Island of Shadows (11 page)

“No!” Lusa halted, staring in shock at the place where Toklo had vanished. There was a large hole there now, with snow still crumbling from the edges and falling into the darkness below. “The ground just opened up and swallowed Toklo like he was a beetle!”

“Where did he go?” Kallik asked. She had never seen anything as terrifying as the way the ground had gaped open without warning and eaten Toklo.

“Let's take a look,” Yakone suggested, padding forward.

Kallik exchanged a nervous glance with Lusa. “Be careful,” she said as she followed Yakone.

Drawing closer, checking that the ground was solid at each pawstep, she studied the jagged hole. As Yakone leaned over, trying to peer into the depths, the snow began to give way under his paws.

“Help!” he roared.

Kallik sank her jaws into the fur on Yakone's flank and dug her paws into the ground as she dragged him back. She realized that Lusa was tugging at him from the other side, but the white bear was heavy, and Kallik could feel her paws beginning to slip. Yakone scrabbled to find firm ground, sending more showers of snow down into the hole. Just as Kallik was beginning to think she couldn't support his weight for a moment more, he found a pawhold and stumbled backward.

“Thanks.” Yakone's breath came in huge gasps. “I thought I was gone for sure.”

More cautiously, Kallik edged forward and peered down into the hole, Lusa at her shoulder.

“Toklo! Toklo, can you hear us?” Kallik called.

There was no reply from below. Down at the bottom of the hole Kallik could see the glimmer of the fresh snowfall, but no sign of Toklo. She called his name again, but there was no sound or movement.

“I—I'm afraid he might be dead,” she whispered, drawing back again from the hole.

Yakone nodded solemnly. “Sometimes white bears are lost if they fall through cracks in the ice. I think Toklo has been lost beneath the ground.” He raised his head to look up at the sky. “Spirits, take care of the spirit of our friend Toklo—”

“No!” Lusa exclaimed, interrupting Yakone's prayer. “Toklo
isn't
dead. I won't believe it.”

“Lusa…” Kallik began.

“You don't see him, do you? So he might be okay,” Lusa said. “He might be lying under all that snow, injured and waiting for us to help him.”

“You would have to go underground to find him,” Yakone objected.

Lusa glared at him. “Then that's what I'll do.”

Kallik's heart began to pound with fear, but she knew that if her friend went beneath the earth to find Toklo, that she would go with her.
Lusa's right
, she thought.
I
won't
believe Toklo is dead. Not after all we've been through together.

Yakone was stamping his paws in the snow and casting doubtful glances at the hole where Toklo had disappeared. “Tell her she's being cloud-brained,” he said to Kallik. “You know we can't go down there. It's too risky. If Toklo was hurt in the fall, we could be hurt, too. Or we might land on top of him.”

Kallik didn't like disagreeing with Yakone, but she knew that she couldn't turn away and leave Toklo underground. “I'm sorry, but I'm with Lusa,” she said. “We have to do something. Toklo needs our help.”

“Besides, we're not going to jump down the hole,” Lusa added. “That
would
be cloud-brained. We'll have to find another way of getting to him.”

Yakone stared at the she-bears as if he couldn't believe what he was hearing. “White bears don't belong underground,” he told Kallik. “Our place is under the open sky, or in a snow-den.”

“I'm not suggesting we live there,” Kallik snapped. “Yakone, I have to do this for Toklo.”

Yakone blinked, surprised, and looked away.

Another kind of apprehension tingled through Kallik's fur.
Am I going to lose Yakone over this?
She knew that if she left Lusa and Toklo behind, and journeyed on with Yakone toward the Frozen Sea, she would never forgive herself. “You don't have to come with us,” she added.

Yakone let out a gusty sigh. “I had no idea what I was getting into when I started this journey with you,” he said, touching Kallik's shoulder with his muzzle. “All right. Maybe my brain is full of cloudfluff, too, but I'll come with you.”

