Great Bear Lake (21 page)

“Wake up!” The excited voice roused
Lusa from sleep and a paw prodded her sharply in the side. “Come on, Lusa, hurry!”

Lusa grunted and opened eyes bleared with sleep to see Miki's excited face peering into hers. “What's the matter?”

“It's the start of the Longest Day! We've got to be there for the sunrise ceremony.”

Lusa yawned and rubbed her eyes. “Okay, I'm coming.”

She scrambled down the trunk after Miki and headed through the trees toward the lakeshore. More black bears were emerging from the forest, crowding together along the water's edge, just inside the barrier of leaves and berries she had seen them building. They waited in silence; near Lusa, a tiny cub squeaked with excitement and was hastily hushed by his mother. Lusa recognized the she-bear Issa, whom she had seen in the clearing the day before.

The sky was streaked with red, and an intense golden glow on the horizon showed where the sun would rise. A breeze flattened Lusa's fur as she stepped into the open, making the
trees whisper, rattle, and hum. The lake water was rough with ridges of gray water; Lusa wondered if the bear she had seen the day before had made it to the island.

“There's Hashi,” Miki whispered. “He's the oldest bear.”

Lusa watched as a plump male bear clambered onto a rock at the edge of the lake. Leaves and berries were heaped at its base. He turned to face the glow in the sky, where a dazzling point of light blazed out as the sun struck the surface of the world. At the same moment the wind dropped; although there were still waves out on the lake, the trees where the bears were gathered became still.

“Spirits of the trees,” Hashi called, lifting his snout to the open sky, “we thank you for the long days of sun that have brought us berries and other food.”

“Too much sun if you ask me,” some bear muttered behind Lusa; she turned her head and spotted one of the half-grown cubs who had been playing in the clearing the day before. “It makes the berries all dry and yucky.”

“
And
it's too hot,” his friend agreed.

“That's enough.” An older she-bear—Taloa, Lusa thought—cuffed the first speaker over his ear. “Show a bit of respect.”

The young bear rolled his eyes, but stayed silent.

“We beg you for more berries to feed us as the days grow shorter,” Hashi went on, “enough to sustain us through the dark times until the sun comes again.”

“Fat lot of good asking for more berries.” The bears behind Lusa were muttering again. “As soon as the bushes grow, the flat-faces dig them up and leave them to die.”

Issa let out a long sigh. “That's true,” she whispered. “And they cut the trees down. So many bear spirits are being lost—when we die, will there be any trees left for our spirits?”

Lusa shivered. If flat-faces were cutting the trees down, there might soon be a world without any trees at all! Everything would look like the empty land she had seen when she climbed the tree at the edge of the forest. Where would the black bears live
before
they died?

Hashi saluted the rising sun with both forepaws raised. Lusa and the other bears copied him. Rocking back onto her haunches until she was sitting upright, she felt warmth and strength flow into her as the first pale rays struck her belly fur. Then the bears all remained still until the whole of the sun's disc had appeared above the horizon. Lusa thought they were waiting for something.

Then some bear cried, “There's no wind! The spirits aren't speaking to us!”

“Have we made them angry?” another bear fretted.

“Maybe the spirits know the flat-faces have defeated them!”

More anxious cries and murmurs rose from the assembled bears. Hashi raised a paw for silence, but the clamor didn't die down until an old she-bear scrambled onto the rock beside him.

“The spirits will never give up fighting,” she announced. “Don't be afraid. Trust them to take care of us as they always have.”

“But how do you
know
?” Issa persisted.

Miki poked Lusa in the side. “This is boring. Let's go play.”

Lusa would have liked to stay and listen. She was a proper black bear now, and she needed to understand their worries. But she didn't want to lose her new friend, so she turned and followed Miki back into the forest.

 

Pressing herself close to the ground, Lusa crept around the thornbush. Her paws scarcely rustled on the dead leaves that covered the ground. Pausing, she sniffed the air and cast a cautious glance behind her before creeping on again.

As she rounded the bush, she spotted Miki; he had his back to her, intently scanning the undergrowth in front of him.

But you're looking the wrong way!

Lusa bunched her muscles and pounced; Miki let out a squeal as she landed on top of him. The two cubs wrestled together among the bushes, rolling over and over and batting each other lightly with their forepaws; Lusa felt a delighted huff welling up inside her. This was like playing with Yogi in the Bear Bowl.

The branches of a nearby tree waved up and down; Miki sat up with bits of leaf stuck all over his pelt as a bear's face poked out from between the leaves.

“Hi, Ossi!” Miki called. “Come down and meet Lusa.”

A young male bear, bigger than Miki but not full-grown yet, swarmed down the tree, followed by a she-bear of about the same age. Both their pelts were a warm russet-brown color, and Lusa liked the lively sparkle in their eyes.

“This is Ossi and his sister Chula,” Miki introduced them.
“I met them on the way here. This is Lusa,” he added. “She came all the way here from a…a Bear Bowl.”

Chula gave Lusa a friendly sniff, while Ossi asked, “What's a Bear Bowl?”

Lusa explained again, while the two cubs' eyes stretched wide with astonishment.

“And you came all this way by yourself?” Chula asked when she had finished.

“No, I was with some other bears…brown bears.”

Ossi looked shocked. “Rather you than me.”

“No, they were—” Lusa hesitated.
Weird? Difficult? My friends?
“They were okay,” she said at last.

Ossi shrugged. “I wouldn't want to travel with grizzlies. They're dangerous.”

“We ran into a grizzly on the way here,” Chula put in. “He was huge!”

“What happened?” Miki prompted.

“We were traveling through a forest,” Ossi said, “and we must have missed his markings on the trees, because he suddenly leaped out at us, roaring that we were on his territory.”

