Raven's Mountain (2 page)

‘Could be why there's no resort,' says Scott.

‘So it's not safe to stay here!' Lily says.

‘Look at the grass and moss around it
 
– that rockfall happened years ago. The mountain's not lying in wait for us so it can do it again!'

2
THURSDAY EVENING

When I was little, Lily was my hero. On my very first day of school she knocked down the big boy who kept rapping me on the head and calling me a redheaded woodpecker. Some nights she'd climb into bed with me and tell me stories. But ever since she turned thirteen, my sister has been Queen of the Putdown. She doesn't have to say anything: just rolls her eyes, sniffs, and looks away . . . and I realise I'm the stupidest, most immature being on earth.

Amelia thinks she's been possessed by aliens, but Jess says we should make our own pact: We won't be mean when we turn thirteen.

The air is fresh and piney. The breeze blows tiny rippling waves across the lake, and cools the backs of my sweat-sticky legs. I want to run through the long grass to the lake and splash.

But Scott says no one's running anywhere till we've learned how to use the bear spray. ‘Just like Lily said, we're in the wilderness. You've got to be prepared for anything. So this goes on your belt, not inside your pack. If you need it, you'll need it fast.'

It looks like fly spray, but you can't just spray it around your tent to keep bears away
 
– you have to wait till one's charging before you spray it in the face.

‘No way am I getting close enough to a bear to spray it!' Lily exclaims.

‘I'd run!'

‘You can't outrun a bear!' Scott snaps, and gives us the bear lecture again, plus the cougar one. He shows us the safety catch and makes us practise using the spray, as much as you can without actually letting it off.

Lily says that because Scott has never had kids before, he has to try extra hard to be a good parent and warn us about every possible thing that could ever go wrong in every possible universe. There's no way we'd be on this mountain if he and Mum really thought we could get eaten by a bear.

Part of the fun of camping out is fishing for our dinner. That's what Scott claims. I tell him I don't like fish.

‘You would if you caught it yourself!'

He shows us how to control the line with our left hands and cast with the right. I don't exactly want to catch a fish, but I can't wait to see Scott and Lily's faces when I
 
pull one in my first go.

First I tangle the line on a log; next I nearly wrap it around Scott's neck, and the third time the hook flies back into the toe of my sneaker.

Scott doesn't argue when I say I'm done with fishing for now.

Lily's standing on a rock with the sun setting behind her. The light's so bright that she looks shadowy; tall and mysterious, with a kind of golden halo around her. Her fishing line arcs smoothly into the lake.

After about five minutes she gets bored and sits down to paint her toenails. If she'd stayed there one more minute the fish probably would have jumped right onto her hook the way they were supposed to.

I start picking up sticks at the edge of the woods. Lily helps build a fire on the gravelly beach when her nail polish is dry.

‘Look!'

A silver trout is dancing on the end of Scott's line; it would be beautiful if it weren't fighting for its life. Scott takes it a long way around the lake to kill and clean it, so there's no smell for bears to follow. Lily and I are glad because we don't want to watch.

‘I could never do that,' I say. For once, Lily agrees with me.

We light the fire and wrap the fish in foil, and the potatoes and corn on the cob we've brought from home. When the flames die down but the rocks are hot, we put the potatoes, then the corn and then the fish, into the ashes to cook.

The potatoes are crunchy and the corn's a bit black, but the fish is crispy and doesn't look anything like a fish swimming in a lake. Turns out I was hungrier than I
 
thought.

At bedtime we drag our sleeping bags out of the tents, Lily and I on one side of the fire and Scott on the other. The ground is lumpy, frogs are croaking and mosquitoes whining, but we're too smeared with Insect-Off for them to touch us. After a while it starts to sound like a weird kind of music. When I take my glasses off the stars go blurry bright, and the Milky Way is so solid and near I
 
feel like I could swim in it. I keep thinking: ‘I'm sleeping under the stars!'

