Smoke Mountain (13 page)

‘Wait!' Lusa barked at both of them. She had spotted something the others hadn't. Her heart thudded as she hoped she was right. She stood her ground, her eyes shut tight, as the dog hurtled towards her. His jaws snapped at the air, but just before he reached her, something jerked him back with a clanking sound. The dog's barks were cut off with a yelp. Lusa slowly opened her eyes.

‘See? It's chained to that tree,' she said, nodding at the long metal vine that held the dog out of reach. Its eyes rolled and its tongue hung out as it strained to get to her, but it couldn't move any nearer. She took a long, shuddering breath.
Phew
.

‘Wow,' Toklo said, and he actually sounded impressed.

A light came on inside the den. Lusa shoved her friends back into the bushes, where they crouched, holding their breath, as a flat-face stormed out the back door and shouted at the dog.

‘Poor thing,' Ujurak said. ‘He was just trying to warn the flat-face about us.'

‘I say it serves him right.' Toklo snorted. ‘Picking a fight with me! I'd like to see him try!'

Lusa's ears perked up as the dog stopped barking
and the flat-face went back inside. There was a rushing, bubbling noise very nearby. ‘Do you hear that?' she whispered. ‘I think we're close to the river!'

She pushed through the bushes to the other side and ran across the grass behind the next den. The others followed her as she ducked under a low-hanging branch, slipped between two dens, trotted across a small BlackPath, and darted around a big square patch of BlackPath that smelled like firebeasts had been hulking there all day.

Lusa came to a halt when her paws hit wet sand and stared down the slope that stretched below her. Just as the other cubs crowded up behind her, the clouds parted and a thin, pale moon came out, glimmering on the river right in front of them. They'd reached the Big River that Qopuk had told them about! Now they just had to follow it to the Ice Sea, and they'd be well on their way to the Last Great Wilderness.

‘Good job finding it, Lusa,' Kallik said. ‘I'd have got all turned round in the middle of all those no-claw dens.'

‘Yeah,' Toklo rumbled. ‘Well done.'

Lusa glowed with pride. They had made it through the flat-face denning place.

But her happiness drained away as she looked down at the dark, fast-flowing water only a few bearlengths from her paws. She swallowed hard. This
had
to be the Big River . . . there couldn't be any rivers bigger than this!

‘It's
huge
!' she squeaked.

They all stared at the vast stretch of water. It was too dark to see the other side. Lusa didn't think she'd ever seen anything like it – Great Bear Lake was enormous too, but that was a lake; it was supposed to be big, and lakes didn't have strong currents that could wash a bear away. She thought of rivers as being a sensible size that a bear could swim across without drowning. Kind of like watery BlackPaths – dangerous, but not impossible to cross.

But this . . . this was terrifying!

I
t was eerily quiet on the mudflats. Toklo could hear the faint hum of firebeasts in the distance and an occasional sharp, lonely bark that he thought might be the dog they'd passed. Smoke Mountain loomed on the far side of the river.

‘Are we sure this
is
a river?' Lusa said. ‘I mean . . . it's so . . . it's so . . .
big
.' She stood up on her hind legs and stretched her neck up, trying to see the opposite bank.

Kallik sludged forward through the wet, clingy mud and tentatively lapped up a mouthful of water. She looked back at the others and nodded. ‘It's not salty. It tastes yucky, but it's not the sea or anything.'

‘And from the current you can tell it's a river,'
Ujurak pointed out. ‘Just a really . . . really big one.'

Toklo was no longer afraid of swimming. His fear of water spirits was gone after Great Bear Lake, where he heard the voices of his mother, Oka, and brother, Tobi. But that didn't mean he'd lost all his fear of drowning. The dark river in front of him stretched as far as he could see. And it wasn't still like the lake when he'd swum out to Paw Print Island. The cubs would have to fight hard to avoid being swept away by the currents. He wondered if there were any brown bear spirits in the river . . . Even if there were, he wouldn't count on their being any help.

He could just make out branches and bits of flat-face debris floating down the river, faster than a bear could run. Further out, he glimpsed some kind of structure rising from the water, silhouetted in the pale moonlight.
Is that a tree?
he wondered.

‘Are you sure we have to cross this river?' he asked Ujurak. ‘You said the old white bear told you to follow the river to the Ice Sea. Can't we do that on this side?'

Ujurak shook his head. ‘The Last Great Wilderness is on that side,' he said. ‘We will have to cross this
river somewhere to get to it, and Qopuk said this was the only place where we could.'

Toklo stared at the thick black water. ‘There's got to be an easier way,' he muttered.

‘We have to trust Qopuk,' Ujurak said in a voice that sounded strangely high and squawky. Toklo turned and saw that grey and white feathers were popping out through Ujurak's fur. His limbs shrank into his torso, and wings sprouted as his snout turned into a beak.

‘I thought you said you'd try not to change,' Toklo growled.

‘Going to scout,' Ujurak managed to croak before his bear features disappeared completely. A scrawny, bedraggled seagull now stood on the sandy shore beside them. With a vigorous flap, Ujurak launched himself into the air and soared away over the river.

‘Gosh,' Kallik said, watching him go. ‘I wish we could all do that!'

‘It'd be a lot easier than swimming!' Lusa agreed.

Toklo wasn't sure. Flying didn't look particularly easy or safe to him. He would much rather keep all his paws on the ground, thank you very much.

They waited uneasily on the exposed bank of the
river. Toklo swivelled his head from side to side, jumping at every small sound. He wished there was something to hide under. If something came at them, there was nowhere to go except back up to the dens – or straight into the river.

