by Erin Hunter
“Wow, look at that!” Lusa exclaimed.
More wind-ruffled grassland unrolled in front of them, but this time three vast rivers sliced through it, with only narrow stretches of dry land between them.
“Toklo, did you cross these rivers last time?” Yakone asked.
Toklo looked puzzled. “I think we crossed one of them . . . but it must have been farther upstream.”
Kallik felt a faint stir of worry that Toklo couldn’t remember the rivers from before, but her concern was lost beneath the tempting thought of swimming in cool water.
“Come on!” she called. “Let’s race!”
All four bears sped up as they galloped down the hill, pushed through the bushes that edged the first river and plunged into the cool, greenish-brown water. The river was broad, but the current was gentle, and Kallik felt no fear as she pushed out into the middle.
Yakone appeared in the water beside her, swimming strongly. “Let’s fish!” he puffed.
The two white bears dove below the surface side by side. In the underwater dimness, Kallik could see silver flickers as fish darted past her. She lunged at one of them and snapped her jaws closed on it. Kallik kicked out with her hind legs and pushed herself back to the surface, keeping a firm grip on her fish. Shaking drops from her ears, she spotted Lusa and Toklo making their way across the placid water. They both looked like they were enjoying the cool water after the relentless heat of the sun.
Yakone’s head broke the surface beside Kallik. He, too, had a flapping fish in his jaws. Together they made for the far shore, flicking water from their fur as they waded up the bank.
“That was easy!” Kallik exclaimed, dropping her fish in front of Toklo and Lusa.
Lusa’s eyes gleamed. “You’re great fish hunters!”
“And we’re so clean now!” Kallik declared, looking down at her spotless, streaming fur.
Toklo wasn’t so pleased. The white bears could now be seen from the far horizon, and his pelt prickled with anxiety.
The bears settled down to feast on the fish in the shade of some spindly trees. Fully fed and comfortable, Kallik felt herself drifting off to sleep.
She dreamed that she was surrounded by several white bears, padding along with them in a mist that obscured the landscape. Yakone was by her side. Kallik was happy to be with him, relieved that she had reached the end of her journey, and comfortable to be wreathed in the scents of the other white bears.
In her dream, Kallik stirred. Wait . . . other bears? Opening her eyes, she sat up and sniffed the air. Other white bears have been here!
Kallik gave Yakone’s shoulder a nudge. “What is it?” he mumbled.
“Wake up!” Kallik urged him. “I can smell bears like us!”
Yakone scrambled to his paws, his muzzle raised to scent the air. “You’re right. And they were here not long ago.”
Leaving Toklo and Lusa to finish their nap, Kallik and Yakone began to scout around the tiny copse. Kallik came across the shallow scoop of a sleeping place.
“White fur,” Yakone said, pointing to a tuft caught on a rough bit of tree trunk. “Wow!” he went on. “There are other white bears traveling this way!”
“They must be coming from the Melting Sea,” Kallik guessed. She recalled her first lonely slog across the open land, with nothing but a fox for company. “These bears seem to be in a group,” she said, concentrating on the smells around her. “I can pick out three or four different scents.” I wonder if one of them is Taqqiq, she added to herself, hopeful but at the same time dismayed that she couldn’t be sure of her brother’s scent anymore.
By this time Toklo and Lusa were stretching and opening their eyes.
“What are you doing over there?” Toklo grunted.
Kallik padded across to him. “Other white bears have been here,” she announced.
Toklo and Lusa shared a surprised glance. “That’s great!” Lusa barked. “They must be on their way to Great Bear Lake, too. I wonder if we’ll catch up to them. Maybe we should try.”
Kallik saw that Toklo didn’t share Lusa’s enthusiasm. He had a wary look. “We’d better not,” he responded to Lusa. “We don’t know if they’d be friendly, and we don’t want to be fighting over prey. Besides, a large group of bears are more likely to attract flat-faces.”
“But there aren’t many flat-faces around here,” Lusa protested.
