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lips, her mouth watering with anticipation. “You’ll love the taste of seals. Just wait till I catch one!”
    “All right, enough talk,” Toklo grumbled. “Lead the way.”
    Kallik turned and faced the horizon. She was home! This was her world, and now she could show her friends how wonderful it was. She just had to trust that the ice spirits wouldguide them to their destination, as Ujurak’s spirits had been guiding him.
    She took a deep breath, searching the air for useful smells. Was the seal smell in this direction? It had been so long since she’d smelled it…but the warm, rich, fatty scent made her hungry, even though she could tell it was far away.
    She looked down at the bubbles, hoping they would guide her the way her mother had taught her they would. It seemed as if there were a lot more spirit-bubbles and shadows than she remembered from her childhood on the ice with Nisa. Was she remembering wrong…or was the ice different here? There was less white around the spirit-bubbles, so the ice looked almost black in places. As if it was hardly there at all…
     
    A chilly breeze rippled through Kallik’s fur. Did that mean lots of white bears had died since she’d last stood on the ice? She thought of all the white bears at Great Bear Lake, heading back toward the rising sun, like Taqqiq. What if they hadn’t made it back to the Melting Sea? Or what if they had made it back, but it hadn’t frozen? They couldn’t have survived forever eating leaves and twigs.
    What if one of these ice spirits was her own brother? How would she ever know?
    Stop worrying , she told herself, shaking her head. This is where you’re supposed to be! You made it back to the ice!
    Thrumming with excitement, she shoved the anxious thoughts out of her mind and padded toward the seal smell, leading the others out into the icy expanse.

CHAPTER THREE
Kallik
    As they left the water behind them, the ice became less liquid under their paws, and Kallik found more gritty patches for them to walk on without slipping. White hills of snow surrounded them, piled into whorls and crests by the force of the wind. Some of the snowdrifts were higher than Kallik if she’d been standing upright on her back paws; others were barely squirrel-sized mounds. She kept an eye out for other white bears, but she smelled only one or two in the distance, and the falling snow hid any prints that might have been left behind. Once she thought she scented a dead seal, but when she found it, the carcass had been picked clean of any flesh and there was nothing left to eat.
    More snow began to fall, whirling white powder drifting down from the sky and balancing on the surface of the ice, too light to land properly. Kallik almost imagined she could see her mother and brother walking ahead of her in a swirl of the storm. Right now Nisa would be telling them stories of Silaluk, while Taqqiq tried to wrestle Kallik into the snow.
    “Great Spirits, this is boring,” Toklo announced suddenly.
    Kallik jumped, distracted from her memories. “Boring?” she echoed.
    The brown bear scuffed at the snow under his paws. “There’s nothing to smell, nothing to see, nothing to chase. Nothing but white, white, white in every direction.”
    “I think it’s pretty,” Lusa said loyally.
    “And there’s so much to see!” Kallik said. “Every snowdrift is different. Every block of ice has a unique shape, and it’s not even all white…. Look at this one.” She padded over and tapped a large outcropping of ice with one of her claws. A few sparkling shards broke off and landed in the snow. “Can’t you see all the shades of blue and gray and white in there? It’s like a rainbow, but even more beautiful.”
    “I can see them,” Ujurak agreed, peering over his nose at the ice.
    Toklo looked skeptical. “So that’s what you do out here?” he said. “Stare at the ice? That sounds like fun.”
    “We play games, too!” Kallik protested. “Taqqiq and I played the best