Warmth flooded through Kallik. “Thank you!”

Lusa had been shifting her paws impatiently as she listened. “Remember those caves on Smoke Mountain?” she said to Kallik. “They stretched a long way back into the ground. If Toklo's hole reaches farther than this gap at the top—”

“Then we might be able to get to him from a different entrance!” Kallik interrupted, suddenly understanding. “We have to look for a cave opening.” Her optimism died as she gazed around at the landscape. As far as she could see, there was nothing but snow-covered rocks and hummocks, with a thorn tree or boulder here and there.

“How are we going to find another hole, unless we fall into it?” she asked bleakly.

“I think I can help,” Yakone told her. “I can tell whether the snow or the ground under my paws is thick, or whether it might be hollow.”

“You can?” Kallik was astonished. “How do you know that?”

“The older bears on Star Island taught me,” Yakone explained. “They teach all the cubs. I'm surprised you don't know how to listen to your pawsteps.”

Maybe I would, if I hadn't lost Nisa when I was so young
, Kallik thought, an unexpected pang of loss stabbing through her.

“Can you teach me?” she asked.

“I'll try,” Yakone replied. “You have to learn how to sense the differences in the ground through your paws.”

Kallik shook her head. She wasn't sure she understood.

“Like this.” Yakone brought one paw down on the snow. “Listen and feel what the snow is telling you.”

Kallik copied him, but she wasn't sure what she was supposed to hear. “It just feels like snow to me,” she confessed.

“Now over here.” Yakone carefully approached the hole, though he kept well away from the edge. He brought a paw down again. “Doesn't that feel different? If I'd been listening to my pawsteps earlier, I wouldn't have started to fall.”

Kallik tried it, but she wasn't sure that her paws felt any different. “I'm not getting it,” she said apologetically.

“I'm not teaching it very well,” Yakone admitted. “It's hard to explain. It's just something I've known how to do since I was a cub.”

“Do you think we can start looking for another entrance?” Lusa interrupted. “Toklo could be dying down there! And you're up here trying to listen to
snow
!”

“Sorry.” Kallik felt guilty for getting distracted. “Yakone, where do you think the best place to start looking for another hole would be?”

Yakone scanned the ground around the hole where Toklo had fallen, and risked another glimpse into the depths. “It's hard to tell how far the space stretches, with all this piled-up snow,” he murmured.

“If it's anything like the caves on Smoke Mountain, it's more likely to curve than go straight,” Kallik mused. “Over in this direction, maybe,” she added, sketching out a line with one paw.

“Do you think there's smoke and fire underground here, too?” Lusa asked, suddenly alarmed. “Toklo might be burning up!”

“There's nothing coming out of the hole,” Kallik reassured her. She sniffed the air for the smell of smoke, and picked up a faint tang that reminded her of firebeasts. “The air smells funny, but in a different way.”

Lusa nodded uneasily. “I hope you're right.”

“Okay,” Yakone said briskly. “I'm going to walk around and see if I can find a place where the ground feels hollow. Maybe you two better wait here. We don't want someone else falling in.”

Lusa and Kallik looked at each other. “We want to help,” Lusa said. “We'll be careful.”

All three bears began testing the ground, but without success. Kallik was concentrating so hard on feeling the snow like Yakone instructed that she began to feel as if every pawstep were an effort. Raising her head to look at the sky, she realized that the daylight was dying.

“We'll have to stop and rest for the night,” she said reluctantly. “We can't help Toklo if we're exhausted.”

“But—” Lusa scrabbled with her front paws in the snow, then let out a huge sigh. “Okay.”

Yakone nodded. “We need to eat, too. I'll go hunt.” He strode away.

While he was gone, Kallik and Lusa dug out a den in one of the snowbanks, and Lusa uncovered some roots while she was digging.

“At least we'll eat something,” she remarked, “even if Yakone doesn't find any prey.”

