Fire in the Sky

by Erin Hunter

  “Sure,” Toklo said in a tone of voice that clearly said he wanted to end this conversation. Kallik decided to drop it for now. Perhaps he was right, and she was reading too much into Ujurak’s behavior.

  Together they managed to rouse Lusa, and the three of them hurried after Ujurak. The mounds of snow around them seemed to become flatter and smaller as they traveled on, until the ice appeared to stretch almost evenly from sky edge to sky edge. Twice Kallik thought she saw pawprints in the snow of other bears, although she wasn’t sure how long ago they’d been left there. Once she scented another bear moving far off in the distance, but it was heading away from them.

  She wondered why they hadn’t seen more bears out here. She knew white bears preferred to keep to themselves, so she guessed that full-grown bears used their long-distance sense of smell to avoid too many encounters with others. But she’d always imagined the Endless Ice as such a paradise that she’d expected to find happy, well-fed bears everywhere. It surprised her to find only a few pawprints here and there.

  After walking for most of the morning, they came to a broken-up section where huge chunks of ice floated free in the pale blue-green water. It looked strange to Kallik; she could see that the broken section extended for a skylength in either direction, like a path stomped right through the ice. No bear could have left this shattered trail behind them. So what had made it?

  She breathed in and gagged. The scent of the black, foul-smelling stuff was strong in the air, and the broken ice reeked of firebeasts.

  “Maybe we should try to go around,” she suggested.

  Ujurak shook his head. “I read the signs, and I know this is right. We have to keep going that way,” he said, indicating the ice beyond the broken channel. “We’ll have to cross.”

  “Oh, no,” Toklo said. “Not more swimming! Come on, the ice looks exactly the same in that direction as it does over there. Why can’t we go this way instead?” He jerked his head at the empty ice to their right.

  “We must cross,” Ujurak said again, stubbornly.

  Toklo growled low in his throat. “How do I know you’re not just making this up?” he said. “There’s nothing to tell you where we are out here. I don’t think anyone has any idea where we’re going.”

  “Do we have to have this fight again?” Ujurak flared. “Either stop arguing and trust me, or go your own way without us!”

  Toklo stepped back as if blasted by the force of Ujurak’s anger. “Well, I just might do that sometime,” he muttered.

  “It’ll be easy to swim across,” Kallik jumped in, trying to reassure Toklo. “I did this all the time with my mother and Taqqiq. Look how short the distance is between the ice floes. We’ll be over on the other side in no time.”

  Lusa looked doubtfully at the water. She edged closer and dipped her front paw in, then pulled it out and shook it. “Oh, brrrr!” she squeaked.

  “Swim fast, and it’ll warm you up,” Kallik encouraged her.

  “All right, fine,” Toklo said, marching down to the water. “At least there’s plenty of room to come up for air here.” He was about to launch himself in, when Kallik spotted something moving under the water. Was it a seal? She searched the water with her eyes. Her heart began to pound. There it was again—sleek, black and white, with fins…

  “TOKLO!” she shouted. “Get back! Don’t jump in! Get away from the water now!”

  “Huh?” he said, stumbling at the edge. “But you said—”

  “Orca!” she shrieked. “Get over here!”

  Toklo spotted a black fin slicing through the water toward him and scrambled back to where his friends stood. For a heart-stopping moment Kallik saw her mother’s death happening all over again. Terrified, the bears huddled close together, listening to the splashes and strange noises the killer whales were making only bearlengths away.

  “We’ll never make it across,” Lusa whispered, trembling with fear.

  “Yes, we will,” Ujurak said. “We have to. There must be a way to get there without swimming.” He lifted his head to look at the unbroken ice on the far side.

  Kallik raised her head, too, studying the stretch of water where the orcas swam. Most of the floating ice chunks were large and close together. “We might be able to jump from one piece of ice to the next,” she suggested. “Then we wouldn’t have to go in the water at all.”

  “I like that plan,” Toklo said. “No more going in the water. Ever again, please.”

