The Burning Horizon Read online

  No, he thought, stifling a yawn. We can manage another skylength before nightfall.

  They kept walking even after the sun had gone down, though light still lingered in the sky, until Toklo realized that none of them could go another pawstep. He halted at the edge of a hollow among the roots of a pine tree, with bushes overhanging it.

  “Let’s rest,” he said. “This will make a good den.”

  Lusa puffed out a breath. “Thank Arcturus! My paws are falling off.”

  She slid down into the hollow. Kallik and Yakone followed, careful not to squash her. Toklo hesitated for a moment, wondering if he ought to keep watch.

  But I’m so exhausted, if anything crept up on us, I wouldn’t have the strength to fight.

  He clambered down into the den to join the others, wriggling to make space for himself. In the dim light he could see Lusa with her paws wrapped over her nose, and Kallik and Yakone lying close together, already snoring. With a sigh of relief, Toklo let himself slide into sleep.

  Toklo woke and stirred in the temporary den, then stretched his jaws in a vast yawn. Poking his head out from under the bushes, he saw that the sky was paling toward dawn. Dew glimmered on the grass, and shreds of mist drifted among the trees. The air smelled clear and fresh.

  His three companions were still sleeping, their bellies still comfortably rounded from Kallik’s hare. This would be the third sunrise since the bears had set out from the Sky Ridge, and there had been more prey after that.

  Leaving the others undisturbed, Toklo heaved himself out of the den and padded toward the edge of the trees to look out across the open grassland. All around him mountains rolled endlessly away, wooded slopes giving way to bare rock. Some of the summits shone white where snow still lay unmelted.

  It’s like we’re the only living things in the whole world!

  The thought had barely crossed Toklo’s mind when a flock of birds flapped noisily out of the trees above his head, and immediately after a long screech ripped through the air, followed by a harsh rumble that throbbed in Toklo’s ears.

  Toklo’s shoulder fur began to rise, though he knew the sound was only a firesnake racing through the trees along an unseen SilverPath. “I know it can’t reach us up here,” he grumbled aloud, “but it doesn’t belong here, and I don’t like it!” He shuddered at the memory of their journey on the firesnake, the speed and noise and the reek of flat-face stuff.

  He turned his focus back to the mountains. Somewhere far ahead, beyond the rolling hills, was Great Bear Lake, where all the other bears would be traveling for the Longest Day. Toklo had made the journey before, but everything was different now.

  I was so young then, so lost and angry and frightened. I didn’t even know where I was going; I just knew that I had to leave the place where Oka lived because of her grief and her rage. Meeting Lusa and Ujurak was the best thing that could have happened to me. I wasn’t lonely anymore, and they gave me something to live for.

  A pang of grief pierced Toklo as he thought about Ujurak. Is he watching me right now? Looking up, he could see one or two stars still glimmering in the dawn sky, but he couldn’t make out his friend’s star-shape.

  Toklo asked himself whether Ujurak would have told him to stay in his newly won territory. Lusa probably would have been fine traveling to the Longest Day Gathering with Kallik and Yakone, and they could have helped her to find a new home before heading off to find their own. And Kallik and Yakone would always have each other, so no bear would be left alone.

  There’ll come a time when I have to make the long journey back here by myself.

  Toklo’s belly churned as he realized that by choosing to travel once again with his companions, he was putting off the inevitable separation.

  A familiar voice echoed in his mind. “Perhaps it’s fitting that the final part of your journey, to claim your own territory, should be alone, like a true brown bear?”

  Toklo caught his breath. Turning, he saw a small, dark-furred bear standing beside him. “Ujurak!” he exclaimed.

  “After all,” Ujurak continued, as if they were in the middle of a conversation, “won’t you get more respect at the Sky Ridge if the other bears know you as ‘the wanderer’? The bear of all territories, the bear who has seen more of the world than any of them will be able to imagine?”

  “Maybe . . .” Toklo murmured.

  “Other brown bears will look upon you as fierce and wise,” Ujurak said, “but only if you make it to Great Bear Lake, to the gathering. Nothing is more important than that right now. For Lusa, and for you.”

