Fire in the Sky (4 page)

“How dare you blame this on
me?” Toklo growled. He could smell Kallik’s warm breath barely a muzzlelength from his nose. Her black eyes glittered with fury. “It’s
your
fault we have nothing to eat right now, not mine!”

He bunched his muscles to spring. If she attacked him, he’d fight back. At least that would take his mind off his growling, empty stomach. He opened and closed his jaws, baring his sharp teeth. Kallik should watch who she messed with!

“Toklo, calm down.” Ujurak swiped at the snow between them, forcing Toklo to take a step back. He sounded just like Oka when she’d scold Tobi and Toklo for bickering over newkill. “Kallik knows what she’s doing.”

“Oh, really? It doesn’t seem like it!” Toklo snarled.

“Kallik is in charge out here,” Ujurak said. “Not you.” He dipped his head toward the white bear. “We should all listen to her.”

Toklo took another step back, but his hackles were still raised. “I didn’t start it! She did!”

“You were like a seal-brained cub, whining and scaring away the prey!” Kallik retorted.

Toklo built himself up to roar at her, but Ujurak slapped his paw down on the ice. “That’s enough! If we can’t catch a seal here, then we just keep going.” He turned his back on them and started off across the ice. “Come on, Lusa.”

Kallik let out a snort, gave Toklo a disgusted look, and padded after Ujurak. Lusa shook her head vigorously as if she’d been drifting off to sleep and jumped to her paws. She nudged Toklo’s flank with her nose. “It’ll be all right,” she said. “You’ll feel better when we catch some prey.”

“
If
we catch some prey,” Toklo muttered.

Kallik swung her head around and glared at him. “Why don’t you do it, then, if you think you’re so clever?”

“Maybe I will!” Toklo shot back.

Kallik turned her back on him, sticking her nose in the air.

Toklo looked down at the bubbles in the ice and growled deep in his throat. He didn’t see any spirits there, just unhelpful shadows. Those weren’t going to give him any clues. He started to trot, staying on the snow so he wouldn’t slip on the ice and covering the ground with long strides until he was galloping. He ran right past Kallik and Ujurak, but they didn’t say anything about him taking the lead. Huh! Probably because they had no idea where they were going.

A tremor of unease ran through him. How could he hunt out here? The ice told him nothing. On land, he could find pawprints on the ground or the marks of something passing
through the bushes, crushing leaves and snapping twigs, so he could follow his prey and catch it. But how would he know where the seals were hiding out here?

His long brown pelt billowed around him as he ran. For a moment he felt powerful again. White bears didn’t scare him. Even on the ice, he was still a strong, dangerous bear! He opened his mouth and roared. The sound echoed across the snow as if it could be heard skylengths and skylengths away.

Underneath his paws, the ice creaked, and he thought he felt a shudder in the slippery surface. Even the ice was scared of him! Ha! Now all he needed was a seal, and then the other bears would start listening to him again.

Suddenly he lifted his head and sniffed. That scent…it was like the smell Kallik had followed to the last hole. Was it the smell of seal? Only one way to find out. Toklo picked up speed, following the scent until he saw a dark circle in the ice. It was another seal’s breathing hole, standing out like Kallik’s black nose against her white fur.

Toklo glanced over his shoulder. The others were several bearlengths away. Maybe he could catch a seal before they caught up! That would show Kallik! She was too slow, but he wouldn’t be. He crouched down beside the hole, just as she had done. The smell of prey was so strong, his stomach spasmed painfully. His ears twitched as he stared at the hole. Where was that stupid seal?

He saw a flash of movement below the water as a dark shape shot past the hole without popping up. Maybe it was like the salmon in the river; if the seal didn’t stop for him, he just had
to be faster! Toklo plunged his front paw into the water.

A jolt shot up his leg. The water was
freezing
! He felt a slick body whisk past his paw, but he couldn’t get a grip on anything. Frustrated, he pulled back, shaking his wet paw. It felt like icicles were starting to crisp on his fur.

