Smoke Mountain

by Erin Hunter

  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.

  Ujurak flew overhead again as the cubs waded into the water. River water flooded into Toklo’s mouth and he spat, losing his rhythm for a moment. It tasted bitter and disgusting, nothing like the streams in the woods where he grew up. He couldn’t taste or smell any signs of fish nor hear the murmurs of the bear spirits. The river was as empty and dead as the islands. Oka wasn’t here, and nor was Tobi. Toklo felt a pang of loneliness. After all these moons being scared of their spirits, now he missed them with something that felt like pain.

  His muscles were all aching by the time he dragged himself on to the second island, and the scratches that Taqqiq had given him stung. A few of them had started seeping blood again, and he licked them while he waited for Kallik and Lusa to catch up. They were further behind this time, which worried him. Kallik swam with broad, powerful strokes, and she kept herself on the downstream side of Lusa so the smaller bear wouldn’t be swept away. But Toklo could tell that it was tiring her to swim as slowly as the black bear.

  ‘I can swim with Lusa this time,’ he offered as they dragged themselves across the second island. He ducked under a low-hanging branch of the flat-face construction. The islands were so strange and evenly spaced. Was it possible the flat-faces had built the islands too? Could they make islands sprout from rivers like that?

  ‘I’m fine,’ Lusa protested. ‘I like swimming; really, I do.’ But Toklo could see her paws trembling with exhaustion.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Kallik said. ‘You go on ahead, Toklo. It’s easier to follow you than to keep my eyes on Ujurak.’

  So Toklo led the way again as they swam to the third island. His head felt as if it were full of sodden thistles. He couldn’t think of anything except keeping his nose above water and paddling his paws as hard as he could. Ujurak circled overhead, letting out sharp cries to call them forward when they drifted off course or lost sight of the island in the waves.

  On the third island they were all too exhausted to speak at first. The Ujurak-gull strutted around them, poking at their fur as they huddled together, their eyes drooping.

  ‘Give us a moment, Ujurak,’ Toklo said irritably.

  ‘Can we sleep just for a little while?’ Lusa asked.

  Toklo could see her exhaustion in her shaking paws. He nodded and leaned into her wet fur, trying to warm her with his bulk as she dozed. He felt himself slipping in and out of sleep, restlessly half dreaming of flat-faces and of drowning.

  Soon the Ujurak-gull was poking them again. Toklo blinked awake and realised that the sky above the flat-face denning place was already turning grey as the night shifted towards dawn. The short night was nearly over. Ujurak flapped his wings impatiently.

  ‘All right, all right.’ Toklo sighed. He heaved himself down to the water and turned to make sure Kallik and Lusa were right behind him.

  The next swim was a blur of aching muscles and bitter water sloshing over his head. A large tree branch covered in scummy yellow foam came barrelling down along the current and whammed into his side before he could avoid it. Pain blossomed along all his wounds, and a part of him wished he could just give up – stop swimming and let the current take him wherever it wanted to. Maybe he’d find his mother and his brother at the end of the river . . .

  As the water rolled him right over, Toklo caught a glimpse of the dawn-grey sky through the surging waves and spotted the last star still glimmering up there. He remembered Oka’s story of the lonely bear being chased by the other stars. But maybe he wasn’t being chased . . . maybe he was being followed, the way Toklo was followed by Kallik and Lusa.

  He couldn’t give up. The other two were counting on him. They needed him to lead the way through the river. With a new surge of energy he forced himself forward until he felt sand under his paws. He’d reached the fourth island.

  While he waited for the others he paced forward to look for the next island. The light was bright enough now that he could see clearly across the water to a long shore, much bigger than the other islands . . .

  It was the other side of the river! They were nearly there!

  ‘Lusa!’ he called as Kallik nudged her out on to the pebbly bank. ‘Kallik, look! We’re almost there! We’re going to make it!’

  ‘Bawwrk!’ Ujurak squawked from overhead. Toklo guessed he was trying to say, Hurry! The first gleam of the rising sun was peeking up at the edge of the sky.