  Toklo put his head on one side. “What do you mean? Is something going to happen to me at the lake?”

  “I can’t say,” Ujurak replied. “It’s something you must discover for yourself. But trust me, it’s vital for you to get there.”

  A rustling sound behind Toklo made him turn his head, and when he looked back, Ujurak was gone. Lusa appeared through the trees, blinking and stretching as she stumbled up to Toklo.

  “Why are you out here by yourself?” she asked through a massive yawn.

  “I wasn’t by myself,” Toklo replied. “Ujurak was here.”

  Lusa’s eyes sparkled with excitement, the last of her drowsiness vanishing. “Oh, I wish I’d seen him!” she exclaimed. “What did he say to you?”

  Toklo decided not to tell her that Ujurak had said the gathering would be of huge importance to him. It’s all too mysterious, he decided, wanting to think about it more by himself.

  “Not much,” he replied. “Or not much that I understood.”

  “Does he think it’s right for you to go to the lake?” Lusa asked anxiously.

  Toklo nodded. “Yes, he does.”

  “I’m so glad.” Lusa let out a sigh. “It feels good having you with us.”

  The glittering edge of the sun was just appearing between two mountain peaks. Toklo glanced down at Lusa, seeing a deep sadness in her eyes as she watched. He moved closer to her so that their pelts were brushing.

  “The four of us won’t have many more times like this, will we?” Lusa murmured, leaning against his shoulder. “I know our journey together has been full of danger, but even so—I’ll miss it.”

  “Me too,” Toklo agreed. “It’ll seem really strange, settling down in one place instead of moving on all the time.”

  “And no more adventures,” Lusa said wistfully.

  “I know,” Toklo responded. “But it’s time, Lusa—time to find a territory that truly belongs to us.” He tried to sound cheerful.

  “But we’ve made a territory for ourselves with every step of our journey, haven’t we?” Lusa asked, turning her head to look at him with berry-bright eyes. “That territory will stay in our hearts through the memories we have.”

  Toklo had never thought of it like that. “You’re right, Lusa,” he said. “A territory in our hearts.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Lusa

  Lusa swallowed her last mouthful of elk and swiped her tongue around her jaws. “That was great,” she sighed. “We must be the best hunters in the whole wild.”

  “I’m stuffed,” Toklo said, shuffling back from the carcass. “I feel as if I could sleep for a whole suncircle.”

  The four bears were sharing the prey near their temporary den, the hole underneath the pine tree. Sunlight glanced through the branches, and the air was full of warm scents. Lusa was struggling with drowsiness, too.

  “It was a good idea to stay here an extra day and hunt, Toklo,” she said. “We needed to build up our strength.”

  Toklo shrugged. “It just seemed sensible.”

  Lusa butted Toklo’s shoulder gently with her head, knowing that he didn’t want to act like he was in charge. “We all appreciated it.”

  But looking at her friends, Lusa was still worried. They all looked so tired, and their pelts seemed to be hanging from their bones, even though they had eaten well since they left the Sky Ridge. Have we traveled too far?

  Still, it was good to see
Kallik and Yakone contentedly sprawled out side by side, and the extra day’s rest had helped Yakone’s paw start to heal again.

  “I know why you love the mountains so much,” Kallik said to Toklo. “You hunt best among rocks and trees.”

  Toklo gave a pleased grunt. “True. But it’s time to move on now.”

  He took the lead as they set out across the open grassland and then down a steep slope that led into denser forest. But as they plunged back into the shade of the trees, Lusa heard high-pitched yelping sounds, and the thump of heavy pawsteps, drifting up from somewhere below.

  “Flat-faces!” Toklo exclaimed, halting.

  He jerked his head, signaling to the others to scramble back to higher ground. Kallik and Yakone dove into the cover of a rocky outcrop, while Lusa joined Toklo behind a huge boulder a couple of bearlengths away.

  The sounds of flat-face voices and the clump of their clumsy paws grew louder. Peering cautiously from behind the boulder, Lusa saw a ragged line of flat-faces heading diagonally across the slope. They all had huge black eyes that seemed to poke out of their faces, and brightly colored pelts. They moved slowly, looking around them, but Lusa didn’t think they were hunting. They weren’t concentrating enough for that.