He’d been so close! Now he could see dark shapes moving under the bubble-filled ice, as if the seals were swimming around right below him, laughing at him. Why did he have to wait for them to surface? Sitting by a hole was a stupid way to hunt. He just needed to make more holes and go in after the seals, instead of waiting for them to come to him! That wasn’t how a real bear hunted!

Toklo jumped at the edge of the hole with his paws stretched out, trying to break off some of the ice to make the hole bigger. If it were more like a river, he’d be able to seize a seal just like a fish and drag it right out. He pictured the look on Kallik’s face when she realized he was a better hunter than her, even out here in her own territory!

Ice shattered under his paws, sending splinters into the air that caught the sunlight in bright dazzles as they fell.

“Stop!” Kallik yelled. “You’ll frighten the seals away! Stop!”

But Toklo kept pounding, rearing up on his hind legs and bringing his front paws crashing down again and again. He knew this would work! It had to! He was so hungry and so frustrated and so ready to tear something apart. Something splashed bright red against the snow, and he realized he’d cut his pads on a splinter of ice. It didn’t matter; he couldn’t feel
them anyway. His paws were too numb with the cold, especially the one he’d dipped in the water.

“Toklo, please stop!” Lusa barked. “You’re hurting yourself!”

Toklo stood for a moment with all four feet on the ice, breathing hard. The jagged hole in front of him was bigger, but empty of seals. Spots of red splattered the snow around the edges. He growled and stomped away from the hole. He could hear more ice splinters crunching under his paws, although he still couldn’t feel them.

“Toklo, wait!” he heard. It was Kallik calling to him. “Don’t go that way!”

Now she was trying to boss him around. She just didn’t want him to take the lead! Perhaps she could tell that he was closer to catching a seal than she had been. Toklo started running, letting the wind carry away the voices calling behind him. There had to be another seal hole out here somewhere. He swung his head from side to side, scanning the ice and sniffing. The scent of prey was muddled by the sharp smell of his own blood coming from his paws.

Toklo slipped on a patch of bare ice and skidded several bearlengths before he was able to get his paws under him and scramble up again. He glared down at the ice and noticed that it looked darker than the ice they’d been on before. Large bubbles surged and wandered just below the surface. It was almost as if he could see right through to the dark, cold sea underneath.

If the ice was thinner here, surely he could find another seal
hole? He started running again, avoiding the slicker patches of ice. Snow crunched under his paws. He saw a dark spot up ahead and leaped toward it.

Suddenly, Toklo skidded as a slab of ice tilted underneath him. Cold seawater bubbled up from a jagged line just in front of his paws. There was a crack in the ice! He scrabbled with his paws as he slid toward it and managed to leap over the crack at the last moment.

As he landed, the ice on the other side wobbled dangerously, and bubbling water flooded over his paws. Toklo dug in his claws to steady himself. His heart was pounding. This whole place felt so wrong. Why would any bears live with only a thin, bubble-filled sheet of stuff that could melt between their paws and the yawning, hungry ocean at any moment?

He looked around and saw his friends padding cautiously toward him. Lusa’s steps were tentative, as if she was testing every movement before putting her weight down. Kallik’s paws padded expertly over the surface, gliding so that she hardly lifted each foot up before moving it forward. Behind her, Ujurak was standing up on his hind legs so he could watch Toklo.

“Be careful, Toklo!” Kallik called. Her voice didn’t sound bossy to him anymore. It sounded…worried. “There’s something wrong with the ice.” She lowered her head to stare into the bubbles. “It’s—I don’t understand—but I think it’s not as thick as it should be. It’s not as thick as the ice where I was born.”

“Listen to Kallik, Toklo!” Ujurak cried. “She knows what
she’s talking about!”

“Oh, Toklo!” Lusa yelped. “Please come back!”

