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We were turning round and heading back, when the air sickness got to my dad and he threw up. Luckily though, he had picked up the sick bag just in time.
BUMP! BUMP!
“What was that?” My mum asked the pilot, looking very worried.
BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!
One of the dials on the main control panel had started beeping and there was a warning signal coming from somewhere on the panel in front of the pilot. He started pushing some buttons and pulling some levers.
“What? What’s wrong? Why is it beeping?” My dad questioned.
“It’s OK. Just stay calm. It’ll be fine. We’re losing fuel!” The pilot shouted. “We’re going to have to land! Everybody sit back and make sure your seatbelts are done up properly.”
We watched as he took us down into the gorge. I looked out of the window and saw the sides of the valley rush up beside us as we went down. We were going to land in a small clearing the pilot had spotted near the river. I could see the pilot struggling to keep control of the helicopter. We were nearly there now, only 10 feet away from the ground and... THUD! We landed with a heavy jolt.
“Is everyone alright?” I asked.
“No, my arm hurts,” my sister said.
“There’s a first-aid kit under my seat and under the back seat,” the pilot told us.
“Thanks,” I replied.
My mum opened the kit and took out the bandages and antiseptic cream first and then looked at the injury. After taking some cream in her hands she gently rubbed it on my sister’s arm, taking care not to hurt my sister too much, she then rolled out the bandage and wrapped half of it around her right arm. I could see that my sister’s arm had a large cut down the middle of it.
“We are going to have to walk to that point up there and quickly, so we can get a clear radio signal,” the pilot said, pointing up to the cliff and looking at the radio.
“OK then, if we have to walk, then we’ll have to walk.” My dad said.
We started walking towards the cliff and as time went on we started getting tired. On the way, we saw a fallen tree in our path and I thought that we would have to go round it or another way, but my dad had already started climbing over it.
“Come on! I’ll pull you up!” He shouted from on the top. He pulled everyone up one at a time which saved us from walking around it.
A little way along from the fallen tree incident, we decided to stop and take a look around to see where we were. So we decided to send my dad up one of the trees to see if he could find out where we were. The pilot told us that while we were resting he was going to go and try to get a radio signal from a ledge he had spotted about 200 metres from our current location.
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As my dad was climbing the tree, my sister said that she was feeling cold, so I thought I would try to make a fire. I was trying to start a fire using the wood bits I had chipped off from the fallen tree, some paper from my pockets, some dried grass from the floor and the pilot’s lighter. For some reason it didn’t work very well. I got some wood alight but it went out. Then I realised that there was too much wind blowing from the east. I simply turned round and faced the other way and I got it to light again and stay lit.
I could begin to see a shadow falling in the gorge as I felt the chill of the dark. Everything was silent now all I could hear was the roar of the river and the noise of the crickets. It was starting to get quite dark now and we didn’t know what we were going to eat for dinner, how we were going to build a shelter of some sort and where we were going to sleep. It looked pretty hopeless; we didn’t think we were going to get out of there. We didn’t think that things could get any worse, but we were wrong.
“Hey, we could eat these berries?” My sister asked. “Couldn’t we?
“I don’t know,” I said, “they could be poisonous.”
“Well, I’m not going to wait around and starve to death!” My sister exclaimed. “I’m eating them.” She put a couple in her mouth and tasted them. “They taste ...”
“Puja? How are they?” I asked her. I got no reply.
She clenched her stomach and fell to the floor, with her eyelids half closed and looking slightly pale. My mum ordered no-one to touch the berries and told me to get some water. So, I quickly took out the water bottle from my backpack and gave it to her. She took it and immediately put it against my sister’s mouth trying to get her to drink it.
When my dad came down, he told us that we were about halfway there, he’s good at working out distances and he’s strong (that’s why we sent him up the tree). He told us that he had seen a small hut a little while along for where we were. Then he suddenly noticed my sister in pain on the floor and asked what had happened.
“She ate some of those berries,” I told him, pointing at them. “You and Michael will have to carry her to the hut.”
“It’s not that far from here, only about 5 minutes walk.” He told us.
Then I saw the pilot running towards us with a small smile on his face.
“I sent out an SOS message but I don’t know whether or not it was received by anyone. I hope it was.” The pilot said contently. “What happened to her? Why is she on the floor?” He asked worryingly, looking at my sister.
“She ate some of the berries over there.” I replied. “You and my dad are going to have to carry her to the hut my dad has spotted.”
“Alright then. Those berries are poisonous; they are called the Convallaria majalis (Lily-of-the-Valley) and can cause a bad stomach ache.” He warned us, whilst examining the berries. “Good thing she only ate a few. That means she’ll be fine in a little while.”
We kept walking and as it became nightfall, we came upon the small hut. We knocked on the door but there was no answer, so we pushed the door and it was open. We went inside and checked if there was anyone staying there, we found no such person, but we did find a small kitchen and an area for sleeping in with a fireplace.
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We were all wondering why there was a small hut in the middle of the Grand Canyon, when the pilot told us that there are a series of small huts here built for climbers who walk through the bottom of the valley.
We went inside and made sure the door was shut because we did not want any uninvited creatures coming in during the night. The pilot and my dad gently put my sister down on one of the three beds, while my mum checked through the hut to see what there was: she found a first aid kit, a torch, some candles and a box of matches, some chocolate and two bottles of water. We decided to have half of the chocolate now and the other half tomorrow morning. We thought that, hopefully, we would be rescued by afternoon time.
We ate the chocolate and I turned the torch on. I shone it around the hut to see how large it was and to my surprise it was only about the size of one of the classrooms at school, maybe a bit bigger, but it was smaller than I thought it would be. When I looked at the time it was coming up to ten o’clock. My mum and dad would sleep in one bed, my sister and I would sleep in another and the pilot would sleep in the remaining bed. So we decided to go to sleep and get some rest just in case we would have to walk tomorrow.
In the morning, I woke up at about 8 o’clock and looked around, my mum and dad were waking up and my sister was still asleep but the pilot was nowhere to be seen. He had been out trying to get another radio signal and it appeared that his SOS distress signal had been received by the tour company and they had told the police, who had sent out a helicopter in the morning to find us. The pilot told us that we would have to make some kind of signal so that the helicopter would be able to find us.
“We could make a smoke signal using the fire and a bed sheet from the hut,” I told him.
“Yeah, that’s a good idea, Nayan,” he replied. “OK, then lets get to it.”
We started the fire like before and took a bed sheet and waved it over the fire, making a smoke signal. The smoke was big enough to get us noticed because we could hear the helicopter coming from around a corner in the valley. We became so excited and relieved that we were getting rescued, that we forgot about the sheet that had caught fire.
After we put the fire out, the helicopter came and landed on the site of the burnt ashes. There was a paramedic on board who came out first and had a look at my sister’s arm. He unwrapped the bandage and put some special cream which made her frown. Then we all got on board the helicopter, which looked like the one we had gone down in.
“So much for the safety video,” I said jokingly.
“I’m never flying on a helicopter again,” my mum said, relieved that she was going back.
“Me too,” my sister said, “I’m also never eating any berries without thinking again.”
There was just one thing I wanted to know. What happened to the helicopter that was so bad that made it lose fuel?
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