We Sled With Dragons

by C. Alexander London

  “Okay,” said Oliver. “But it’s getting dark.”

  “I just said that,” said Celia.

  “I mean, I think we should camp here.”

  Celia nodded. She was tired too. Exhausted, really, and cold and could use a good night’s sleep. Or at least as good a night’s sleep as she could have sharing a tent with her brother on an Arctic ice sheet surrounded by a herd of walruses.

  Oliver started pulling supplies off the sled. The dogs looked at him eagerly.

  “I think they want to eat,” said Celia.

  “So do I,” said Oliver, rummaging. He pulled out another bag of cheese puffs and started eating it. The dogs wagged their tails and whimpered.

  “You aren’t going to share?” said Celia.

  “Dogs eat dog food,” he said.

  “You eat like a walrus,” said Celia. “Too bad we don’t have any walrus food.”

  Oliver smiled and held two long, curled cheese puffs so they hung out of his mouth like walrus tusks. He roared at Celia. She put her arms on her sides and gave him a look that would have frozen the ocean, if it weren’t already frozen.

  Oliver stopped roaring. Celia shook her head and pulled out a bag of dry dog food that was underneath the case of cheese puffs. She dumped it onto the snow. As the dogs dug in to their kibble, Oliver went back to the sled to find a tent and start setting it up.

  Celia stared out at the cold ocean, thinking her hardest about how to get across, but no ideas were coming to her.

  “You could help me out, you know?” Oliver called back to her, struggling to keep the wind from blowing the tent over before he could get the poles in. Every time he got one corner up, the other would blow down.

  “I’m trying to figure out what we’re supposed to do,” said Celia. “We don’t have a boat.”

  “Sleep,” said Oliver.

  “I don’t suppose there are toothbrushes or pajamas on that sled?” Celia wondered.

  “I don’t think the walruses care if we brush our teeth,” said Oliver. “And it’s too cold to change into pajamas anyway. I’m sleeping in everything I have on.”

  Celia guessed her brother was right and she helped him finish setting up the tent. The dogs were already curled into a pile, snoozing happily in the snow. Their paws twitched and they made high-pitched whimpers as they dreamed about chasing squirrels or walruses or whatever it was sled dogs dreamed about. She crawled inside with Oliver and they snuggled into two slippery sleeping bags, zipped up so just their faces stuck out.

  With all the honking and snorting from the walruses, Celia wondered how they’d ever get any sleep at all, then she realized that Oliver was already as sound asleep as the dogs outside. Celia was amazed how similar her brother could be to a drooling Siberian husky.

  “Figures,” she grumbled.

  She couldn’t sleep. She unzipped her bag again and sat up with a flashlight, shivering and reading the old leather explorer’s journal. His handwriting grew messier toward the end.

  Nearly arrived. Journey much harder than I imagined. Ran out of food. The dogs are starving, but I need them to pull the sled. Forced to make soup from my boot leather and share it with them.

  “Gross,” Celia grunted.

  Frostbite on my toes now. A polar bear stalked me for days, but this morning I reached a most remarkable place. A frozen canyon opened before my eyes, all ice and crimson snow. What should make the snow turn red, I do not know. I have had frightening dreams each night, visions perhaps, of Ratatosk, the gossiping squirrel, warning me to turn back. But I cannot turn back. I must press onward through the canyon, over the bones of ancient giants, to the lost city of the north. Only there will the library be safe. I hear a roar in the distance. Perhaps the bear has followed again, driven mad with hunger. Or perhaps the stories are true . . . perhaps here there be dragons. The days to come will tell.

  There were no more entries after that until the last one, that he’d written thousands of miles away, hiding in a cavern on a desert island. Whatever happened in between, he didn’t write about. He probably went mad, dreaming about squirrels who gossiped and dragons who roared.

  Listening to the cacophony outside, Celia almost thought she heard the roar of a dragon in the wind. And the chattering of the walruses sure did sound like the other kids in sixth grade gossiping.

  Thinking about sixth grade made Celia homesick. Not just for the TV, but for their apartment at the Explorers Club, and for their mother and father, together at home after all this time, and for boring stuff like eating vegetables, doing homework, and even climbing the rope in gym class.

  She felt her eyelids growing heavy again, felt herself finally drifting to sleep to the gentle sounds of the ice cracking and shifting, and the water lapping up against the edge of the ice, and the cold quiet of the Arctic lulling her to sleep.

  Her eyes snapped wide open again.

  The cold quiet.

  But it wasn’t supposed to be quiet. How long had she been asleep?

  “Oliver!” she poked at her brother. “Oliver wake up! Oliver!”

  Oliver opened one eye and scowled. “I’m tired,” he said.

  “Listen,” said Celia. “You hear that?”

  “What?” said Oliver, propping himself up on his arms. “I don’t hear anything.”

  “Exactly!” said Celia. “What happened to the walruses? And why aren’t the dogs snoring anymore?”

  “Oh,” said Oliver, sitting up all the way.

  “Oh is right,” said Celia. “Go look outside.”

  “Me?” said Oliver. “Why me? Why do I always have to—”

  Celia raised her eyebrows at him.

