by Erin Hunter
Shaking his head to clear snow from his eyes, Toklo realized that he was lying at the bottom of a narrow ditch. He guessed it was the course of a small stream, and he had landed hard on the frozen surface. A bearlength above his head Lusa was gazing down at him.
“Toklo, you have snow on your head!” she exclaimed with a gurgle of amusement.
“He’s almost a white bear,” Kallik added, padding up beside Lusa. Yakone peered interestedly over her shoulder with a gleam in his eyes.
“I can still see some brown bits,” Lusa responded. “I can fix that, though.” Her eyes sparkling mischievously, she flipped more snow down on top of Toklo.
“Hey!” Toklo growled in mock anger. Scrambling to his paws, he heaved himself out of the ditch. “I’ll make you into a white bear.”
Lusa squealed with excitement as Toklo chased her, charged into her, and rolled her into a deep snowdrift. Lusa floundered around, waving her paws, her belly shaking with laughter. “I’ll get you for that, Toklo!” she threatened.
“You can try!” Toklo retorted.
As he waited for Lusa to scramble out of the drift, Toklo noticed that Nanulak was standing a little way away, underneath a thorn tree. The small brown bear had a strange expression on his face, as if he didn’t understand what was going on.
Poor Nanulak, Toklo thought. Maybe his family never played with him.
“Hey, Nanulak!” he called. When Nanulak turned toward him, Toklo galloped closer, scooped up snow in his paws, and flung it into the smaller bear’s face.
Nanulak jumped with surprise. For a heartbeat he looked outraged. Then he reached up to the lowest branch of the tree above him and shook off all the snow. He was aiming for Toklo, but at that moment Yakone barged past, running from Kallik, and the snow caught him full in the face.
Yakone halted; the smaller bear shrank back a step. Toklo was ready to step in, worried that the white bear was angry, when suddenly Yakone spun around.
“Great idea!” he exclaimed. “Let’s do it to Kallik.”
“Oh, no!” Kallik swerved away. “You won’t catch me like that.”
The warmth of fun and companionship spread through Toklo as if he were standing in the sun. Then he heard a distant rumble and realized it was firebeasts on the BlackPath he had spotted earlier.
“That’s enough,” he said, intercepting Yakone as he tried to chase Kallik. “We can’t stay here playing all day.”
Kallik halted and padded back, her panting breath billowing into a cloud in the cold air. “You’re right,” she said regretfully. “It was fun, though.”
“That’s where we’ve got to go, right?” Toklo pointed his snout at the next ridge of hills.
“Right,” Yakone agreed. He gave Kallik a friendly nudge. “I’ll get you next time. Just you wait.”
Walking closer together now, the bears fell into an easy stride. As they climbed higher, Toklo kept casting glances at Nanulak, padding along at his side. It felt good to be traveling with a brown bear again. Having Nanulak by his side eased some of his pain over losing Ujurak.
Maybe Ujurak guided me to Nanulak, so I could look after him. Is that what he meant about remembering what truly matters? Looking after your own bears?
“You must have seen so many different places,” Nanulak said after a while. “Is there a lot of snow like this where you come from?”
“No, there’s not much snow at all,” Toklo replied, casting his mind back to his BirthDen, where he had played with Tobi among trees and grassy meadows. “There are forests, as far as you can see in all directions. And rivers—”
“What’s a forest?” Nanulak interrupted.
Toklo gave him an amused look. “Of course, you’ve never seen one. Well, you see that thorn tree?” He angled his head toward the stunted tree they were just passing. “Imagine that it was really big, stretching right up into the sky, many bearlengths above your head.”
Nanulak nodded, his eyes wide with wonder.
“Now imagine a lot of them—more than a bear could ever count—so many that you could walk for days and not get to the end of them. That’s a forest.”
“Oh, wow! I’d like to see that!” Nanulak exclaimed.
“You will, one day, if you stay with me. I’m going back there.”
The smaller bear let out a happy sigh. “I’m so lucky that I met you! Tell me more,” he went on eagerly. “Tell me about when you were a cub.”
