Anakat, their destination, lay on Alaska’s west coast, looking out over the Bering Sea.
‘I’ve stopped over there a couple of times,’ the pilot continued. ‘You know, the elders there have an oral tradition that goes back centuries. They can recite their entire history at the drop of a hat. They know this land inside out and back to front.’
‘I can’t wait to meet them,’ Uncle Al agreed. He twisted round in his seat to wink at Beck. Beck smiled back. They both knew this wasn’t just a pleasure trip.
Uncle Al didn’t really make pleasure trips – all his travels had a point to them. To the rest of the world he was Professor Sir Alan Granger, anthropologist and TV personality with a keen interest in environmental matters. When they were alive, Beck’s parents had taken him all over the world in their travels on behalf of Green Force, the environmental direct action group. Now Al was determined to carry on the good work of his younger brother, Beck’s dad.
‘With all due respect to the National Curriculum,’ he had once said to Beck, ‘you’ll learn a lot more this way.’
That, as Beck recalled, had been as they flew out to the Australian Outback to live with a community of Aboriginals . . .
He gazed back at the landscape outside. It looked very different to the baked desert of Western Australia but in some way it was very similar. This too was a world where Mother Nature ruled. Her word was law. An unprepared human being would be swallowed up and never seen again. It looked beautiful, but it was harsh and hostile.
But a prepared human being . . . ah, that was very different. A prepared human being could live in harmony with nature down there and never want for anything. The Inuit – the people who lived up here in the northern latitudes – spread from Alaska to Greenland; they had been managing it for thousands of years. That was why things like the oral tradition and culture of Anakat were so important. You could never learn it through books or off the web. You had to live it.
Beck and Uncle Al had flown from London to Seattle in a brand-new, wide-body airliner. Seattle-Tacoma International Airport was like a small space-age city, sparkling and modern. Then they had caught a plane to Anchorage, smaller and more crowded. And finally they had been picked up by the Cessna for the four-hour flight out here, across a landscape that hadn’t changed in thousands of years. With each stage of the journey, Beck had felt he was shedding something he didn’t need; one more layer of the twenty-first century.
Someone tugged at his elbow. Beck turned away from the window to look at the plane’s third passenger. The twenty-first century’s greatest fan.
Tikaani was in the seat next to Beck’s. Like Beck he was thirteen years old. His accent was pure American, but one look at his features and his sleek dark hair told you where his ancestry lay. He belonged to the Anak, one of the Inuit peoples native to this area. In fact Tikaani’s father was the headman of Anakat. He was a forward-thinking man and had decided the village’s isolation couldn’t last. Someone had to go out and learn the ways of the modern world.
So Tikaani had been bundled off to school in Anchorage. When Beck and Uncle Al stopped off there, Al’s contacts in Anakat had called and asked if they could pick up the boy for the last leg of their journey.
Rather than use the intercom, Tikaani just leaned close to Beck, pulled back the earphone and shouted.
‘What are you looking at?’
Beck replied the same way, putting his head close to Tikaani’s. ‘This landscape!’ he called. ‘It’s amazing!’
‘Uh-huh . . .’ Tikaani craned his neck to look out of Beck’s window, but there was only polite interest on his face. He was just trying to be friendly. There wasn’t anything down there he hadn’t seen almost every day of his life. ‘Right. Uh’ – he waved the thin plastic sliver of Beck’s iPod, which he had borrowed back in Anchorage – ‘how do you make it shuffle?’
Beck fought the temptation to roll his eyes. He took the iPod gently out of Tikaani’s hand and showed him how to scroll through the options on screen.
‘Thanks!’
Tikaani sat back in his seat again. The iPod’s thin wires disappeared inside the padding of his earphones. Beck smiled to himself and shook his head. Tikaani’s father’s plan to help his son learn the ways of the modern world had been a little too successful. For all Tikaani’s Anak heritage, Beck suspected he would gladly drop the oral tradition and culture of Anakat down a deep dark hole and leave them there.
And perhaps he would get the chance, because his world was about to change in a way that even Tikaani’s father had never dreamed of.