  They walked along the edge of the ice for a short way until they found a chunk close enough to jump to from where they were. Broken pieces of ice floated in the water all the way across, like a path of smooth white stones.

  Kallik went first, although the sight of the black shapes under the water made her paws shake and her fur stand on end. But she had to be brave for the others. She crouched at the very edge of the ice and leaped, closing her eyes. She landed hard on the nearest chunk, which bobbed and tilted underneath her.

  Kallik dug in her claws and crouched down until the ice stopped rocking and she was able to balance for the next jump. As she sprang, the chunk shot backward, toward the edge, where the others waited with anxious eyes. This time she was ready for the lurch under her feet as she landed, and she stayed low, hardly breathing, until the chunk of ice steadied in the water. It was bigger than the previous piece, large enough to take all of them. Kallik decided to wait for the others.

  “Okay!” she called. “Join me here!”

  Lusa jumped next, slipping on the ice as she landed, but clearing the small stretch of water easily. She looked fierce and determined, gathering her haunches underneath her for the second leap. Kallik slid carefully back to make room for her, and to balance the chunk of ice so that it didn’t tip her into the freezing water. Lusa arrived with a small grunt, and a flash of triumph in her eyes.

  Toklo and Ujurak followed, their blond-brown fur flicking along their flanks as they plunged through the air. It was a squeeze to fit them all onto the second chunk of ice, but at least it was a lot more steady—though the water had started to lap over the side where Kallik stood. They’d made it safely across half of the channel.

  Well, Kallik thought, “safely” if you don’t count the dark fins circling us. She tried to shove that thought out of her head. Their ice floe had floated closer to the other side when Toklo landed, and another large chunk was near enough to jump to.

  One at a time, they leaped again. This time Kallik went last so she could keep an eye on the orcas slicing through the water. By the time it was her turn, the pieces of ice had floated farther apart. She took as much of a running jump as she could, but as she pushed off, she felt the ice move below her paws, and she knew she wouldn’t be able to cover the whole distance.

  The water seemed to rise up to meet her, sucking her in, and she landed with a cold splash that took her breath away. Frantically she swiped her claws at the shapes around her. One of them darted in and rammed her in the side, knocking the wind out of her. Another swept up from below and crashed into her shoulder, leaving it numb from the impact. Kallik could hear her friends screaming her name, but the water swamped into her eyes and she was thrashing about too much to swim straight.

  Terror coursed through her as she realized she was going to die. She was going to be killed by orcas, just like her mother. She was leaving her friends behind the same way as she’d been left—with no one to take care of them, no one to guide them through this strange world. It would be her fault if they died, too.

  Suddenly she spotted a pale shadow in the water—white where the orcas were dark. The water was churning fiercely, so she couldn’t see it very clearly, but the orcas all moved away from it, whatever it was. Kallik squinted through the waves.

  “Kallik, swim!” Lusa’s voice carried across the water. “Hurry!”

  “Over here!” Toklo yelled.

  Kallik turned away from the pale shadow and swam through the space the orcas had left. She reached up and felt the claws of her friends digging into
her fur, dragging her up onto the ice. With a final heave and a scramble from her back paws, Kallik shoved herself up and out into the air. She was alive!

  Even better, this chunk of ice had floated close enough to the other side that they could leap across safely to the unbroken ice. Kallik tumbled onto the snow and lay there, her head spinning. She was too exhausted and dazed to stand up and shake out her soaking wet fur.

  “That was really weird!” Lusa puffed, licking Kallik’s ear. “The orcas just seemed to back away all of a sudden.”

  “If they hadn’t, I would have jumped into the water and fought them off,” Toklo promised. “I was just about to.”

  “You can’t ever do that!” Kallik barked. “You can’t fight them, Toklo. Not even my mother could fight them. Promise me you won’t ever try.”

  “But it seemed like you scared them off,” Lusa said, her eyes shining.

