The rest of the hut was already bustling with preparations for the hike. It was also the first time she got dressed into her expedition clothing: khaki lightweight trousers and a matching shirt, a breathable camouflage jacket and US Army issue jungle boots.
‘I feel like I’m in some kind of a movie,’ she said, checking her reflection in the window – there were no mirrors in the hut. ‘I just don’t know quite what kind …’
‘You look cool,’ said Frazer.
‘You really should think of some word other than “cool” when you like something, you know,’ said Amazon.
But she was secretly quite pleased.
They breakfasted on fried eggs, cooked by the old woman, and hunks of black Russian bread.
After breakfast Amazon sat on the cabin porch and checked out her equipment. She had been issued with the standard TRACKS expedition backpack. It contained spare lightweight waterproof clothing, a fleece, a medical kit, a wash bag with soap, insect repellent, a water bottle, a tube of water-sterilizing tablets, a multi-tool, a tiny but powerful torch and emergency rations.
Amazon took everything out of the neat pack and then found she couldn’t get it back in again. She heard an annoying chuckle and saw that Frazer was watching her. He sat next to her and helped her repack, showing her the best way to store everything.
‘It’s best if you keep it all in separate dry bags,’ he said. ‘Not just to keep it dry, but so you know where everything is. Nothing worse than having to empty the whole thing when all you need is an aspirin. And most people think you should put the heavy stuff at the bottom of the pack, but it’s actually easier to trek if you keep the heavier things above your centre of gravity.’
‘Who made you an expert?’ asked Amazon, who didn’t much like the way Frazer was suddenly acting like the boss of her.
‘Five expeditions,’ said Frazer. ‘You learn the hard way.’
Amazon pulled a face and flicked Frazer’s smug ear.
Miranda Coverdale came over and gave a small box to Amazon. ‘This might come in handy. Make sure you learn how to use it.’
Amazon opened the box. Inside was a chunky green watch. It wasn’t Amazon’s style at all. She was about to say just that, but Frazer got in first.
‘Cool … er, I mean, that’s great,’ he gushed. ‘A GPS watch.’ He looked up at Miranda. ‘Where’s mine?’
‘Sorry, Frazer. Not after what happened with the satellite phone in Borneo.’
‘Hey, that so wasn’t my fault! What was I supposed to do – let the croc eat me instead of the phone?’
‘That would have been considerably cheaper,’ said Miranda, the merest hint of a smile pulling at the corners of her mouth. ‘You’re forming a team with Amazon, so you won’t need two. And it’s obvious that Amazon is much more reliable.’
‘Not fair!’ grumbled Frazer, and kicked over the rucksack he’d helped pack so neatly.
‘Just remind me,’ said Amazon. ‘What exactly is a GPS watch?’
‘See,’ whined Frazer, ‘she doesn’t even know what it is!’
Miranda ignored him. ‘Global Positioning System. It uses satellites to pinpoint your position. If you programme in the coordinates of your destination, it’ll give you a route. Use it with a map and you’ll never get lost. Frazer –’
‘Yeah?’ said Frazer, perking up.
‘You get to carry the map.’
‘Hmph.’
‘Does it do anything else?’ asked Amazon.
‘Like what? You mean does it fire lasers or explode when you put it on the timer?’
Amazon blushed. She had wondered if maybe the Trackers had stuff like that.
‘We’re a conservation organization, Amazon, not secret agents. No, it’s just GPS. Oh, and it’ll tell you the time.’
While this was going on, Amazon saw that the old man, Makha, was walking around the clearing, stooping every few steps to examine the ground. He spoke to his grandson, and then to Bob Doolins. Dersu came over to the others.
‘My grandfather says that Amba came back to the house last night. He says that Amba is angry, and that he must be calmed with prayers and gifts.’
At that moment Boris emerged from the cabin and barged past them. Boris the Dog followed at his heels.
‘Only gift tiger get from Boris is another bullet. This time in brain. Ha ha.’
‘He is a bad man,’ said Dersu.
‘And that is one cowardly dog,’ added Amazon.
