by Erin Hunter
Toklo glanced sideways at him, hesitating. “We’ll see how things turn out,” he replied after a moment.
Kallik understood Toklo’s reluctance. She knew, just as they all did, that sooner or later their journey together must come to an end. But her pelt prickled with irritation at Nanulak’s dismissive tone, as if their final parting were something that didn’t matter.
“Let’s press on ahead for a bit,” she murmured to Yakone. “Otherwise I’m going to give that bear a swat over the ear!”
As Kallik took the lead with Yakone beside her, she cast a glance back at Lusa. The black bear hadn’t reacted to Nanulak’s words; she was trudging along with her head down, her snout almost brushing the snow.
She’s been quiet for a while, Kallik thought. I hope she’s okay. Maybe she’s still fighting the longsleep. And we can’t give her the sort of food she needs. But when burn-sky comes, she and Toklo will have all they want to eat. It’s Yakone and I who’ll have problems, if we can’t get to the Frozen Sea in time to fill our bellies before it melts.
Picking up the pace, Kallik realized that the land was beginning to slope downward. The edge of the ice cap, which they had been following for several days, was curving away from them. Ahead of them, the ground fell away in fold after fold of snow-covered hills.
“We’re almost at the other side of the island!” Kallik exclaimed, peering forward to see if she could detect the sea.
Yakone halted beside her, sniffing the air. “Not far now,” he said with satisfaction.
Kallik turned and looked back along the ridge. Toklo and Nanulak were padding together a few bearlengths behind, while Lusa plodded along in their pawsteps.
“Come over here!” Kallik called. “We’ve found the way down!”
Instantly Toklo and Nanulak broke into a gallop, and even Lusa looked more alert and quickened her pace.
“At last!” Nanulak exclaimed as he halted beside Kallik.
Toklo gave a grunt of appreciation as he looked out at the rolling hills. “This way,” he said, veering down the slope at an angle. The she-bear said there’d be a gully.”
Nanulak followed him closely, bounding and slipping through the snow like a cub. As Lusa came toiling up, Yakone crouched down for her. “Come on,” he invited her. “Ride on my back again. You look exhausted.”
Lusa blinked at him in gratitude. “Thanks, Yakone.” She clambered up onto the white bear’s shoulders and wriggled down into his fur until she was comfortable. “That’s nice,” she murmured sleepily.
Once Lusa was settled, Kallik and Yakone padded after Toklo, who was heading purposefully onward. Nanulak frolicked around in the snow, though he never ventured far from Toklo’s side. Suddenly he let out a startled yelp and slid down out of Kallik’s sight.
“Oh, no!” she gasped, starting to run. “He’s fallen down a hole, just like Toklo!” Raising her voice, she called, “Toklo, what happened?”
Toklo had halted and was gazing calmly downward. As Kallik came panting up to him, she spotted Nanulak scrambling to his paws at the bottom of a deep fissure in the ground. He had landed in the middle of a clump of thorns and was struggling to tear himself free.
“Nanulak found the gully by slipping into it,” Toklo replied. There was a rumble of amusement in his voice that Kallik hadn’t heard for a long time.
“It’s not funny!” Nanulak squealed from down below. “Come and help me out!”
“Okay, we’re coming!” Toklo responded, beginning to edge carefully down the steep slope that led into the gully. “Follow me,” he added to Kallik. “This is the way we have to go.”
By the time Toklo and Kallik reached the floor of the gully, with Yakone and Lusa following more cautiously, Nanulak had escaped from the thorns. He shook mud and snowmelt from his fur, spattering Kallik, then examined each of his pads with minute attention.
“I think I have a thorn stuck,” he complained, holding out a forepaw to Toklo. “See if you can get it out.”
It was Kallik who seized his paw with her own and turned it over to inspect the surface of his pads. “There’s no thorn,” she said after a moment. “You’re fine.”
“But it hurts!” Nanulak put his paw to the ground, wincing. “I can’t walk like this.”
Kallik tried to suppress the memories of their own injuries on their long journey. They had been attacked by firebeasts, shot at by no-claws with firesticks, hunted by hungry orca… But we never made a fuss like this.