Toklo took a step toward them, trying to go around the crack through which seawater was still bubbling. To his horror, he heard a loud
SNAP!
The world tilted crazily around him, and before he could scrabble backward, the ice rolled away from his paws and sent him plunging into the freezing water.

All the air was knocked out of Toklo’s chest by the impact with the water and the shock of how cold it was. The sea closed over his head, surrounding him in darkness and eerie silence. It was still and heavy and bottomless—nothing like a river or even the lake. And there were no brown bear spirits here to help him.
Oka! Tobi!
But all he could hear were the weird creaks and groans of the ice overhead.

Desperately Toklo hauled his way back up to the surface. He knew he couldn’t take a breath until his head was above water. But instead of breaking through into fresh air, Toklo felt his head bump against a roof of solid ice. A swell of water tugged at his fur, dragging him away from the hole he’d fallen through. He flailed his paws, trying to get back to it, but he didn’t even know where it was anymore. The surface was too churned up with bubbles and splinters of ice to show where the crack had appeared.

He was trapped!

Toklo tried clawing at the ice above his head, pushing against it, scrabbling at its underneath until his claws were nearly wrenched out of his pads, but it was as solid as rock.
The glare of daylight beyond it tortured him with the promise of air he couldn’t get to. Where was the hole? The saltwater stung his eyes so he could barely see to look for it. He felt panic rising as his chest began to ache. His vision was getting red around the edges.

He was going to drown, just as he’d always feared, but it wouldn’t be in a river or a lake with the spirits of his mother and brother—it would be here, in this horrible, cold, empty place.

Tobi
, he called in his mind as everything started to go dark.
Oka…please help me….

But how could they help him? The only spirits here were the white bears in the ice, and they were the ones trapping him down here. They wanted him to drown.

Nothing was going to save him now.

As Toklo vanished into the dark
water, Ujurak felt a tremor ripple through his body. He didn’t stop to think about what he was doing. He was already running toward the hole in the ice as his body began to change shape.

He could hear Kallik shouting, “No! Ujurak! It’s not safe!” but his ears were pulling back into his head, and he barely registered her words.

His thick brown fur shrank and melted away into a thick, rubbery white skin. His forehead bulged out and up. His whole body got bigger and fatter, surging out like a bubble expanding. As he dove toward the hole, his paws shrank into flat white flippers and his back legs joined together into one long tail.

The cold sea closed over him with a splash, but his new layers of fat and blubber kept him warm. He beat his tail and small, square flippers to propel himself forward, underneath the clear roof of gleaming ice.

What am I?
He spun in a slow circle, studying his sleek,
pale body. He felt the water ripple around him in a comforting, supportive way. He knew just how to move, how to send himself in a new direction with the smallest twitch of his flippers.

Whale. Beluga whale. Of course.

It was strangely beautiful down here, with beams of sunlight filtering through the ice and disappearing into the darkness far below. For a moment, Ujurak floated in place, mesmerized by the light. He drifted slowly, making a high twittering sound as he gazed around at the ocean.

A peculiar shape caught his attention. What was
that
? Something big and much too furry for the ocean. That wasn’t supposed to be here. It seemed to know that, too; it was pounding at the ice above it in a frantic way, but its motions were getting weaker and weaker.

Curious, Ujurak swam a little closer. It was a bear! And not even a white bear; this one was
brown
! What was a brown—

His tiny whale eyes blinked as he remembered. Shifting into other animals was getting dangerous. He kept coming so close to forgetting who he really was: a brown bear, with bear friends who needed him.

Ujurak gave a powerful flick of his tail and surged toward Toklo. He charged into the bear cub with surprising force, shoving Toklo toward the hole he’d fallen through. Toklo flailed his paws in a panic, perhaps thinking he was being attacked by an orca, but Ujurak swung his hefty body—nimble and weightless in the water—and avoided his claws.

