Читать книгу Rescue Dog Tales - Mikael Lindnord - Страница 6

••• CHAPTER ONE •••

Deep in the Heart of the Jungle

‘Go the extra mile; it’s never crowded there’

The jungle, Ecuador, November 2014

The vegetation was getting even more impenetrable, and more and more mud was sticking to our boots with every step we took. All four of our team were probably as exhausted as we had ever been, and in this business of extreme racing that is an exhaustion that most people can’t really begin to imagine.

I looked down at the new fifth member of our team: a filthy, wounded dog, covered in mud and blood. As he trod slowly through the swampy earth, dragging each paw out of the ground with a visible effort, you could see that somewhere underneath the matted fur was a beautiful golden creature. As we struggled on, side by side, I found myself unconsciously matching him step for step. Not wanting to get ahead of him, because he was clearly finding it so hard to keep up, and yet not wanting to slow down to the point where we had no hope of staying in this increasingly gruelling race.

The Adventure Racing World Championship was – is – the pinnacle of the year for adventure racers. And this race, in the heart of the Ecuadorian jungle, was the climax of months and months of heart-bursting, leg-busting training. Staffan, Karen, Simon and I had set out as a team of four highly trained athletes determined to come in the top three of the adventure racing world, if not in the top one. And yet now, as the captain of our highly trained team, I found myself distracted and preoccupied by the struggling dog by my side.

He seemed to ask for no pity; he just seemed to be quietly determined not to leave my side. All I had done was notice him, talk to him and give him some food. And yet in the intense, feverish atmosphere of the jungle, I felt myself drawn to this struggling creature as he appeared to be drawn to me.

At one point he suddenly disappeared; shot off into the vegetation in search of some creature that only he could see or smell. I told myself that he was probably gone for ever, on some mission that a mere human couldn’t understand, and that I had just been imagining that there was some kind of bond between us. I bit my lip at the thought of never seeing him again. I couldn’t believe that a dog – random, stray, appearing out of nowhere – could have so affected me.

And then, almost as quickly as he’d gone, he was back. Looking unblinkingly at the path ahead, walking determinedly by my side as if he’d never left it.

Perhaps that was the moment when I knew for certain that this dog and I would always be walking side by side.

Örnsköldsvik, November 2015

Bike gloves – check; mosquito nets – check; trekking boots – check. As I laid out all my kit in the sitting room ready for the journey to Brazil and the next championship race, I thought about how this time last year I was making the same familiar preparations for Ecuador. Then I had had the help of Helena, and the occasional distraction from little Philippa, but now the house was full of noise and activity as three-month-old Thor made his presence felt from around the corner in the kitchen.

By my feet was the quiet presence of the other new member of the family, the now sleekly golden Arthur. He was lying on his shiny black bed, one paw tucked under him in his usual position, and looking calmly up at me as I laid my kit out, as if to say, ‘I know what you’re doing. And it means you’re going away. But I know you’re coming back. I trust you to come back.’

I put down the kitbag that I had been filling with headlamps and batteries and went over to Arthur. I knew he trusted me, but I somehow felt I needed to take a moment to reassure him.

‘Hey, boy,’ I said as I knelt down in front of him. ‘You know I’m coming back, don’t you?’ I scratched his dark gold ears and put my nose an inch away from his. Arthur’s gaze – his amber eyes ringed by the distinctive black lines that seemed to emphasise his air of wisdom and calm – was unwavering.

I gave him a quick kiss on the tip of his nose and turned to pick up my son. Thor was waving his arms at Arthur, so I held him nearer so he could say hello. Once he was close enough, he put out his tiny chubby hand and gave Arthur’s nose a friendly squeeze.

Arthur, the most regal and gentlemanly of dogs, remained calm and gentle as ever, just as he had done from the very first moment he had met the newborn Thor. He just lowered his head onto his paw, looked up at us, from one to the other, gave a small sigh and shut his eyes.

For all that the preparations were so familiar, it was strange, this year, to be leaving behind a family of four.

It was almost a year to the day since I had first met Arthur, but it was as if he had always been a part of us. In fact, it’s hard for me – and Helena – to remember a time before Arthur, hard to imagine that we ever planned a day without thinking about how he would fit in.

