Free Rain & Fire by Chris D'Lacey

It was snowbound on three sides, the houses huddled in a cloistered heap like Christmas presents on a large white armchair. Tootega, when he saw it this time, was reminded of something David Rain had said about Inuit settlements looking like a room that you forgot to clean. Anything an Inuk did not need, any broken-down appliance or unused item, he would cast away — but not very far. So it was in Savalik. An incongruous mix of brightly painted roofs and overhanging wires and old oil barrels and junked bent metal and columns of steam. But it was home, and the dogs knew it, too. Their noses lifted at the first scent of seal meat warming in a pot. Their tails wagged.Their paws spent less time in contact with the ice. Orak, the lead dog, whose mapping was every bit as sensitive as his master’s, was tugging his comrades toward the colony long before the whip was up.
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    Tootega has come to visit his grandfather, who is very ill, in his home in the settlement. Nauja, Tootega’s sister-in-law, is looking after the old man.
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    Tootega went in, bowing his head. The old man, famed throughout the north as a healer and shaman, commanded great respect within the community and even more esteem at home. He gave a thin cry of joy to see his firstborn grandson and called out to Nauja, Mattak! Mattak! meaning she should bring them whale meat to chew. Tootega crossed the floor, surprised to find a woolen rug under his feet. It dismayed him every time he came to this house to see his grandfather a little more absorbed by southern culture. This room, with its wardrobes and lampshades and remote-controlled television, was a painful affliction of the disease calledprogress. Tootega could readily remember a time when this proud and happy man, now lying in a bed that had drawers in the mattress and propped up loosely on a cluster of pillows, would have been surrounded by furs and harpoons and a seal oil lamp, with blood and blubber stains under his feet. On the wall above the bed, slightly tilted at an angle, was a framed embroidered picture saying “Home, Sweet Home” in the Inuit language. To see it made Tootega want to empty his gut.
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    Progress will always happen, in the High Arctic as well as everywhere else, of course. And this is not necessarily a bad thing. However, Chris is deeply concerned about the effects of pollution, global warming, climate change, and so on, especially regarding polar bears, one of his favorite animals. So much so, that he has David, working at the research base already mentioned, write in a letter back home to Liz and Lucy:
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    We spend our days analyzing ice samples. Some of them date back hundreds of years. Zanna is checkingfor increases in toxic chemicals called PCBs, which can poison bears and other forms of wildlife, and I am melting ice cores down and making the tea — I mean, making interesting graphs to monitor the levels of something called beryllium 10. This is to do with global warming. Dr. Bergstrom thinks that changes in the levels of beryllium 10 coincide with an increase in sunspots or flares, which might be warming the Earth and making the polar ice cap melt. That’s scary, especially for bears. Every year, the ice in Hudson Bay melts earlier but takes a little longer to refreeze. This means that bears are fasting more and more and will reach a point, maybe in the next fifty years, when they will not be able to survive their time ashore and will die of starvation out on the tundra. It’s hard to believe that the natural world we take so much for granted is constantly under threat from climatic change and that creatures like polar bears could so easily become extinct. No one here wants to see that happen. So we are busy searching for long-term answers, feeding the data into our computers to try to predict how long the polar ice will last.
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    So how can you and I make a difference? David writes White Fire , of course, to bring these issues to the