“It would be interesting to meet new bears,” Yakone pointed out. “Surely none of them will want to stop and fight. The Longest Day is a time of peace, right?”
“It isn’t the Longest Day yet,” Toklo muttered, clearly not convinced.
Lusa looked up at the sky. “We hope,” she said. “Come on, let’s keep going.”
“Okay,” Yakone agreed as they set off again. “If we don’t meet these bears, maybe we’ll find some other white bears to travel home with after the gathering is over, Kallik.”
At his words, Kallik felt a jolt of dismay that struck her like lightning out of a clear sky. The final good-bye is too close. Oh, spirits, do we really want to reach the end of our shared journey? She said nothing to the others, but inside she had a growing feeling of dread that dragged at her paws and made her breath feel tight in her chest. We’ve been traveling to reach this moment for so long, but now I don’t want it to come.
Yakone let his shoulder brush against hers. “Are you okay?” he murmured. “You seem very quiet. You’re not worried about meeting these other bears, are you?” He nudged her gently. “I’ll look after you!”
Kallik huffed in protest. “I can look after myself, thanks!”
Yakone butted her with his head. “I know you can, cloud-brain. I was only teasing. Come on, don’t fall behind.”
The sun was sliding down the sky when the bears approached the next river, a faster current foaming over stones.
Yakone gave a bark of excitement. “Look! The white bears are here!”
Gazing ahead, Kallik made out four white shapes, two large and two small. They were just about to enter the water. It had been so long since she had seen other white bears that the distant figures seemed to leap out of the flat green landscape.
“Let’s hurry up and join them,” Yakone urged. “They might know the bears we met on the Melting Sea.”
But Kallik felt her paws slowing down. “There’s no hurry,” she said. “We don’t want to alarm them!” Yakone looked surprised, and she added hastily, “Don’t forget that we’re traveling with a black bear and a brown bear as well. We should let the white bears get safely across the river first.”
Yakone looked puzzled, but Toklo gave a nod of agreement as he fell in beside Kallik. “I’m happy to wait before we catch up to them,” he said.
Lusa trotted beside them, swallowing a leaf that she had picked from a bush. “We must be in time for the Longest Day,” she pointed out, “since other bears are still traveling.”
“Unless they’ve missed it, too,” Toklo warned. “Look, they’ve started swimming. Let’s hang back and let them cross without startling them. We can catch up to them tomorrow, after we’ve had a chance to rest and hunt.”
To Kallik’s relief, Yakone didn’t argue, and as the sun went down they began to search for a place to camp, leaving the second river crossing for the next day. The other white bears had trekked onward without glancing back. The wind is blowing toward us, Kallik thought. It’s carrying their scent to us, but they don’t know that we’re following them.
They found a sheltered spot in a hollow between two big boulders, where the sound of flowing water drifted faintly to their ears.
Toklo touched Kallik on the shoulder. “Let’s hunt,” he suggested. “Lusa looks tired, and Yakone should rest his paw.”
“Sure.”
Kallik tried to put her worries about meeting other bears out of her mind as she and Toklo headed back up the slope to look for prey. At first the land seemed to be deserted. Then she spotted a hare, almost invisible against the rocks in its brown burn-sky pelt. Sh
e pointed it out to Toklo with a nod in its direction.
Without a word, Toklo slipped into their well-practiced hunting pattern, circling around the hare in a wide arc until he could come upon it from behind. Kallik crouched low to the ground, taking advantage of the long grass for cover.
Toklo let out a roar. The hare sprang up, its eyes bulging in panic, and streaked off at an angle. Kallik raced to intercept it while Toklo bounded in pursuit.
Kallik reached the fleeing hare first. Toklo hung back at the last moment to let her make the catch. As she slammed her paw down on it, she asked herself, How many more times will we do this together?
CHAPTER TWENTY
Toklo
Toklo rose to his paws, gave his pelt a shake, and gazed across the flat land toward the river. Dawn light filled the sky, and there was a rosy glow on the horizon where the sun would rise.