The ice made a loud cracking sound as Toklo’s back hit the
spot where it had split in two. His head popped out through the hole into the air and he threw his front paws onto the ice shelf, hanging on desperately. Ujurak used his wide, blunt nose to shove Toklo again from below, pushing him up onto the unbroken ice closer to Kallik and Lusa. Toklo dug his claws in and pulled himself away from the hole, collapsing onto the ice and retching seawater.

Ujurak waited for a moment to be sure that Toklo was breathing, then he shot a stream of water out of his blowhole and let himself drift back down into the water. Through the fragile sheet of ice, he could see Kallik and Lusa racing toward Toklo, calling his name. Their voices were muffled, but he could still hear their alarm.

Foolish Toklo, running out onto the thin ice like that. He should have waited for Kallik! Couldn’t he understand that they all depended on the white bear out here? Ujurak should have guessed that it would be hard on Toklo, giving up his leadership. Toklo was used to being the one who took care of them all, and he’d done it well…but why did he have to be so stubborn about everything?

It made Ujurak tired just thinking about the fight Toklo and Kallik had nearly had, or the arguments that probably still lay ahead as Toklo tried to adjust to letting someone else lead and hunt for him.

But under the ice, it was quiet and peaceful. Kallik had promised there would be plenty of prey to fish from the water, but right now it seemed as if he were the only creature alive in the whole ocean. If he tried looking with his eyes, the dark
water around him seemed empty, shimmering blue and green in the rays of sunlight through the ice.

But when he used his whale senses he could detect movement and life in every direction. The twittering sound he made brought pictures back to him somehow, as though it was echoing off the faraway shapes and turning them into images in his head. For a start, he knew that there were seals everywhere, swimming and playing and chasing fish.

Curious, he swam toward the closest group and watched them hunt for a while. Like sleek, silent wolves they circled a ball of fish that swerved and darted and folded over itself like a single dazzling wing of black and silver. At an invisible signal, the seals closed in, jaws snapping at mouthfuls of sparkling fish. They were so fast, so strong as they pushed through the water, that it seemed impossible for the silver wing to survive; it shattered like ice, then re-formed a heartbeat later and pulsed into the darker water, out of sight.

Ujurak’s mind felt fuzzy, as if he’d forgotten something, but he was too distracted by the beauty of the undersea world to focus on remembering. He swam on, noticing how the light around him grew dimmer and brighter like sunlight striking through trees. He guessed it depended on how thick the ice was over his head. Where the water was filled with pale light, the ice must be dangerously thin. He wondered how thick the ice had been before. A flickering hole of bright white caught his eye. A seal’s breathing hole was directly above him. Ujurak swam toward it, wondering if he could learn anything about hunting by seeing the hole from the other side.

A large dark shadow lay unmoving on the ice beside the hole. It took Ujurak a moment to realize it was a full-grown white bear waiting for a seal to surface. Ujurak considered popping up and giving the bear a shock: a huge white whale instead of the seal it was waiting for! But then Ujurak thought how sharp the bear’s claws must be, and how it would probably be just as happy to eat a whale as a seal, and he quickly turned to swim away.

Gigantic pale bulks appeared out of the shadows ahead, hanging in the water like smooth-edged clouds. With a start, Ujurak realized they were beluga whales like him. He slowed down, not wanting to provoke a conflict. But the whales just blinked at him as he approached, twitching their flippers to stay in line with the current.

One of them opened its huge mouth, letting out a stream of bubbles. “Seen any prey?” he asked in a series of clicks and squeals.

“Sorry, no,” Ujurak replied, flicking his tail to propel himself past. He couldn’t exactly remember what he’d been doing a few moments ago, but he felt hungry, so he assumed he hadn’t found anything to eat. The other whales bobbed slightly in the wave he’d created below the surface. Part of him wanted to stop and talk, but he was running out of air and needed to find somewhere to breathe…preferably somewhere without a white bear waiting for prey!