Normally Toklo was comfortable beside rivers. He liked the speeding rush of water and smooth river stones under his paws, and he loved fishing – and eating fish – more than anything. Perhaps tomorrow he would catch a fish in the river as they followed it to the sea. But this river, or at least this part of the river, felt strange and unfriendly to him. Instead of the murmur of bear spirits, he heard the sucking and slapping of water against flat-face constructions. Its scent was grimy and metallic, not sweet and fishy and clean, the way it should be.

Toklo spotted a greyish shape in the sky, growing bigger as it got closer. He lost it for a moment in the shadow of Smoke Mountain, and then it reappeared again as the Ujurak-gull swooped down and landed next to them. His feathers quivered as they turned brown and smoothed out into fur again. He waved his growing snout, eager to talk.

‘Qopuk was right,' he burst out as soon as he
could. ‘This spot is different from the rest of the river. I flew up and down a long way to see if there was anywhere else. But this is the spot.' He stretched his forelegs stiffly. ‘Flying is tiring.'

‘How do you know this is the right place?' Toklo asked.

‘There are small islands all the way across,' Ujurak said, pointing with his snout out at the river.

‘There are?' Lusa said, squinting to see them through the darkness. ‘Are there any flat-face dens on them? Or firebeasts?'

‘No, they're empty. There are some flat-face metal things, but they aren't doing anything. We can use the islands to rest, so we don't have to swim the whole way without stopping,' Ujurak explained.

‘Hmmph,' Toklo grumbled. ‘It still sounds weasel-brained to me.'

‘We can do it,' Kallik said. ‘I'm a strong swimmer. I'll stay near Lusa and make sure she doesn't get swept away.'

‘You should change back into a seagull and fly across,' Toklo said gruffly to Ujurak. As much as he hated his friend's changes, he wanted him to be safe. ‘Then you can keep an eye on us and warn
us if anyone gets caught in the current.'

‘Good idea,' Ujurak said, dipping his head. ‘Will you be all right?'

‘We will,' Lusa said. ‘Right, Toklo? Let's go before the flat-faces wake up and see us.'

Ujurak slipped back into the gull's feathers and lifted off into the sky. Toklo led the other two cubs down to the water's edge.

The river smelled sharp and dirty, as if there were firebeasts swimming in it. Toklo shuddered.
That
was a horrible thought – firebeasts lurking in the dark water. He'd never seen any orcas like the ones in Kallik's story of her mother's death, but he pictured them like big, wet firebeasts with teeth. He shoved that image aside as he waded into the water. Their journey – wherever they were going – continued on the other side, so they had to cross. Light from some of the flat-face dens lit up bits of the river further out, so he could see that it was brown, with swirls of dirt kicked up from the bottom. Flat-face waste floated past, bumping around his legs.

He glanced back to make sure the other two cubs were right behind him. Taking a deep breath, he
launched himself forward until his paws struck off the bottom and he began paddling. The force of the current took his breath away. It seemed to grab his fur with strong, hooked claws as it tried to haul him downriver. His paws churned as he drove forward. A gull swooped overhead, and he nearly snarled at it before he realised it was Ujurak, pointing the way to the first island. Squinting and snorting to keep water out of his nose, Toklo lifted his snout and realised he could see a bulky shape looming out of the water below the seagull. The island!

He barked to let the others know, hoping they could hear him and that they would spot the island up ahead. He tried to twist about in the water to see them, but he only caught a glimpse of Kallik's white fur before the current yanked him around and he had to focus on swimming again. Lusa was too small and dark to spot, he told himself; that was why he couldn't see her. But surely she was back there.

At first glance the island didn't seem so far away, but the more he paddled, the further it seemed to be. So much of his strength was used up simply not being swept away, but he kept swimming, forcing himself across the surging waves until his paws
stubbed against gritty sand. He dragged himself up on the island's shore and collapsed on the pebbles. Sticky black liquid was splattered over the stones, smelling of firebeasts. A huge, square flat-face construction loomed over him, bigger than their dens, with long limbs like bones reaching into the sky. Toklo remembered the story of the giant flat-face and shuddered, even as he reminded himself that he didn't believe in that kind of cloudfluff.

Catching his breath, he hauled himself to his feet and spotted Kallik stumbling through the shallow water. Bobbing in the water beside her was a small, dark shape that he guessed was Lusa's head. Kallik nudged her shoulder under Lusa's paws, supporting her up on to the shore. The two cubs crawled out of the river and flopped down beside him. Water streamed from Lusa's fur, soaking the sand underneath her.

‘Brrrrr,' she muttered. ‘Kallik, you don't even look wet!'

It was true; the water seemed to run right off Kallik's fur. The bigger bear shook herself vigorously. ‘That's just how white-bear fur is,' Kallik said.

The Ujurak-gull landed nearby.

‘How many more islands?' Lusa asked, panting.

The gull turned one beady, bright eye on her, then the other. It flapped its wings as if to say either,
I don't know
, or,
Lots and lots
. Neither answer made Toklo feel better. He looked back at the shore where the flat-face dens glowed. Then he looked ahead and spotted the same tall metal bones rising over the next island. It was reassuring to be able to see it . . . but daunting to see how far it was. He just wanted to lie down and fall asleep.

They rested for as long as they dared. The nights were so short that Toklo kept glancing at the sky expecting to see the first rays of dawn, especially since getting through the denning place had taken so much of the brief time of darkness. He didn't want to be caught by flat-faces on one of these islands. They smelled of flat-face things, and he was afraid the flat-faces might decide to protect those things with firesticks. Better to get safely across, away from the flat-faces altogether. And there was no food or water on the island, nothing but strange metal flat-face towers and the sharp smell of that sticky black liquid coating everything. They picked their way around the towers and slipped down to
the shore on the far side of the island.