They fetched their coats from the plane and set out to explore. It didn’t take long.
North of here, Beck knew, the wind would be too harsh and the soil too icy for large plants like trees to grow. There would be nothing but tundra – a treeless plain of tough, scrubby grass and moss and lichen – all the way to the snow and ice of the North Pole. But here they were just far enough south for clusters of trees to gather together as if making a united, heroic effort to fight back the cold. They could stick their roots down through holes in the permafrost and survive.
The plane had come down right on the edge of one of those clusters. A few more metres and it would have crashed right into the firs and they would all have been smashed to pieces.
‘So they’ll come looking for us, right?’ Tikaani asked as they walked. ‘How long do you think it will take?’
‘They don’t know where we are,’ Beck pointed out. ‘We changed course.’
‘But I heard the pilot do a mayday!’
‘Yes,’ Beck agreed, and repeated, ‘But we changed course. I didn’t hear her say that bit.’ And he had no way of knowing if anyone had heard the mayday at all . . . Though he didn’t say that to Tikaani.
‘Well . . .’ Tikaani looked thoughtful, but only for a moment. ‘They’ve got satellites and’ – he waved a hand vaguely – ‘things. Haven’t they?’
‘Yeah, they have,’ Beck agreed. And for all he knew Tikaani was right. Someone at Anchorage might have noticed the moment their plane vanished off the radar and the rescue services might be on their way as they spoke.
There again, they might not.
‘We need to make ourselves easy to find,’ he told Tikaani. ‘Let’s gather stuff together. Rocks. Bits of timber. Wreckage. Look, the plane’s half buried – they may never see it from the air. We’re going to mark out a huge great SOS, here on the ground . . .’
‘Letters on the ground will just look tiny,’ Tikaani pointed out.
Beck shrugged. ‘So we make ’em big!’
And so they marked out an SOS with letters six or seven metres high. It took a good half-hour.
‘They should see that, shouldn’t they?’ Tikaani asked with satisfaction.
‘Uh-huh . . .’ Beck cast an eye up at the sky. There was no sign of anyone looking for them yet . . . But it’s still early days, he told himself. ‘OK. Next we . . .’
And that was when the thought that had been lurking at the back of his mind ever since the crash – ever since before the crash – finally saw its chance and thrust itself forward. It chose its moment well. It smashed through his defences and brought him to a standstill.
Was it like this for Mum and Dad?
All Tikaani would have seen was Beck trailing off and gazing into the distance.
‘Beck?’ he asked anxiously. A pause, then again. ‘Beck?’
But Beck barely heard him.
Had they survived the crash in the jungle? Had they done everything he was doing? But all for nothing, because they had vanished into the wild, never to be seen again—
‘Beck!’
Tikaani’s call brought him back with a shudder, and he vowed he wasn’t going to do that again. There was no point trying to second-guess the past. It had happened and couldn’t be changed. What mattered was the future, and what you did with it. Besides, in order to survive you needed to keep your spirits up. You needed good morale. You did not obsess over what might have happened.
‘Next we find out exactly where we are,’ he said decisively. ‘There’s a GPS in one of the bags. I make sure Uncle Al never travels without it.’
As they walked back to the plane, they could see something was different. Al had woken up. He had propped himself up on his elbows and was looking about.
‘Hey, Uncle Al!’ Beck and Tikaani ran forward.
Al’s teeth showed white as he smiled up at them. ‘Beck! And Tikaani too. Well done, both of you.’ He spoke cautiously, occasionally stifling a grunt. Beck guessed he was in more pain than he wanted to admit. ‘How’s the pilot?’
The boys crouched down next to him and Beck explained the situation. Al didn’t say much, though Beck knew he must understand how bad it was. There wasn’t any need to say it out loud.
‘There’s a GPS—’ Al started to say.
‘I know. Hang on.’ Beck climbed back down into the cabin and made his way to the rear of the plane. He rummaged through the bags until eventually he found what he was after.