Smoke Mountain (22 page)

He disappeared around the corner as if he hadn't heard her. Perhaps he hadn't. The wind and the rain were coming down hard, sweeping away their voices.

Toklo and Kallik were still peering in the window. Lusa hurried after Ujurak. Why would he want to know more about this place?

As she rounded the corner behind him, she saw him standing in front of the den with his teeth
bared. She followed his gaze to the roofed area that jutted out from the front of the den.

Her heart seemed to freeze in her chest.

Hanging from the roof, blowing in the fierce stormy wind, were three empty, bloodstained bearskins.

E
ven through the storm, Toklo heard Lusa's terrified shriek. He dashed towards the front of the den with Kallik right behind him.

Lusa was already racing away through the trees. He could see her tiny black paws pumping madly as she ran.

‘What . . . ?' He gasped, turning to Ujurak.

His friend was staring at the den. Now Toklo saw the bearskins. Their heads were hanging loose, jaws open, eyes staring blankly straight at Toklo. Dead eyes. Their teeth snarled hopelessly at the sky. The wind caught one of the skins and flapped it so the paws seemed to reach towards Toklo. All three of them were brown bears.

Thumping noises came from inside the den, and
suddenly the door flew open. The flat-faces pointed and yelled. Three of them were already holding firesticks. Toklo saw one of them raise his stick and point it at the bears.

Toklo started running, his paws thudding across the ground, slipping on the wet leaves. Bangs and shouts echoed behind him. He searched for Lusa's scent and followed it, tearing through the trees. He could hear crashing in the undergrowth that he hoped was Kallik and Ujurak.

His paws jerked and he shuddered as he imagined claws slicing into his fur, peeling away his skin. He skidded through a puddle and slammed hard into a tree, but he bounced off and kept running. One of his scratches was bleeding again, but he ignored it. He had to catch up with Lusa. That old white bear was right about this place: it was dangerous for bears.

Rain dripped in his eyes and turned the world blurry and dark. The trees seemed to shake their branches at him as he ran past. Suddenly the ground dropped out from under him and he lost his footing, tumbling head over paw down a slick, muddy bank. He braced himself for a bone-jarring impact at the
end, but instead he landed in a river with an enormous splash.

He floundered to his paws and shook out his fur, which did very little good, considering that as much water was falling out of the sky as there was in the river below him.

Then he saw Lusa. She was crouching upstream from him, shivering with terror.

‘Lusa!' he cried. He waded over to her and wrapped his front paws around her.

‘Toklo,' she whimpered. ‘Did you see them?' The river rushed by their noses, smelling faintly of smoke and death.

‘Yes. But we knew flat-faces did terrible things,' Toklo said. ‘It's just a shock to see it, that's all.'

‘But . . . they hunt bears!' Lusa cried. ‘They're looking for bears to kill, Toklo! And then they're stealing their skins! Why would they do that? We kill to eat, but we wouldn't keep our prey's heads around to look at!'

‘That must be what Qopuk's stories are really about,' Ujurak said, coming out of the woods with Kallik beside him. They slid down the bank and waded over to Lusa and Toklo.

‘So there's no giant flat-face,' Kallik said, wiping the rain off her snout. ‘No cooking fire. The smoke from the rocks must have started the legend. When bears went into the mountains and didn't come back, all their families would have seen was the smoke, and they knew how no-claws burn their food.'

‘So it's just real flat-faces,' Lusa murmured. ‘With real firesticks, hunting bears.' She buried her nose in Toklo's fur.

He nuzzled her, his heart still pounding. The truth frightened him far more than stories of spirits. His paws itched. They had to get away from here.

‘Come on,' he said, nudging Lusa up to the other side of the river. ‘Let's eat something and then keep going.'

‘I want to keep going now,' Lusa insisted.

‘You need to rest,' Ujurak pointed out. ‘You're bleeding again.'

‘And so are you, Toklo,' Kallik prompted.

He realised that it wasn't just rainwater trickling through his pelt; blood was seeping from a long scratch on his shoulder. He must have cut it while he was running from the flat-faces. ‘I'm fine,' he said gruffly. ‘Lusa, over here.'

She followed him to the other side of the river, which swirled around their bellies. Toklo splashed through the pebbly shallows to a tall bush, the leaves glittering with silver raindrops, and curled up in the damp shelter underneath. Lusa and the other bears squashed in beside him.

‘Where's the trail?' Kallik asked Ujurak.

The rain dripped around them as they huddled together, staring gloomily back at the forest they'd run through. Toklo didn't want to go back to find the trail. He didn't think any of the others did either.

‘We'll just keep going,' Ujurak said. He crawled further under the bush and rubbed his back against the branches. ‘I'll figure it out.'

Toklo ducked his head. ‘I'll hunt,' he growled.

He bounded back into the river and splashed away upstream, ignoring Kallik when she called, ‘But shouldn't you rest too?'

The rain rolling off his snout made it hard to concentrate on any scents, but Toklo focused his sharp eyes on the banks, knowing that his own smell would be hidden from any prey as well. Concentrating his mind on hunting relaxed him, distracting his thoughts from flat-faces with firesticks that killed bears.

Something moved in the mud on the bank to his right. He slowed down and crouched so his nose was just sticking out of the water. He hoped he looked like a log floating along . . . and that the prey would be too dumb to realise he was floating upriver. He slid quietly through the water, closer and closer.