People often ask me how he’s changed us, how we managed to suddenly accommodate a dog into our lives. I only have one answer: he is just part of the family, no more and no less.

The jungle, Brazil, November 2015

The championship in Brazil was always going to be a major challenge and a hugely important race for us as a team. We were on track to keep our place in the top five in the world if we did as well as we hoped we would and finished in the top six. We knew we could do it and had, as ever, done months of training and preparation for this highlight of the year. Just as we had on the way out to Ecuador, we had checked and double-checked our kit and our strategies, and were fresh and fit from weeks of intense training – both at home and in camp in Turkey.

The people who designed the championship course in Brazil had announced that the race in the Pantanal wetlands of western Brazil would be very challenging and absolutely unforgettable. They were dead right on both counts.

I have been to any number of dangerous, uncomfortable places in the course of my adventure racing career, but this place probably beat all records. We were told to expect jaguars, wild boar, crocodiles and snakes, not to mention bullet ants, tarantulas and tropical mosquitoes. It was as close to Indiana Jones as you could possibly get.

And in addition, the organisers had no regulations about when to sleep or rest; there were no ‘dark zones’ – it was just first past the finish post. The maps had only the sketchiest of details, the terrain was as swampy, dense and unmanageable as we’d ever encountered, and all this in temperatures of over 40 degrees.

We were a different team from the one in Ecuador; Staffan and I were this year joined by Marika and Jonas. We were a well-knit team, though, and I was pleased that we’d come second in the Chile series in the summer. It would be a tough race but we were ready for it, I thought.

One of the members of one of the other teams had spent the morning before the start of the race talking and reading with a class of small children. They asked her if she was afraid of jaguars. When she asked them if she should be, they all nodded long and seriously. It turned out that all of them had already met a jaguar. I wasn’t sure whether to be encouraged that they’d all survived the experience, or worried that we wouldn’t.

The beginning of the race was a paddle up the river. That was only as nice as it sounds for about an hour or so. Soon the heat was intense, one of our boats leaked and we were attacked by clouds of man-eating mosquitoes. The wait for a new boat wasted valuable time, so at the next trekking stage we tried to push through the vegetation as fast as we could. Perhaps too fast, but we were still fresh enough to keep up a good pace, running along the trail whenever we could.

Head down and concentrating on the track, I half registered the signs of jungle creatures that had been that way before us. Then, as I focused more intently on the ground, I noticed a series of huge paw prints. The noise of our progress meant that at first I didn’t hear the sinister sounds of rustling a couple of metres to my right. At that point I was slightly ahead of the others, so I paused to check that it wasn’t just my imagination. No – there was another rustle and, I could swear, the sound of chewing. To be able to hear such a thing so loudly, I could only assume it was a creature big enough to match the paw prints. A huge cat. A jaguar.

I felt every muscle in my body tense as I remembered pictures I’d seen of jaguars in full hunting mode. But then I found myself thinking of Arthur, the world’s most enthusiastic chaser of cats. What would he have done if he were here? Did I smell of dog, and was that a good thing or a bad thing? And then somehow, thinking of Arthur, with his aura of calm and his history of surviving in jungle as dangerous as this one, made me calm down. If he could survive in the jungle, then so could I.

I waited for the others and then, picking up speed, we headed downhill (always welcome, particularly in temperatures of 40 degrees) towards the ‘transition area’ and a large lake where we changed to pack-rafting. The others hadn’t felt the presence of a jaguar, but Staffan assured me he had seen two wandering spiders, which the organisers’ race notes had cheerfully assured us were generally considered to be ‘the most venomous species of spider in the world’. Even aside from the sleep deprivation and exhaustion, adventure racing is not for the faint-hearted.

Pack-rafts are lighter and more stable than kayaks. They are also a lot slower. To start with we were on a network of rivers, so that didn’t matter so much, but then, when we got out into the open onto another lake and facing a headwind, it mattered a lot. Progress was really slow and I was pretty sure we were now quite a way behind two of our major rivals – the Swedish Armed Forces team and the Lithuanians. So perhaps it was understandable that when we eventually made it to the landing area, the rest of the team were impatient to make swift progress up a steep hill rising out of the water.