  “What are they doing?” Lusa whispered to Toklo. “They didn’t touch the berries on that bush, and they stomped right over those deer tracks. What do they want?”

  The brown bear shrugged. “Who knows? We’ll just wait here until they’ve gone, and then move on again.”

  But the flat-faces didn’t pass by. Instead, they stopped, removed bundles tightly wrapped in pelts from their backs, and sat down. Yapping cheerfully to one another, they began pulling packages from their bundles. Even though she had eaten well, Lusa’s belly began to rumble as she picked up the scent of food, and her jaws watered as the flat-faces opened the packages and began to pass the food around.

  “Oh, spirits!” Toklo groaned. “If they’re stopping to eat, they could be here for a while.”

  Looking around, Lusa spotted another path that curved upward, away from the slope where the flat-faces were sitting. She nudged Toklo to point it out to him. “There might be a way around the flat-faces,” she murmured. “But we’ll have to climb a little higher.”

  “It’s taking us in the wrong direction,” Toklo grumbled, then shrugged and grunted agreement, signaling to Kallik and Yakone. Lusa took the lead as they headed up the new path. It was wide enough for all of them to pass, but narrower than the paths they had used so far, and it wound around the hillside with a sheer drop on one side. Lusa began to worry that if it shrank any further, one of them might fall.

  Yakone, just behind Lusa, slipped and dislodged a stone from the edge of the path. “Seal rot!” he muttered, but he managed to keep his balance. The stone bounced down the side of the mountain with a rattle.

  The flat-faces had heard the noise. All of them looked up and pointed their paws, making chuffing noises. Lusa didn’t think they were afraid; they seemed delighted to see the bears, their voices growing shrill with excitement as they raised small black boxes.

  Lusa flinched, afraid the things might somehow hurt them. But she soon realized they were harmless. Still, her fur prickled at being exposed to the flat-faces’ gaze.

  It’s like being back in the Bear Bowl.

  A powerful vision of her first home flashed into Lusa’s mind. The expanse of earth in the Bear Bowl seemed so small to her now, with a single tree and flat-face walls all around her. She remembered how the flat-faces had crowded around the edge of the Bear Bowl, gazing down at her and chattering. The first time she had ventured out from her BirthDen, she had been terrified.

  Be brave and keep playing, her mother, Ashia, had said. They won’t hurt you, little one.

  For a moment the soothing sound of her mother’s voice filled Lusa’s head, blocking out everything else. Ashia had rolled over with her paws in the air and let Lusa scramble all over her; then she’d given her a piece of fruit to eat, and soon Lusa had almost forgotten the flat-faces. She felt safe, cared for, and so tired that she could sleep forever. . . .

  Yakone stumbled against Lusa, jolting her back to the sun-scorched mountain and the stones sliding beneath her paws.

  “Lusa!” Toklo hissed from behind her. “What’s wrong with you? We have to get moving now!”

  Lusa realized that they might have only moments before the flat-faces started to pursue them. That was then; this is now, she told herself, shaking off the memories like a troublesome fly. I’m a wild bear now.

  She set off again, trying to quicken her pace, but there were more loose stones on the path, and she had to put her paws down carefully. Then she spotted a dense patch of scrub a few bearlengths farther up the path and headed for it, hoping it was big enough for all of them to hide in. Glancing over her shoulder, she tried to see if the flat-faces were following.

  As they left the path and plunged into the scrub, Lusa relaxed slightly. Nothing bad has happened, she thought. And not all flat-faces are hostile. Even so, she kept going, thorns and brambles raking her pelt as she pushed through. Once they had gained some height she checked and looked back, peering through the foliage to see if she could spot the brightly colored pelts. To her relief there was no sign of the flat-faces, and their voices had grown fainter in the distance.

  Toklo lumbered to her side, glaring at a chipmunk that was chattering at him from a branch just above his head. “Don’t stop,” he muttered to Lusa. “Even if we don’t see them now, who knows what they might do?”

