Spirits in the Stars Read online

  Silaluk glanced back over her shoulder. “You’re doing fine, Lusa,” she said. “I will be watching you.”

  She moved away once more, so swiftly that Lusa had no hope of catching her, until she dwindled to a bright star on the horizon.

  Lusa let out a wail of loss and immediately felt something prodding her sharply in the side.

  “Stop making all that noise,” Toklo growled. “A bear can’t get any sleep around here.”

  Blearily Lusa opened her eyes and looked around. She was curled up in the makeshift den in the snowbank, with the other bears huddled closely around her. I’m not alone, Lusa thought, suddenly feeling more optimistic. I have three friends with me.

  Above Lusa’s head the sky was growing pale with the approach of day, and across the ice she could see a golden flush to tell her where the sun would rise. Her belly growled, reminding her of how long it had been since they had found any food.

  The sun rose as her friends clambered out of the den, and they set out again, blinking through the bright whiteness as the rays reflected off the surface of the ice. Soon they made out the shape of the land up ahead: It looked like another island, bigger than the first, rising in a dark mass from the frozen sea around it.

  More willow shoots, Lusa thought hopefully, water flooding her jaws in anticipation of filling the hollow in her belly.

  Toklo took the lead, breaking into a trot. Lusa and the others picked up their pace to keep up with him, and soon the island was looming above them. This time it was easier to see where the sea ended and the land began, because the land sloped more steeply upward with only a narrow strip of beach. Here and there the wind had blown the snow away, leaving patches of bare gray rock.

  “I’m so hungry!” Lusa exclaimed, burrowing eagerly down through the snow.

  Toklo jumped back as the white crystals splattered his fur. “Watch it!”

  But disappointment flooded through Lusa as her claws scraped on stone. There were only big pebbles at the bottom of the hole she had made—no earth, no plants. “We can’t eat rock!” she complained.

  “We need to go farther inland,” Kallik pointed out. “We’ll find something to eat soon, don’t worry.”

  “Right. What are we waiting for?” Lusa bounded a few paces away from the shoreline and glanced back to see that Kallik and Ujurak were following her.

  “Stop!” Toklo exclaimed.

  The big grizzly angled his ears at something in the distance, farther up the hill. Turning in that direction, Lusa saw a white bear standing on a rock. He looked young and fit, about the same size as Kallik, and his pelt had a reddish tinge. Even though he was so far away, Lusa could feel his eyes on her.

  After a moment’s silent scrutiny the white bear turned and galloped away, disappearing over the brow of the hill. Lusa felt a pleasant thrill of excitement as she watched him go.

  It’s so long since we’ve seen any other bears! Maybe we’ll find more.

  Then her excitement gave way to anxiety as she wondered whether these bears would be friendly. What if they attack us and drive us away? She swallowed nervousness at the thought of facing hostile bears who were so much bigger than her.

  Kallik clearly didn’t share her misgivings. A pang of jealousy shook Lusa as she saw the pleased expression on her friend’s face. I wonder if she’ll like other white bears better than she likes us.

  But there was no time for Lusa to dwell on her feelings. Ujurak was already heading toward the nearest rise, jerking his head to beckon the others to follow him.

  “Come on!” he called. “We’ll be able to check out the whole island from up here.”

  Lusa’s short legs ached with the exertion by the time she stood on top of the ridge. Standing beside her friends, she looked out across a vast landscape of rising and falling hills. Except for the ice the bears had crossed, which now lay behind them, there was no sign of the ocean.

  “Hey, this island is big!” Lusa exclaimed.

  “I can’t see any more white bears,” Kallik added, looking around and sniffing eagerly.

  At first Lusa thought that nothing at all was alive in all that rolling stretch of hills. Then she spotted movement and gasped in astonishment as a whole herd of creatures came into sight, shambling down a gully on the far side of the hill they had just climbed. They reminded Lusa of the caribou, but they were bigger and more solid, with hunched shoulders and shaggy brown fur that hung down as far as their knees. Lusa repressed a shudder at the sight of their long, curving horns.

  “What are those?” she asked, hardly expecting a reply.

