Smoke Mountain Page 16

  She followed him to the other side of the river, which swirled around their bellies. Toklo splashed through the pebbly shallows to a tall bush, the leaves glittering with silver raindrops, and curled up in the damp shelter underneath. Lusa and the other bears squashed in beside him.

  ‘Where’s the trail?’ Kallik asked Ujurak.

  The rain dripped around them as they huddled together, staring gloomily back at the forest they’d run through. Toklo didn’t want to go back to find the trail. He didn’t think any of the others did either.

  ‘We’ll just keep going,’ Ujurak said. He crawled further under the bush and rubbed his back against the branches. ‘I’ll figure it out.’

  Toklo ducked his head. ‘I’ll hunt,’ he growled.

  He bounded back into the river and splashed away upstream, ignoring Kallik when she called, ‘But shouldn’t you rest too?’

  The rain rolling off his snout made it hard to concentrate on any scents, but Toklo focused his sharp eyes on the banks, knowing that his own smell would be hidden from any prey as well. Concentrating his mind on hunting relaxed him, distracting his thoughts from flat-faces with firesticks that killed bears.

  Something moved in the mud on the bank to his right. He slowed down and crouched so his nose was just sticking out of the water. He hoped he looked like a log floating along . . . and that the prey would be too dumb to realise he was floating upriver. He slid quietly through the water, closer and closer.

  And then, with a lightning-fast movement, he lunged out of the water and sank his claws into the animal on the bank.

  It flailed wildly with a furious hiss, and Toklo realised it was a snake. He slammed his paw into the back of the snake’s head, pinning it to the ground, and then snapped his jaws around its neck, killing it instantly. The long, thick body lay in the mud. Toklo’s belly rumbled, and part of him wanted to eat the whole thing right there by himself. But he knew he had to feed the others. He picked up the snake and trotted back down the river.

  Snakes killed to eat too – that was just life. If you were hungry, prey was prey. It made sense to kill something if you needed to eat it to survive. Did flat-faces eat bears? The thought had never occurred to him.

  The other bears were still huddled together, trying to stay dry. He squeezed in next to them and they shared the snake in silence. No stars were visible through the thick covering of clouds, and the river thundered by below them. Toklo could see the water rising as it swelled with the rain.

  Ujurak left the last scraps of the snake to the others and padded out to search for signs. Toklo watched the dim shape of his friend pace slowly up and down the river. The trees around them were not as dark or thick as those near the flat-face den. There was less cover, which meant more rain dripped through the leaves on to his cold nose. But there was also more room to run if they needed to.

  It was pitch-dark as they set off. Slippery leaves squished and slid around under Toklo’s paws. Ujurak was leading them uphill again. Toklo missed nice flat plains that didn’t make his muscles ache so much.

  After a while, Ujurak found a trail through the trees that looked like a large animal had wandered through several days earlier. The rain had washed away the scents, but Toklo guessed that it might have been a moose or a caribou. It wasn’t as wide as the real caribou trail, but it made walking a little easier, since their paws didn’t have to fight the undergrowth at every step. At one point, when he glanced up, Toklo thought he caught a glimpse of the Pathway Star glittering in the sky through a gap in the rain clouds.

  He should have felt better. They were moving on. It couldn’t be much further to the other side of Smoke Mountain.

  But as he traipsed through the woods, a wind rose up, tossing the leaves on the trees and tugging at his fur. He remembered the wind lifting the bearskins, their dead eyes, and the way their claws seemed to be reaching for him. He shivered and looked over his shoulder. Did the wind carry the faint scent of flat-faces?

  No, he was imagining things.

  There was nothing there. He shook his head to clear the smoke from his mind.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE:

  Kallik

  Kallik felt as if she were carrying a lump of ice in her stomach. Even several days after the night of the flat-face den, she could still see the bearskins splayed out in her mind. Her nose seemed clogged with the stench of death, making it hard to hunt. Whenever it wasn’t raining, trails of smoke filled the air.

  Her fur pricked and her sleep was full of nightmares. Now when her mother was dragged under the water, it wasn’t by orca whales; instead it was flat-faces with firesticks shooting her mother full of bloody holes.

