The boys knew the route by heart, having done this several times already that week. Ten minutes later they were in a clearing among the conifers, where a wooden box the size of a large suitcase with slatted sides stood on a tripod as tall as their heads.
Jonas unlatched one of the sides and swung it open to reveal a bank of measuring instruments that recorded every available bit of data about the local environment. Beck dug a tablet out of his thick weatherproof coat and slotted it into a data port inside the box. It took a few moments for the data to transfer from the monitoring station — just one node in the vast net Green Force had thrown around the environmentally sensitive Arctic Circle. In addition, as part of their training, the boys were expected to record their own observations in paper notebooks: any signs of animals, the approximate number of birds they could hear, weather conditions at the time of the recording, and anything else that struck them.
Jonas bent his head over his notebook and wrote the date. Then he looked around him with an air of studied detachment as though he was weighing up all the possibilities in his head.
“Cold,” he said, and wrote the word carefully down in Swedish. Kall.
“You say that every day,” Beck laughed.
“Still true.”
Then he cocked an ear at a distant bird sound. It sounded to Beck like the sound someone might make falling off a cliff — a sudden burst of crying out that quickly faded to silence.
“Buzzard,” he said, and made a note of that too. “Rough-legged.”
It was always when Beck was thinking Jonas would always be a city boy, that he did something like that — not just identifying a bird from a snatched half-second cry, but the type of bird too. Raptors — birds of prey — seemed to be his speciality.
When he had first mentioned his interest in raptors, Beck had thought he was talking about dinosaurs, before realising that ‘raptor’ just meant ‘hunter’.
“Probably looking for food,” Beck commented.
“I know the feeling,” Jonas said pointedly. “Snow on the ground, harsh environment, prey animals forced out into the open — and the hunters come out after them.”
“‘Nature, red in tooth and claw’,” Beck quoted. He had read that line in a poem at school for English.
“Nature-ally,” Jonas replied, with a shy, sideways smile, showing a pride in his bad English joke. He latched the box back up and they started to move on to the next station, half a mile away.
Doing the rounds of all the stations was a job they had done every day of their placement, and it normally took most of the afternoon. With the skis, Beck expected it could be done in a couple of hours — which was just as well, he thought, looking up at the sky through the trees. The clouds were a very thick, dark grey, poised to drop something heavy on them.
The weather struck on the last station. Icy rain began to fall as they made their way through the trees, and Beck was glad to be able to pull his hood up over his head and around his face. By the time they reached the clearing of the last station, it was coming down heavily — a very thick kind of sleet, somewhere between water and ice that swirled in the air and numbed any bare skin that it touched immediately.
Jonas wrote down, mycket kall.
“Very cold,” he said.
“And wet,” Beck pointed out.
“Visst,” Jonas agreed, which Beck had worked out meant ‘certainly’ or ‘right’. “Come on. There's a hot meal in the canteen calling me to eat it.”
It was easiest to go in single file through the trees, and Jonas took the lead. Beck had soon learnt that it took a lot to hold Jonas back when he had the promise of being warm, dry and fed ahead of him. And Beck couldn’t really argue. There had been many times in his life when he hadn’t been any of those things.
They always took care to be back in daylight, and they had been this way every day on foot for a week. So Beck wasn’t too worried that the thick ice clouds were making it prematurely dark, and he could only see a few metres through the trees. Jonas knew the way as well as he did.
But he was taken by surprise when Jonas suddenly skidded to a halt, and Beck had to twist his body and skid sideways to stop running into him.
“What’s up?” he asked peering past his friend.
The track ran into a tangle of branches and shrubs that blocked their way. That wasn’t the problem. They could easily push their way through with a bit of effort.
The problem was that Beck had never seen it before. It wasn’t something that had happened in the last twenty-four hours, since they had last done the rounds — the tangle would obviously have taken some time to grow. With a sinking feeling, Beck realised they had gone the wrong way.
Jonas turned worried eyes on him.
“I, uh, might have missed our turning. It must be back down the route somewhere. I’m sorry.”
“Hey, no worries.” Beck didn’t know Jonas well enough yet to guess how well he would react to the unexpected, and he didn’t want his friend flipping out. He acted quickly to soothe the rising fear. “We’ll just retrace our steps. Come on.”
It wasn’t hard to turn 180 degrees and head back the way they had come, this time with Beck leading.
But five minutes later, Beck had to call a halt. And now he was the one feeling worried. The swirling ice-rain still filled the air and it had obliterated their tracks. All the ways through the trees looked the same.
“Even if we missed the turn again, we should be back at the monitoring station by now.” Jonas said what Beck was thinking.
“Uh-huh.”
Beck rolled back his sleeve to show his watch. He angled the watch face up at the sky and turned slowly, looking for the sun. Even if he couldn’t see it — even if there was just a slightly lighter patch in the sky above — he would be able to work out which way was north, and that would help them navigate back to the lodge.
But there was no sign of the sun either.
With night coming on, and the temperature heading rapidly into the minuses, they were well and truly lost in the woods.