KEEWATIN

Extracts

It was mid-afternoon. I heard a car pull up outside. A few seconds later the door to the lab was flung open so hard that it banged back against the wall. A girl about my age came in. Without even saying hello or anything she called out to Lester:

'The car's outside. I thought I'd tell you that Vicky is grumpy so you'd better not hang around. It wasn't my fault the eggs fell out of the box. The lids are only hinged on one side so why don't they put a fastener or something on the other side to stop it opening? I cleaned it up as best as I could but there is still egg all over the… well, not all over, but it is on the seat and a bit on the –'

'Alex,' Lester said to me, interrupting her. 'Have you met my daughter, Suzie?'

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I didn't like it when Dad went away, it meant that Mum had more things to do. Me too, because Dad did most of the shopping and when he went away I had to volunteer to do it. Late that afternoon Mum drove Dad to the airport and I went with them. I didn't want to go, I had planned to go to my mate Roger's house to see his pet lizards. In the Departures Hall at the airport we waved Dad off. He hugged me in public, which was all right because none of my friends were around. I was glad I went. Three weeks later, on the day Dad was supposed to fly home, somebody phoned Mum and told her he had disappeared.

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Lester explained that when the plane didn't return, the mine security guards phoned the police at Churchill, a town on Hudson Bay. The police phoned around all the inhabited places the Otter could have reached that day. Nobody had seen it. He told me that the police and forestry people sent up a water bomber, a huge floatplane that they used to drop water on forest fires. He explained that the water bombers travel slowly and can stay in the air for hours without refuelling.

'They didn't find anything,’ he said. ‘There is no wreckage. That's a good sign.'

He also told me that there had been a heavy fall of snow the day after Dad disappeared. It had covered everything. After three days the official search had been called off. The mine manager at Twin Bays wasn't happy about that, so he hired two planes and pilots from the local airstrip. They flew from dawn to dusk, right out to the limits of their fuel tanks.

'They found nothing either,' Lester said. 'No clues to show what could have happened to your dad and the pilot.'

Things sounded bad. The best thing we could hope for was that they had survived and would eventually turn up. That night I had a dream about Suzie. I dreamt that while I was searching for Dad I went to her school. Suzie was the headmistress and I was the only boy there. It was scary. More like a nightmare than a dream. 

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Rob Herbert was bigger and taller than Lester. He looked about my dad's age and had long hair. He was wearing a scruffy green jacket. When he shook my hand I thought my fingers would break off. He looked at me, seriously.

'Sorry we've had no luck finding your father,' he said very quietly. 'Perhaps Lester told you that I organised the unofficial part of the search.'

I didn’t know that. I shook my head.

'I was the guy that got the search going at our end. We hired planes to look around. We haven't given up yet. Trouble is, we don't know what more we can do. I guess you know that if it wasn't for your father there would be no mine here at Twin Bays?'

I rather wished that there had never been a mine. Then none of this would have happened. But I didn't like to say so.

'Do you really think he is still alive?' I asked.

The big man frowned. 'Tell you the truth, I don't know what to think, what with the winter and things. We would like to believe that he is okay. To be honest with you we reckoned on seeing or hearing something of him by now.'

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From the other side of a bush came the sound of breathing. I froze. There were tiny berries on the bushes: blueberries. Bears love blueberries. I was standing in the middle of a bear's blueberry patch. The breathing stopped. I tried to think what to do but my mind wouldn't focus. Brown bears are huge. If this one was hidden by bushes then it had to be small. If it was a baby bear then the mother would be somewhere nearby. That meant two bears, not one. She would be in the forest, somewhere close. The crash I had heard earlier must have been her, pushing her way through the trees. Things had gone from scary to terrible. If the mother saw me near her baby she would get mad. I knew I had to run. I had to turn around slowly and dash back the way I had come. I was about to do it when something moved, something low down, right beside me. There, behind a bush, was a patch of brown fur.

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I had seconds to think things through. The men would be safe because they had the rifle. But that was wrong. They weren't safe at all. They were asleep. The bear would just crash through their tent and trample them. Something went thump in the cab. Suzie had slid back the glass in her small window.

'Alex? What on earth are you doing?'

'Bear!'

'What?'

'Bear! Bear! Bear! There's a bear outside!'

She had been kneeling on something and she fell off it.