  “Right,” he said. “My catchphrase.”

  He slithered out of his sleeping bag and put his hood up and went to the edge of the tent. He peeked out.

  “There’s no more walruses,” said Oliver.

  Celia started to bundle herself up to see.

  “The dogs are gone too,” he said.

  “What!” Celia pulled herself up behind her brother. “Where’d they go?”

  “They didn’t go anywhere,” said Oliver, and he opened the tent flap wider. “We did.”

  Celia stuck her head outside and gasped. Their tent was in the middle of a small circle of ice floating away from the shore, where the herd of walruses slept soundly.

  “We broke off!” Celia cried out. “We’re adrift!”

  25

  WE’RE DRIFTERS

  “WE’RE FLOATING INTO the Arctic Ocean,” Oliver declared.

  In the distance, the dogs stood beside the sled on the edge of the mainland, barking as their masters floated away on an island of ice.

  Celia’s shoulders sagged.

  She should have known.

  For her and her brother, it was pretty certain that whenever something could go wrong, it would.

  On shore, she saw the dogs looking around at the walruses and at each other and then, lastly, at a polar bear as it came charging through the snow.

  Huskies are very loyal dogs and very intelligent too. At this point, their little dog brains must have been struggling between their loyalty and their intelligence. Loyalty told them to stay and look after their masters. Intelligence told them that six dogs were no match for a hungry polar bear. Intelligence, it seemed, won out. They took off together hauling the sled behind, barking and racing back in the direction from which they’d come.

  The polar bear ignored the dogs, rushing instead into the middle of the herd of walruses. Most of the walruses dove into the water to escape, but some of the bigger ones turned to fight. Oliver and Celia had seen enough nature programs to know what gruesome scene would come next.

  They turned away. Hearing the roars and growls of bear-on-walrus combat was enough for them, they didn’t need to see it too.

  Fleeing walruses race
d beneath the surface to the ice field on the opposite shore. Some of the walruses came by the little chunk of ice on which the twins were floating, bumping it and making it tilt and shudder in the water. Some of them tore chunks off as they rushed by, knocking holes and watery cracks into it.

  “Watch it!” Oliver yelled, as if the panicked walruses could understand.

  Another bumped into the ice floe, and another. Oliver lost his footing and fell again. Celia grabbed him and pulled him to the center, where the ice was the most stable. They looked to the distant field of ice, the path to the North Pole, where the walruses were leaping back onto the ice with a great flurry of roars and honks. The twins were drifting away from it.

  Instead of going toward the ice, they were being pushed out to sea. With just their tent and a few bags of cheese puffs that Oliver had brought in for a late-night snack, they didn’t have enough supplies to last very long.

  “If we don’t get across to that ice,” said Oliver, “we’ll never survive on the ocean.”

  “Duh,” said Celia.

  She tried to come up with an idea. Random thoughts raced through her head, about Djibouti and dragons, Janice and squirrels, the theme song from The World’s Best Rodeo Clown. For those of us who have ever had to come up with an idea, we know how annoying it can be when other thoughts keep popping up to distract us.

  “Think, Celia!” she told herself. They were getting farther and farther into the open water. “Stop thinking about rodeo clowns!”

  “That’s it!” said Oliver. “You did it!”

  “What?” said Celia. “What did I do?”

  “Rodeo clowns!” Oliver cheered and started taking apart their tent.

  “Huh?” Celia wondered. It wasn’t usual for her to be the puzzled one.

  “Help me get the tent apart,” said Oliver. “Quickly.”

  Celia hesitated.

  “Come on!” Oliver yelled. “We don’t want to miss our chance! We need to rope a walrus!”

  “We need to what?”

  “It was your idea!” said Oliver. “We’re gonna snag a walrus with this tent. He’ll drag us to shore.”

  Celia looked at the water. Only a few walruses were racing below. If they didn’t do it now, they’d miss their chance. She rushed over and helped Oliver with the tent.

  “Okay,” he said. “When a walrus passes under, we’ll drop it over the side and it’ll swim right into the tent like a net. Then it’ll drag us to shore.”

  “What if the tent breaks?” Celia wondered.

  “It won’t,” said Oliver.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because you made me watch Celebrity Fashion Crimes,” said Oliver.

  Celia remembered what Madam Mumu said about her tent dress. Warm, fireproof . . . and indestructible.

  “On three,” said Oliver as two walruses raced toward them just below the surface of the water. “One . . . two . . . three!”

  They tossed the tent into the water. The walruses hit it as they came out from underneath. Oliver and Celia leaned back and dug their heels into the ice. The large sea mammals were too big and moving too fast. They dragged the twins across the top of their floating island. The back side pulled up into the air as the walruses surged forward; the front edge plowed into the water and tipped them forward.

  “Oops!” Oliver shouted, just before he and his sister slid off the end.

  As the ice-cold water hit him like a punch in the face and the walruses pulled him below the surface, he realized that he probably should have thought the plan through a little harder.

  Just before she went under, Celia remembered why she was the one who usually came up with the plans.