  “Musk oxen,” Kallik whispered. “I’ve never seen them before, but my mother told me and Taqqiq about them. She said they live near the Endless Ice, and they can feed a family of bears for a whole moon.”

  “Great!” Toklo bared his teeth. “Let’s hunt!”

  Ujurak was giving the musk oxen a doubtful look; Lusa shared his misgivings. They were bigger by far than any animals the bears had ever hunted.

  “Are you sure we can catch one?” she asked Toklo.

  “We can if we work together,” he replied confidently.

  He led the way down the hillside, and the bears hid behind a rock to watch the herd. The huge animals were ambling along placidly, pausing here and there to scrape the snow with their sharp-looking hooves and munch on the grasses they uncovered.

  Lusa swallowed; up close the oxen were even more frightening, and she couldn’t help wondering whether even Toklo could bring one down. What if the whole herd turns on us?

  “Seals are much less scary to hunt,” Kallik muttered into her ear.

  Suddenly Lusa felt more confident. “Excuse me!” she whispered back. “You fought a whole gang of orca yesterday!”

  Toklo had been watching the herd closely; now he turned back to his friends. “We’ve got to get one,” he said. “I can taste it now. . . . This is what we’ll do. . . .”

  A few moments later Lusa and Kallik were creeping quietly down the hill, working their way behind the herd of musk oxen to the other side of the gully. A flap of white wings made Lusa look up to see a tern skim low over their heads and circle in the air above the herd.

  “There goes Ujurak,” she murmured.

  “I hope he waits until we’re in position,” Kallik replied.

  Once on the far side of the herd, Lusa and Kallik took shelter behind a huge boulder. Lusa gagged on the strong scent of the musk oxen.

  “At least they’ll never pick up our scent through all of that!” she whispered.

  The tern-Ujurak swooped down toward them and let out a screech as he rose into the air again. At the signal Toklo burst out from the cover of a scrawny thornbush and launched himself down the hillside toward the herd.

  The musk oxen bellowed in panic and turned to run, heading for the boulder where Lusa and Kallik crouched in hiding.

  “Now!” Kallik said.

  She and Lusa sprang out of their hiding place and sprinted toward the herd. The roaring and the pounding of the oxen’s hooves terrified Lusa, but she swallowed her fear and ran on.

  The leaders of the herd spotted Lusa and Kallik and tried to turn back, but they were pushed from behind by the other oxen fleeing from Toklo. The strung-out herd quickly became a mass of milling, panic-stricken animals.

  In the confusion Lusa spotted Toklo running alongside the herd; he leaped on a smaller, young-looking ox and brought it crashing to the ground. Its hooves flailed as it rolled in the snow, trying to stand up. Kallik sprang on top of it, and Lusa avoided the thrashing hooves to get a grip on its haunches.

  We’re good at this, she thought as she struggled to hang on. We’re no longer weak, silly cubs—we know how to work as a team.

  The musk ox gave one last convulsive jerk and then went limp as Toklo dealt it a massive blow across the neck. Panting, the three friends relaxed, gazing at one another across the body of their prey, while the rest of the herd stampeded away up the gully.

  “We did it!” Kallik excla
imed joyfully.

  “I knew we could,” Toklo growled, his eyes blazing in triumph.

  Lusa said nothing, but warmth flooded through her at the closeness she felt to her friends and the way they had worked together. That’s it. . . . Together we can fight orca and musk oxen and anything!

  Ujurak came trotting down the gully, back in his bear shape, and the four friends feasted on their prey. The musk-ox meat was rich and warm, and they gulped it down eagerly. It tasted good, even to Lusa. She couldn’t remember the last time they had been able to gorge until they were full.

  “Thank you, spirits,” Ujurak said, when none of them could manage another mouthful. He cast a hopeful glance up at the sky.

  The sun was already sinking behind the hills, and twilight gathered in the gully while the last scarlet rays lingered on the ridges. There was still no sign of the fire in the sky. Lusa opened her jaws to ask Ujurak why not, then closed them again. She could tell all her friends were just as worried as she was, and none of them was prepared to talk about it.