  Kallik glanced over at Ujurak, who had a knowing look in his eyes as he gazed at the water. He lifted his head into the breeze. “I knew you would make it,” he said. “It’s another sign. We’re meant to be together, and we’re meant to be going this way.”

  Toklo snorted. “Could you ask the signs to be a little less traumatizing next time?”

  Kallik didn’t know or care if it was a sign for their quest right at that moment. She knew what she thought the pale shadow had been.

  Thank you, Mother, she thought, closing her eyes and resting her cheek against the cool ice. Thank you for saving my life.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Ujurak

  As soon as Kallik was up to it, they started walking again. Ujurak tried to shake off the fear he’d felt when he’d seen the orcas attack Kallik. He knew that if she’d died, it would have been his fault for insisting they cross the broken ice.

  And was he right about where they were going? He wasn’t even sure. The signs out here were so strange. He was used to reading broken tree limbs and piles of rocks and the sound of streams burbling in the distance. He didn’t know what to make of the shifting whorls of snow or the endless, blank emptiness of the ice, and that troubled him deeply.

  He glanced around at Kallik’s huge bulk, looming over Lusa’s small, dark shape as they trudged side by side. It had been a relief to hand off the responsibility of leadership to her for a while. He’d hoped her knowledge of the ice would be enough to guide them wherever they were going, especially when he was so confused out here. But of course she knew even less than he did…well, she knew more about surviving on the ice, but she didn’t know how to read the signs of their journey, and of course she didn’t know what they were looking for.

  He barely knew what they were looking for. The strange tugging under his fur pulled him forward relentlessly, so he knew there was a reason to be here. He just hoped he’d recognize it when they found it—and that it would help them save the wild, as his and Lusa’s dreams had promised.

  Ujurak turned his eyes back to the sky. The dancing lights had been such a promising sign, but all they’d told him was to go out onto the ice. They gave him no clues about what to do once he got there. Even the Pathway Star confused him; at night it was nearly directly overhead, so he couldn’t tell if they were still supposed to be following it, or if it had just been leading them here, to the ice.

  And during the day it was even harder. He squinted at the thin gray clouds scattered across the dull blue sky. Earlier he’d seen four distinct streaks of clouds, all angling in this direction, which he’d taken for a sign they should go this way. But now the lines had blurred away, and his certainty had melted along with them. There was nothing in all this emptiness at the moment to convince him they were on the right path.

  He clung to the thought of Kallik’s mysterious escape from the orcas. Surely that meant what he hoped—that they had made the right choice and the spirits were with them. He just had to have faith.

  And most important, he had to act confident for the others. They couldn’t know that he was even a little unsure; he had to hide how much the ice confused him. If they knew how lost he felt, they’d lose faith in him. Ujurak looked back at Toklo stomping along, muttering grumpily to himself as he sometimes did. Toklo’s temper was already on edge; Ujurak was afraid the brown bear would seize any excuse to go back to the land.

  If Toklo lost faith in Ujurak’s guidance, there would be nothing to keep him here…nothing to keep all four of them together. And Ujurak was certain that was the most important thing. All four bears were essential for whatever was ahead.

  He took a deep breath, trying to calm himself. The memory of how he’d nearly lost himself as a whale still terrified him. And now that he’d taken back the role of guide from Kallik, the weight of his friends’ expectations lay heavily on his fur.

  He had to be strong. He had to act sure, even when he wasn’t. He had to watch even more carefully for signs and hold the group together, no matter what. He couldn’t hope that Kallik would lead the way in his place anymore.

  Everything depended on him.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Toklo

  Toklo stopped on a sloping bank of snow and looked back at the broken ice river in the distance. He could still see black fins slipping through the green water. He shuddered as he imagined vicious teeth closing over his paws.

  Nearly losing Kallik had given him more of a fright than he wanted to admit. He couldn’t rely on the white bear to take care of them. He needed to learn to catch seals properly and how to find shelter on the ice, in case he needed to take over for any reason.