  26

  WE FIGHT FOR OUR LIVES

  CELIA TURNED HER head to the side, still holding the tent in both her fists, and holding her breath with just as much effort. She opened her eyes and saw the blurry shape of her brother stilling clinging to his strip of the tent. She was glad he hadn’t let go either. If they made it out of the water, she wanted the chance to yell at him.

  Of course, she figured, they’d probably freeze to death seconds later.

  She could tell by the pull against her heavy clothes that they were moving very fast. The walruses were in a panic now and plunging forward blindly, making loud bell-like noises. You would probably panic too if you were fleeing from a polar bear and suddenly some kids dropped a tent over your head. You probably would not make loud bell-like noises, as you do not have a walrus’s air-filled throat sac to make them with, which is also why you couldn’t hold your breath very long. Oliver and Celia were just realizing that now.

  The cold water began to feel like a thousand tiny needles poking into their skin. Celia couldn’t feel her toes or her fingers. Oliver wasn’t certain he still had a nose.

  Suddenly, they broke the surface, bursting into the light and the air. The walruses crashed up onto the ice sheet, sliding forward and dragging the twins behind. They let go of the tent and rolled onto their sides as the two creatures bucked and bellowed underneath the fabric.

  “They looked like they’re playing ghosts . . .” Oliver panted. “Except . . . they don’t have . . . eye holes.”

  “You . . .” Celia panted. Her whole body started to shiver. ”. . . almost drowned us.”

  “We . . . made it . . . didn’t we?”

  Celia looked around. “No,” she said.

  They hadn’t made it across the water to the other side. They were back on the ice sheet where they had started. They were no closer to the North Pole than before, except now they were wet and had no dogs and no supplies. They saw the tracks of the dogsled leading away through the snow.

  “The walruses must have turned around while we were underwater,” said Oliver. “They couldn’t see through the sheet.”

  “Wait,” said Celia. “That means the bear is here too!” She turned and saw the polar bear battling the scar-faced walrus closer to her than she liked to be to the front of the classroom in school. She jumped backward, pulling her brother with her.

  The two walruses the twins had ridden shook off the tent and rushed forward to help their fellow walrus. When three walruses fight a polar bear, the sound is something like an angry mob in Djibouti, except with more bone-crunching noises.

  “I think we’d better get out of here,” Celia suggested.

  “We still need to get across the ice somehow,” said Oliver.

  “We’ll freeze to death if we don’t get somewhere warm and dry. Have you ever heard of hypothermia?”

  “Duh,” said Oliver. “It’s when your body temperature gets below 95 degrees and you can’t get warm and your organs stop working and you freeze to death. I told you I watch as much educational programming as you do and I’m tired of you thinking I’m dumb.”

  “I don’t think you’re dumb!” said Celia.

  “You always act like you do.”

  “You’re my brother; that’s how I have to act.”

  “Who says?”

  “Everyone!” said Celia. “That’s how sisters treat their little brothers!”

  “I’m not your little brother! You’re only older by three minutes!”

  “And forty-two seconds,” said Celia. “You always leave that out.”

  “Because it doesn’t matter! We’re the same age!”

  “You’re my little brother!”

  “I am not!”

  “You are!”

  As they argued, the battle between bear and walrus raged behind them. Flesh was torn, teeth gnashed, and the ice was stained with blood, yet the fight continued. Every time the bear swung his claws at one walrus, another would swing his entire body into the bear from his exposed side. Thousands of pounds of fat and muscle crashed into each other. Oliver and Celia hardly noticed.

  “Well, I’m not dumb!” Oliver yelled.


  “I never said you were!”

  “You always say I am and you never say you’re sorry!”

  “I’m sorry that you think that I think that you’re dumb!” said Celia.

  “That’s not an apology!” said Oliver.

  “Well, I have nothing to be sorry about! I didn’t come up with the plan that gave us hypothermia!”

  “At least I had a plan!”

  “I have a plan too!”

  “Oh yeah? What’s that?”

  “To keep yelling at you! Because yelling at you is keeping me warm!”

  “Me too!” yelled Oliver.

  “So we need to keep fighting or we’ll freeze to death!”

  “But now I’m not angry at you anymore!”

  “What if I called you dumb again?” she yelled.

  “It’s not the same if you don’t mean it.” Oliver stopped yelling. He shivered.

  “What if I do mean it?” Celia yelled, getting right in his face.

  “You’re my sister,” said Oliver. “I know that you don’t really mean it.”

  He didn’t feel angry anymore. Actually, he didn’t feel anything anymore. Just tired. Had he been thinking more clearly, he would have known that being suddenly sleepy and not caring about things like freezing to death or bear-and-walrus battles going on behind you were symptoms of hypothermia.

  Celia glanced over his shoulder at the bear-and-walrus fight. It looked like they had reached a standoff. The bear was circling the walruses, and the walruses were huddled together, growling and snorting at the bear. Neither side had the strength for another attack, but neither side wanted to retreat.

  Celia felt the same way. She was tired, but she knew that fighting was the only way to keep both of them warm, so she was not going to retreat. If they stopped arguing, their body temperature would go down even more. Oliver might already have hypothermia, so she had to yell at him again, she had to get him mad. She thought of the one thing that would insult him more than anything else.