“We have to keep going,” Yakone said, coming up with Lusa in time to hear the last of this exchange. “Dawn is breaking over the hills. We’ll have to find shelter soon. You can rest your hurt paw then, Nanulak,” he added sharply. “Meanwhile, you’ll just have to put up with it.”
Nanulak gave Yakone a sulky glare and looked at Toklo for support.
“Yakone’s right,” Toklo responded. “We have to get into hiding before daylight. Come on.”
Muttering under his breath, Nanulak followed. He was limping heavily; Kallik started to feel sorry for him until she realized that he was favoring the other forepaw, not the one that was supposed to have the thorn. Letting out a small sigh, she decided not to say anything. He’s never been on a journey like this before. But he’ll learn.
As the dawn light grew brighter, they found a shallow cave in the side of the gully and crowded into it to sleep the day away. Lusa scraped a few scraps of lichen off the rocks at the entrance and chewed them stoically.
“Better than nothing,” she muttered.
“I’m hungry, too. When are we going to hunt?” Nanulak asked. “I want to come this time.”
“Maybe later.” Toklo’s jaws stretched wide in an enormous yawn. “Right now I want to sleep.”
Kallik was prepared for more protests from Nanulak, but the younger bear just curled up close to Toklo. Trying to forget the gaping hole in her own belly, Kallik settled down beside Yakone. As she closed her eyes, she thought she heard the distant rumble of thunder, but the sky was clear.
I must be imagining things, she thought as she drifted into sleep.
Hunger woke Kallik when it was still light outside. Lusa was curled up in the den, but she could hear the others moving around outside.
“I know you’re hungry, Nanulak,” Yakone was saying in an exasperated voice. “We’re all hungry. What do you think, Toklo? Is it safe to hunt?”
“I’d like to get moving,” Toklo replied as Kallik emerged, blinking, into the open. “We can hunt on the way. The gully is pretty sheltered,” Toklo pointed out. “And I haven’t noticed any bear tracks. I think we can risk it.”
“Let’s do that,” Kallik begged; every hair on her pelt was sick of plodding along in darkness. When Toklo nodded, she ducked back inside the den and nudged Lusa awake. “Come on, we’re going to travel in daylight for once.”
“Good,” the black bear mumbled, heaving herself to her paws and stumbling outside to where the others were waiting.
With Toklo in the lead, the bears set off down the gully. The bottom gradually grew wider, though the sides still rose steeply, cutting out any view of the hills. Kallik had no idea if they were going the right way, but she trusted the she-bear’s directions, and she felt as if they were making good progress.
“At this rate, it won’t be long before—” she began. She broke off at a loud squeal from Nanulak.
“A hare! Look—a hare!”
Kallik spotted the telltale black tips of its ears as the hare sprang up from the shallow scrape in the ground and fled with huge bounds. Nanulak pelted after it. Suddenly the hare changed direction and ran right into Yakone’s paws. The white bear killed it with a swift blow to the neck.
“Good catch!” Kallik exclaimed.
Nanulak glared at her. “I sent the hare into Yakone’s paws. It’s my prey, really.”
“Yeah, right,” Yakone murmured, rolling his eyes at Kallik.
One Arctic hare shared among five didn’t satisfy any bear’s hunger, but Kallik felt new strength
in her paws as they headed down the gully again. Gradually it grew wider and shallower, and it began to twist, so that they couldn’t see very far in any direction.
“I’ll be glad to get out of this,” Yakone muttered into her ear. “I like to see where I am. Anything could creep up on us down here.”
Kallik felt an uneasy prickle in her fur as he spoke, but she had no time to reply before Toklo halted and exclaimed, “I can smell flat-faces!”
“What, up here?” Lusa asked, darting swift glances all around.
“Somewhere ahead,” Toklo said. “We’ll carry on, but keep quiet.”
Setting her paws down carefully, Kallik followed the brown bear around the next curve in the gully. Suddenly he stopped again, peering around a huge boulder.
“Great spirits!” he whispered.
“What is it?” Nanulak gave an excited bounce as he tried to push past Toklo and see what lay ahead.