  He hurried to catch up to Kallik, scrambling past a sleepy-looking Lusa and a plodding Ujurak. Kallik’s wet fur was drying quickly under the sun and with the brisk breeze; she didn’t even seem very cold. Toklo had always thought his fur was the perfect thickness to keep him warm, but now he secretly craved whatever was keeping Kallik so comfortable out here.

  “Hey, Kallik,” he said, nudging her flank. “Maybe you could teach me your way of catching a seal, the way your mother taught you.”

  “Really?” she said. She swung her head around to look at him. “You really want to learn? It seems pretty boring at first. You have to be very patient.”

  “Well, I’m quite a patient bear,” Toklo said. “I mean, that’s what I’m known for.”

  Kallik snorted with laughter and Toklo checked behind him to see if Lusa had heard his joke. But she was a couple of bearlengths back, struggling through the snow with her head down.

  “I want to learn,” he said earnestly. “I promise to listen, I really will.”

  “And behave?” Kallik prompted. He nodded. “And not grumble?”

  “I don’t grumble!” Toklo barked. “I never grumble!”

  “Oh, really?” said Kallik.

  “All right, if we get through this lesson, and I do exactly as I’m told, then you say you’re sorry for calling me a grumbler.”

  “Deal,” Kallik huffed. She lifted her head and sniffed deeply. “We’re in luck. I think there’s a seal breathing hole only a skylength and a half that way.” She nodded at the edge of the sky in a direction that looked exactly like every other to Toklo. He tried inhaling, but couldn’t smell anything like seal.

  “How do you do that?” he whined.

  “Same way you can find your way back to places you’ve been before,” Kallik said. “It’s just something white bears are good at, smelling things that are far away.”

  Ujurak only nodded when Kallik suggested they veer slightly out of their way to reach the breathing hole. The sun had crossed the highest point of the sky and was heading back down into night when they reached the place Kallik had smelled. Dark clouds were gathering in the blue above them, warning of more snow to come.

  This breathing hole looked small to Toklo, and he wished he could make it bigger, but he remembered what a bad idea that had been last time. So he followed Kallik, walking exactly as she did, sliding his paws carefully over the ice and then lying down right next to the hole with his ears pricked, watching for
seals.

  He could sense Lusa and Ujurak behind them, curled up together in the snow, but he tried to focus all his concentration on the hole, just as Kallik was doing. They waited and waited and waited for even a flicker of movement…but nothing happened. Not even a whisker of a seal broke the surface of the dark water.

  Finally Kallik sat up with a sigh. The sun had nearly reached the edge of the sky, and the heavy gray clouds were thick above them, casting shadows ahead of the night. “I’m sorry, Toklo,” she grunted. “You’ve been very patient, but this is longer than I’ve ever waited before.”

  Toklo scraped his claws along the ice in frustration. That wasn’t fair! How could he learn to hunt if they couldn’t even be sure there’d be seals where he was hunting? He turned to look at the other two waiting bears.

  “Hey, Ujurak!” he called. “I have an idea! Come here!”

  Warily Ujurak stood up and padded over to the hole. Lusa shifted slightly where he’d left her, but didn’t wake up.

  “Kallik says there might not be any seals here at all,” Toklo explained. “So I was thinking, maybe you could turn into a seal and just check for us.”

  “I’m not a piece of prey, Toklo,” Ujurak snapped. “I’m a bear!”

  “All you have to do is dive down there, swim around a bit, see if you spot any, and then come back and tell us. It’ll be so easy. All right?”

  “No!” Ujurak cried. “How can you ask me to do something like that?”

  “It’s no big deal,” Toklo insisted, surprised by Ujurak’s reaction. “We just want to know if it’s worth waiting here any longer. It’s not like we’re asking you to lure them back here or anything.”

  Ujurak’s eyes stretched wide amid the snow-flecked brown fur. “You don’t understand!” he spat. “When I’m a different animal, I feel everything that animal feels—their hunger, their worries, their fears. I wish I couldn’t do it at all.”