest it can be is that service station with the bear paw prints. I hope it's before that.

But the truck's still nearly a whole mountain away.

I'm at the other end of the cemetery field before I
 
realise this is where Lily started choking. Of course the tombstone rocks weren't here this morning, because I
 
hadn't broken the mountain yet.

Did Lily know, somehow? Was her running out of breath a sign that we should have turned around and run down the mountain as fast as we could?

The strange thing is Lily never has anything much wrong with her at all. Until she turned into a witch, she'd always been a kind of golden girl
 
– and I'm not saying that just because she's my big sister and the opposite of me. When I was little I thought she was the fastest runner and best ball player in the world. Even now I know that's not true, sometimes I still feel secretly proud when I watch her race down a soccer field or slug a softball. Secretly proud and even more secretly jealous.

The problem with being nearly three years younger is that I never catch up; by the time I can do something too, Lily's doing something else even better. The only thing I'm as good at is riding, and that's just because I
 
care more: Lily likes horses, but I love them.

So if anyone had tried to guess which of us would suddenly forget how to breathe, they'd have picked the scrawny, freckle-faced, can't-even-go-out-in-the-sun-without-getting-frizzled little sister, not the one who's a natural at everything she tries.

I still wish I hadn't said Okay when she said we should go on without her. I didn't mean to be the only one who got to the top after all.

10
6:00 FRIDAY EVENING

The ridge we followed up this morning is at the end of the cemetery field. It's like the spine of the mountain's back, from here down to where we saw the bears. After that, I just have to find the trails and keep on walking downhill till I get to the lake.

I build another Inukshuk to point across the cemetery field. He's little, but I put him on a table rock sitting a little way apart: the rescuers can't miss him.

Except it's already getting harder to believe that anyone's going to camp at the lake.

I've got to get to the truck before dark.

I change my watch to mountain time: twelve past five instead of twelve past six. That gives me a bit longer till nighttime, but I don't know if it's enough.

So walk faster!
says that voice in my head.

If walking faster is good, running is better. For about twenty steps all I can think about is staying on the path and not tripping on loose rocks.

After that all I can think about is how much I hurt. Every thump of my feet onto the rocky ground is a stab of pain: even my finger hurts more.

Maybe running isn't such a good idea. As long as I
 
keep on walking, that's all that matters.

Toes numb, heels blistering, doesn't matter: keep on
walking. Left, right; trudge trudge; keep on walking.

There's the raven!

It's the first living thing I've seen since I fell off the cliff.

I know it's the same one, even though its feathers were almost purple in the sunlight yesterday, and they're just plain black now that the day's getting dark. It's flying the way it was when we first saw it, flapping its wings so slowly and lazily you know it could go faster if it wanted, but this is all it can be bothered to do right now.

‘Hello, Mr Raven!' I shout. That's one thing about being alone on a mountain: you can shout out anything you like.

Coyote Girl will be Jess's best play ever when she works out the ending. Coyote Girl crawled away from a picnic when she was a baby and got adopted by a coyote family.

I'm Coyote Girl. Amelia's Mama Coyote; Jess is the director and the real mother, but later on she's the hunter. She wants the hunter to accidentally shoot himself so Coyote Girl lives happily ever after, wild and free with her coyote family.

Amelia wants Mama Coyote to chase the hunter away in a ferocious but beautiful jazz ballet dance.

I want Coyote Girl to track the hunter, but he turns out to be her father and they all go home and live in one big happy coyote and people family.

The raven's gone, and I'm alone again. Alone on a mountain is different from other kinds of alone. Alone in your room is good sometimes, not when you've been sent there but just when you feel like it, because your bedroom is safe, and it's your own place.

Alone out here means that no one on earth can hear me scream. I could wave, jump up and down, spell out HELP! with emergency flares . . . and nobody would see me.

Which should be good in one way, because right now I really need to pee. The funny thing is that even though I know there's no one anywhere around, I still wish there were some trees I could hide behind.

Because I know I'm alone from people, but I'm not so sure about bears. Or wolves or cougars. Wild animals are different from people; just because I can't see them doesn't mean they can't see me.

I really don't want to get eaten by a bear while I'm halfway through peeing with my jeans around my ankles.

It's the opposite scariness from last night, because then there were lots of trees that the animals might be hiding behind, and here there are none for me to hide behind. Last night, before Lily and I went off together, Scott shone his torch into the woods and shouted, ‘Hey, bears! Lily and Raven want some privacy here!'

That was something I never knew I wanted a dad for: to scare off grizzly bears so I could pee.

Anyway, I can't hold on till I get past the tree line. I
 
should have gone in the cemetery field. It had enough big rocks for a hundred kids to find their own places to pee.