The river was an easy half-hour hike down through the forest from the hut. The morning was misty and cool, and the terrain almost reminded Amazon of the woods around her school. Birch, elm and hazel gave way to poplars and willows as they approached the river.
They followed a narrow track, and Boris had decided that he should be at the front. Boris the Dog would run ahead of his master for a while, putting on a show of bravery, and then would come slinking back, scared by a weasel, or a rabbit, or the falling of a leaf.
Bob Doolins was next, with his long, gangling strides eating up the forest floor. Then came the aged Makha, shuffling on his almost comically short legs. He walked with the long stick, forked at the end, which Amazon had seen him wield the night before.
After the Udege came Miranda Coverdale, her step dainty and yet forthright, her brow wrinkled in concentration. Amazon and Frazer came next, walking together, with Bluey just behind them, chattering and joking. Dersu was behind Bluey, his own stride easy and fluid. An ancient rifle – as tall as the boy – was slung awkwardly over his shoulder.
At the very end came Kirov. Like Boris and Dersu, he was armed. But unlike the others he carried a Kalashnikov assault rifle.
‘For defence against bandits,’ he had said when challenged by Miranda.
Glancing back, Frazer found it hard not to admire the easy way he moved, and the way he looked alert without being jumpy. A good man, Frazer concluded, to have as your tail-end-Charlie on a forest trek.
His thoughts were interrupted by a bellow from Boris.
‘Is river!’ he yelled. ‘Is boats!’
Frazer had seen many powerful rivers during his expeditions. He’d white-water rafted on the Colorado, and travelled by dugout along the Orinoco in Brazil. The Khor wasn’t a frothing white-water river like the Colorado, and nor did it have the awesome majesty of the Orinoco, but it had a steady, understated power all of its own. There was none of the sort of brash, hectic energy that expresses itself in rapids and whirlpools, but rather a steady, building force, like a freight train, or lumber truck, or destiny.
It was too wide to throw a stone across, but Frazer reckoned he could skim a nice flat pebble across it in a dozen skips.
There were two boats pulled up on to the narrow shingle beach. One was a modern rigid-hulled inflatable with the TRACKS logo on the side, and a huge Yamaha 350 horsepower V8 outboard motor at the back. The other was an ancient wooden craft, scuffed and battered and patched, belonging to Makha.
‘Bagsy I go in the TRACKS boat,’ said Frazer, stroking the Yamaha engine.
The two Udege pushed their slender boat down into the river and stepped nimbly aboard. On a whim, Amazon joined them, although in fact there was room for everyone in the inflatable, even after all the gear was stowed. To her surprise Boris the Dog jumped in heavily after her, looking warily over his shoulder at the other Boris, who sniffed airily, as if to say ‘please yourself’. It seemed that the big black dog had decided that Amazon was his new best friend.
Dersu had given the girl his hand to help her into the boat, and Makha made a little bow, and smiled a fleeting smile. It was the first smile she had seen on his weather-beaten face. He said a few words in his own native language, and then a few more in Russian.
‘My grandfather welcomes you on to our boat,’ said Dersu. ‘But please do not fall into the river … it would be bad.’
Amazon wondered if this had something to do with the strange animistic religion of the Udege. She half remembered a Russian fairy tale about water spirits,
the Rusalki, who would lure young people into the water to drown them.
‘Are there spirits in the water?’ she asked.
Dersu looked puzzled for a moment, and then spoke to his grandfather, who smiled again, and this time the smile was full.
‘Spirits?’ said Dersu to Amazon. ‘No. It is that we do not have the proper insurance.’
And then he pulled the cord on the old putt-putt engine and they set off, leading the much bigger inflatable into the strong current.
The river made a wonderful change after the darkness and gloom of the forest. Under the trees all Amazon had been aware of were the distant cries of birds and the occasional rustle as an invisible animal skulked away. For all she knew there were great sights around her: volcanoes, mountains, waterfalls, the ruins of lost civilizations, but in the forest all she could see were the broad trunks, the spreading branches, the dark green of the foliage.
