First Light by Rebecca Stead

Author:Rebecca Stead
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307495471
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2007-12-21T17:00:00+00:00

There it was: a circle of twisting scarlet strands. Peter pressed a glove to the ice. Fingers spread, he could cover the thing with one hand. He pulled his mother's drawing of mtDNA from his coat pocket and took off his gloves to unfold it, ignoring the immediate throbbing of his hands in the frigid air. He studied the sketch, peering now and again at the red ring under the ice. It couldn't be a coincidence. Was this what she was looking for? Had she put the thing here? Why?

Peter sat down on the sled and put a hand out to pat Sasha absently. She was having trouble settling down.The dog paced a few restless circles and then started darting around making snuffling noises.

What was the matter with her? Peter unclipped her from the sled but kept a tight grip on a harness strap. And then he realized that he was hearing something. A high-pitched sound, like whistling, but with a purer tone. The wind, maybe. He listened again. It was almost like singing. Or wailing.

It was then that he remembered the polar bear. A shot of fear ricocheted around Peter's body. Did bears wail? Heart thumping, his mind ran through his father's advice: move slowly, stay far away from any cubs, and … and try to look big, something like that. He took his pack from the sled and put it on with some effort: He had stuffed half the contents of the equipment box into it, but he didn't have a single flare. It made him look bigger, anyway.

Sasha strained to run, but he held tight to her harness. Slowly, he let her pull him around one end of the ice wall to the other side, where the ground fell away in front of them into what looked like an empty lakebed, frozen and deep. The keening sound was getting louder. It didn't sound like any bear. More likely a wolf, he thought, calming down a little. Wolves, his father said, would stay away from him unless he got between a mother and her cubs.

He scanned the landscape in front of him. In the dimlight he could make out hummocks of ice here and there along the high edge of the slope, like clusters of white sails or giant shark teeth. He glanced from one to another, but the wailing was everywhere at once. Then the sound stopped, and the echoes fell silent.

There were a few moments in which nothing happened, but Sasha was still pulling hard. Peter let her pull him forward, just a step, and then the noise started up again, an arrow of sound that bounced around the frozen bowl in front of him. But this time he had a better sense of where it was coming from. Somewhere close.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.