Though I like the way the mountain is starting to look almost normal, without so many newly broken rocks thrown around.

Why do you want it to look normal?
Amelia asks in my head.
It doesn't make it any easier for Lily and Scott.

Because somehow it doesn't see I
 
haven't wrecked the whole mountain. Because half of me knows that Lily's right, there's no way my Top-of-the-World Dance could have knocked a huge cliff off the side of a mountain
 
–
Of course you couldn't!
Jess agrees
 
– and half of me knows I did. Knows that Scott being hurt, Lily being scared, and both of them being trapped is all my fault.

So just keep on going; that's all you can do,
Jess soothes.

But pee first, or you'll wet your pants,
Amelia teases.

I do what Amelia says.

That feels better. Not just because I've stopped feeling like I'm going to burst, but because I've never peed outside before without Lily or Mum watching out for me. I
 
automatically feel braver now I have.

Maybe that's why the other voice, the Dad one, suddenly pipes up:
If you can move chunks of rock the
size of a car . . . you can do anything. Even get out of here
alive and rescue Lily and Scott.

It's still too high for any bushes or normal plants to grow, but the mountain's starting to get that softer look, as if the rocks are more settled into the ground. Sometimes little tiny plants are tucked in beside them.

And up ahead there's a sticking-out rock that just about says
Raven is on the right trail
. It's the hail-shelter rock.

‘You could camp here if it was bigger,' I said when we were squatting under it this morning. Which is another of those things I wish I'd never said.

‘
You
could. I'd rather sleep outside again.' Which is something I wish I hadn't heard Lily say.

‘Or you never know
 
– if everything goes smoothly, we could even drive home and sleep in our own beds tonight,' said Scott.

Maybe it would have been better if nobody had said anything.

There's still a small white drift of hail against the north edge of the shelter rock. The bottom stones are dirty, but the ones on top are ice-cube clean. My mouth is so happy it could make an ad:

When you're lost and all alone

What you need is a good hailstone!

The lichens are still there too.

A terrarium seems like a pretty Lily and Scott aren't home safe, a pickle jar of moss is never going to make Mum smile.

Suddenly I can't help it
 
–
I hate them, I hate them,
I hate them!
 
– because six hours ago I was happy and excited to be so far up a mountain that lichens were the only plants, and now they make me feel like a fat black F on a spelling test. I kick those pretty golden cups right off the rock and stomp them into dust.

I'm sending Mum an ESP message:
Don't wait till
Sunday! Call 911, get a search party, drive up and find
us!

But Mum's not a mountain climbing, rescuing sort of person. She's more like a mum in a kids' book: she likes cooking, flowers and music
 
– and even though she used to whack in nails and fix things around the house before she married Scott, she just did it because she had to, not because she liked it. She's too pretty and nice to be a hero.

About a year ago, the hot water heater in the basement burst. It wrecked the carpet, and the laundry cupboards got so soggy they fell apart. The landlord sent a carpenter to build new ones.

He came back about twenty times to make sure they were exactly right. Then, one night, Mum was making chili and cornbread. She always makes too much, so she asked him to stay for tea.

He stayed.

11
6:48 FRIDAY EVENING

Here's a list of all the things I don't want to see: bears, wolves, cougars, bobcats, coyotes, rattlesnakes
 
– and sunset.

I didn't know that sunset was on the list until the sky started turning red. Last night I loved the way the mountains turned different shades of purple, with the sky all pinky-gold behind them
 
– but scenery is only beautiful when you're safe. Tonight sunset just means it'll be dark soon.

I've got to get to the truck first.

It's not like I've been dawdling. I've built three more little Inukshuks, but I've been going as fast as I
 
can in between. And the faster I go the more I hurt. My body is nothing but a bunch of sore bits joined together.

Think about the parts that don't hurt.

That's a shorter list than the things I don't want to see:

My eyelashes.

My right eye. (The left one got dust in it.)

My left ear.

The inside of my left elbow.

There must be somewhere else!

My hair.

And my front teeth. (The back ones feel like I
 
chomped on a rock. I probably did!)

I don't know if this is the tree where we ate lunch, but it's definitely a tree. I'm glad to see it again now, and not just because it means I'm about half way. Even skinny, deformed trees are friendlier than rocks.

Trees make shadows too, and shadows aren't so friendly. Shadows are tricky and twisty, and now I really wish I
 
had my glasses because some of the shadows look like bears, and what if there are bears that look like shadows and I
 
can't tell the difference?

The farther down I go the more trees there are and the longer their shadows are. The more shadows there are, the harder it is to follow the trail. It's not much of a trail anyway.