  He took the lead as they continued, on and on until they had left the flat-faces far behind. The scrub gave way to dense undergrowth beneath close-growing pine trees. At least it was cool under the deep shade, but their progress was slow. Lusa noticed that Yakone was struggling to clear a path for himself without putting his injured paw to the ground. It must be hurting him again.

  Lusa ducked and wriggled among the clinging vegetation, then turned back to tug aside vines and brambles so the larger bears could get through. “Over here,” she said to Yakone, as the white male halted in front of a particularly dense bramble thicket. She pointed him toward a narrow gully with stones at the bottom, where he could slide down and stoop underneath the bramble tendrils.

  Yakone blinked his gratitude and managed to thrust his way through, his body almost filling the gully.

  All around them were the sounds and scents of small prey.

  “I can’t believe we’re passing up the chance to catch something!” Lusa muttered to Kallik.

  The white bear unhooked herself from a clinging bramble. “Right now I’m more worried about scratching my eyes out,” she responded.

  “That elk will keep us going for a while,” Toklo grunted, ducking beneath a vine. “We need to put some distance between us and those flat-faces before we stop.”

  “But they’re a long way behind us now,” Lusa pointed out.

  Toklo let out a snort. “You can never be too careful.”

  The bears kept going, pawstep by weary pawstep, though now they could see no more than a bearlength in any direction and had no idea where they were going. Though they knew they had to head along the side of the ridge, Lusa felt confused, trapped beneath the tree canopy, unable to check their direction.

  “I’m going to climb a tree,” she declared, frustrated by their slow progress. “That might help us to find a clearer path.”

  She scrambled up a blue spruce tree that looked like it might be taller than the others. Breaking out of the forest canopy, she caught sight of a stretch of ground farther up the slope where young trees grew more sparsely. But before she could examine it further or look for flat-faces, she heard a harsh screech. Looking up, she saw a large bird diving toward her. It swooped down and battered her head with its wings, while its talons clawed at her face.

  Lusa raised one paw to swat the bird away and lost her grip on the branch. With a yelp of alarm she plummeted to the ground, feeling twigs break beneath he
r. She landed with a thump on something soft and furry. When she could catch her breath and look around her, she realized that Yakone had caught her on his mighty shoulders.

  “Thanks!” she gasped, sliding to the ground. “A bird flew right at me. I must have gotten too close to its nest.”

  “You’re welcome,” Yakone grunted, flexing his shoulders with a hiss of pain. “Anytime.”

  “I’ve had enough of this,” Toklo barked. “Birds attacking us . . . chipmunks chirping at us . . .” He swiped a paw at another of the little creatures chittering at them from a nearby branch, but it was too far away for the blow to connect. “Stuck here, wedged in the undergrowth . . .”

  “There’s a clearer patch farther up the slope,” Lusa said, nodding in the direction she had seen. “Let’s go that way.”

  She urged the others on through undergrowth that seemed even denser than before, their paws tangling in brambles and vines as they pushed their way through clumps of dogwood. Panting hard, they struggled upward, only to freeze at the sound of more flat-face voices coming from close by.

  “Here! Hide!” Lusa pushed Toklo into a thicket of barberry bushes and followed him into shelter, wincing as the thorns tore into her fur. Kallik and Yakone thrust their way in as well and crouched at Lusa’s side.

  “Couldn’t you have found us a nice clump of ferns to hide in?” Kallik asked irritably, licking at her paw where one of the thorns had scratched it.

  “Shh!” said Lusa.

  All four bears watched warily as the flat-faces came into view, stumbling through the undergrowth on huge, clumsy paws. They were different from the ones who had stopped to eat, though they wore the same kind of brightly colored pelts.

  Lusa’s heart pounded, and she concentrated on staying still and silent. Kallik was trying to balance on three legs to keep her scratched paw off the ground, while Toklo had ended up in a shallow stream that flowed through the thicket. Lusa choked back a snort as she spotted him sinking slowly into the peaty ground. But her amusement faded a moment later as a spider dropped down on a thread of gossamer and landed on her nose.