But as soon as they hit the water, the world opened up. Suddenly there was a sky again, and the forest became a place of life and hope. In part this was simply because the curtain of foliage had been drawn back, but it was also because the edge is where things happen: life is richer at the margins between two worlds. Creatures come to the water to wash, to drink, to kill, to play.
And so Amazon gazed about with joy as the little boat puttered along. She sat on a hard bench with the muzzle of Boris the Dog on her lap, heavy as a bowling ball. Distant mountains, their peaks dipped in snow, made her feel tiny and yet somehow important at the same time. There is a special name for that feeling that mixes together pleasure and awe: the sublime, and Amazon felt it now.
Closer at hand, a golden eagle soared across the river, the feathers at the tips of its wings spread wide like fingers. Without any visible effort, it rose and perched on the naked tip of a dead pine tree.
Dersu touched her arm, pointed, and Amazon saw a wild pig drinking, with one-two-three-four-five-six stripy piglets in a line behind her. The mother looked up, stared hard with her weak eyes, grunted once, and the family trotted back into the safety of the trees.
A flash of green and gold, followed by a plop, alerted Amazon to a kingfisher, and a second after it had dived into the fast-flowing waters it emerged again, a stickleback in its dagger of a beak. She gasped at the jewelled beauty of the tiny bird, but also admired its perfection as a hunter – to the minnows the ten-centimetre kingfisher was a terrifying dragon swooping down from heaven.
‘This is so beautiful,’ she said to Dersu, or, rather, she said it to the world.
But it was Dersu, and not the world, who answered her.
‘Yes, it is beautiful. But like all beautiful things, it is – what is the English word …? The word for something that is easily broken?’
‘Delicate? Fragile?’
‘Yes, this is the word, fragile. Like the first ice of winter that even a falling leaf could break. There is pollution now in the river. The fish are not so good to eat. People come to cut down the trees. They make roads to take away the wood. Men have come to find gold. To take the gold from the earth they use chemicals that poison the river. Hunters come from the town with machine guns and kill everything, but not for food, just for the sake of killing. These are people who do not see the spirit that lives in things.’
Amazon wanted to ask more about what Dersu believed, but at that moment the inflatable, which had been keeping a set distance behind them as they cruised downstream, roared into life and shot past, sending a bow wave that almost swamped the low gunwales of the Udege boat.
‘Woo hoo!’ hollered Frazer, who was at the wheel. ‘This rocks!’
Amazon thought about yelling back, that ‘rocking’ was exactly what you didn’t want when you were in a boat, but it was too late – he was already out of earshot.
Frazer zigzagged for a couple of hundred metres, with Bob Doolins and Miranda Coverdale trying to wrestle control back from him, while Bluey guffawed and egged him on.
‘Idiot!’ said Amazon, although she couldn’t stop herself from smiling.
It had been a pretty tense trip so far, and perhaps they all needed to let off steam.
And then, as she watched, the big inflatable suddenly flipped head over heels, exactly as if some giant had stuck out a foot and tripped it up. For a second she thought that this was some mad trick of Frazer’s – some stunt he’d pulled off a dozen times before. And then she watched in horror as the carefully stowed gear – and, more importantly, the human cargo – flew out like the contents of a handbag held upside down and given a good shake.
Makha gave a guttural cry, and Dersu gunned the little engine and directed the boat to the rescue. They were at the scene in seconds.
The inflatable had been carried by an eddy into the reach of a fallen tree, so they didn’t have to worry about recovering it. Miranda had made it to the same refuge, and was clinging to a branch. Boris was just tall enough to reach the bottom, and he was using his huge strength to heave himself towards the shore, holding his rifle above his head.
‘Safe!’ he bellowed at the Udege. ‘Boris safe. You help others.’
Kirov was swimming powerfully towards Frazer, who was limp in the water. Makha skilfully steered the boat to them, and Amazon was relieved to see that Frazer’s eyes were open – the spinning fall from the boat had merely dazed him.
Dersu and Amazon pulled, and Kirov pushed, and soon Frazer was in the bottom of the boat.