There was no sign of the four white bears they had seen the day before. They must have set out early, he thought with a grunt of relief. He felt it was much better for him and his companions to walk on their own. Two white bears, a brown bear and a black . . . I don’t want to spend our last days answering questions about what brought us together.
Toklo roused his friends, and they set out for the river. This one flowed more swiftly than the first one they’d crossed, but it wasn’t as deep. Near the shore, the shallow water rippled and murmured as it rolled over tiny, smooth pebbles. Light from the rising sun danced on the surface.
Wading into the current, feeling the cold water tug at the fur on his belly, Toklo was plunged into a memory of learning to fish when he was a cub. He glanced around, half expecting to see other brown bears peering into the water. But he only saw Kallik and Yakone, swimming in the middle where the channel was deepest, splashing water at each other and diving like a couple of cubs.
Staring down into the water again, Toklo caught a flicker of movement. Salmon! He launched himself at it, recalling long-buried instincts, and his claws dug deep into the fish before he snatched it into the air.
“Nice work, Toklo!” cried Lusa, who was watching him from the bank.
Toklo tossed the salmon to her and pushed his way deeper into the river. His ears filled with whispers, the murmurings of long-dead bears as their spirits washed around him. Salmon flashed around his paws, but Toklo was transfixed by the bear spirits.
“Oka, are you there?” he called softly, pierced by a pang of longing for his lost family. “Tobi? If you are there, I hope you’re free now. I hope you have endless fish to catch.”
An image of Aiyanna came into Toklo’s mind, and he imagined fishing with her in the broad rivers in the valleys of his territory.
Will I live there with her until our spirits wash away together in the river?
A shiver went through him at the thought of spending the rest of his life with one bear, but it was a good feeling, filling him with anticipation. Then Lusa splashed up to him, jerking Toklo back to the present.
“Are you okay to swim across?” Toklo asked.
Lusa nodded. “It’s not far,” she mumbled around his salmon, which she carried in her jaws.
But Toklo felt strangely reluctant to cross the river. Reaching the other side would take them even closer to the lake where they would part forever. Ujurak said it was important for me to get to the lake. I wonder what he meant.
Pushing that thought from his mind and wanting to delay, he slapped his paw down on the surface of the water to splash Lusa, thinking of how much better it would be to stay here and play than continue with their trek.
Lusa backed away, snorting as the water spattered over her face. “Stop that!”
“All right, why don’t you practice your fishing skills?” Toklo suggested.
Lusa stepped up to him and waved the salmon in his face. “We’ve got a fish, cloud-brain!” she said around it.
Toklo sighed. “Give me that,” he said, taking the fish from her. “You’ll manage better without it.”
Lusa struck out, swimming strongly for the opposite bank, and Toklo followed, sheltering her from the current with his body.
When they had all reached the shore, the bears shared the salmon, then continued across another stretch of open ground until they finally reached the last of the three rivers. Toklo wrinkled his nose with disgust as he looked at it. The channel was narrow, and it would be no trouble to cross, but the water ran sluggishly, brown with silt. A foul stench rose from it, and when Toklo padded into it he could feel filth soaking into his pelt.
The water was so shallow that Toklo and the white bears could wade. Lusa was the only one who had to swim, with Kallik and Yakone on either side of her.
“This water is disgusting!” she yelped as her paws splashed busily. “I can’t—”
A ripple splashed into Lusa’s mouth and she choked noisily, flailing her paws until Yakone grabbed her by the scruff and held her up.
“Thanks!” she gasped as she recovered and began to swim once more.
“Keep your jaws shut this time, chatterbug,” Toklo advised.
When Toklo emerged from the water his fur felt dirty and slippery, and he longed for clear, running water to wash off in.
“We didn’t stay clean for long,” Kallik remarked ruefully. She gave her chest a half-hearted lick, curling her lip at the taste of the dirty water.
The ground on the far side of the river sloped up steeply, and instead of soft grass, now the bears were trudging over loose stones and grit. As they clambered upward, they began to hear strange growling sounds from somewhere ahead, and the ground seemed to tremble under their paws.