The sky and lake are still end-of-the-night grey when I
 
wake up. Then the first edge of the sun starts creeping over the mountains, and suddenly the sky and lake are early-morning blue, and I still didn't catch the exact minute when the night turned into day.

Scott's already up; the fire's glowing and flapjacks are sizzling. I've got a feeling today isn't going to be just a good day, it's going to be one of those days
 
– like the first time I ever rode a horse
 
– that's like a picture framed with light. I know I'll remember it for the rest of my life.

Finally we've packed, tidied and locked the last bit of stuff into the truck. The hike can officially start. My watch says 8:25 am.

‘Wouldn't it be easier to call it 7:25 like the rest of us?' Scott asks. ‘You can't stay on Cottonwood Bluffs time forever!'

But if I change my watch I'll know I don't live there anymore.

The forest is all around us, thick, dark and cool. It's the same heavy quiet feeling as Gram's living room, as if you're not really supposed to be there.

I concentrate on stepping one foot in front of the other, silently as a native hunter. It's not easy when you're climbing over logs. A branch slaps my face. ‘Ow! Sorry.'

‘It's not a library,' Scott says. ‘You're allowed to talk.'

‘But that'll scare the animals!'

‘That's what we want to do!' says Lily. ‘It's not like we're hunting.'

‘We just don't want to surprise them. If you're not hunting, you don't want to be hunted.'

‘Do you ever go hunting?'

‘Not anymore.'

‘How come?'

‘Because when I killed a bear I finally got it. One minute he was a happy, healthy animal moseying along, minding his own business, and the next he was gone
 
– all because of me.'

There's a deer grazing just below us. My first real, live, wild animal.

Lily reaches for her camera. With one leap, the deer disappears.

Two seconds later a smaller deer bounds past us.

‘Her teenage daughter,' says Scott.

Lily and I get the giggles. But I keep wondering how the daughter deer is ever going to find her mother in that thick dark forest.

We open our packs of almonds and raisins on top of a rocky cliff. It's warm out in the sun; I wish we didn't have to go back into the trees. There's just as many of them above us as below; you can't even tell where we've been except for a splash of turquoise, way down at the bottom, that must be the lake.

I still don't see how we can climb all the way to the top and down again in one day.

Scott points down at a valley on the other side. ‘Remember I showed you my buddy Greg's ranch? We used to ride all through those hills.'

‘Could we have a horse now we live in the country?' Lily interrupts.

‘You'd have to ask your mum.'

When Lily and I argued about moving, Mum came up with all sorts of excuses
 
– but even when I cried she never said, ‘We could have our own horse.'

‘You could get one,' I suggest to Scott. ‘And we could ride it.'

‘Like I said, it's up to your mum.'

I didn't really think it would work. But Lily grins at me
 
– it was worth a try.

Scott's given me the compass because I got that Girl Scout badge. The trail zigzags, but the top of the mountain is due south from the lake; I line the needle up while we're out in the open.

Except now he's got the map out because he wants to detour east to show us the most special thing in his special place. ‘I promise it's worth it.'

It better be. You'd think going across would mean the ground was flatter, but mountains don't work like that; it's still hills going up and down, and the woods are nearly as thick as they were at the start.

But there's a rumbly kind of highway noise, up here where no highway can be. Luckily I realise that before I
 
say it.

Louder and louder; the noise is like thunder. I never knew a waterfall would be so loud. It crashes over a cliff in a solid white wall of water. A pool at the bottom swirls and bubbles like Amelia's mum's hot tub.

‘Take a picture for your mum,' Scott asks Lily.

‘She should have come with us like she said!' Lily says, but she takes a picture anyway. She wants to send it to her friends.

We squat on the fat rocks to catch the water in our filter bottles. The spray splashes over us, as if someone's turned a sprinkler on. It's so hot it feels good.

‘You think this is special?' Scott says. ‘You ain't seen nothing yet!' He scrambles halfway up the cliff beside the waterfall
 
– and disappears. ‘Come on!' His voice is like an echo from behind the thunder.