  Lusa was jumpier than usual, sometimes leaping right into trees when a twig snapped behind them. She was also quieter. Kallik tried to get her to tell more stories about the Bear Bowl, hoping that would cheer her up, but halfway through a story, Lusa would trail off and stare into the trees, her nose twitching.

  Then there was Ujurak, who seemed less and less certain about the signs he found. Once, as they crossed a grassy meadow, he stopped and gazed at a boulder high above them. The enormous rock, the size of a full-grown bear, was resting right at the edge of a cliff over their heads.

  Toklo growled, ‘What is it?’

  Ujurak whispered, ‘I’m not sure. But something is hanging over us. I feel that we’re in danger.’

  ‘Well, let’s stand around in the open until it lands on us, then,’ Toklo barked. He stomped away and the others followed.

  Only Toklo acted as if he were unaffected by the horrifying sight of the bearskins, but Kallik noticed how quickly he was walking. It was as if he were trying to hurry them on as fast as he could without drawing attention to what he was doing.

  She didn’t mind travelling faster, though. She wanted to get away from Smoke Mountain. If she were on her own, she’d spend every day running as far as her paws could carry her. She might even have crossed all the way over by now. But she would never leave the others, and she knew Lusa couldn’t go any faster on her wounded leg.

  Then, as they left the trees and climbed higher into the mountains, their spirits started to lift. Toklo led them on to a craggy slope, treading carefully along narrow ledges and slippery outcroppings. A valley full of scrubby trees spread out below them. For the first time, they could see how far they had travelled from the BlackPath, and from the thick, dark forest with the flat-face den.

  Kallik lifted her nose into the air. The scent of something cool and crisp and clear was drifting down from the peak above them.

  ‘Snow!’ she yelped.

  Lusa stood on her hind legs and sniffed. ‘Wow! I think you’re right.’ Up ahead, Ujurak and Toklo paused near a crack in the rocks and looked back at them.

  ‘It smells like home,’ Kallik said, breathing in deeply. ‘Toklo! Can we go a little higher?’ She imagined burying her paws in thick white drifts of snow. She wanted to roll and roll in it until her fur was clean and cold again. She wished she’d had one more chance to play in the snow with Taqqiq, like they used to. That was where they both belonged.

  But Toklo was shaking his head. ‘I’m sorry, Kallik,’ he said. ‘Snow means no prey up here in these mountains. We need to stay where we can find food.’

  ‘Oh,’ Kallik said. She scraped a bit of moss out from between two rocks. She knew he was right, but it was strange to think of snow as a sign of hunger, when she saw it as bringing the world back to life. ‘All right.’

  The brown bears turned and kept walking. Lusa poked Kallik’s side with her nose. ‘I wish we could go play in the snow,’ Lusa said. ‘It sounds like fun when you talk about it.’

  ‘It’s not just that,’ Kallik said. ‘I feel safer when my fur blends into the landscape.’

  ‘I didn’t think of that,’ Lusa said. ‘But if it makes you feel any better, you’re so muddy that you blend in just fine here.’

  Kallik snorted. ‘Thanks. I feel much better.’

  They hurried to catch up with th
e others, who had stopped at an outcropping of craggy grey rocks.

  ‘I’m going to scout ahead,’ Ujurak said. Feathers sprouted through his fur, and his snout folded under, becoming hard and hooked. His furry ears melted back into his head, and talons appeared in place of his paws. In moments he was a falcon, and he flung himself into the air with a few swift wingbeats.

  ‘Well, thanks for warning us this time,’ Toklo muttered. He sat down on a rock in the sun, and Lusa lay down beside him, closing her eyes. Kallik stayed in the shade under the rock, wishing she had a snowbank to roll in. She lifted her head to watch Ujurak circling far overhead. She couldn’t believe he could see anything from that far away. She watched the Ujurak-falcon soaring over the territory in front of them, swooping in a long arc. Then he disappeared over the ridge.

  Kallik wriggled around and peered down the mountain to the forest below, where they had just been. The trees were so small from here that it looked like she could squash them all under her paw.

  Something moved in the shadows.

  Kallik tensed. Had she imagined it? The woods were so far below . . . it could have been anything.