“I don’t like this,” Toklo muttered. “What’s happening on the other side of this hill?”
“Don’t you remember?” Kallik asked. “Or you, Lusa? You’ve been this way before.”
Toklo shook his head. “Not exactly this way. I don’t remember all those rivers, and I don’t recognize this place at all.”
“Me either,” added Lusa.
Panting and scrabbling on the rough soil, the bears reached the top of the slope. They paused to catch their breath and stared in horrified silence at the scene below them. A dizzying precipice fell away in front of their paws, revealing a huge, flat-face-made canyon gouged out of the earth. Enormous roaring firebeasts moved slowly across it, leaving deep tracks in the dust. The sides of the canyon were sheer cliffs, crisscrossed by scars, and gigantic holes gaped in the rock. The growling the bears heard as they climbed the hill was so loud now they could hardly hear one another speak.
“We can’t go this way!” Lusa squeaked.
Yakone let out a low growl. “This is a route for bears. Flat-faces have no right to carve it up.”
Toklo’s nostrils flared, and his grubby fur stood on end. “We’ll have to go around,” he decided, trying to sound confident.
Lusa looked up to study the sky. “I’m trying to remember where the Pathway Star is,” she said. “I wonder how far out of our way we’ll have to go.”
“We’ll be okay,” Kallik told her. “All the bears who’re coming this way will have to change direction, just like us.”
Lusa nodded, though she still looked worried and went on gazing up into the sky, as if she could make out the stars beyond the blue.
“I think we should wait here on the cliff until it gets dark,” Toklo said. “It’ll be safer to travel then.”
“But we’re losing time!” Lusa protested.
“We’ve made good progress up until now,” Toklo pointed out. “And in the meantime we can go back down to the river and hunt in the undergrowth. It doesn’t look like we’ll find anything to eat up here.”
Lusa shrugged miserably.
“I’ll go with you to hunt,” Yakone offered. “Kallik, you stay here with Lusa and try to get some rest.”
Kallik nodded and gave Lusa a gentle push into the shade of a nearby rock.
Toklo led the way as he and Yakone scrambled down the hill again to the bushes that bordered the river.
Toklo bristled at the question. “Of course we will! The stars are guiding us.”
Yakone was silent for a moment as they approached the river and began scenting the air for prey. “Those other bears we saw . . .” he began. “Don’t you think we should try to catch up to them and travel together for the last part of the journey?”
A flash of defensive anger rose up in Toklo, but he quickly calmed himself and said, “We might not be welcome to join their group. Besides,” he added, “we’re different. We’ve seen more, and traveled farther. Other bears won’t understand that.”
“But in the end we’ll need to mingle with other bears, and go back to living with our own kind, won’t we?” Yakone persisted. “That’s the whole point of the journey. To find a home for each of us.”
At that moment, Toklo picked up the scent of a goose somewhere in the foliage beside the river. Tracking it was a welcome distraction, and he didn’t reply to Yakone’s question.
By the time the bears had eaten, night had fallen. They set out along the edge of the chasm, casting glances down at the hordes of yellow-pelted flat-faces, who seemed to be churning up the ground with huge firebeasts and lifting stones out of it.
“Weird,” Toklo muttered, but he had seen too much of the strange ways of flat-faces to pay them much attention now.
Harsh, unnatural lights illuminated the canyon, and massive firebeasts growled in and out. The bears had to slink along the flat, dusty ground at the top of the cliff, making the most of the scanty cover. Now and then a bright white glare lit them up. How can the flat-faces not see us? Toklo wondered uneasily.
They crouched down when they came to a BlackPath and waited until it was safe to scuttle across. At first Toklo thought this wouldn’t be too difficult. The BlackPaths were narrow, and as they approached there hadn’t been that many firebeasts passing by.
But then a harsh rumble filled the air. Gazing in the direction of the chasm, Toklo’s heart began thumping as he saw a whole herd of firebeasts heading their way, one after the other, their glaring yellow eyes slicing through the darkness.