Beck struck the fire steel again next to the small pile of kindling. Sparks settled on a couple of strands of Old Man’s Beard and they started to burn, more a red glow than a flame. They twisted and writhed as the glow consumed them. A few seconds more and the dead moss was all but gone, but a thin flicker of flame licked against the kindling. A piece of wood snapped, another crackled as the fire took hold and gradually spread out. Now Tikaani grinned and crouched down with his hands held out to the heat.
‘How’s the leg?’ Beck asked his uncle.
Al shifted himself towards the fire and looked thoughtfully down at the bandage. ‘You did a good job, Beck. Thanks. Get more of the gauze ready. I’m going to release the tourniquet . . .’
Beck nodded and fetched the first aid box. The tourniquet had to be released eventually because a limb with insufficient blood supply will just go rotten. But if the wound hadn’t sealed itself, blood would simply rush into the leg and out of the gash and it would need rebandaging.
‘Could you . . . ?’ Al asked. Beck held the stick steady while his uncle released the knot holding it in place. He loosened the tourniquet by half a turn and grunted, teeth clenched. All three of them looked carefully at the bandage. After a minute it obviously wasn’t getting any redder.
Beck breathed out; Al refastened the tourniquet in its new, looser position.
‘Give it another twenty-four hours and I’ll take it off,’ he said. He smiled with an effort at the boys. His face was white and drawn with pain but he seemed determined to be cheerful. ‘Now, lunch?’
Lunch was a frugal meal of cold meat and biscuits. It did the job, but . . .
‘This isn’t going to last us for a few days,’ Tikaani said unhappily.
‘Hey, we’re surrounded by food!’ Beck told him.
Tikaani looked around. ‘Yeah. Yummy grass followed by fir-tree dessert.’
Beck reached for the toolbox that lay nearby. He tipped out the contents and stood up with the empty container. ‘Come on, I’ll show you.’
Five minutes later they were in the woods. The boys crouched by a fallen log that was slowly disintegrating with age. Beck poked aside the layers of rotten bark with the knife tip and they fell away to show a cluster of brown, lens-shaped mushrooms, smooth and silky beneath the dirt.
‘This is deer mushroom,’ Beck told the other boy. ‘It grows on dead wood and it’s perfectly safe to eat.’
‘Paluqutat,’ Tikaani said unexpectedly. Beck looked up at him in surprise, and he shrugged. ‘Hey, I used to help my grandma gather it up. It’s just never been a main meal before.’
‘OK . . .’ Beck pried the rest of the deer mushrooms off the log and dropped them into the box. ‘Well, we need plenty of this and also . . . Aha!’
He pushed aside the leaves of a nearby bush and Tikaani saw a cluster of berries. They were black and half the size of plums.
‘These are bearberries,’ said Beck. ‘They’re very easy on the stomach and they fill you up, so . . .’
‘What are you?’ Tikaani asked as they set to stripping the bush of its load. ‘Some kind of expert?’
‘Expert?’ Beck paused a moment. He didn’t want to brag. ‘I know a thing or two. I spent a month with a Sami tribe in Finland once – Mum and Dad were doing research there. It’s not too different to this place.’
‘So you’ve done this before? I mean, actually had to survive in the wilderness?’
‘The wilderness? No.’ Beck straightened up from the bush and looked around for more. ‘The jungle . . . well, yes.’
‘Hey? When?’
‘Look around for more mushrooms,’ Beck instructed. ‘I’ll see if I can find some more berries. When? Um . . . a couple of months ago . . .’
And so, while they gathered food together, Beck found himself telling Tikaani about his recent time in Colombia with his friends Christina and Marco. Uncle Al had been kidnapped, and they’d had to get through miles of inhospitable, humid jungle to rescue him. As well as finding food they’d had to negotiate waterfalls and bullet ants and jaguars and a poisonous snake . . .
‘You cut its head off? Just like that?’ Tikaani was incredulous as Beck described his encounter with the deadly bushmaster.
Beck grinned. ‘And ate it later.’
Tikaani whistled, impressed.
They found a cranberry bush bearing small, tart fruit. The berries exploded on the tongue in a burst of sourness, but they were still edible.
The boys went back to the plane with a box full of one variety of mushroom and two kinds of berries. Tikaani was looking a little more cheerful.