'Get the rifle!'

'Rob has it.'

She was whispering, fiercely. 'No, it's there!'

'Where?'

'In the cab. Over your head.'

I looked up. On the back of the cab, above Suzie's face in the window, was a rifle rack. I reached up, unclipped it and lifted down the rifle. It was quite old. It was also a lot heavier than I expected it to be. I swung it round so that I could get the wooden butt through Suzie's window.

'I don't want it, you fool! What am I supposed to do with it back here?'

'What do I do with it?'

'Fire it!'

The bear had moved again. It was about five or six paces from the mess tent and standing high on its hind legs.           

'I've never… if I shoot it I’ll break the windscreen!'

'Then open the side window. Wind it down. Stick the barrel of the gun out of the window.'

I did what she said. I lowered the window just enough to get the end of the rifle out.

'Don't you dare hurt it, Alex!'

There was no possibility of hurting the bear. I couldn't even point the gun at it, never mind look through the sights. I tried to pull the trigger but it wouldn't move. The bear was running now. It had changed direction. Instead of heading for the mess tent it was heading for the tent with the sleeping men.

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She kicked down on the starter and the engine roared into life. She tweaked the throttle a couple of times the way racing drivers do at the start of a race. The next thing I knew she had ridden up right beside me.

'Jump on!'

'Eh?'

'Jump on. You have longer legs than me. You can put your feet down either side and keep the bike upright. I can't do that.

If that's all she wanted then that was okay. I swung a leg over the back of the bike. I was right up behind her, there wasn't much room. The seat was higher than I'd realised. I could touch the ground on both sides only if I went on tiptoe. I should have known better. As soon as I was settled on the seat Suzie let in the clutch and the bike took off across the grass. I shrieked, and grabbed on to her. If there hadn't been panniers behind my legs I would have slid off the bike backwards. My feet trailed behind in the way some insects' legs do when they fly. By the time we had ridden twice around the clearing I had found the footrests. I wasn't sure what to do. My head was a muddle. I wanted to be brave enough to tell her to stop, to say I didn't want to be there. The third time we went round the clearing I had made up my mind. We hadn't crashed and we had slowed down. She was no longer riding as if trying to tame a wild stallion. Round and round the clearing was fine. I got used to it. It felt good. It was better than doing nothing all day, waiting for the team to return. Then, on the fourth circuit of the clearing, just as I was beginning to relax Suzie swung the bike onto the track and headed out of the camp.

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We had reached the end of the road. The edge of the forest was still some way off but I could see the plane's float clearly. It was perched at an odd angle as if it had dived through the treetops like a torpedo.

'It doesn't look damaged,' I said. 'Perhaps it just fell off. Perhaps the bolts that held it on worked loose or something. Perhaps the plane didn't crash. Perhaps it kept going until they could find somewhere safe to land. 

'Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps. If it had kept going then it would have flown back to the mine. Well, wouldn't it?'

I nodded. Everything was too real. Dad had crashed. I didn't want to think about it. I shouldn't be here at all. I should be home with Mum. Suzie had walked off the road and was sitting on a fallen tree, undoing the laces on her left boot. She took the boot off and emptied water out of it. Then she put her hand in and pulled out bits of twig.

'We should be getting back,' she said. 'What's the time?'

I slid up the sleeve of my jacket and glanced at my watch. I don't know why it is, but sometimes, when you look at a watch with a second-hand, the hand seems to have stopped moving. The trouble with mine was that it had.

'Um… not sure. I think my watch has stopped.'

I didn't think it, I knew it. Had it stopped recently, or had it stopped hours ago? I knew the answer to that question, too.

'Has it stopped or hasn't it? Is it ticking?'

'It doesn't tick. It has a battery. The second-hand doesn't seem to be moving.'

'Doesn't seem to be? Doesn't SEEM to be? It's either moving or it's not.'

'Not.'

She went quiet. She was no longer looking at the float, she was looking at the sun. It wasn't setting, exactly. But it looked quite low in the sky.

We didn't need a watch to know that in a couple of hours it would be dark. Suzie turned to me, her hands on her hips. She was trying to look confident but I could see fear in her eyes. Then she spoke, quietly and slowly.

'You and me are in big trouble, Alex Mackenzie…'

END OF EXTRACTS