“Land creatures,” said the mermaid dismissively. She kept swimming, tail flicking through the water.
Cassie tried to watch the mermaid, but the mermaid swam in a blur now, still circling her. “They’re almost sea mammals,” Cassie said. It was a controversial theory, but her father had done a paper on it. Maybe the caretaker of the sea would like the theory. “Blubber. Water-resistant fur. Streamlined ears. Webbing between their toes. They’re evolving into the sea.” Please, let her believe!
The mermaid laughed, and the bubbles spun in waves. “I am helping you,” she said. “You have not drowned.”
The mermaid swam even faster. Cassie felt dizzy. She squeezed her eyes shut, but the vertigo stayed. She opened her eyes. “But I need to find Bear!” she shouted. Bubbles cycloned faster and faster. She was surrounded, as if in a net. Cassie swam at the bubbles. She was thrown back into the center. She could not see through the bubbles. “Wait!” The mermaid blurred into silver and green.
The cyclone lengthened. Cassie saw it stretch like a Slinky through the sea. “Hush, child,” Sedna said. “Trust the munaqsri. We want what is best for our world, as all creatures do.”
“Not the trolls,” Cassie called through the bubbles. “The trolls don’t want ‘what’s best.’ They want the polar bears extinct!”
“No one knows what the trolls want,” the mermaid said. “You must go to Father Forest. He knows best how to help you.”
“Who is he?” she asked eagerly. “How do I find him?”
The cyclone collapsed around her. Bubbles hit Cassie’s skin. She kicked, yelling, and the bubbles squeezed. Cassie flew. Like paint squirting from a tube, she shot down the cyclone through the water. The roar of the water drowned her screaming as she sped through a tunnel of bubbles. Just when she thought the ride would never end, she felt the sea undulate beneath her and the cyclone of bubbles thrust her into the air. She broke out of the water. Sun hit her eyes. “Whoa!” she yelled as she rushed to meet the shore.
CHAPTER 21
Latitude 68° 32’ 12” N
Longitude 89° 49’ 33” W
Altitude 2 ft.
Cassie skidded on her tailbone. “Ow, ow!” Shielding her face, she slammed into a dune of snow. For an instant, she lay there, limbs tangled. She was alive. She had dived into the Arctic Ocean and lived.
Closing her eyes, Cassie inhaled. The air tasted wonderful, like salt and sun and earth. Opening her eyes, she turned her head. Her pack lay beside her. The nylon had ripped in three spots, and the frame had warped into an S, but it was dry and whole.
Gingerly, she untangled herself and tested her joints—no broken bones. Just a lot of bruises. She pushed herself up to sitting and looked around. Glacier-scoured rocks stretched for miles, patches of snow alternating with windswept expanses. She was on the tundra.
A brown blur scooted over her mukluks. She jerked her feet under her.
“I am here,” a voice said.
“Where? Who said that?” she asked. She looked around at the rocks, the waves, the sky.
The brown blur shot past her, darting from rock to rock. Suddenly, it stopped, and she saw a roly-poly brown rodent, like a furry toy football perched on a rock—a lemming. Cassie grinned. Sedna had said she’d help. Cassie just hadn’t expected that help to take the shape of a magical rodent. She pictured herself telling Bear about this. He was going to laugh for days.
“Come on,” the lemming said. “Pick me up. We must be off. I have responsibilities to tend to, you know.”
With the lemming cradled in her hands, Cassie sped across the tundra at munaqsri speed. The world sped by like a film on fast-forward. She saw clips and heard snippets of the landscape as it changed around her. Geese flew overhead, and unseen birds called across the grasses. In hollows, purple saxifrages and arctic white heather flourished. Poppies bloomed in snow patches. She was heading south (quickly), and summer was heading north.
Late in the sunlit night, they halted. “I feel a call,” the lemming said. “Camp here. I will return for you.” Before she could protest, the rodent was gone.
Her one link to Bear, gone.
Cassie swallowed hard. He’ll return, she told herself. He said he’d return. And Sedna had said to trust. Ordering herself to stop worrying, she looked around. She was beyond the shrub tundra now, deep in tussock tundra.
Stretching out her legs, Cassie threaded between headsize clumps of grass. Filled with stagnant water, the tussocks would burst if she stepped on them. To walk through the minefield, she had to lift her knees high like a stork. She imagined how she’d retell this to Bear: She’d march around the banquet hall as if she were walking through tussocks, and he’d laugh in his low rumble. He’d serve that chicken in white wine sauce, and she’d tell him how she’d picked lichen from rocks for her dinner on the tundra. She’d say how much she’d missed him, and he’d say he loved her and had never meant to hurt her…
But all the apologies in the world wouldn’t undo anything that had happened. Cassie laid her hands on her stomach. Even if she found Bear… everything would be different. She swallowed hard. She didn’t just want Bear back; she wanted the life they’d had.
She camped between tussocks. Overhead, the northern lights chased each other in pale ribbons as the sun continued its low roll along the horizon. She dreamed about Bear, and she woke expecting him to be beside her like he used to be. She nearly cried when she realized he wasn’t.
To her relief, the lemming returned shortly after she woke, and again they raced across the tundra. The next time they stopped, she was surrounded by cottongrass. Thousands of flowers that looked like gone-to-seed dandelions covered the tundra in a fine white mist. She took out her GPS. After a dip in the Arctic Ocean, it shouldn’t still have worked, but the numbers flickered. She tilted it until she could read it. Latitude 66° 58’ 08", longitude 110° 02’ 13". Whoa. She’d come hundreds of miles in less than two days. At this rate, she’d be in the boreal forest before she knew it. “Thank you,” she said to the lemming. She’d never imagined it would be a rodent who would be her savior.
“The owl will hunt for you,” the lemming said. “She enjoys it.”
“What owl?” Cassie scanned the skies. She didn’t see… Wait, she saw a white splotch to the north. Silent, the snowy owl drifted over the tundra. Her feathers were like a cloud against the sky. Cassie saw her dive—right toward the lemming. “Watch out!” Cassie yelled as the owl’s talons wrapped around him.
The lemming did not flinch, and the owl released him and glided a few feet away before settling in the cottongrass. “You invite me to play,” the owl said, “And you do not even run. Where is the sportsmanship in that?”
Cassie exhaled. It was the owl munaqsri, and they obviously knew each other. Cassie wasn’t going to lose her transportation.
“I did not invite you to hunt me,” the lemming said in his piping voice. “I invited you to hunt for her. She travels to Father Forest. She is the wife of the polar bear.”
The owl swiveled her head a hundred eighty degrees. “I see. And the child is his?”
Cassie threw her arms around her stomach. The sun was warm, and she had shed her parka and wool. Her curved stomach strained her flannel. More than four months now. “I need to find Bear,” she said, her voice rising. “Father Forest has to help me.”
The owl studied her for another moment. “Of course he will help you,” the owl said. “You may rely on him to do what is best. What do you wish to eat?”
Cassie’s knees wobbled in relief. The owl wasn’t going to argue, and she was going to get her dinner. Food! She wanted chocolate cake and stacks of hamburgers and Dad’s beans and Max’s sausage omelettes, but she tried to think of what lived in sedge meadows. Dad used to refer to lemmings as “wild fast food.” Cassie glanced at the lemming munaqsri. “Rabbits?” she suggested.