  Lusa was too tired to speak, but her eyes shone as she leaned against Kallik.

  ‘Just one more swim,’ Kallik urged her.

  Toklo stayed close to the she-bears this time as they swam. They could all see the distant bank; they didn’t need him to lead the way. A few slanting beams of sunlight glinted on eddies in the brown water around them.

  Lusa was struggling to swim. Her back paws were dragging behind her, and her nose kept dipping under the water. Kallik tried to support her, but the current was fast and strong, and Toklo could see that they were all drifting downriver from the islands. He paddled around and took Kallik’s place beside Lusa, nudging the small black bear to the surface and kicking his back paws to shove her forward.

  At last the three exhausted bears reached the shore. They were coughing and spitting water, and rough, sticky sand clung to Toklo’s paws as he staggered out of the river. Ujurak was waiting for them, a bear once more, looking dry and tireless. He pressed his nose into Toklo’s fur, almost holding him up. ‘You’ve made it,’ he said. ‘We’re on the other side of the Big River.’

  Toklo blinked slowly, looking around. Smoke Mountain towered overhead, suddenly much closer. In the grey dawn, he could make out the distinct shapes of separate mountains, though their peaks were still hidden in shadow.

  There were only a few flat-face dens on this side, small with shiny silver sides, scattered across the churned-up earth. But there were more flat-face constructions with limbs like the ones on the islands, blossoming out of the ground every few bearlengths. He saw strange new firebeasts slumbering everywhere, all enormous and oddly shaped, many of them bright yellow, like dandelions.

  He was too tired to explore. The important thing was that the river flowed behind him and he was safe. He’d never have to set paw in the Big River again.

  Ujurak hurried to Kallik and Lusa at the water’s edge. The little black cub lay listlessly on the ground, rubbing water from her eyes. ‘Why does it still smell like flat-faces?’ she mumbled. ‘I thought we’d got away from them.’

  ‘Not yet,’ Ujurak said. ‘There’s a huge gash in the earth just over that rise – it runs along the riverside. At the bottom is a long, silver flat-face thing that smells like the black stuff we saw spattered on the islands. I think we should cross the trench and then stay near the treeline while we follow the river to the Ice Sea.’

  ‘What are those awful things?’ Lusa asked without sitting up. She pointed with her snout at the enormous misshapen firebeasts that were sitting up the slope from them.

  ‘I think they eat the earth,’ Ujurak said. ‘From the air I saw some of them sitting in the trench with their claws full of dirt.’

  ‘Why would they do that?’ Kallik asked. She lay down right where she was, letting the clay turn her belly fur a muddy brownish red.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Ujurak said. He turned to Toklo. ‘But the birds don’t come any more. They used to feed
in the mud by the river. I talked to an old gull – he told me the flat-faces have been spreading further across the land on both sides of the river. They dig and dig and build strange things into the earth. They’re taking something sticky and black out of the ground that clogs the bird’s feathers and gets on everything they eat and makes them sick. There’s nothing here for the gulls any more.’

  Toklo huffed. What did it matter about the birds? He felt as though he were ready for the longsleep that was supposed to come only with the end of fishleap. He thought he might sleep straight through until next year’s fishleap.

  ‘We should keep going,’ Ujurak urged. ‘We’re still too close to all these flat-face things.’

  ‘There’s no way,’ Toklo said. Even if he could keep going, he could tell from the way Lusa was panting that she needed to rest. ‘We can barely walk. We need to sleep a little.’

  Ujurak hesitated, glancing at the hazy orange band of sky above the flat-face denning place. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘But only for a short time. We must move on before the flat-faces wake up.’

  The bears dragged their paws to a patch of ground half-enclosed by leafy bushes, the best shelter they could find at a short distance from the river. From here they had a clear view of the flat-face diggers, which were too close for comfort, but at least they weren’t moving. And, Toklo reasoned, this way the bears could see them coming if necessary.

