the Bright Soft Cold came drifting down from the Up.After a while, Wolf smelled that they'd entered the range of a pack of stranger wolves. That meant danger.The big pale-pelted male went off on his own, and hope leaped in Wolf's heart. Maybe Pale-Pelt would be foolish enough to attack the stranger wolves, and86they would defend themselves, and he would be killed!Much later, Pale-Pelt returned--unharmed. He was smiling his terrible smile, and carrying a small deerhide Den that wriggled and snarled. Wolf smelled the rank fury of a wolverine. A wolverine? What did this mean?But he couldn't hold on to that for long, because he was getting tired again, sliding down into sleep.A great owl hooted--and he woke. Without knowing why, his fur prickled with dread.The owl fell silent. That was worse.Wolf was now fully awake. While he'd slept, the Dark had come, and the sliding tree had stopped. The bad-taillesses were some paces away, crouching around the Bright Beast-that-Bites-Hot. Wolf sensed that they were waiting for something. Something bad.Around him the strange white land lay windless and still. He smelled a hare nibbling willow buds many lopes away. He heard the tiny scratchings of lemmings in their Dens, and the hiss of the Bright Soft Cold falling, falling.Then through the Dark he heard a tailless approaching. His claws twitched with eagerness. Could it be Tall Tailless, come to rescue him?His hope was swiftly torn to pieces. It wasn't his pack-brother. It was a female whom Wolf hadn't smelled87before. He knew that she was part of the bad pack, for he saw the others rise on their hind legs to wait for her. He felt their dread as she came gliding through the hissing whiteness.She was tall and very thin, and the pale fur of her head hung about her like worms. Her voice was as the rattle of dry bones, and her smell was of Not-Breath.The others greeted her quietly in tailless talk; but although they hid it, Wolf smelled their fear. Even Pale-Pelt was afraid. So was Wolf.Now she turned, and came toward him.He cowered. His very spirit shrank from hers.She came closer. He wanted to look away, but he couldn't. There was something terribly wrong with her face. It was blank as stone, and it didn't move at all, not even a twitch of her muzzle when she spoke. And her eyes were not eyes, but holes.Wolf growled and tried to pull away, but the deerhide held him fast.Now she was leaning over him, and her Not-Breath smell was dragging him down into a black fog of loneliness and loss.Slowly she brought one forepaw close to his muzzle. She was holding something--he couldn't see what--but he caught the scent of that which has lain long in the deep of the earth. Through her pale flesh he glimpsed a gray light, and he knew, with the strange certainty that88came to him sometimes, that what she held bit as fiercely as the Bright Beast-that-Bites-Hot. Except that it bit cold.His growl became a terrified whimper. He shut his eyes and tried to think of Tall Tailless coming for him through the Bright Soft Cold: coming to rescue him, just as he'd done when Wolf was a cub.89ELEVENInuktiluk's sled hurtled west, carrying Torak and Renn the wrong way. The only sounds were the panting of dogs and the scrape of runners on crusted snow, and an occasional gasp from Renn as they banked on a slope, and leaned in hard to avoid toppling over."You can't watch us all the time," Torak told Inuktiluk when they'd stopped to rest by a wide, frozen lake. "Sooner or later, we'll get away.""Where would you go?" retorted Inuktiluk. "You'd never make it north; you'd never get around the ice river."They stared at him. "What ice river? "90"It's about a sleep from here. No one in the Ice clans has crossed it and lived."Torak set his teeth. "We've crossed an ice river before." ,Inuktiluk snorted. "Not one like this.""Then we'll go around it," said Renn.Inuktiluk threw up his hands. Whistling to his lead dog, he started across the lake. "We cross on foot," he told them. "Walk behind
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