Ujurak tried to shake off the fear he’d felt when he’d seen the orcas attack Kallik. He knew that if she’d died, it would have been his fault for insisting they cross the broken ice. And was he right about where they were going? He wasn’t even sure. The signs out here were so strange. He was used to reading broken tree limbs and piles of rocks and the sound of streams burbling in the distance. He didn’t know what to make of the shifting whorls of snow or the endless, blank emptiness of the ice, and that troubled him deeply. He glanced around at Kallik’s huge bulk, looming over Lusa’s small, dark shape as they trudged side by side. It had been a relief to hand off the responsibility of leadership to her for a while. He’d hoped her knowledge of the ice would be enough to guide them wherever they were going, especially when he was so confused out here. But of course she knew even less than he did…well, she knew more about surviving on the ice, but she didn’t know how to read the signs of their journey, and of course she didn’t know what they were looking for.