  He took a moment to glance down the river before curling up to rest. All he could see along the shore in either direction was flat-face dens and diggers and hills of earth and rocks. His heart felt as heavy as his limbs. Qopuk had told them to follow the river down to the Ice Sea. But how would they ever make it? Wherever they went, it seemed they couldn’t escape the flat-faces.

  He rested his chin on his paws and drifted into sleep, but in his dreams he was running, running, dodging firebeasts and tumbling into holes dug by the flat-faces, smelling nothing but burning and death, no matter how far or how fast he went.

  CHAPTER TWELVE:

  Kallik

  Something shrieked, a long, piercing wail, and in Kallik’s muddled sleep she thought for a moment it was the metal bird crashing down out of the sky again, taking Nanuk to her death. Then it shrieked again, followed by roaring and growling and rumbling, as if all the bears at the Longest Day gathering were shouting at one another, but with no words. She blinked and rubbed her nose, slowly coming awake. Perhaps she was still lying by the Great Bear Lake, and everything since then had been a dream . . .

  She looked up and saw an enormous yellow claw, twice the size of the biggest white bear, falling out of the sky towards her.

  Kallik yelled with terror, springing to her paws. Beside her, the other three cubs were still waking up. Desperately, Kallik slammed her head into Toklo’s side.

  ‘Wake up! We’re being attacked!’ she roared.

  Toklo leaped up, snarling. Ujurak and Lusa struggled to their paws behind him. Kallik could see that Lusa’s paws were still wobbly with exhaustion. They hadn’t slept for long – the sun had barely moved up the sky – but the no-claws had woken, and so had all their giant beasts.

  Kallik bundled into Lusa, shoving her away from the claw in the sky. ‘Run!’ she howled. ‘Run!’

  The claw paused above them with another shriek as the bears scattered, diving into the bushes. Now Kallik could hear no-claws yelling above the other sounds. They had spotted the bear cubs!

  She swerved, staying close to Lusa as they burst out on the other side of the bushes. More beasts and no-claws and burning smells waited for them here. Kallik scrambled to a stop at a line of firebeasts that blocked the way forward. Beyond them she could see the trench Ujurak had told them about. It looked like a huge claw had sliced through the earth from one end of the sky to the other. Bare tree trunks lay abandoned where they’d been cut down. Thick streams of brown and black water trickled from the mud churned up by the firebeasts’ paws. Kallik spotted something long and silvery lying at the bottom, like a giant dead snake running the length of the trench.

  ‘We can’t go this way!’ she cried. ‘We have to find a way around the firebeasts!’

  Lusa tried to dart away, but she got turned round and started running back towards the river. Kallik knew she’d be trapped there; none of them were strong enough to swim any further. They needed to cross the trench and run up the slope into the woods she could see on the far side, where the no-claws might not follow.

  She chased after Lusa and headed her off, driving her back up the shore. Lusa’s eyes were huge and frantic; Kallik wasn’t even sure the little black bear knew that Kallik was trying to help. She was just running in blind panic.

  ‘This way!’ Toklo called. He was racing towards a gap in the firebeasts with Ujurak on his heels. Kallik pushed Lusa towards them. As they sprinted between the firebeasts, suddenly the ground seemed to fall away. Kallik felt herself tumbling head over paws down a slippery, muddy slope. She crashed into the silvery snake thing at the bottom with a bone-jarring thud, and then Lusa tumbled right into her.

  ‘Oof!’ Kallik grunted.

  Toklo and Ujurak landed a short way off, in a heap of brown fur and flailing paws. Kallik wriggled out from underneath Lusa and shook herself. Her white fur was caked with red mud, dragging her down. She shoved Lusa to her paws and they scrambled after Toklo, slipping and sliding. The brown bears had already picked themselves up and were floundering along beside the silvery tube, which loomed higher than their heads. Fortunately, it was still and quiet.