Amazon bent over him. ‘Fraze, Fraze?’
‘My baby …’ he moaned. ‘My X-Ark …’
Amazon tutted, and then realized that in fact the whole mission depended on the tranq guns. She scanned the choppy water, and saw that most of the baggage was snared in the same fallen tree to which Miranda was clinging. She spotted the bright aluminium case of the X-Ark.
‘I think your baby’s OK,’ she said. ‘But what happened back there?’
‘There was something in the water. A deer, I think. It came out from the bank and was swimming across the river. I only saw it at the last minute. It was too late to swerve …’
‘That’s because you were going too fast.’
‘Yeah, I guess so. I feel pretty stupid.’
Meanwhile Makha had directed the boat towards Doolins and Bluey. Doolins looked in a bad way. He was on his back and Bluey was trying to swim him to the shore. By the time the boat reached them Bluey had found his feet, and together they all got Doolins up on to the muddy bank. He had a cut over one eye, and his right arm hung limp at his side.
Miranda Coverdale swung into action, despite her own scratches and bruises. She was a trained vet, rather than a doctor, but as she said: ‘When it comes to treating wounds, there’s no difference between a pig and a person.’
‘Can someone get my pack?’ she said as she examined Doolins. ‘It’s caught in the tree. My medical kit is inside.’
Amazon went back into the river and edged along the fallen tree until the water was up to her chest. The water was ice cold – it had, after all, flowed down from the high mountains. The current forced her into the network of branches, which poked and scratched at her as if they deliberately wanted to do her damage. But she reached Miranda’s pack and hooked it over her arm.
‘Good work,’ said Miranda. She didn’t give much in the way of praise, and Amazon felt a surge of pride.
Soon Miranda had Doolins’s head bandaged, while the others recovered what they could from the disaster.
As well as the gear caught in the fallen tree, some pieces of equipment had washed up further downstream, and other items were stranded on a shingle bank in the middle of the river. Kirov took charge of the operation, and even Boris went to work without complaining.
The biggest problem was that the satellite communications equipment was all either lost or destroyed.
Frazer and Amazon were given the job of lighting a fire. Frazer was unusually quiet, and Amazon sensed that he was really upset about having caused the accident. She took pity on him.
‘Sure,’ sh
e said, ‘you were going too fast, but it wasn’t your fault that the deer came out in front of you. It could have happened to anyone. I suppose.’
Frazer nodded back to her.
‘Thanks. I may be an idiot sometimes, but I only ever make a mistake once. Next time I’ll swerve.’
Amazon tried not to, but in the end she couldn’t help but smile, although she accompanied it with an eye-roll and a friendly tut.
Frazer and Amazon collected some dry wood for the fire from the edge of the forest. Although they were too embarrassed to say anything out loud, they both had that feeling that something was lurking in there, not very far away, watching them. It made them hurry back to the others.
‘How are we going to light it?’ asked Amazon, looking down at the sticks.
‘Watch and learn,’ replied Frazer, who was almost back to his old self. ‘I’ve started fires pretty well everywhere in my time. My dad showed me. He was the best.’
Amazon remembered something her own father had told her, years before. He didn’t speak much about his brother, Hal, but he had said that there were two things that his brother was good at making: wind and fire. And sometimes he linked the two together. The memory made her splutter with laughter.
‘What?’ said Frazer.
‘Oh, nothing.’ Amazon quickly changed the subject. ‘Go on, I want to see how you do this.’
Frazer was unexpectedly methodical. ‘A fire is the most important thing when you’re in the wilderness,’ he said as he cleared an area of the foreshore. ‘It keeps you warm, cooks your food, sterilizes your water and cheers you up.’
He put down a flat base layer of dry wood. On top of that he put a layer of silvery bark, stripped from a rotten log.
‘Birch bark has flammable oils in it,’ he explained as he worked. ‘Burns like a dream.’
On top of the bark he placed two bundles of small twigs, crossed over each other. Then he prepared a pile of larger sticks by the side.