Toklo blocked him with his shoulder. “Keep back.”
By now Kallik had caught up to Toklo and could gaze around the boulder. She gasped with astonishment, hardly able to believe what she was seeing.
Ahead of her, the gully flattened out into a wide bowl. Instead of unbroken snow, scars of raw earth and stones stretched across it from edge to edge. It looked as if some enormous creature had rampaged across it, tearing up the land with its claws.
On the far side of the bowl a big orange firebeast was sleeping. Three or four no-claws stood near it. One of them was bent over something that looked like a firestick stuck upright in the ground. He gestured to the other no-claws, who went behind the firebeast. Then he seemed to push the firestick down into the ground.
“What is he—?” Lusa began.
Her words were drowned in a clap of sound, so loud that Kallik thought her ears would burst. It was louder than firesticks, louder than thunder, louder than the metal bird that had hunted them near the no-claw denning place. At the same moment, the earth and stones at one side of the bowl fountained up into the air. They hung there for a moment, blocking out the sunlight, then fell down again. Some of the debris pattered to the ground around the bears. Kallik flinched as some of it landed on her pelt.
“That stings!” she exclaimed.
Nanulak had pressed himself to the ground, his paws wrapped over his head. Lusa was shaking. Kallik felt her heart pounding as she gazed at Toklo and Yakone, then back again at the stretch of earth that now displayed a new wound.
That was what I heard last night, she realized, remembering the mysterious rumble of thunder. The sound died away, but for a few moments Kallik felt as though her ears were still vibrating with its power. Toklo’s jaws were moving, but at first she couldn’t hear what he was saying.
What if I never hear anything again? she thought, on the verge of panic.
Then Toklo’s voice gradually faded in, as if he were approaching from a long way away.
“… can’t go this way,” he was saying. “We’ll have to go back up the gully and find somewhere we can climb out.”
“Why are the flat-faces tearing up the ground?” Lusa asked, her eyes round with fear. “What are they doing?”
“Why do flat-faces do anything?” Toklo echoed. “They’re always weird. And this is seriously weird. Come on, Nanulak.”
The younger bear was still quaking on the ground. Toklo nudged him gently with one paw. “Come on,” he repeated. “It’s over now. Let’s get away before they do it again.”
In response to his urging, Nanulak stumbled to his paws and pressed himself close to Toklo as the grizzly headed back up the gully.
“Are you okay, Lusa?” Kallik asked.
Her friend nodded. “Just a bit shaken. I’ll be fine.”
The sun was going down, casting deep shadows across the bottom of the gully. Overhead the sky was stained with scarlet, and the first of the star spirits were beginning to appear. Kallik looked in vain for the outline of Ujurak; that part of the sky was hidden by the side of the gully.
“Let’s find somewhere to rest,” she suggested. She was still quivering from the shock of the blast and wondered how long her paws would go on supporting her. “The slopes are too steep to climb in the dark, anyway.”
“Makes sense,” Toklo grunted.
But he led the bears on until they were well away from where the no-claws were tearing up the earth. Kallik stayed alert for the sound of another thunderclap, but heard nothing except the ordinary sound of wind and the scuttering of small prey. As darkness gathered, she guessed that the no-claws would have gone back to their dens.
Finally Toklo halted at the foot of the slope, where an overhanging rock gave a little shelter. “This will have to do,” he said.
“Thank Silaluk!” Kallik exclaimed, letting herself flop to the ground.
Yakone settled beside her and touched his muzzle comfortingly to her shoulder. “You were very brave,” he murmured.
Kallik shook her head. “I was terrified. But at least we don’t have to go that way again.”
“That’s what bothers me,” Yakone admitted. “The she-bear told us that’s the way down to the sea. Now that we have to avoid the no-claws, it’s going to be much harder to get there.”
The next day dawned gray and chilly; the sky was covered with threatening cloud, and a raw, damp wind funneled down the gully.
“I think the wind is looking for us,” Lusa grumbled. “I feel as if it’s going to blow my fur off!”
Toklo walked in front again as the bears headed back the way they had come. Soon they came to a spot where part of the side of the gully had crumbled away. Huge boulders were piled at the bottom; above them thorn trees were rooted in cracks in the rock.
