Smoke Mountain (23 page)

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 the 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.'

A
flutter 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.

Don't think about that
, she told herself.
Don't think about those big rocks way down below. Don't think about how jagged they are. Definitely don't look down at them
.

She leaped through the air and landed in the tree, feeling the wet leaves trail across her fur in a way she found comforting. It was as if the tree spirits were saying,
It's all right; we've got you
. She wondered if there was a bear spirit living in this tree. If so, she hoped it didn't mind being soaked all the time.

The next part was a little trickier. There were two more boulders sticking out of the waterfall, but the first one was too small to fit on. She needed to balance on it while she made it across to the second one, which meant landing on both of them at the same time. She wasn't sure she could do that without falling.

But she would. She had to.

She wrapped her front paws around the tree branch closest to the far side and slowly lowered her back paws down until she was hanging from the tree. The branch dipped a little with her weight, and she felt the powerful current of the waterfall catch at her paws. Lusa swung herself back and forth to get closer to the first boulder. She let out a gasp when her claws scraped painfully against it. Now just a little closer – she stretched her back paws as far as she could – and when she felt the stone under her pads, she let go of the tree.

For a dizzying moment the water spun away below her and she thought she was falling the wrong way, but then her front paws hit the next boulder and she stopped with a bone-jarring thud, splayed across the two boulders with her front paws on one and her back paws on the other. She caught her breath for a moment, sucking in the water-soaked air, and then she shoved herself quickly on to the bigger boulder.

The slick rock rubbed against her claws, making her feel unsteady. But now there was only one jump to go, over to the dry ledge on the far side.
Lusa closed her eyes and sent up a prayer to the bear spirits in the trees.

‘Please help me,' she whispered.

Then she crouched and leaped. Her back paws skidded on the wet stone and she flailed in the air, trying to make herself fly further. If only she had wings like Ujurak! Her heart raced with terror.