  Then it moved again, and she realised that something was creeping out of the woods on to the rocky slope. It moved cautiously, stopping every few pawsteps. It was hard to tell what it was, as if it were deliberately hiding in the shadows of the rocks. Was it an animal? A flat-face? Something else?

  Kallik looked up at the rock above her and realised that Lusa and Toklo were leaning over the edge, watching it too.

  The three bear cubs stared down as the moving shape crept along the bottom of the mountain. It reached the point where the cubs had left the trail to climb higher. There it stopped for a long moment.

  And then . . . it started to climb towards them.

  Toklo and Lusa slid down the rock and pressed in close to Kallik.

  ‘What is it?’ Lusa whispered.

  Kallik wished she knew. The wind was blowing in the wrong direction, so there wasn’t even a scent to offer a clue.

  Toklo took a step backwards, further into the shadows. ‘I don’t know,’ he said in a voice more full of fear than Kallik had ever heard from him.

  Toklo glanced up at the sky, as if he wished Ujurak were back already.

  ‘What’s it doing?’ Lusa whispered in an even smaller voice.

  Kallik and Toklo exchanged glances. They didn’t need to know what it was to recognise how it was acting.

  Toklo answered her.

  ‘It’s hunting us.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO:

  Lusa

  Aflutter of feathers behind them nearly scared Lusa out of her fur. Ujurak was turning back into a bear. Lusa normally loved to watch him transform; she loved watching feathers turn to fur, limbs changing, a new animal appearing in his place. But now the ripples across his fur conjured up thoughts of bearskins blowing in the wind, and she had to look away.

  ‘We have to go,’ Toklo said to Ujurak. ‘Right now.’

  Ujurak started trying to walk before his paws were all in place and stumbled, sending a few pebbles skittering down the slope. Lusa flinched, sure that the sound would guide the hunter straight to them.

  ‘I know. I saw them,’ said Ujurak, his voice still high-pitched like the cry of a bird. ‘Four flat-faces with firesticks.’

  Four? For a moment, Lusa’s legs gave way and she started to sink on to the stones.

  ‘Let’s go,’ Toklo said, bounding to his paws. ‘Come on, Lusa.’ He gave her a shove, and she lurched to her feet again.

  ‘Up,’ Kallik insisted. ‘We should go up.’

  ‘But –’ Toklo started.

  ‘Listen, if it’s cold for us, it’ll be far worse for them without any fur. And we can climb faster than they can.’

  Toklo didn’t argue. They hurried straight up the rocky slope, all of them wrapped in their own fearful thoughts. Lusa’s legs weren’t wobbling now. They were strong with terror, tingling as she pushed herself as hard as she could to keep up with Toklo. Surely if the cubs got far enough ahead, the flat-faces would give up and turn back?

  Her paws scraped painfully as she hauled herself over boulders. Stones rattled down the slope behind them.

  ‘Oh no,’ she fretted. ‘That will bring them right to us!’

  ‘They already know where we are,’ Toklo pointed out. ‘We just have to outrun them.’

  The slope slanted up into a towering cliff wall, and Ujurak turned to lead them along a narrow ledge that ran around the peak. As Lusa edged along behind Kallik, trying not to look down, she heard a roaring sound up ahead. It was different from the roaring of the BlackPaths. For a moment she thought of the giant flat-face, but she shook those thoughts away. There were real dangers right behind them.

  The cubs came around a corner of the ledge and saw a huge waterfall pouring down the mountain, sparkling and thundering. Their path ended abruptly in a blaze of white water. There was no way forward. They were trapped!

  Don’t panic, Lusa told herself. No one else is panicking. There must be a way around it. We don’t have to go back towards the flat-faces . . . no, there must be another way.

  Toklo led them closer until the spray from the falling water beaded their fur. He sniffed around the ledge and the slope above and below them. Lusa studied the waterfall. It wasn’t a torrent shooting straight down from above; it ran down the cliffs on more of a slope, charging around boulders and splitting into smaller waterfalls here and there as it bounced over different rocky outcroppings.

  ‘There’s a kind of path down there,’ Toklo said, nodding over the side of the ledge. ‘If we scramble over the edge at this point, we can slide down to that trail and follow it to the bottom of the valley. Then we can cross the river down below, where the current is calmer.’