And then, with a lightning-fast movement, he lunged out of the water and sank his claws into the animal on the bank.

It flailed wildly with a furious hiss, and Toklo realised it was a snake. He slammed his paw into the back of the snake's head, pinning it to the ground, and then snapped his jaws around its neck, killing it instantly. The long, thick body lay in the mud. Toklo's belly rumbled, and part of him wanted to eat the whole thing right there by himself. But he knew he had to feed the others. He picked up the snake and trotted back down the river.

Snakes killed to eat too – that was just life. If you were hungry, prey was prey. It made sense to kill something if you needed to eat it to survive. Did flat-faces eat bears? The thought had never occurred to him.

The other bears were still huddled together, trying
to stay dry. He squeezed in next to them and they shared the snake in silence. No stars were visible through the thick covering of clouds, and the river thundered by below them. Toklo could see the water rising as it swelled with the rain.

Ujurak left the last scraps of the snake to the others and padded out to search for signs. Toklo watched the dim shape of his friend pace slowly up and down the river. The trees around them were not as dark or thick as those near the flat-face den. There was less cover, which meant more rain dripped through the leaves on to his cold nose. But there was also more room to run if they needed to.

It was pitch-dark as they set off. Slippery leaves squished and slid around under Toklo's paws. Ujurak was leading them uphill again. Toklo missed nice flat plains that didn't make his muscles ache so much.

After a while, Ujurak found a trail through the trees that looked like a large animal had wandered through several days earlier. The rain had washed away the scents, but Toklo guessed that it might have been a moose or a caribou. It wasn't as wide as the real caribou trail, but it made walking a little easier, since their paws didn't have to fight the
undergrowth at every step. At one point, when he glanced up, Toklo thought he caught a glimpse of the Pathway Star glittering in the sky through a gap in the rain clouds.

He should have felt better. They were moving on. It couldn't be much further to the other side of Smoke Mountain.

But as he traipsed through the woods, a wind rose up, tossing the leaves on the trees and tugging at his fur. He remembered the wind lifting the bearskins, their dead eyes, and the way their claws seemed to be reaching for him. He shivered and looked over his shoulder. Did the wind carry the faint scent of flat-faces?

No, he was imagining things.

There was nothing there. He shook his head to clear the smoke from his mind.

K
allik felt as if she were carrying a lump of ice in her stomach. Even several days after the night of the flat-face den, she could still see the bearskins splayed out in her mind. Her nose seemed clogged with the stench of death, making it hard to hunt. Whenever it wasn't raining, trails of smoke filled the air.

Her fur pricked and her sleep was full of nightmares. Now when her mother was dragged under the water, it wasn't by orca whales; instead it was flat-faces with firesticks shooting her mother full of bloody holes.

Lusa was jumpier than usual, sometimes leaping right into trees when a twig snapped behind them. She was also quieter. Kallik tried to get her to tell
more stories about the Bear Bowl, hoping that would cheer her up, but halfway through a story, Lusa would trail off and stare into the trees, her nose twitching.

Then there was Ujurak, who seemed less and less certain about the signs he found. Once, as they crossed a grassy meadow, he stopped and gazed at a boulder high above them. The enormous rock, the size of a full-grown bear, was resting right at the edge of a cliff over their heads.

Toklo growled, ‘What is it?'

Ujurak whispered, ‘I'm not sure. But something is hanging over us. I feel that we're in danger.'

‘Well, let's stand around in the open until it lands on us, then,' Toklo barked. He stomped away and the others followed.

Only Toklo acted as if he were unaffected by the horrifying sight of the bearskins, but Kallik noticed how quickly he was walking. It was as if he were trying to hurry them on as fast as he could without drawing attention to what he was doing.

She didn't mind travelling faster, though. She wanted to get away from Smoke Mountain. If she were on her own, she'd spend every day running as
far as her paws could carry her. She might even have crossed all the way over by now. But she would never leave the others, and she knew Lusa couldn't go any faster on her wounded leg.

Then, as they left the trees and climbed higher into the mountains, their spirits started to lift. Toklo led them on to a craggy slope, treading carefully along narrow ledges and slippery outcroppings. A valley full of scrubby trees spread out below them. For the first time, they could see how far they had travelled from the BlackPath, and from the thick, dark forest with the flat-face den.

Kallik lifted her nose into the air. The scent of something cool and crisp and clear was drifting down from the peak above them.

‘Snow!' she yelped.

Lusa stood on her hind legs and sniffed. ‘Wow! I think you're right.' Up ahead, Ujurak and Toklo paused near a crack in the rocks and looked back at them.

‘It smells like home,' Kallik said, breathing in deeply. ‘Toklo! Can we go a little higher?' She imagined burying her paws in thick white drifts of snow. She wanted to roll and roll in it until her fur
was clean and cold again. She wished she'd had one more chance to play in the snow with Taqqiq, like they used to. That was where they both belonged.

But Toklo was shaking his head. ‘I'm sorry, Kallik,' he said. ‘Snow means no prey up here in these mountains. We need to stay where we can find food.'

‘Oh,' Kallik said. She scraped a bit of moss out from between two rocks. She knew he was right, but it was strange to think of snow as a sign of hunger, when she saw it as bringing the world back to life. ‘All right.'