  “We’d better make a den,” Toklo said, sighing with satisfaction as he swallowed one last mouthful of the prey.

  Ujurak nodded. “If only the days weren’t so short. We’ll never get anywhere at this rate.”

  Lusa agreed. She missed warm sunshine more than anything. Here the sun hardly had time to come up before it went down again.

  But at least we’re well fed.

  She felt a twinge in her belly as she padded over to the side of the gully where Toklo and Ujurak had begun to scrape out a den.

  Maybe too well fed, she added to herself as she scrabbled in the snow to find some grass and gulped down the stalks to ease the pain from so much rich food.

  The den grew quickly with all four bears digging their way into the snow. As Lusa paused for a brief rest, panting, she looked up and spotted the watching shapes of more white bears standing on the horizon.

  Shuddering, she nudged Kallik’s shoulder and pointed her muzzle at the pale figures outlined against the darkening sky. “Look up there.”

  “Don’t worry,” Kallik responded. “They won’t come near us.”

  I hope that’s true, Lusa thought. But sooner or later we’ll have to meet them.

  When Lusa scrambled out of the den at sunrise the next day, there was no sign of the other white bears. She let out a sigh of relief. I don’t care what Kallik thinks. I think they look scary.

  “Hey, Lusa!” Ujurak was crouching beside the carcass of the musk ox they had killed the night before. “Come and eat.”

  Lusa still wasn’t hungry after their previous feast, but they couldn’t carry the prey with them, so it made sense to eat as much as possible before they left. She joined Ujurak, to be followed a few moments later by Toklo and Kallik, still blinking sleep out of their eyes.

  “This is cold and hard now,” Toklo grumbled, giving the prey a prod.

  “Hey, it’s food. We’d have been glad of this when we were out on the ice,” Kallik reminded him.

  Lusa felt optimistic as they set out, enjoying the dazzle of sunlight on the snow. With Toklo in the lead, they crossed a valley, pausing to dip their snouts for a drink from a half-frozen stream.

  “I’ve almost forgotten what running water sounds like,” Lusa remarked, listening to the gurgle of the icy current, so different from the silent depths of the sea.

  Splashing through the stream, the bears headed across an open space where snow and earth had been churned together.

  “The musk oxen have been here,” Ujurak said as he peered at the hoofprints.

  “There are so many of them!” Kallik exclaimed.

  Toklo swiped his tongue around his jaws. “Good!”

  They were still too full to think of tracking down the musk oxen, so they kept going to the far side of the valley. Here the ground sloped steeply upward to a ridge, but when they tried to climb, the loose snow gave way beneath their paws, and they slid helplessly back again.

  “Now who’s stuck?” Lusa teased as Toklo pawed his way out of a drift, scattering snow as he shook his pelt.

  Toklo just growled in annoyance.

  They tried again and again, and before long Lusa was too wet and exhausted to think about teasing anymore. “There has to be an easier way than this,” she muttered as she struggled to climb through thick snow.

  Glancing around to make sure she hadn’t lost sight of her friends, she realized that Kallik wasn’t with them. Anxiety stabbed through her, until she spotted the white bear farther up the valley, nosing around at the bottom of the slope.

  “Look over here!” Kallik called.

  Lusa trudged over and found Kallik standing at the mouth of a gully leading upward, where broken rocks poked out of the covering of snow.

  “This looks easier,” Kallik went on.

  The two she-bears waited while Toklo and Ujurak came plodding over. Toklo gazed up the gully, then nodded. “It seems to cut through the ridge,” he said. “We might as well try it.”

  Kallik took the lead, bounding easily up the broken rocks. Lusa found it harder—sometimes she had to bunch her muscles for a long leap—but she kept going, her breath puffing out in clouds in the cold air.

  A breeze was blowing from the top of the gully; Lusa picked up a salt tang carried along with it and realized that they were heading toward the sea.

  As they reached the top of the gully, Kallik halted suddenly.

  “What can you see?” Lusa asked.

  She scrambled up to peer out from behind her friend; Ujurak and Toklo caught up a moment later.

  In front of Kallik the ground leveled out, stretching in front of them for many bearlengths until it stopped abruptly. The salt tang of the sea was even stronger.