Toklo hesitated for a moment. There was so much that he didn’t want to remember about those days—about how Tobi had gotten sick and died, and how Oka had driven him away because she was afraid that he would die, too. But there were other stories that he could tell Nanulak: stories of sunlight and games and the things his mother had taught him before her despair made her turn on him.
“I remember how my mother taught us to stalk prey,” he began. “She would walk ahead of us through the trees, and then hide in a thicket…”
Nanulak could hardly get enough of the stories, or of Toklo’s descriptions of what it was like to live in the forest as a brown bear.
“But then I met Ujurak,” Toklo went on, when he was running out of early memories. “And he wanted to journey to the place where the spirits dance. So we—”
“No, tell me more about the forests,” Nanulak interrupted.
“Okay … but we did really exciting stuff on our journey.” Toklo was surprised at how uninterested Nanulak seemed about Ujurak.
“That’s all behind you,” the smaller bear argued. “You’re going home now. When we get there, will you teach me how to catch salmon?”
“Sure I will,” Toklo responded. “I’ll bet you’ll be good at it, too.”
Nanulak gave a little bounce, plopping down again into the freshly fallen snow. “I’ll be the best brown bear in the forest!” he boasted.
Toklo’s paws prickled with excitement at the thought of teaching the younger bear. He wanted to push on faster, to get back to his familiar trees.
That’s the right place for brown bears. Nanulak and I could carve out territories for ourselves, side by side. Then we could look out for each other all the time….
Reaching the top of a ridge a little way ahead of Kallik and Yakone, who was carrying Lusa on his back again, Toklo looked across a shallow valley to the slope beyond. Covering the whole summit of the mountain was a mass of ice, glimmering in the pale light of snow-sky.
“Ice!” he exclaimed.
“Yes,” Nanulak said. “It covers the top of the ridge in the middle of the island. It’s great up there.”
Toklo gave him a doubtful look and suppressed a shiver. The wind was already probing its cold claws deep into his fur; it would be colder still up on the frozen mountaintop. He didn’t think he had ever seen a bleaker place, unless it was out on the Endless Ice.
“More snow’s coming,” Nanulak said suddenly, sniffing the wind. “Lots of it.”
“Are you sure?” Toklo asked. The sky was still clear, though cloud was beginning to build up behind them.
“Positive. Can’t you smell it?”
Glancing at Nanulak, Toklo saw his head and shoulders outlined against the sky, his muzzle raised. His silhouette looked like Kallik or Yakone, not like a brown bear at all. White bears could scent snow. Nanulak wasn’t just a brown bear, Toklo realized—he had all the instincts, and some of the appearance, of a white bear, too.
“My paws are falling off!” Kallik exclaimed as she joined Toklo and Nanulak on the ridge, closely followed by Yakone with Lusa. “We should think about making a den for the night. There’s more snow to come and we’ll want to be well rested.”
The way that Kallik unconsciously confirmed what Nanulak had just said made Toklo feel uneasy. He had been thinking of Nanulak as a brown bear; now he was powerfully reminded of his new friend’s white-bear heritage.
Beginning to pad down into the valley, Toklo wanted to fire questions at Nanulak. Do you think of yourself as a brown bear or a white bear? If you could choose, would you
rather be just one? But he couldn’t form the words. Nanulak’s brown-bear kin had driven him away, and white bears had attacked him. Toklo couldn’t imagine that he wanted to talk about any of them.
Maybe he doesn’t know what he is, Toklo reflected. Just the way Ujurak used to be.
Down in the valley, Kallik and Yakone found a dip in the ground sheltered by boulders, and they started to dig out a den. Toklo located a half-buried thornbush and scraped away the snow to uncover the leaves and bark for Lusa.
“Thanks, Toklo,” she muttered drowsily, stripping off a pawful of leaves and cramming them into her mouth until she could barely speak. “It’s … so … good.”
“Why does she prefer that stuff to meat?” Nanulak asked, staring at Lusa with undisguised curiosity.
“She’s a black bear. That’s what they like,” Toklo replied.
“Weird!”
Toklo was glad that Lusa was too tired to react to Nanulak’s tactless comments. “We’ve all eaten roots and leaves and bark before,” he pointed out. “It’s better than nothing.”