  The walls of the trench rose up on either side of them, steep and slick with wet mud. Kallik wondered desperately how they would get out. Toklo and Ujurak stopped to wait for them, their flanks heaving and their eyes huge with fear. Kallik looked past them and spotted a part of the trench that had collapsed against the silver snake. The heap of red earth blocked their way along the bottom of the snake – but it could offer a way out . . .

  ‘Toklo!’ she barked. ‘Look up there!’

  Toklo spun around, wiping mud out of his eyes.

  ‘If we climb up that pile of earth, we could get on top of the snake and make it across to the other side of the trench,’ Kallik explained breathlessly.

  Toklo nodded. ‘It’s worth a try. We might be able to jump from the snake to the top of the slope. I’ll help Ujurak; you take Lusa!’

  Without waiting for an answer, he shoved the smaller brown bear ahead of him until they came to the collapsed mud. Ujurak scrambled up, his belly dragging in the sticky soil, and Toklo followed in a couple of giant leaps. Then he nudged Ujurak on to the top of the snake. The little bear’s paws slid from under him and he flopped to his belly. It would have looked funny if they hadn’t been running for their lives. Toklo buried his nose in Ujurak’s flank and heaved him towards the bank on the other side.

  Legs flailing wildly, Ujurak sank his claws into the wall and grabbed a tree root between his teeth. With Toklo pushing from behind, he scrambled up and over the top of the trench. He crouched there, panting, while Toklo braced his slippery paws on the snake and turned to help Lusa.

  The black bear’s climbing skills proved useful as she scrabbled up the pile of earth and jumped on top of the snake. She wobbled for a moment, then balanced herself before stepping carefully towards Toklo. He gave her a shove and she flew through the air to land close to the top of the slope. Ujurak was waiting for her, ready to sink his teeth into her scruff and haul her up beside him.

  Toklo jumped next, his powerful hind legs pushing him off the snake. His paws left brown smears across the silver surface. When he was at the top, he turned and called down to Kallik: ‘Come on! Quick!’

  From the anxious glance he gave behind her, Kallik guessed that the no-claws were coming along her side of the trench. She dug her front paws into the pile of earth and heaved herself up. The silver snake was slippery as ice – but Kallik quickly sank her weight evenly through her paws and kept herself low, just as she had done on the frozen sea. She ran along the top o
f the snake and sprang into the air. Her muddy pelt flapped wet and heavy against her belly, pulling her down, but her front claws sank into the side of the trench, and a moment later Toklo’s face appeared at the top. He leaned down to bury his teeth in her neck fur and drag her up.

  ‘Go!’ Kallik gasped as she tumbled on to flat earth. She scrambled to her paws and looked around. On this side of the trench, the trees were close enough for her to see each trunk, with the mountains looming black and misty beyond them. A short row of firebeasts stood in their way, but they were all quiet, and there were no signs of no-claws.

  Ujurak was already running towards them. On the far side of the silver snake, no-claws were standing in a line, staring and shouting, but none of them tried to cross. Toklo raced after Ujurak, his paws skimming over the bare, ruined earth. Kallik nudged Lusa to her paws and they sprinted away from the trench, leaping holes and splashing through puddles.

  Up ahead, Kallik could see that Toklo and Ujurak had made it safely through the sleeping firebeasts and were nearly at the treeline. She put on a burst of speed and darted right between two of the huge yellow creatures. Can’t catch me! she thought triumphantly.

  Suddenly there was a rumble, which quickly built to a roar. The ground trembled, and there was a bitter, choking smell in the air. One of the firebeasts was waking up! Kallik looked over her shoulder to make sure Lusa was close behind her. To her horror, the little black bear was heading for the gap beside the firebeast that was awake. Maybe Lusa hadn’t heard the noise above the splash of her paws and the thudding of her heart. Her head was down and she was running, running, running.

  Kallik held her breath. Please let her get past. From the position of its big round eyes, the firebeast was facing the other way, so it couldn’t see Lusa. But just as Lusa darted through the gap, the firebeast let out a bellow and rolled backwards. The little black cub howled with pain as the beast struck her, and she crashed down on to her side.