It was fully dark by the time Yakone came back, a plump goose dangling from his jaws. As the warm prey-scent flooded over Kallik, she wondered whether Ujurak's spirit might have taken goose form, but between her exhaustion and the growls of hunger from her belly she couldn't bring herself to believe it.

Ujurak wouldn't do that to us
, she told herself as her teeth sank into the juicy prey. She remembered how certain Toklo had been that Ujurak wouldn't want them to starve.

Lusa crouched beside the white bears, gnawing on the roots she had dug up. Then they huddled together in the snow-den. Not even her anxiety about Toklo could stop Kallik from falling into sleep.

The next morning Kallik awoke with a vague sense that something was wrong. Cold light filtered into the snowy hollow, where Lusa still slept with her paws wrapped over her snout. Kallik blinked, shaking off her drowsiness, and the memory of what had happened struck her like a gust of storm wind. Then she realized that instead of three bears in the temporary den, there were only two.

We've lost Toklo! And now Yakone has gone, too!

Careful not to wake Lusa, Kallik struggled to her paws. Inside she felt colder than the snow-covered landscape outside the den.
Has Yakone really left us? Was it all too hard for him, so he's gone back to his friends on Star Island?

Stumbling out into the open, Kallik narrowed her eyes against the biting wind and looked around. She bit back a joyful cry of relief as she spotted Yakone loping easily across the snow toward her. As he drew closer, she could make out a triumphant gleam in his eyes.

“Guess what?” he panted as he drew to a halt in front of her. “I've found a hollow place!”

“That's great!” Kallik yelped, with a sharp twinge of guilt that she hadn't trusted Yakone to stay with them. “Where?”

“Come on, and I'll show you.”

“Okay. Let me wake Lusa.”

Optimism flooded over Kallik as she prodded the little black bear awake. With Yakone's special skills they would soon find a way underground; it felt as though Toklo were only a few pawsteps away.

“Hurry up, Lusa,” she urged as the black bear rubbed snow over her eyes and muzzle to wake herself up. “We're going to find Toklo!”

Yakone retraced his pawsteps to a humped, uneven stretch of snow. He halted at the foot of a snowy bank, where Kallik could see a few scrape marks, as if he had already begun digging experimentally. Kallik walked toward him, trying to listen to her pawsteps to see if she could sense the hollow place, but she still couldn't tell any difference from the rest of the snow.

“Under there,” Yakone said, pointing with his muzzle. “We'll need to dig down, but we must be careful. There's a hole there, but I'm not sure how big it is.”

Kallik nodded. All three bears began digging cautiously at the snow, pawful by pawful.

“I can feel something!” Lusa exclaimed.

Scrabbling excitedly, she uncovered the edge of a piece of wood. To Kallik's amazement, it wasn't the branch of a tree. It looked as if it had been cut and squared.

“No-claws did that,” she said, stopping abruptly with a paw raised to take the next scoop of snow.

Yakone backed off a pace. “No-claws, here?”

“We're not so far from that BlackPath,” Lusa reminded him, still scraping vigorously to reveal more of the wood.

Kallik sniffed the air. “I can't smell no-claws,” she said. “Just that weird scent—a bit like firebeasts.”

She began digging again, and after a moment's hesitation Yakone joined her, pushing the snow aside with powerful paws. Soon they could see that the wood was part of a slab lining a hole with square sides. It led into the side of the snow-bank, stretching downward into darkness.

Lusa's eyes stretched wide. “It's not a hole; it's a tunnel!”

Kallik snuffed at the dank air that flowed out of the opening. “It's that smell again,” she muttered, wrinkling her nose in disgust. “But it's a lot stronger here. Whatever is causing it must be down there.”

“Flat-faces must have made this.” Lusa had stepped into the mouth of the tunnel and was peering curiously into the blackness. “But there's no scent of them.” She took another pace forward. “Toklo! Toklo!”