Raven's Mountain Read online

  A little way along, Lost Helicopter Creek joins a smaller one; together they’re a fast, roaring river. At the top of a cliff the new river plunges, straight as a curtain, into a pool at the bottom. The spray shimmers rainbows in the sun; the pool looks as bubbly and foamy as Amelia’s mum’s hot tub.

  It’s the secret cave waterfall.

  I imagine another message to Jess and Amelia: It’s okay: know where I am!

  Ha ha. I am nowhere.

  Because I know where I am, but it’s not where I wanted to be.

  And I don’t feel very okay. I still feel emptied out and hollow: the only thing inside me is a black pit of exhaustion that keeps squirming into sick. I’ve got to climb down that cliff to find the trail we took yesterday.

  The rocks are smooth and slippery from the spray.

  A raven croaks what sounds like a warning, but I’m too busy to look: I’m crawling backwards, feeling with my toes, clinging with my fingers. Halfway down they’re all cramping so badly I have to stop. That’s when I look down.

  The three bears are splashing in the spa pool below me.

  Not fair, Bears! Couldn’t you have got there while I was at the top? Not standing on tiptoe halfway down, stretched between two rocks like a basketballer reaching for a goal!

  I don’t know if I can climb back up again.

  But I’m not stupid enough to even think about going down. Mama Bear might decide to catch me instead of a fish.

  The one thing for sure is that I can’t stay here. My hands are cramping and my right leg’s trembling. If I don’t make up my mind soon I’ll land on top of them. Mama Bear might not think that’s quite as funny as when Hansel and Gretel landed on top of me.

  I slip down the next bit of cliff. Mama Bear stops splashing to watch.

  One more slide, and I land on the Open Sesame! rock. I take a deep breath, shake out my crampy fingers, and sidle around the ledge to the secret cave.

  Yesterday, looking at a waterfall from the inside out seemed as magical as Alice in Wonderland behind the mirror.

  Today it’s so dark after the bright sun that I can hardly see, and it’s damp and clammy. Maybe that’s why I’m shaking so badly. Or because it’s safe.

  ‘Remember how scared you were after the helicopter disappeared?’ my brain asks. ‘And then you got over it so you could go on walking? Well, you’re not going anywhere till those bears leave, so it’s my turn now! Just so you know: you are petrified, terrified, scared out of your wits – and very, very afraid.’

  Plus you’re getting weirder, says Amelia. I agree.

  ‘So quit it!’ I tell my body.

  My body’s too busy shaking to listen. My knees dissolve into jelly, my legs fold like an accordion, and I collapse onto the floor in a quivery, shivery mess. My teeth are chattering as fast and loud as my heart, and I’m so cold I can feel the hairs on my arms standing up straight in their goose pimples.

  So pull up your hood and zip your jacket!

  That’s a Mum voice, and she’s right.

  The shaking is slowing down, and I’ve stopped feeling like I’m going to throw up. I wrap my arms around my quivery legs, stare out through the waterfall and try to feel as strong as my crocodile-hunter dad.

  The strange thing is that even though it’s a fierce sort of waterfall, the more I stare through it the calmer I feel. Sometimes it’s good not being able to see. It feels like being tucked up in bed with the covers over my head, knowing everything’s safe in the house around me. Maybe it’s just that the water’s roaring too loudly to hear all those scary thoughts, but my mind is being washed as clean as a blackboard when the day’s problems are wiped off for the night.

  And I’m rocking, floating in the darkness . . .

  . . . flying through the forest on the back of a great black bird. His feathers are warmly smooth against my skin; I lie with my arms at his neck and my feet at his tail and feel the strong, slow beat of his wings as he flies down the mountain. Trees flash past in a blur; the raven soars over creeks and chasms, I’m nestled in, snug as a baby on a rocking horse and know I can’t fall.

