The Great Journey Home

Snorre loved the sound the ice made under his paws, that squeaky-crunchy sound that meant the frost was thick and good for jumping. He crouched low on the edge of the shelf, watching his sister dart across the frozen ledge with her ears flopping, and he grinned the biggest grin a polar bear cub could grin.

"You'll never catch me, Snorre!" Signe called over her shoulder, her claws clicking against the ice as she skidded around a snowbank.

"Watch me!" Snorre shouted back, and he bunched up all four of his stout legs and leaped.

He landed hard, harder than he meant to, right on the spot where the ledge met the wider shelf. There was a sound like a giant's knuckle cracking, sharp and sudden, and the whole world seemed to shiver beneath him.

"Did you hear that?" Skuld asked, freezing mid-waddle with his little round body tipped sideways, the smooth river stone tumbling out of his mouth.

Before anyone could answer, the ice gave a second crack, louder than the first, and a jagged line raced across the snow like a bolt of black lightning. Snorre felt the ground drop away beneath his hind paws.

"Jump! Jump back to the big ice!" he yelled, but the gap was already too wide, a churning ribbon of dark water opening between them and home.

Signe tried anyway. She threw herself forward with her claws stretched out, but her paws only scraped against empty air and she tumbled back onto the drifting slab beside her brothers. Skuld let out a small, frightened whimper and pressed himself against Snorre's side, his stone forgotten on the ice.

"We're moving," Signe said, her voice tight but steady, the way it always got when she was trying very hard not to sound scared. "The current has us. Look how fast the shoreline is shrinking."

Snorre looked, and his stomach dropped lower than the crack in the ice ever had. Their mother's den, the tall blue glacier, the whole white world they had always known, was already turning small and far away, smudged at the edges like a drawing left out in the wind.

"Mama!" Skuld cried out, though he knew, even as small as he was, that she couldn't hear him over that much water and that much wind.

"She'll come find us," Snorre said quickly, wrapping a paw around his little brother. "Bears are good swimmers, Skuld. She probably already knows something's wrong."

He said it with all the confidence he could muster, but underneath his fur, in the quiet part of himself where nobody else could look, Snorre knew the truth. He was the one who had jumped too hard. He was the one who had cracked the ice. If he had just tagged Signe a little gentler, if he had landed a little softer, they would all be curled up together right now, warm and safe, instead of drifting out on a broken piece of their whole world.

He didn't tell his siblings that. He just held on tighter to the guilt, the way Skuld held on to his stone.

The days that followed blurred together the way snow blurs in a storm. The ice raft carried them across water that never seemed to end, rolling gently under a sky that changed from gray to blue and back to gray again. At first the wind stayed cold and familiar, and the three cubs huddled close, sharing warmth the way they always had. But little by little, something strange began to happen.

"The wind feels different," Signe said one afternoon, lifting her nose and sniffing at the air. "Warmer. And listen, there's no cracking sound under us anymore when the waves hit."

"Maybe that's a good thing," Snorre offered, though he wasn't sure why it would be.

"Maybe," Signe said slowly. "Or maybe it means the ice is getting thinner."

She was right, of course. She usually was. Each day the raft beneath them shrank a little more, its edges rounding off and softening like a snowball left too close to a fire. Puddles formed on its surface and dripped steadily into the sea below. The cubs learned to squeeze together in the middle, on the last dry patch, careful not to lean too far in any direction.

Skuld spent most of those long hours pressed against Snorre's side, turning his smooth river stone over and over between his paws. It was the one thing from home that had come with them, and he held onto it as though letting go of it might mean letting go of everything else too.

"Snorre," he asked quietly on the third day, watching a strange white bird wheel overhead, "when do you think we'll see Mama again?"

Snorre opened his mouth to answer and found he didn't have one, not really, not one that was true. "Soon," he said instead, because that was the answer Skuld needed, even if it wasn't the answer Snorre could promise.

"Point one," Signe said, breaking the silence in the careful, listing voice she used when she was working through a problem out loud. "The water keeps getting warmer, which means we are moving south, away from home, not toward it. Point two, our ice is melting faster the warmer the water gets. Point three, if we don't reach land soon, we won't have a raft left to stand on at all."

"Thank you, Signe," Snorre said, a little more sharply than he meant to. "That's very helpful."

Signe blinked at him, surprised, and Snorre immediately felt bad for snapping. It wasn't her fault she was right. None of this was anyone's fault but his own, though he still hadn't found the courage to say so out loud.

"I'm sorry," he mumbled. "I just... I don't know how to fix this yet."

"You don't have to fix everything," Signe said, gentler now, nudging her shoulder against his. "You just have to keep us together. That's what you're good at."

Snorre wasn't sure that was true, but he was grateful she'd said it anyway.

On the fourth day, the air turned thick and heavy, warmer than anything the cubs had ever felt in their lives, and the raft beneath them had shrunk to barely the size of a sled. Snorre's oversized paws hung off the edges now no matter how he curled them in.

"Snorre, look!" Skuld shouted suddenly, pointing his round nose toward the horizon.

Far ahead, past the rolling blue water, a line of green had appeared, tall feathery shapes swaying above pale golden sand.

"Trees," Signe said, squinting. "Strange, tall, skinny trees. I've never seen anything like them."

"It's land!" Snorre cried, scrambling to his paws so fast the little raft wobbled beneath them. "It doesn't matter what kind of trees they are, it's land!"

Skuld clutched his stone tightly to his chest and pressed close against his brother's side, his big dark eyes wide with a mixture of hope and worry.

"Do you think Mama is there?" he asked softly.

Snorre looked at the strange green shore rising slowly out of the water, so different from anything he had ever known, and he wrapped a paw around each of his siblings.

"I don't know," he said honestly. "But we're going to find out."