Paw Prints in the Snow (2 page)

‘What’s a goral?’ asked Joe.

‘It’s a sort of cross between a goat and an antelope,’ offered Binti.

When they arrived at the airport, Peter parked the car at a drop-off point and they all piled out. A valet was waiting, ready to take their car away to a long-stay car park.

‘Going somewhere hot?’ he asked.

Chapter 3

Joe kept himself occupied during the long flight. He watched two films, slept a bit, ate the rather overcooked meal that was put in front of him, jumped from one game on his console to another, played cards with his father and listened to music. He looked on with amusement as a large man across the aisle made himself comfortable, closed his eyes and began to snore. The man’s head dropped forward occasionally, swayed from side to side with the movement of the aircraft, then jolted backward again as if an electric shock had been administered.

‘He sounds like a walrus, doesn’t he, Dad?’ Joe whispered, nudging his father.

‘I have no personal experience of walruses, but if you say so then I’ll take your word for it,’ Peter whispered back.

At that moment the man snorted loudly and the magazine that had been resting on his belly fell to the floor. Joe bent down to pick it up and was upset to see that it had a photograph of a dead tiger on the cover. A man with a gun held high stood triumphantly by its head. Joe couldn’t read the caption because it was written in what he took to be Russian.

‘Give the gentleman his magazine back, Joe,’ Peter prompted.

Joe turned to see that the man had woken and was looking questioningly at him. He thrust the magazine towards him as if it were burning his fingers. The man said something gruffly, pushed the magazine into the seat pocket and closed his eyes again.

‘Did you see that, Dad?’ Joe whispered after a while. ‘There was a dead tiger on the cover of his magazine. I knew he looked a bit fishy.’

‘Walruses are,’ said Peter.

‘That’s not funny,’ Joe growled.

‘Having a dead tiger on your magazine doesn’t make you fishy,’ Peter whispered. ‘Your mum’s always surrounded by pictures of animals, dead and alive, and she’s not fishy – thank goodness. I never did see myself marrying a mermaid.’

‘But Mum’s an international wildlife vet,’ Joe said hotly.

‘So might the Walrus be,’ replied Peter.

Joe didn’t think for one minute that the large grumpy man across the aisle was an international vet. He wanted to ask his mother what she thought, but Binti and Aesha were both snuggled up in their blankets, fast asleep. Joe tried to go to sleep as well, but he couldn’t help casting sideways glances at his neighbour, and the more he studied him, the more he convinced himself that the man was some sort of villain.
He might be a hunter, or a poacher, or a smuggler of tiger parts!

Binti had told him about how valuable tiger parts were in some societies, and he knew the skins were worth a fortune. He also knew that trading in tiger parts was strictly illegal.

I bet that’s what he does
, Joe thought, only to see that the man had woken up again and was delving into a packet of sweets. Joe watched out of the corner of his eye as he put a sweet in his mouth and began to suck on it. The man suddenly held the packet across the aisle and encouraged Joe to take one. Joe shook his head and moved nearer his father. He did his best to ignore the man for the rest of the flight.

When they landed in Moscow, he kept close to Binti as they trekked along the airport’s endless corridors until they reached the lounge reserved for passengers waiting for connecting flights. They had a long wait, and Joe was annoyed to discover that the man had followed them.

‘Are you tired, Joe?’ Binti asked, putting her arm around his shoulders. ‘You look done in.’

Joe shrugged. He
was
tired, but he didn’t want to admit it. ‘What happens to people who get caught smuggling tiger parts?’ he asked.

‘Not enough, frankly,’ Binti replied. ‘It’s not considered that serious an offence by some courts, though it seems to me that anyone profiting from the potential extinction of any form of wildlife should have the book thrown at them.’

‘I bet they’re not very nice, the people who do that,’ said Joe.

‘In some cases that’s probably true,’ said Binti. ‘In other cases it’s more complicated. We can’t necessarily blame people for seizing the few opportunities that come their way to climb out of poverty. In those cases we need to help them find other ways to earn a living.’

‘But tigers are dying out,’ Joe protested.

‘And that’s why so many caring people all over the world are doing everything they can to save them.’

Joe looked across at the man who was now sitting at a table in the transit lounge café. ‘What would you do if you thought someone might be a smuggler?’

‘I’d try to find some evidence and then report them to the authorities,’ said Binti. ‘But it’s not easy – it’s not as if they have “smuggler” written across their foreheads.’

Joe thought about the one piece of ‘evidence’ he had had – the magazine. It didn’t amount to very much – nothing at all, if he was honest with himself. He would just have to forget the man.

He was relieved when at last they boarded the onward flight to Vladivostok, but dismayed to see that the man was boarding it too.

Chapter 4

‘It’s freezing!’ Aesha cried, as they hurried towards the minibus that was waiting for them outside the terminal at Vladivostok airport.

‘Isn’t that what we were expecting?’ Her father grinned.

‘There’s freezing and then there’s freezing. This is
f-f-f-freeeeezing
!’

‘Put your hat on then!’ said Binti.

‘It’s not that bad,’ Aesha replied quickly, scrambling into the minibus while the driver stowed their luggage in the back. ‘It’s warm in here. Hurry up and get in!’

‘You’re right about one thing – you do look like a beluga,’ chirped Joe, jumping into the seat behind her so that she couldn’t take a swipe at him.

They set off through the town. Joe found himself gripping the door handle as the minibus swerved past cars that were going too slowly along sweeping boulevards lined with buildings that seemed to belong to another century. The next minute, they were driving nose to tail through streets that were too narrow for all the traffic. The driver was very vocal and shook his fist at anyone he deemed to be in his way.

‘He’s excitable,’ Peter observed.

‘He’s a lunatic!’ Binti muttered.

