Spirit Wolf by Kathryn Lasky

Author:Kathryn Lasky [Lasky, Kathryn]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
Published: 2012-05-17T22:00:00+00:00

Edme had great powers of concentration and she simply blocked their endless bickering from her ears. Edme had learned a thing or two about ice in the past year, the year of the deep cold when the summer and spring moons came and went but it always felt like winter. She knew that just as there were dozens of kinds of snow, there were at least as many kinds of ice. She could see that she was in what she thought of as a weeping region. There were large patches of the ice sheets that appeared to be slick with water — melt water. This made it all the more dangerous for her. Trying to climb would be deadly; she was lucky that she hadn’t slipped off as it was. She peered intensely at the sheer walls of blue ice, her single eye blinking again and again. But it was only her outer eye blinking. The inner eye that guided her remained steadily open, its gaze hard and bright. Some of the melt water had refrozen and glistened luminously like a lens, revealing a complex network of tiny cracks inches beneath the smooth surface of ice. Could she possibly uncover them, excavate them using her dewclaw, the fifth little claw on her front paw? This claw was totally useless for hunting or protection, but it was good for digging and maybe perfect for scraping out these fissures. If she could dig these cracks out, she would have some purchase points and she could attempt a climb. It was going to be time consuming, but she could do it.

She began quietly. She did not want to tell the others what she was trying until she was sure it could work.

And it did work for a while. She managed to lift herself a good distance up from where she had begun. She found lots of little cracks to dig out and afford her a grip. But then she reached a long smooth section with no cracks at all.

Edme was exhausted. “What’s happening?” Faolan called down. “I don’t hear you scratching.”

“I’m taking a little rest.” For the first time she felt like crying. She looked at the walls of ice that had imprisoned her, the glowering blue sheet directly in front of her. She had studied it for hours or so it seemed; she had lost track of time in this ice hell, this blue Dim World. She felt as if she knew the ice sheet better than she knew her own body. She had studied its every crack, no matter how minute. She could see the tiny buried bubbles of air. Some were close to the surface, some much deeper. They bloomed like galaxies in the long blue night of the ice, but they were not stars and this was not the sky. She watched as some of the melt water beside her began to refreeze, knowing it wouldn’t help her. She needed to go up, not sideways, up, up, up, up to the sky, up to the earth, up to Faolan.

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