Raven's Mountain by Orr Wendy

a great black bird. His feathers are warmly smooth against my skin; I lie with my arms at his neck and my feet at his tail and feel the strong, slow beat of his wings as he flies down the mountain. Trees flash past in a blur; the raven soars over creeks and chasms, I’m nestled in, snug as a baby on a rocking horse and know I   can’t fall.
    He dips low into the dark forest, so that branches whisper and tickle. I’m starting to be afraid, starting to choke with fear . . . until a path opens like magic, guiding us to a clearing, safe and sunny. Mama Bear follows, with Hansel and Gretel tumbling behind her like twin acrobats in a circus. As we reach the clearing the two cubs stand up straight.
    â€˜It’s okay,’ says the white one, and turns into Lily.
    For a minute I’m still so deep in the dream that I’m not sure if my sister is Lily or the white cub. I can’t help looking around.
    At the back of the cave there’s a deeper nook with a shallow ledge. Neatly arranged on that rock shelf are a long, straight white feather with a black tip, the polished prong of an old antler, and a shiny black tooth, exactly like the fossilized shark’s tooth in Mrs Thomas’s science display.
    Curiouser and curiouser , says Jess.
    I imagine a shark swimming in here, chasing an under – water dinosaur, or whatever prehistoric sharks chased, millions of years ago when this mountain was at the bottom of the ocean. The cave feels old enough. Even the antler is so smooth and white it could be hundreds of years old.
    But I don’t think a deer would have ever come into this cave, and neither would an eagle.
    Something from the sea, the land and the air . . .
    They’re good luck charms, Jess explains . The tooth will keep you safe along the creek, the antler will guide you through the forest, and the feather will make you fast as an eagle!
    I feel as if I’m still dreaming as I hold each charm in my hands, letting the magic of the animals they came from flow into me. I’m swimming with the tide, galloping through the woods, and flying high above the mountain, seeing my way clear below me . . .
    This time I come out of the dream feeling calm and sure: even my bee stings are soothed. My legs have remembered that they’re made out of bones instead of jelly and my twisted ankle feels straighter.
    I put the three things back on the shelf exactly where they were. I have a feeling it might be bad luck to take charms that someone else has arranged as carefully as if they were on an altar in a church.
    But I can still ask them for help.
    â€˜Please, please, let me get home safe and get help for Lily and Scott. Please don’t let it be my fault that the rockfall started. And please just make everybody safe even if it was.’
    I peer cautiously out of the cave: the bears have finished their fishing and disappeared. It’s time for me to go too. There’s only one way I’m going to get out of this forest, and it won’t be on the back of a great black bird.
    The dream feeling stays with me just long enough to get to the bottom spa pool and check if the bears have left me any fish for dinner.
    They haven’t.
    I could kill and clean a fish myself now if I caught one. I know that for absolutely sure. I could even eat it raw. Maybe I’m turning into a real raven.
    One of Scott’s jokes: ‘What’s worse than finding a worm in your apple? Finding half a worm.’
    Gross! groan Jess and Amelia.
    Which just goes to show that my brain’s turned into applesauce, because a worm in an apple doesn’t sound gross at all right now.

16

3:09 SATURDAY AFTERNOON
    Jess wrote a river play for us last year: she was Huck Finn; I was Tom Sawyer, and Amelia was Becky. Amelia’s actually the best at canoeing and swimming, but she hates being a boy in Jess’s plays, and since we were doing it in her back yard, the swimming part didn’t matter