  “Cliffs,” Ujurak murmured. “We can’t go that way. They’ll just lead us down to the sea again, if we don’t fall off and break our necks.”

  “Hey, look!” Toklo pointed with his snout toward the edge of the cliffs.

  Lusa spotted a white bear struggling through the snow, dragging the body of a seal behind her. The seal left a furrow in the snow, smeared with blood.

  “I’m surprised there are so many white bears on this island,” Kallik murmured, looking puzzled. “Mostly we live alone on the ice. We don’t stay together once we’re full-grown.”

  Lusa shrugged. “Well, these ones do.”

  “Let’s chase her off,” Toklo suggested, bouncing a little on his paws. “Then we can steal her catch.”

  Kallik gave him a shove. “What’s the point? If there are seals around here, we can hunt them fresh.”

  “And not risk a fight,” Lusa added.

  Toklo shrugged. “Okay.”

  “We could go and talk to her, though,” Ujurak pointed out. “She might be able to tell us something useful.”

  When the bears emerged from the gully, they had hardly covered a bearlength before the white she-bear turned and saw them. She stared at them for a moment, her eyes wide with alarm; then she lumbered back the way she had come, abandoning her catch in the snow.

  “It’s okay! We won’t hurt you!” Kallik called after her, but the white bear didn’t seem to hear her.

  “She didn’t even try to defend her catch,” Toklo said, sounding faintly disappointed.

  “Maybe she’s not really hungry,” Lusa responded. “She’s pretty thin, though. She looks as if she’s in need of a good meal!”

  Toklo padded up to the seal and gave it a quick sniff; Kallik and Ujurak gathered around, too, while Lusa headed past them to peer over the edge of the cliff. Her claws dug through the snow to the ground beneath as she gazed over the dizzying drop to the shore below, where sharp rocks were half covered by the frozen sea. Cautiously she edged backward again.

  “I wonder how that white bear got down there,” she murmured to herself.

  “It’s prey!” Toklo was arguing when Lusa rejoined her friends. “We can’t just leave it here.”

  “But our bellies are full now,” Kallik retorted.
“And I don’t want to drag a seal carcass all over the island. Ujurak, what do you think?”

  “It won’t be too hard to carry if we all take turns,” the smaller brown bear pointed out.

  “Well, maybe . . .” Kallik still sounded doubtful.

  Lusa bent her head to sniff at the seal, wondering if she felt hungry enough to eat some now. A strange, rank scent was rising from the carcass, like a mixture of rotten fruit and firebeasts.

  “Yuck!” she exclaimed, flinching. “I’m not eating that. It’s disgusting!”

  All her instincts were telling her that they shouldn’t eat the seal, but the others had hardly noticed her reaction and were still continuing to discuss whether they should take it with them or not.

  “Have you smelled it?” Lusa interrupted. “We really shouldn’t eat it. There’s something wrong with it.”

  Her friends broke off their discussion and stared at her.

  “Lusa, it’s prey,” Toklo pointed out, as if he were trying to explain something to a very small and stupid cub.

  Kallik let out a huff of laughter. “You’ll be glad enough of it when your belly is empty again.”

  “No, I won’t,” Lusa retorted, furious that they were laughing at her; even Ujurak’s eyes gleamed with amusement. “It smells wrong. No bear should eat it.”

  “Well, I’m going to eat it,” Toklo announced. “So it smells a bit weird. So what?”

  Lusa gazed at him in horror as he began to drag the seal toward him. “No!” she screeched, leaping across the carcass and butting Toklo in the chest.

  Toklo was so astonished by her attack that he backed off, letting the seal drop. “Are you bee-brained, or what?” he demanded.

  Lusa didn’t bother to answer. Giving the seal a strong shove, she tipped it over the edge of the cliff and drew a breath of relief as she watched it splatter on the rocks below.

  “Lusa, what are you doing?” Kallik asked, anger in her voice. “That’s a waste of good food.”

  “It’s not good; that’s the point.” Lusa knew she had to stand up for herself and what she had done. “Eating that seal would have made us ill.”

  “You don’t know that,” Toklo growled.