His squeaks bounced off the ice overhead and told him there was a patch of open water nearby. Ujurak twitched his flippers and angled up toward it, feeling the water whirl past
him as he swam to the surface. He nudged his way into the air and inhaled through his blowhole, blinking at the glaring whiteness of the ice. The patch of open water he’d found was small, no longer than two of him, but it was enough to give him room to breathe for a moment. Jagged pieces of broken ice around the hole hinted that something had smashed its way up from below.

He blew out a spurt of water and inhaled again, preparing to dive. His stomach was demanding food, and something told him he could find it on the ocean floor. With a flip of his tail, he dove into the water and spiraled into the depths.

He still felt as if he was missing something—as if he’d been in the middle of something and had forgotten to go back and finish it. Or as if he’d left something important behind. But he had no idea what it could be. The blue shadows turned black the farther down he swam, and sometimes he could rely only on his squeaks bouncing clearly back to tell him there were no obstacles in his way, since he couldn’t see anything with his eyes in the pitch darkness. Swerving up to a lighter patch of water, he found a shallower area where a sandy shelf was just visible below him.

Ujurak sucked seawater into his mouth and puffed a strong jet of water at the sandy bottom. Sand flew up in a whoosh, clouding the water around him, but he could see crabs and shrimp that he’d dislodged from the seafloor scrambling for cover. Feeling a thrill of satisfaction, he gobbled up as many as he could fit into his mouth in one swoop, swallowing them whole.

This kind of hunting was fun! Easier than chasing after fast, wriggly little fish like the seals had to. Ujurak swam a little farther and did it again, blasting more crustaceans out of the sand and bolting them down.

When his belly felt full, he flicked his tail and rose to the surface again for air. He felt quite pleased with himself, but there was also a sense of unease prickling along his skin. Something was wrong. Something was
missing.
He wasn’t supposed to be alone. Where was his pod? Shouldn’t he be traveling with other whales? How had he lost them?

He searched his memory, trying to remember who he’d been with, but he couldn’t recall any other whales. That was strange. He knew he should be surrounded by others; he had a definite memory of warmth and friendship, but he couldn’t attach any faces to it. He floated in the open water for a moment, breathing in and out, and then dove back down. Perhaps if he kept swimming around, he’d find his pod around here somewhere. They couldn’t have gone far.

As he paddled swiftly along under the ice, the sound-pictures in his mind told him that there was something large up ahead—much, much larger than a whale. He couldn’t imagine a creature that big, but it was moving, so it must be alive. It seemed to be making odd pinging and creaking and humming noises. Ujurak swam toward it, sending out squeaks to find out more.

The closer he got, the more he was aware of a noisy thrumming vibrating through the water. It stung against his skin and made his head ache. Tense with alarm, Ujurak was about
to turn back, when a vast gray shape loomed out of the water, charging straight toward him.

It was an underwater firebeast! It had the smell of firebeasts and the fierce glow of their eyes and the same hard shiny skin, but it was long and sleek like a fish without flippers or paws. A short, spiky tail spun at the back to keep it moving forward, thrusting it through the water much faster than Ujurak could swim. Hurling himself sideways, he bounced through a storm of bubbles as he veered out of the way just before it sliced through the water where he had been swimming.

The rush of water as it went past tossed Ujurak over and over, leaving him disoriented and confused. He flailed his huge body as hard as he could, trying to swim away from the rotating tail before it caught him and churned him into pieces. Finally the firebeast disappeared into the dark, leaving a gritty, foamy wake that lashed against Ujurak’s skin and tasted like oil.

Stunned, Ujurak drifted for a moment. Had that firebeast taken him on in a fight, and won? Or had it not even noticed that he was there? Whatever that monster was, it would have killed him without a sideways glance—not for prey, not for territory, but purely by accident, because he was in its way.

Even far below the ice, there was death and danger pulsing in the shadows, tasting of oil and flat-faces, and churning animals and fish out of the way as easily as Ujurak had snorted the tiny crabs out of the sand. Ujurak thought he would never feel safe again.