Lily shrugs.

I follow.

The cliff rocks are big, and the ones closer to the edge are wet and slippery. Falling off would hurt. I'm half scared, half not wanting to be chicken, and mostly wanting to see what's so great.

I get to the
Open Sesame!
boulder where Scott disappeared. I still can't see where he's gone.

‘Slide down to the ledge!'

It's actually quite easy once you see it. I slip down and sidle along to where Scott's standing in a cave behind the waterfall.

It's funny because from the outside I couldn't see in at all. Now I'm dry and secret inside the cave, looking out at ghost trees and rainbows on the other side of the silver water.

‘Magic?' asks Scott.

‘Magic,' I say.

Lily won't come up. Lily hates caves.

More trees, more forest, more wondering if we'll ever get to the top of the mountain . . . Finally we're out in the sun again, in a field of orange and red berries.

At the bottom of the field is a bear.

It's just standing there, big and bearlike, munching up branches of berries, exactly like you see in pictures. Except it's white.

There's no such thing as a white bear in these mountains.

A black cub leaps at the berries bobbling from its mother's mouth. A white cub jumps on top of the black one and wrestles him to the ground. But Mama Bear's not worrying about naughty cubs: she stands up on her hind legs, tall as Scott, and sees us.

She woofs and shoos the cubs up the nearest tree
 
– and Scott shoos Lily and me up the trail.

‘Don't run,' he murmurs. ‘Just keep walking.'

I look back. He's walking sideways so he's not turning his back on the bear. His can of bear spray is out of its holster and in his hand. He wants us to be afraid, so we'll pay attention to his lectures.

But around the next bend, he decides we'll be safe spying from behind a shield of rocks. He and Lily peek over the top. I find a perfect peephole at the bottom. My hands and knees are cold on the hard ground, but the rock is warm against my face.

Mama Bear's still watching and sniffing; the cubs are still up the tree, the black one at the top. A mother and two cubs: just like our family. Lily's the pretty white one that looks like her mother, and I'm the ordinary black one.

Except bear families don't have stepdads
 
– even their own fathers sometimes eat the cubs. At least our real dad didn't try to eat me before he disappeared.

I used to make up lots of different stories about my father. When dancers from the Crow Nation came to the school, I
 
decided that Mum had named me Raven because my real dad was Crow. Other times I thought he was a Viking, or a superhero or a cowboy.

Now I'm older I know that's not true.

My real dad lives in Australia.

He's suntanned and blond like Lily. He wears khaki shorts and shirts, says ‘Crikey!' and can wrestle crocodiles and snakes, just like the Crocodile Hunter.

‘Are they polar bears?' I whisper.

Lily rolls her eyes. ‘Right. And we're sitting on an ice floe.'

Scott ignores her. ‘The dad was probably a plain old black bear
 
– but the mum and white cub look like Kermodes, the Spirit Bears from the coast up north. There are lots of legends about them, like they'll dive to the bottom of lakes to get fish for people who are starving.'

Mama Bear tears off another branch of berries.

‘Look, Raven: she's picking us some!'

Scott's afraid I'll believe Lily, and gives us a lecture about really they're black bears except for being white. ‘It doesn't matter how pretty she is
 
– that bear could attack if we surprised her, or she thought we were threatening her cubs, or even if she was very hungry. That's why we stick together.'

Scott and Lily pick up their packs, but I go on watching. Through the raggedy frame of my spy hole, the bears look like a scene from a fairy tale: Hansel and Gretel hiding from the witch. Hansel is the black cub and Gretel white.

Gretel nudges her brother's bottom. He slides down to her branch and shoves back. They wrestle round the branches and down the tree, swinging, clinging, sliding . . . Hansel crashes to the ground.

A raven caws, laughing.

The black cub rolls to his feet, looking around to see if anyone's watching. You can almost hear him: ‘I meant to do that anyway!'