I’ve been adventure racing for nearly twenty years, and I know that a cardinal rule when conditions are really extreme is to save your energy. So when you are in 40-degree heat and you have a practically vertical climb ahead of you, sprinting up it as fast as your legs will carry you is bound to lead to trouble. The thick jungle at the bottom was tough enough to get through, but the climb after that was hideous – hideously hot and hideously hard going.

I told the team to take it easy, we needed to conserve our strength. But just short of the summit there was a super-steep ridge, the last climb before the ground levelled off. From somewhere, Staffan got some kind of superpower and sped up on the last 50 metres. The rest of us sped up too to stay together but the burning heat – with no hint of a breeze – finally caught up with us, and we just sat there for a while, unable to move.

By the time we arrived at the next transition area, we were not in good shape – not helped by the fact that we’d run out of water. A section of the race that on the map had looked like a simple climb over a hill had been so much longer and tougher than we’d expected that we began to suspect that the whole race was going to be a whole lot harder than any we’d raced before.

The next stage started off with more heat and more hills, but then seemed not to have quite as many horrors as I’d imagined. We mostly walked along a boulder-strewn ridge where we could see over the plains of the Pantanal, and the gods gave us a breeze, which saved us from more direct hits from the infernal mosquitoes. Yet soon enough the sun reached its height and the intense heat returned, to make the second 35 kilometres as searingly exhausting as the previous day’s climb. We’d run out of water again and this time the gods decided not to give us any creeks or rivers. We were desperately thirsty and, despite managing to get two or three hours’ sleep in the relative cool of the night, seriously sleep-deprived.

I think thirst and heat makes everything worse, but in particular it makes you drained and very possibly stupid and muddle-headed. Certainly I found it hard to try to motivate everyone, and was depressed by the slow progress we seemed to be making. As a racing friend of mine says, ‘When you’re safe at home you wish you were adventure racing, and when you’re racing you wish you were safe at home.’ On an hourly basis my mind was taking me home.

By the time we got to the transition area we were all desperate for food, water and sleep. Especially sleep. But there wasn’t time to rest properly; I needed everyone to be up and moving on – by my calculations we could gain at least two places if we cut short our rest.

So when we arrived at the waterside, ready for the kayaking leg, we were back in the sort of poor shape we’d been in the day before. Yet as I led the others down to the landing stage where the boats were waiting, I knew that we would have to make extra-good time on this leg to have any hope of regaining a top-five position.

As we got out the kayaks I could feel a light breeze at my back. We were going to be paddling downstream with a tailwind. For the first time in my racing life, we had ideal conditions for me to try out one of my race-winning theories. Tying the two boats together, I put up the small sail that lay buried deep in our equipment box. Marika and Staffan jumped into the first boat and Jonas and I climbed into the second one.

‘Now we can get those two hours of sleep we need,’ I said to the team as we pushed off. It worked like a dream. Roped together, we could take it in turns to paddle and sleep, navigating carefully in the dark and making good progress.

It wasn’t a very comfortable sleep – wrapped in a light silver blanket, lying on the bottom of the kayak like pigs in blankets – but it meant we didn’t need to sleep when we got to the next stage. And we got to the transition area more quickly than I could have hoped. It was one of the best stages in my racing career. So we set out on the next section – apparently the toughest of the race – in slightly better heart.

An hour later we were wading through swamp and rivers, making agonisingly slow progress. Everything in this particular jungle seemed to be either super-dry and bakingly hot, or swamps and water everywhere. There was nothing in between. This bit was a wet bit. And there was nothing for it but to wade through the water – poking our sticks ahead of us to check for stingrays – as best we could.

Another hour later and the stingrays were the least of our problems. There were some strange new creatures swimming round our legs. Remembering the organisers’ helpful race notes, I realised what they were: piranhas – the kind of fish ‘with a powerful bite that makes them adept at tearing flesh’.

‘Whoa! This can’t be happening,’ I said to the others. ‘But look at these guys. Piranhas. Seems like hundreds of them.’

‘Okaaay,’ said Jonas. ‘Well, that’s fine. I seem to remember it says in the book that they only attack if they’re trapped, or if there’s blood in the water.’