  ‘Or we could go straight up,’ Kallik argued. She pointed with her nose to the top of the waterfall, several bearlengths above them. ‘See those bushes and trees sticking out of the slope? If we could get hold of them, we could push ourselves up until we reached the top, and then cross the river up there.’

  ‘That’s if we don’t get swept over the waterfall,’ said Ujurak.

  ‘Climbing up might be easier,’ Toklo admitted.

  ‘But going down might be faster,’ Kallik said. ‘I don’t know. I want to do whatever those flat-faces can’t do.’

  ‘Me too,’ Toklo said.

  ‘So maybe –’ Ujurak started to say, but Lusa interrupted him.

  ‘Let’s go straight across,’ she said.

  The other three bears stared at her. Lusa squeezed past Toklo and stood on her hind legs, blinking in the spray from the waterfall.

  ‘Look,’ she said. ‘If we climb up just one bearlength, using that bush above me, there’s a spot up there where we could scramble across the boulders – they’re sticking out of the water enough that we could get from one to the next without being swept away.’

  Toklo narrowed his eyes, nodding slowly. ‘I see what you’re saying.’

  ‘I want to go first,’ Ujurak said. ‘It’s my fault we’re going this way; I should be the one to lead us across.’

  ‘No,’ Toklo said, blocking Ujurak’s way with his large, shaggy shoulder. ‘That’s stupid. We can’t afford to lose you, especially now. You should change shape and fly across.’

  Ujurak pawed the rocks angrily. ‘I don’t want to! It isn’t fair to you. My shape-changing shouldn’t be just an easy way to keep me safe while the rest of you risk your lives all the time. I’m a bear, just like you!’

  ‘We know,’ Kallik said gently. ‘But if you get killed by a waterfall, what will the rest of us do? We’ll never find the Place of Endless Ice without you.’

  ‘Please, Ujurak,’ Lusa begged. ‘We’d all turn into falcons and fly across if we could.’

  Toklo let out a tiny snort, as if he would never do such a thing, but he nodded when Ujurak looked at him. ‘Don’t be salmon-brained,’ he said. ‘We’re being hunted, remember? Just get out of
here.’

  ‘And it was my idea,’ Lusa said quickly, ‘so I’m going across first.’ She was pleased when Toklo didn’t argue with her.

  ‘I’ll give you a boost,’ he said.

  ‘OK.’ She stood near the slope of the mountain while Toklo crouched beside her. He braced his shoulders under her hindquarters and shoved her up towards the bush. She pushed off with her back paws and leaped, snagging her front paws in the branches. To her relief, the bush held firm. The thicket of interlocking branches gave her perfect clawholds to snag on to. She wriggled until she was safely perched on top of it, then looked back down at the others.

  Ujurak’s face was just disappearing into a falcon’s feathers. He flapped up into the air, flew across the waterfall, turned in a circle, and then soared higher, leaving them behind.

  ‘How does it look from up there, Lusa?’ Toklo called.

  ‘Easy,’ she said, studying the rocks sticking out of the waterfall. At this spot there were enough things to grip to climb all the way across – assuming her paws didn’t slip and send her crashing down to her death. ‘Watch how I do it.’ She crawled as far along the bush as she could, testing each pawstep to make sure the branches would hold. From there it was only a few pawlengths to the first boulder, which stuck out of the waterfall like a bear snout. Lusa braced herself, wriggled her hindquarters, and launched herself out of the branches.

  For a heart-stopping moment she was afraid she was going to miss and plunge into the torrent of water, but then her paws landed squarely on the flat top of the boulder. She gripped it fiercely, determined not to slip even a hairbreadth.

  ‘Nice jump!’ Kallik called. ‘Go, Lusa! That was terrific!’

  Toklo didn’t say anything; he just watched Lusa with a worried face.

  From the boulder it was a close jump to a tree that rose straight out of the waterfall. Lusa wasn’t nervous about this part. The tree must be strong to have withstood the force of the waterfall for so long. It could hold one little bear. The only thing she had to be careful about was leaping off the boulder she was on. The surface of the rock was slick and wet, and if she lost her footing as she pushed off, she might miss the tree and hurtle all the way to the rocks at the bottom.