Island of Shadows (19 page)

“I can smell a hare!” he announced after a moment.

“Then keep quiet about it,” Toklo murmured, halting to see if he could pick up the same scent. It was there, but very faint. “Well scented,” he added.

Nanulak's eyes shone with pride. “It's over there,” he whispered, pointing with his snout.

Toklo looked, but he couldn't see anything. Suddenly Nanulak launched himself across the snow. At the same moment an Arctic hare leaped up from a dip in the ground and bounded away, with Nanulak hard on its paws.

Racing after them, Toklo was ready to trap the hare if it changed direction. But Nanulak seemed to have an instinct for which way the hare would dodge. He veered to one side and intercepted it, and Toklo heard its shriek of pain cut off abruptly as Nanulak closed his jaws on its throat.

Picking up his prey, Nanulak trotted back toward Toklo. “I got it!” he announced, his voice blurred by the mouthful of fur and flesh.

“Well done!” Toklo barked, feeling as much pride as if he had caught the hare himself.

He let Nanulak take the lead as they headed back to the others. Nanulak padded up to Kallik and Yakone and dropped the hare at their paws.

“Sorry about yesterday,” he muttered. “Here—you eat first.”

“Thanks,” Kallik responded. “Great catch!”

Yakone said nothing; Toklo could see that he was still reluctant to forgive Nanulak, though he nodded in acknowledgment as he bent his head to take a mouthful of the hare.

“You're a good hunter, Nanulak,” Lusa said warmly. “I wish you could scent out some leaves for me!”

Nanulak pointed with his snout toward the thorn tree overshadowing the dens. “If you dig down beside that tree, you should be able to get at the roots,” he announced. “They're quite shallow.”

“Oh, wow! Really?” Lusa bounded off to the tree and started digging down through the snow. Soon she was chewing happily.

“Thanks for helping Lusa,” Toklo murmured to Nanulak as he took his own share of the prey. “She finds it hard out here. Black bears need leaves and roots and berries.”

“That's okay.” Nanulak's eyes shone. “See? You should listen to me more often!”

He really knows about this place
, Toklo thought.
Maybe he will fit in after all.

When they had devoured every last scrap of the hare, the bears set out again. The snow had stopped and the sky cleared. The air was crisp and cold. Strengthened by the food, even though his share hadn't been enough to fill his belly, Toklo strode out with new energy as he and his friends headed farther into the mountains.

Kallik and Yakone were still walking close together, while Nanulak stayed beside Toklo. Lusa followed a bearlength behind. Toklo was aware that the divisions of the previous night still hung in the air like mist, but at least the bears weren't snarling at one another anymore.

As they climbed higher, Toklo spotted the flat-face denning area, tiny now at this distance. A BlackPath led toward it, and Toklo reminded himself to be careful, in case it crossed their path some way ahead. Intent on the view, he failed to watch where he was putting his paws. Suddenly he felt the ground give way under his feet. Letting out a startled yelp, he slid downward in a shower of snow. For a moment he was terrified that he was falling down another hole; then he stopped with a thump on something hard.

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.