Joe stared with fascination when they passed close to the harbour because he loved looking at boats. Small private yachts were moored next to trawlers and cargo ships, while passenger liners were busily swapping places with ferry boats and a huge tanker drifted along the horizon. The road continued to follow the seafront, skirting an extensive stretch of sandy beach.

‘I never thought of Russia being by the sea,’ Joe said.

‘You wouldn’t catch me swimming in it,’ Aesha declared.

‘People do, in the summer. The temperatures then are similar to ours in the UK,’ Binti told her.

‘So it’s not that warm,’ scoffed Aesha.

Soon after they turned inland it began to snow lightly and Binti expressed her concern that they might not make it to Lazovsky, where they were heading.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Peter brightly. ‘Russia doesn’t come to a standstill like it does back home just because of a bit of snow.’

Joe gazed out at the whitening world, feeling excited. This was proper snow – great big flakes the size of cottonwool balls were dropping from the sky, and every mile they travelled took them closer to the realm of the Amur tiger. He peered intently at the pine woods fringing the highway.
I’d
so
love to see a tiger in the wild
, he thought. His mother, however, had warned him that the chances were almost nil.

‘I’m sure you’ll be able to watch any camera footage that’s shot while we’re there, but you won’t be allowed to join the night patrols,’ said Binti, as if reading his mind. ‘The most you can hope for is that we spot a tiger when we’re driving around the reserve, but there are so few of them left.’

‘How many?’ Aesha wanted to know.

‘In the area we’re visiting, only about ten. In total, in Russia, around four hundred.’

‘No wonder there’s such a big campaign to save them,’ Aesha pondered. ‘It would be a crime if they became extinct.’

Joe continued to scour the woodlands and fields as they progressed.
Even if I don’t see a tiger, I might spot something else while everyone is dozing
, he thought to himself.

Joe must have fallen asleep, though, because the next thing he knew, someone was shaking his shoulder.

‘Wake up, sweet prince,’ Peter said. ‘We’ve arrived at our castle.’

Joe struggled to open his eyes. He was disappointed to find it was nearly dark outside, and even more disappointed to discover that their ‘castle’ was a rather grim-looking hotel. His mother and Aesha were in the lobby, being welcomed by a woman dressed in a big furry hat and a deeply quilted coat, who spoke English with a heavy accent. Joe shivered. It was only a few short steps into the hotel, but he was reluctant to leave his cocoon. He pulled his own coat around him, jumped down from the minibus and looked about.

Everywhere was covered with a thin layer of snow. Joe had hoped it would be deeper. He wanted it to be so deep that he would have to lift his feet up to his ears just to walk through it! There had been a lot more snow back home the previous winter, when everyone had talked about the snowfalls as being among the heaviest on record.

‘How long are we staying in this place?’ he asked as they walked through the dimly lit hotel lobby.

‘Only till the morning. We arranged for a stopover here because it’s so late. We, and our hosts in Lazo, felt it would be better if we set off tomorrow, refreshed and in daylight.’ Binti smiled at him. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I know two days of travelling isn’t much fun, but the adventure is about to begin!’

Joe nodded as she squeezed his shoulder. He was overwhelmed with tiredness and right at that moment would have been happy to sleep anywhere – even standing up, there in the lobby. He allowed his eyes to close briefly. When he opened them again, he noticed the man from the plane, the Walrus, sitting on a stool in the hotel bar.

Chapter 5

Early the next morning, the Brooks prepared to set off on the final leg of their journey. Joe had slept well despite his sighting of the Walrus. At breakfast, an unexciting affair of a kind of bread called
kleb
and processed cheese, he watched for him to appear, but there was no sign of him.

They were collected by the manager of the research centre in Lazo, a brisk, athletic-looking woman in her thirties called Iona Petrov. She shepherded them into a six-seater car and asked them to wait while she disappeared back into the hotel. A few seconds later, she came out again with the man from the plane, who loaded his luggage into the back of the car.

‘This is Artem Klopov,’ she introduced him. ‘He works with us as a dog handler. He’s just come back from a training course in the UK. He doesn’t speak much English, though he understands more.’

Artem Klopov nodded to them and clambered awkwardly into the front of the car.

Grinning broadly, Peter turned round to Joe and muttered, ‘Very fishy’.

Joe was annoyed that he had voiced his suspicions, and a little dismayed at being deprived of his imagined role as detective. He stared out of the window and began to wonder what sort of work a dog handler would be doing at the tiger station. He even found himself wondering if dog-handling was just a cover for Artem Klopov’s activities as a smuggler, before he scolded himself for being ridiculous.

The final part of their journey took just three hours, during which time Iona chatted to Binti about her team’s work with tigers and discussed how they were educating the local community in the importance of conservation.

‘This is a society that has hunting ingrained in it, so we have to change the traditional mindset. The problem is not just that tigers are being poached, but that the animals they feed on are declining in number. Tigers can’t survive if there isn’t enough food, and on top of that, all the animals are being seriously affected by illegal logging, which is destroying their habitat.’

Iona chatted with Artem too. Joe wished he could understand what they were saying. Peter asked her a question about Artem’s work, and they learnt that it involved training a team of dogs to recognise different scents.

‘Sniffer dogs are invaluable in helping us track tiger movements in the Lazovsky Nature Reserve,’ Iona translated. ‘It’s a new and vital part of our operation.’

Joe was intrigued. He hoped he would get a chance to watch the sniffer dogs at work, and decided that Artem must be a decent person after all if he was involved in tiger conservation.

‘You’ll be spending most of your time at our park headquarters, and we’ve arranged for you to stay within the reserve for a couple of nights. How does that sound?’ Iona looked in her mirror to observe her passengers’ reactions.

‘Cool!’ said Joe.
Staying inside the reserve sounds like the starting point of an adventure to me
.