Raven's Mountain by Orr Wendy Page A

much.
    â€˜What should I do now?’ I ask them. ‘Find the track we came up on, or follow the creek?’
    A creek has to end up at the lake , Jess says.
    You’ll never find the trail again on your own , says Amelia.
    â€˜Thanks guys. I couldn’t do this without you.’
    I hate to tell you , says Jess, but we’re actually just in your head.
    The other good thing about staying out in the open means I can see Mama Bear or any of her uncles or brothers before I bump into them.
    But it’s hotter too. When I came out of the cave, I   knotted my jacket around my waist to let the sun go right through me. Now my arms are red and my face is burning; if I stay out here any longer, it’ll blister and peel.
    I put on my jacket hood and wrap the sleeves around my head with a big knot in front. The ends droop over my eyes like a thick green fringe.
    Oh, Raven , I hear Amelia saying, in her best snooty lady’s voice, wherever did you get such a fabulous hat?
    â€˜I made it myself,’ I answer out loud.
    The raven hears me. ‘Caw! Caw!’ His head is cocked to one side: this is the funniest thing he’s heard all day.
    â€˜Are you laughing at me?’
    He doesn’t answer, so I ask again: ‘ “Are you laughing at me?” said Raven to the raven.’
    Suddenly I’m the one who can’t stop laughing. The only thing I can talk to on this whole mountain is another raven, and the more I say it the funnier it seems. I laugh till my eyes cry, my nose runs, and my stomach doubles up in knots. I laugh till I’m too wobbly to stand and have to skid down the next lot of rocks on my bottom.
    I laugh because I’m tired, hungry, and I’ve been walking since yesterday morning. I’m sore, bruised, lumpy with bee stings and mosquito bites, and the only bits of me that aren’t sunburned are the ones smeared with dried blood. My heart is a solid lump of ice that never melts no matter how hot the rest of me gets.
    I’m so far beyond scared it’s on another planet.
    And somehow I have to get down the rapids around this next bend.
    The creek’s got bored with winding gently down the hill, making a riverbank that a baby could follow. Now it’s a whirling, splashing, rushing-over-big-brown-rocks creek with drowned trees tangled against its banks.
    To make things more interesting, it’s rolled those shiny brown rocks into three steps of short, splashy waterfalls with a little bit of creek between each one.
    The last one’s a Niagara.
    The cliff beside it is taller, smoother and steeper than the one I fell down when I started the avalanche. But now I’ve found the river I don’t want to leave it. It’ll take me hours to hike around that cliff.
    â€˜Caw! Caw!’
    The raven’s so close I can almost feel the wind from his slow beating wings. His beak is open as if he’s panting. He flies low and straight over the creek to the other side. I   can see a black speck in the blue, and then nothing at all. But it’s enough to tell me what I need to do.
    The cliff is only on this side of the creek. On the other side it’s a hill: it’s steep, but it has grass and trees as well as rocks   – I’ll be able to slalom down it, even if I do some of it on my poor bruised tailbone.
    And just ahead of me, where the river narrows at the first little waterfall, is a bridge.
    You call that a bridge?
    It looks like something built by giant prehistoric beavers who got sick of rebuilding their dam with trees and decided to fix it once and for all with a tumble of boulders. Now the lower sides of the rocks are so worn away the water flows mostly underneath. There are hardly any gaps between them, and the water splashing over the top is only a few inches deep.
    The problem is that the water under the bridge is too deep to see the bottom, and swirls around in eight million different whirlpools before it gets to the next