  He dips low into the dark forest, so that branches whisper and tickle. I’m starting to be afraid, starting to choke with fear . . . until a path opens like magic, guiding us to a clearing, safe and sunny. Mama Bear follows, with Hansel and Gretel tumbling behind her like twin acrobats in a circus. As we reach the clearing the two cubs stand up straight.

  ‘It’s okay,’ says the white one, and turns into Lily.

  For a minute I’m still so deep in the dream that I’m not sure if my sister is Lily or the white cub. I can’t help looking around.

  At the back of the cave there’s a deeper nook with a shallow ledge. Neatly arranged on that rock shelf are a long, straight white feather with a black tip, the polished prong of an old antler, and a shiny black tooth, exactly like the fossilized shark’s tooth in Mrs Thomas’s science display.

  Curiouser and curiouser, says Jess.

  I imagine a shark swimming in here, chasing an under–water dinosaur, or whatever prehistoric sharks chased, millions of years ago when this mountain was at the bottom of the ocean. The cave feels old enough. Even the antler is so smooth and white it could be hundreds of years old.

  But I don’t think a deer would have ever come into this cave, and neither would an eagle.

  Something from the sea, the land and the air . . .

  They’re good luck charms, Jess explains. The tooth will keep you safe along the creek, the antler will guide you through the forest, and the feather will make you fast as an eagle!

  I feel as if I’m still dreaming as I hold each charm in my hands, letting the magic of the animals they came from flow into me. I’m swimming with the tide, galloping through the woods, and flying high above the mountain, seeing my way clear below me . . .

  This time I come out of the dream feeling calm and sure: even my bee stings are soothed. My legs have remembered that they’re made out of bones instead of jelly and my twisted ankle feels straighter.

  I put the three things back on the shelf exactly where they were. I have a feeling it might be bad luck to take charms that someone else has arranged as carefully as if they were on an altar in a church.

  But I can still ask them for help.

  ‘Please, please, let me get home safe and get help for Lily and Scott. Please don’t let it be my fault that the rockfall started. And please just make everybody safe even if it was.’

  I peer cautiously out of the cave: the bears have finished their fishing and disappeared. It’s time for me to go too. There’s only one way I’m going to get out of this forest, and it won’t be on the back of a great black bird.

  The dream feeling stays with me just long enough to get to the bottom spa pool and check if the bears have left me any fish for dinner.

  They haven’t.

  I could kill and clean a fish myself now if I caught one. I know that for absolutely sure. I could even eat it raw. Maybe I’m turning into a real raven.

  One of Scott’s jokes: ‘What’s worse than finding a worm in your apple? Finding half a worm.’

  Gross! groan Jess and Amelia.

  Which just goes to show that my brain’s turned into applesauce, because a worm in an apple doesn’t sound gross at all right now.

  16

  3:09 SATURDAY AFTERNOON

  Jess wrote a river play for us last year: she was Huck Finn; I was Tom Sawyer, and Amelia was Becky. Amelia’s actually the best at canoeing and swimming, but she hates being a boy in Jess’s plays, and since we were doing it in her back yard, the swimming part didn’t matter much.

  ‘What should I do now?’ I ask them. ‘Find the track we came up on, or follow the creek?’

  A creek has to end up at the lake, Jess says.

  You’ll never find the trail again on your own, says Amelia.

  ‘Thanks guys. I couldn’t do this without you.’

  I hate to tell you, says Jess, but we’re actually just in your head.<
br />
  The other good thing about staying out in the open means I can see Mama Bear or any of her uncles or brothers before I bump into them.

  But it’s hotter too. When I came out of the cave, I knotted my jacket around my waist to let the sun go right through me. Now my arms are red and my face is burning; if I stay out here any longer, it’ll blister and peel.

  I put on my jacket hood and wrap the sleeves around my head with a big knot in front. The ends droop over my eyes like a thick green fringe.

  Oh, Raven, I hear Amelia saying, in her best snooty lady’s voice, wherever did you get such a fabulous hat?

  ‘I made it myself,’ I answer out loud.

  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.