Nanulak puffed out his chest. “I’m a brown bear. I hunt for my food!”
Toklo just grunted, undecided whether to be amused or annoyed. “Okay, let’s go and hunt now,” he said. “We’ll see if we can catch something before Kallik and Yakone finish the den.”
Nanulak’s eyes gleamed with enthusiasm. “Great!”
Toklo told the others where they were going and led the way across the valley to a stretch of tumbled rocks and thorns. The tracks of other bears crisscrossed the snow, but they were blurred, as if the wind had already begun to sweep them away. Toklo couldn’t pick up the scent of any strange bears.
“This looks like the sort of place where prey might be hiding,” he told Nanulak. “But I suppose you know that as well as I do.”
Nanulak nodded. “All sorts of little animals might live in the cracks,” he replied. “They’re no more than a mouthful, though. If we’re lucky—” He stopped suddenly, raising his muzzle and sniffing.
Toklo caught the scent at the same moment. “Fox!” he breathed out. He drew in a long breath, trying to pinpoint the scent.
Nanulak angled his head toward a thorn thicket. “In there.”
Toklo gazed at the thorns for a moment, fighting frustration. Their pelts would be ripped off if they tried to go in after the fox. They would have to wait for the fox to come out.
“I know what to do,” Nanulak suggested. “I’ll creep around the other side of the thorns and scare the fox. It’ll run out this way, and you can catch it.”
“Good idea!” Toklo said.
Nanulak slid away, plowing through the snow until he disappeared around the thicket. Toklo stayed where he was, poised to attack. Suddenly a loud roar erupted from the opposite side of the thorns. An instant later the branches parted and the fox darted out into the open.
Baring his teeth, Toklo leaped at it with a roar of his own. Terrified, the fox spun around, only to see Nanulak galloping toward it from behind the thicket. The fox tried to flee, but before it had taken a single pawstep Toklo was on it, swiping a forepaw across its head. The fox collapsed, a limp heap in the snow.
“Got it!” Toklo exclaimed.
“We did it together,” Nanulak responded. “We make a terrific team, Toklo.”
Nanulak dragged the fox back to where Kallik and Yakone had finished hollowing out the den. Lusa was already curled up inside.
Kallik padded up to give the fox an admiring sniff. “Did you catch this, Nanulak?”
“We both did,” Nanulak replied. “Come and share it.”
As they gathered around the prey, Toklo was happy to see Nanulak making more of an effort to get along with the white bears. He’s bound to feel closer to me because we look most alike, he thought. But it’s good that he wants to be friends with Kallik and Yakone, too. He has to learn to trust all of us equally if he wants to travel with us.
The snow that Nanulak and Kallik had predicted began to fall shortly after they set out the following morning. The soft white flakes grew thicker and thicker, and a wind rose, until the bears were battling their way into the teeth of a blizzard. Yakone carried Lusa on his back again. Toklo felt as if the cold were a huge bear fastening its claws around him, dragging him backward. Every pawstep was a massive effort. The white bears handled it better, though Toklo noticed that even they were shivering. Nanulak plodded on uncomplainingly, more at home in the snow than Toklo.
“This is hopeless,” Yakone said. The white male had taken the lead; now he turned and waited for the others to catch up. “We’ve got to find some shelter and wait the storm out.”
Toklo gazed into the whirling snow. “I can’t see a bearlength in front of my nose,” he complained. “How are we going to find shelter in this?”
“We’ll just have to keep going until we do,” Kallik said resignedly.
Toklo hunched his shoulders and faced into the biting wind. “Come on, then.” To his relief, before they had taken many more pawsteps, he spotted something dark looming through the snow. “There’s something up ahead,” he said.
A little farther, and he could see that their path was blocked by a sheer cliff face. Rocks jutted outward, forming a shallow cave underneath.
“There!” Kallik exclaimed, bounding past Toklo to stand under the overhang. “We can wait here until the storm dies down.”
Toklo stumbled after her, thankful to be out of the buffeting wind. Nanulak pressed in beside him, and Yakone followed, letting Lusa slide from his back to the ground.
