The boys climbed into the plane once more and clambered over the seats to the back where the luggage was stored.
‘So, what have we got . . . ?’ Beck murmured.
One of the bags had their packed lunch in it – Beck knew that because he had been the one to pack it. It seemed like a long time since breakfast. He passed it back to Tikaani, then knelt down to have another look around. His eyes lit on a plastic toolbox, and he opened it up and rummaged inside. Among the wrenches and screwdrivers was a sheathed Bowie knife. He pulled it out and held it up so he could appreciate it.
The knife had a wooden handle, and a curved and pointed twenty-centimetre blade. It was a knife designed for the wilderness, equally good for cutting up meat, removing the skin from a carcass, or straightforward slicing of anything that needed it. ‘Excellent,’ Beck murmured.
He heard a grunt of approval from Tikaani.
‘I had one of those,’ the other boy said. ‘I used it for show and tell at school and the teacher confiscated it. It frightened the city kids.’
Beck smiled to himself at the way Tikaani said city kids. However much Tikaani wanted to be a city kid himself, he couldn’t quite shake off his heritage.
He tucked the knife in its sheath into his belt and looked around some more. Aha! A tarpaulin, folded and tucked away. He tugged it out and handed this back as well.
‘Let’s go,’ he said. Behind him, Tikaani turned to climb out of the plane again. Beck tucked the toolbox under one arm and followed him.
Tikaani had asked: ‘What do we do?’ Beck broke the answer down into short term and long term. Short term: make a shelter, make a fire, find food and water. Make themselves as secure and comfortable as they could. Long term . . . well, he would see how the short term worked out. In the long term, rescuers might show up.
They could have used the plane for shelter, but the pilot was still in there and they couldn’t have lit a fire without the risk of igniting the fuel. Besides, Al wouldn’t be able to get in and out without help.
A boulder jutted out of the tundra a short distance from the plane, carried there by ice thousands of years ago and dropped when the ice retreated. With a bit of grunting and heaving, Tikaani and Beck moved Al carefully off the plane’s wings; they carried them over and propped them up against the rock, overlapping so that no breeze could get through the space between them. That was the shelter.
With Beck’s right hand linked with Tikaani’s left, and arms around each other’s shoulders, they formed a makeshift cradle and carried Al over to install him in his new home.
‘Very nice.’ Al lay back on the ground beneath the wings. They had covered it with fir branches and a layer of clothes to keep him off the tundra. ‘Very nice indeed. The best house a man could ask for.’
‘It’s a traditional Inuit home,’ Tikaani murmured ironically, looking at the wings. ‘Aluminium is what we always use if we can’t get caribou skin.’
Making the fire wasn’t hard. They were surrounded by dry dead wood. Tikaani gathered up a pile of small, breakable bits of wood for kindling while Beck went looking for water and some other essentials.
Luckily, he didn’t have to go far before he came across a tiny stream racing merrily through the wilderness. The water was cold and clear and Beck filled the two water bottles that he and his uncle always travelled with.
‘What’s that?’ Tikaani asked a little while later as he dropped his kindling onto the ground. At the entrance to the shelter, Beck was making a heap out of what looked like wispy, grey-yellow hair.
‘Old Man’s Beard,’ Beck explained. He cheekily held up a piece next to Al’s face. ‘See?’
Al swatted his hand away. ‘Less of that!’ he exclaimed.
‘It’s moss,’ Beck explained. ‘Not the wild clematis that we know as Old Man’s Beard in England. Grows on trees, grows on rocks, burns very easily.’
Beck put a layer of Tikaani’s kindling on top of the small pile, followed by a few larger pieces of wood. Tikaani looked on as he pulled out a bootlace hanging round his neck. Two bits of metal – a small rod and a flat square – dangled on the end.
Beck saw him watching. ‘It’s a fire steel,’ he explained. ‘I take this everywhere. You strike the rod with the scraper . . .’ He demonstrated, and Tikaani flinched away from a shower of sparks. ‘And, sparky, sparky. One thing I can do anywhere is set a fire.’