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Keep calm and don’t bleed.’

I reckoned that was good advice for the next bit of the river too. We came round a bend just as it was starting to get dark, but I could make out lots of young crocodiles gathered on the bank. You could hear the snapping noises they made with their jaws. They sounded like they were revving up for a night of hunting.

As we waded slowly past them, through the swamp on the other side of the river, it was getting darker and darker. There was nothing for it but to turn our headlamps on, even though we knew what would happen next.

Sure enough, as if waiting in the wings for lights, camera, action, out came the mosquitoes, the giant wasps and the flying ants. We could feel them biting us – vicious, irritating bites. It was getting harder and harder to keep calm and not bleed. Especially when we remembered that the Brazilians called this time of day, when it got dark, ‘snake time’.

The last time we’d looked at the map it had been especially hard to check our position – reading a map on a scale of 1cm to 1km means there’s not a lot of detail when you’re somewhere in the middle of a 200,000-square-km jungle. I reckoned that we might well have been going in the wrong direction, but it was probably best to push on in the hope that we were heading roughly towards the right bit of water for the next stage.

‘This is worse than Ecuador, isn’t it? Only I suppose this time we haven’t got a dog to worry about.’ Staffan was bending over the map in frustration.

I felt a wave of weakness wash over me at the mention of Arthur. It suddenly hit me that here I was in this boiling heat on the other side of the world, and there he was back at home in the snow with the rest of our family. If I hadn’t known how committed I was to this sport I would have wondered what I was doing here. For that moment, all I could do was stand still and take a moment to hope that he was enjoying a nice run in the snow and not missing me too much.

But meanwhile, the insects were increasing their attacks. To try to protect myself a bit I decided to turn off my headlamp and hope for the best. By this stage we’d run out of land; everywhere around us was water. So we started swimming, keeping in the same direction, with our poles in front of us to push off the thick vegetation and defend ourselves against the bigger snakes and fish.

We found land eventually and decided to rest up and check the map. Laying it on the ground, the four of us switched our lights on and bent over it. Just as our tired eyes focused on the bit of the map where we thought we were, we heard a piercing, terrifying series of loud squeals coming from our left. Wild boar. Herd of.

There was only water behind us, and jungle to our left and right. Staffan said he thought we should climb the three or four trees on the edge of the water. I thought they looked way too spindly to carry our weight, but the noise of screaming and hooves coming our way was now so loud that we would probably have tried climbing a piece of bamboo. Just as we started to pull ourselves up into the trees, there was another sound of screaming – coming from the opposite direction. Another herd of wild boar.

Somewhere in the jungle, they met in the middle. They must have come to some sort of agreement, because after another ear-splitting series of cries, the sound of hooves died away and we were left, shaken, by the edge of the river. In the quiet that followed, I suddenly heard a loud crunching noise. It was the sound of crocodile jaws snapping in the darkness nearby.

I thought it was probably OK to feel a little bit frightened.

It turned out that we had been going in the right direction, and it was only another three hours before we could see a landing strip and some buildings. When we slumped gratefully into the transition area we discovered that four teams had gone on, but the organisers had decided there wasn’t going to be enough time to complete the course. With two days of race left there was still the pack-rafting leg to go, a 27-kilometre trek, 85 kilometres of kayaking and 251 kilometres of mountain biking. Even for highly trained endurance athletes that was going to be a tall order.

So the race was cut back and the waiting teams were airlifted out in three-seater planes to the final bike stage. Flying over the plains and jungles of the Pantanal, scrunched up in the tiny, noisy biplane, I wasn’t in the mood to admire the view; instead I was busy working out the implications of all this for our position in the race. Although it was impossible to work out the rankings with any accuracy, I was pretty sure that if four teams were able to finish the race then our top six ranking overall for the year was in serious jeopardy. As we landed with teeth-shattering bumps on the rough landing strip, I felt pretty downbeat. Not a good mindset with which to go into the 250-kilometre biking leg – which had been billed as one of the toughest in an extremely tough race.