“The snow’s thin back here,” Kallik went on, exploring the back of the overhang. “Why don’t we scrape it away? It’ll be so much warmer if we do that.”
Toklo wanted to grumble that he was already asleep on his paws, but he bit the words back. It would be worth a bit of extra effort to be comfortable, especially if the storm kept them stuck here for days. He attacked the nearest snow pile, thrusting it out into the open with powerful sweeps of his claws. All the others—even Lusa, who was yawning widely as she scraped—joined him, until they had exposed the bare face of the rock and the sandy floor of the cave.
“Look at this,” Lusa said, sounding suddenly more alert. She was pointing at the cave wall with one paw.
Toklo craned his neck to see what she had found. His pelt prickled with shock as he recognized markings on the wall, like the ones they had found in the cave on Star Island, the Place of the Selamiut. These weren’t as clear, though, as if bad weather had scoured them away. He could only just make out spiky figures that he thought represented flat-faces.
“Why are they here?” Kallik asked, a trace of awe in her voice. “Are they supposed to tell us something?”
Toklo felt a touch of the same awe as he remembered the markings in the other cave. In the Place of the Selamiut were images of flat-faces and their dens, and pictures of caribou. Most amazing of all, there were images of the four of them: Lusa and Kallik, Ujurak and Toklo himself. But the images here were faint; Toklo couldn’t tell if they were meant to be bears, let alone pictures of him and his companions.
“I don’t think they mean anything,” he grunted. “I can’t even see what they’re supposed to be.”
“What are they, anyway?” Nanulak asked, going up to one of the nearest marks and sniffing at it.
“Images,” Kallik explained. “We think no-claws made them.”
“Oh, no-claws!” Nanulak turned away dismissively. “Who cares about them?”
Toklo examined the marks for a moment more, but he still couldn’t see any meaning in them. He let himself flop down onto the cave floor; the others huddled around him at the back of the overhang, listening to the storm raging outside.
“The wind sounds angry,” Lusa murmured from where she was curled up between Toklo and Kallik. “It’s like a huge voice, roaring at us.”
“You shouldn’t imagine things,” Kallik warned. Toklo thought she sounded edgy, as if she couldn’t help agreeing with Lusa, even th
ough she wouldn’t admit it. “It’s only wind.”
Toklo was just grateful to have found somewhere to rest. Doing his best to ignore the gaping hole in his belly, he closed his eyes and tried to sleep.
Waking from an uncomfortable doze, Toklo was first aware of the silence. The wind had dropped. He opened his eyes on a glare of white snow-light; when his eyes grew used to the brightness, he saw that much more snow had fallen overnight. Huge powdery drifts had blown in under the overhang, sealing him and his companions into the cave.
“It’s a good thing we weren’t sleeping outside,” he muttered as he began rousing the others.
Together they thrust their way through the fresh snow and into the open. A shallow valley, now a vast expanse of white, stretched in front of them, glittering under the pale, low sun. Thin clouds drifted across an icy blue sky.
Suddenly Nanulak stiffened, staring past Toklo with wide, frightened eyes. “White bears!” he whispered.
Toklo turned to gaze across the valley. A group of white bears—a large male, a couple of females, and a half-grown cub—were walking toward them, plowing their way through the snow.
“They’re looking for me!” Nanulak whimpered. “Don’t let them get me!”
“Are those the bears who attacked you?” Yakone asked.
“I don’t know,” Nanulak replied, shivering. “I don’t remember. But all the white bears on this island are really unfriendly. They fight with the brown bears all the time.”
“Then get back into the shelter and stay there, Nanulak,” Toklo ordered.
Nanulak ducked behind the mounds of snow, while Kallik and Yakone moved to screen the gaps they had made as they pushed their way out.
Lusa came to stand beside Toklo, blinking worriedly. “Do you think the white bears would attack us to get to Nanulak?” she asked.
“We’ll make sure that doesn’t happen,” Yakone said grimly.
It was the first time Yakone had spoken up in Nanulak’s defense, and Toklo flashed a glance of respect at the white bear. Kallik was gazing at him admiringly, and she moved a little closer to him so that their pelts brushed.