“We should be able to climb up there and go around where the flat-faces are,” Toklo said, eyeing the broken surface. “It’ll be better than going all the way back to the top.”
He started to climb before any bear could comment, hauling himself upward by gripping the trunks of the thorn trees. Grit and small stones showered down as he scrabbled to find pawholds.
Yakone nodded at Nanulak. “You next,” he directed. “And I’ll be right behind you if you slip.”
“I won’t slip!” Nanulak retorted. “I can climb as well as any bear.”
Without hesitating, he began to scramble up the slope after Toklo. Yakone followed; Kallik boosted Lusa over the boulders and brought up the rear.
At the top of the gully, Kallik found herself standing on wind-scoured rock scarcely a bearlength wide. On the other side, a sheer cliff fell away into a deep ravine. Instinctively she tried to dig in her claws, half afraid that the wind would blow her off the precarious stone path.
“This is scary!” Lusa muttered.
With Toklo in the lead once more, the bears padded single file along the rock. The wind felt like the buffeting of a huge paw, flattening Kallik’s fur to her sides and making her set her paws down as firmly as she could.
I really don’t like this, she thought. And am I imagining things, or is this rock path getting narrower?
At the same moment, Toklo called out, “Stop!”
“What’s the matter?” Yakone asked, craning his neck to peer past Nanulak.
“This path just came to an end,” Toklo explained. “And we’ve got cliffs on both sides.”
Kallik glanced around. On one side was the gully they had followed before, on the other the ravine, which had shrunk to little more than a deep fissure in the rock. The opposite side was only a bearlength away.
“We could jump over there,” she suggested. “There’s no point in trying to climb down into the gully again. We’d still be cut off by the no-claws.”
“Good idea,” said Yakone.
“But I’m scared!” Nanulak’s voice rose over Yakone’s. “I might fall.”
“Do you want to get off this island or not?” Yakone asked. His voice was irritated, and however much Kallik sympathized with Nanulak, part of her couldn’t blame Yakone.
“Toklo, you won’t
make me do it, will you?” Nanulak begged.
“Lusa’s the only one who might have problems,” Yakone argued, before Toklo could reply. He glanced back over his shoulder at the black bear. “What do you think, Lusa?”
Lusa measured the gap with an intent gaze before replying. “I’m fine with it,” she said.
“Okay, then,” Toklo said decisively. “Nanulak, if Lusa can manage, then so can you,” he added, cutting off another wail from the younger bear.
“Yes, you’re not telling me a black bear can outjump you, are you?” Yakone teased.
Nanulak didn’t reply. Kallik couldn’t see him—Yakone’s body was blocking her view—but she could imagine his offended expression.
Kallik watched as Toklo launched himself into the air, clearing the gap with pawlengths to spare. “It’s easy,” he said, turning back to the others. “Come on, Nanulak.”
“Lusa first,” Nanulak said sulkily.
“Okay.” Lusa sounded determined. “I’ll be glad to get it over with. Toklo, be ready to catch me.”
Unhesitatingly the black bear bunched her muscles and pushed off, her paws splayed, reaching for the opposite side of the ravine. She landed with her hindpaws dangling, scrabbling at the cliff face. Toklo sank his jaws in her shoulder and hauled her up to stand, panting, on the far side.
“Great, Lusa!” Kallik called.
Without letting herself think about it for too long, she made her own leap, landing neatly beside Lusa. Turning back, she saw Nanulak and Yakone standing side by side on the spur of rock.
“I’m coming next!” Nanulak announced. “Keep back, all of you, and give me space.”
Kallik and the others took a few paces backward, though Kallik could see that Toklo was ready to spring forward and grab Nanulak if he looked like he was falling.
Nanulak fussed around for a moment, getting into exactly the right position to jump, then let out a roar as he hurled himself at the far side of the ravine in a great leap.
He landed well away from the edge, stumbled, and righted himself. “See?” he said, looking around at the others. His eyes shone. “I’m a great jumper!”
“So you are.” Toklo touched the younger bear’s shoulder with his muzzle. “I knew you would be.”