Lusa remembered the brown bear who had almost killed her not long after she left the Bear Bowl. “What did you do?”

“Climbed trees,” Ossi replied. “Fast.”

“And then we crossed his territory, jumping from tree to tree so we never had to touch the ground,” Chula went on, her eyes dancing. “That stupid old grizzly followed us all the way, growling about what he would do to us when he caught us.”

“But he didn't catch us,” her brother finished. “Because we were always out of reach!”

“I would have been
terrified
!” Lusa said admiringly.

“Well…I was a bit scared when the branch I leaped onto bent over, and there I was dangling with the brown bear's jaws snapping just below me,” Ossi admitted.

His sister gave him a friendly shove. “I've never seen you climb so fast!”

“I'm hungry!” Miki announced, springing to his paws. “Let's see if we can find some food.”

Ossi leaned forward, glancing around to make sure no other bears could hear him. “I know where there's an ants' nest.”

Lusa remembered eating ants in the Bear Bowl. She liked the taste, but they were hard to catch, and tickly if they got into your pelt.

“Ant grubs.” Chula swiped her tongue around her jaws. “Yum!”

“Let's climb.” Ossi headed for the nearest tree. “We don't want every bear asking where we're going.”

Lusa followed, clambering from tree to tree while the branches waved around them. She'd never traveled like this before, and she found it hard to keep her balance as the branches dipped under her weight, lurching her close to the ground—which looked awfully hard from this high up.

“Don't aim for the ends of the branches when you jump,” Chula advised her. “They bend over; that's how the
grizzly nearly caught Ossi. It's much safer to keep nearer to the trunk.”

Lusa found Chula was right; once she knew what to do, it was easy. Her paws tingled with excitement. Toklo and Ujurak had never climbed through trees like this, and never thought of looking inside an ants' nest for food.

They skirted the clearing where she had seen the bears assembling when she first arrived in the forest. Hashi and a few of the other adult bears were sitting there now; their voices rose up into the trees. Lusa paused to listen.

“I can remember when a bear could travel through the forest for day after day and never see a sign of a flat-face,” Hashi said. “Now they're everywhere with their stone paths and their firebeasts and their dens. Where are we supposed to live?”

“That's right,” a she-bear agreed, casting an anxious look across the clearing to where two small cubs were chasing each other around a tree. “And if it isn't flat-faces, it's grizzlies. One of them drove me and my cubs out of territory where black bears had lived forever.”

“There's never enough food,” Taloa complained. “You can search all day and never find—”

“Hey, Lusa!” Startled by the sound of Miki's voice close to her ear, Lusa nearly lost her balance and had to make a grab for the trunk. “What are you doing?”

Lusa jerked her snout to point out the bears in the clearing. “Hashi said—”

“Oh, you don't want to listen to him.” Miki let out a huff.
“He's always going on about how everything was better when he was a cub. Some of the others think he's wise, but…” He shrugged, flicking his ears as if Hashi were an annoying fly. “Come on, or that greedy pair will have eaten all the ants!”

Scrambling in pursuit, Lusa tried to forget what she had just heard. But it reminded her too much of what Ujurak had said, when he had taken the shape of the goose and the deer and the eagle. All the animals were suffering, not just bears.

Soon she arrived at the edge of another clearing, where Ossi and Chula were already sniffing around a huge mound of earth.

“Is that the ants' nest?” she asked Miki as they scrambled down.

“That's right,” Miki told her. “And it's a big one. I'm surprised no bear has found it yet.”

As Lusa approached the nest she became aware of a pungent scent coming from the ant colony. She blinked stinging eyes. “There was an ants' nest in the Bear Bowl, but it didn't smell like that. It was only a little one, though.”

Her belly rumbled impatiently. Back in the Bear Bowl she'd never been hungry enough to do more than taste the ants, just for a change. Now she eyed the big, juicy nest hopefully; there should be a good meal in there.

Chula had already found a hole in the mound and stuck her long tongue down it. Ossi shoved a forepaw inside, gave it a swift lick, then stuck his whole muzzle into the gap. Trying to ignore the awful smell, Lusa tentatively poked a hole into the mound and stuck her tongue inside. She pulled it out covered
with ant grubs: tiny specks that hardly looked as if they would make a meal.
But there are lots of them,
she thought, and drew her tongue back into her mouth.

Chula had been right. The grubs
were
delicious!

Enthusiastically Lusa probed the mound for more. This was even better than the salty potato sticks that she had found among the flat-face garbage.

At last they had eaten enough; holes gaped in the ant mound and the earth was scattered. Ants were scurrying around distractedly among the wreckage.

Ossi stretched his jaws in a vast yawn. “Time for a nap,” he declared.

He climbed a tree and settled himself in a fork in the branches. His sister pulled herself up after him and found a place for herself a bearlength higher. Their russet-brown pelts were almost lost among the dappled sunlight as sunhigh approached.

“I'm not sleepy,” Lusa said. She padded to the edge of the trees and looked out across the marshy landscape. “What is it like out there?” she asked as Miki joined her.

Miki shrugged. “I don't know. Cold, I guess. And a bit windy.” His fur fluttered around his face, and he shivered.

“Let's explore!” When Miki hesitated, Lusa added, “Come on—it'll be fun!”

“Okay. Keep your eyes open, though. If any bear sees us, they won't be pleased. Black bears are meant to stay under the trees.”

Venturing out from the shelter of the trees, Lusa sniffed the
land ahead: a watery, boggy scent, full of reeds and mud. The ground was covered in tussocky grass, interspersed with sharp stones and clumps of reeds dotted here and there. Wisps of white mist clung to the ground; the air felt damp and clammy, and Lusa shivered. Somewhere a bird was piping a thin call, but she couldn't see it.