Bear Adventure by Anthony McGowan, Nelson Evergreen Page A

the much more difficult jump back across the gorge. He had to drag the front wheel of his bike up by sheer might and main, and even so only just made it.
    ‘You shouldn’t have come back,’ said Amazon, as he helped her back on to the bike.
    ‘The Trackers never leave a comrade behind,’ he replied and, although Amazon checked for any trace of irony, she found nothing but sincerity. ‘We’ll climb down together. It won’t be that bad.’
    ‘Huh?’ replied Amazon. She pointed to the stream coursing below them: ‘Down there is the way of the wuss. I’m jumping this one.’
    Frazer grinned back at her.
    ‘I didn’t doubt it for a second. We’ll do it together.’
    ‘Seriously?’
    ‘Seriously.’
    And so this time they went back together along the trail, turned and, without another word, pedalled like fury to the lip of the chasm and flew together in perfect synchrony. Their tyres hit the ground at exactly the same second.
    ‘If only there’d been someone to film that,’ said Frazer, ‘it’d be a YouTube hit for sure.’
    ‘Hmm,’ said Amazon. ‘Then there wouldn’t be enough room in the whole of Canada for your ego.’

The going around the base of the mountain was good, and it only took them half an hour of rapid cycling to reach an area where, rather than being confronted with a near vertical wall of gunmetal-grey rock, they found a broken slope, made of fractured shale and loose boulders.
    It may have been less steep than the cliff they had just bypassed, but it still looked like a pretty forbidding obstacle to Amazon. And there was something loose and shifting about the crumbly rock that she didn’t at all like the look of.
    ‘Are we really going to climb up there?’ she asked. ‘It looks kind of … unstable …’
    ‘It’s the highest point around. If we want to find that kid and maybe, just maybe, your parents …’
    The thought that they might by some miracle find her parents was always there in the back of Amazon’s mind.
    ‘I know, I know. It just looks so, well,
hard
.’
    ‘Since when were you ever afraid of hard, cuz? Heck, you’ve stared down big cats and bigger sharks. Not to mention –’
    ‘
OK, I get it. Where shall we stash the bikes?’
    ‘I was thinking about that. Walking up a hill is always pretty hard work. But then so is walking down a hill – that’s actually when most people fall. But
riding
down a hill …’
    ‘You
are
kidding …?’
    Frazer grinned a grin so wide that Amazon thought the top part of his head might drop off.
    ‘OMG. You’re not kidding, are you?’
    ‘Listen, Zonnie, I’ve been looking for a downhill challenge like this all my life, so there’s no way I’m going to leave my bike at the bottom of this hill. If you like, you can leave yours down here, but I’m pushing mine up that slope and cruising down in style. I’ll wait for you back here, if that’s what you want.’
    Amazon looked at him, shook her head and started to push her bike up the side of the mountain.
    What followed was, measured purely in terms of physical effort, the hardest two hours of Amazon Hunt’s life. The slope was too steep for them to be able to push their bikes straight up, so they had to laboriously zigzag their way, traversing back and forth. Although the sky was grey and the temperature getting chilly, they were soon drenched in sweat, and
both stripped down to their T-shirts, which clung clammily to their backs.
    The ground itself was treacherous, and several times one or the other would lean on their bike only to find it sliding away under them on the loose gravel.
    ‘You want to rest?’ Frazer asked at one point when, although they felt like they had been travelling for hours, they seemed to have made almost no progress.
    Amazon shook her head wearily. She feared that if she stopped then she’d never be able to carry on, and all the work so far would have been for nothing. So, without even pausing, she reached behind her, took the water bottle from