Almost as soon as we started, our bikes were slowed down to a crawl by the sand, which seemed to clog up everything from the bikes’ wheels to our eyes and feet. The temperatures were soaring up again into the forties and we soon ran out of water. It was so searingly hot that it seemed somehow unsurprising that in the distance, bang in the middle of our route, we saw what looked like a huge grass fire.

As we got nearer its heat grew more intense, and we tried to turn off the track in search of water, any water, before it got dark. Our route took us right near the fire, but as we cut through the nearby jungle, the fire lit up a glimmering, shimmering mass. I began to understand how people hallucinate in the desert when they’re dying of thirst. But then, dimly, we could make out the sound of snapping jaws. It could only be the sound of crocodiles, which could only mean that there really was water there. Talk about good news and bad news.

We crouched down at what was really only a stagnant pond. As we knelt down to fill our water bottles, I tried not to think about the now-familiar snapping sounds. But looking up I could see, shining through the gloom, three large pairs of eyes. The crocs were just the other side of this small expanse of water. Quickly we filled our bottles. Wondering quite what we’d just collected, I held the contents of my bottle up to my headlamp. It looked like muddy Coca-Cola. And it tasted far worse. Praying that we hadn’t given ourselves an obscure waterborne disease, we lay down for an hour of much-needed sleep.

By the time the sun came up, seemingly moments later, the sky seemed to look much darker than it had done the previous day. Could it be that, incredibly, the darkness meant cloud – and therefore water? It could and it did. As the rains started we looked up to the heavens and felt our bodies were absorbing the welcome wet like sponges.

Soon after that we had to navigate a river. Still feeling the pain from the preceding days, I decided we’d use our bikes to support us as we swam upriver – the air in the tyres kept them on the surface of the water and progress was quite swift. So much so that I was able to look around.

For a moment my brain didn’t compute what I was looking at. Was it a particularly thick tyre, a tractor tyre perhaps? Or the root of a tree, somehow growing into the middle of the river? Then I realised it was an anaconda. And I could see there were lumps in it; it was eating something. Something almost as big as itself. My mind flew back to a video I’d once seen of an anaconda eating a cow. I tried not to think about it, and just concentrated on swimming as smoothly and calmly as I could, even though at one point it was no more than three metres away.

As we got to the mouth of the river I was dimly aware of people fishing on the banks, and I was also dimly aware that they were gaping open-mouthed at us. Yup, I thought to myself, we are probably as mad as we look. But I also felt a great respect for the people who lived here – a country that was doing its best to chew us up and spit us out like the anaconda I’d just left behind.

Maybe that burst of adrenaline had got to me, though, because almost as soon as we got back on the bikes, I felt the exhaustion and fever come back. The sun had come up now; the heat was unbearable and the sand was making the going harder than ever. Unable to ride my bike uphill through the sand, I started to push it. I was starting to feel all the classic symptoms of severe heatstroke – the fever, faintness and exhaustion that I felt couldn’t be explained by anything less. Trying to get back on the bike, I collapsed instead by the side of the road. Once this had happened three times, Jonas pulled me up and tied a towline to his bike. This helped for a little while, but I was feeling weaker than I could ever remember feeling, almost as if my body was about to shut down. Trying hard to concentrate on staying upright, every muscle straining, I began to hallucinate. This, I found myself thinking, must be how it feels before your body gives up and you die.

And as soon as I allowed myself to think of dying I felt a far greater despair. For this I’d be leaving behind the light of my life, Helena, my lovely Philippa and brand new Thor. And for this I would leave Arthur, whose life had been saved – and transformed – by our friendship.

In the heat of the jungle, and the hallucination of my fever, I could now see Arthur just ahead of me. Just as clearly as if he were really there. He was walking slowly and steadily, looking neither to the left nor to the right, just walking with a quiet determination in the way that he had when we first met, seeming to know that where he went I would follow. Tensing every muscle, I somehow found the strength to put one foot in front of the other, walking along the path that Arthur seemed to tread in the vegetation.

‘OK, boy,’ I said under my breath. ‘If you can do it, so can I. I’m not going to give up any more than you did. You and I are not done yet.’

From somewhere I found the strength to finish that last stretch. As I crossed the finishing line, I looked up at the sky and gave Arthur and my family a silent thank you. I couldn’t wait to get home and give them a thank-you hug in real life.