Free East by Edith Pattou

sand. Catching my breath, I sat up and gazed around me. We were on a remote stretch of brown sand and waves were breaking not twenty feet away. It was dawn, and over my right shoulder the sun was just beginning to rise. Considering the direction we had been traveling, I guessed that this must be the southern reaches of Njordsjoen, the North Sea. And even though there was an enormous white bear not two feet from me, I felt a thrill of wonder. My grandfather had sailed this sea, and my great-grandfather before him. I had always promised myself that one day I would come to Njordsjoen, although I never could have imagined it happening quite like this.
    Out of the corner of one eye, I saw the bear fiddling with something small and dark, and then he pulled at it with his great paws. Like taffy, whatever it was began to lengthen and grow.
    I watched, dazed and fascinated, and then suddenly he came toward me, and before I knew what was happening, I was being encased from head to toe in some kind of soft, pliable covering. It was brown and smelled of fish and musk, and I thought maybe it was a sealskin. Then he pulled it up over my eyes and I felt myself being patted all over, as if I were a bairn being checked to see that my blankets were snug on a cold night. Suddenly I felt a pressure on the back of my neck and shoulders, a clamping down. I was being lifted and we were moving forward. Then the light and sound changed, became dimmer and muffled, distant.
    Though I could see nothing, I knew we were then underwater.
    I panicked for a moment, wondering how I was going to breathe, but I quickly discovered that I could breathe quite normally and gave myself over to the sensations of traveling under the sea, swaddled in sealskin and being carried, I suspected, in the jaws of a great white bear.
    We were not long in the sea. If anything, the white bear swam faster than he ran. A strange regret overcame me when I felt myself being carried out of the water and laid upon the ground. The bear made quick work of removing me from my cocoon, and soon I was again on his back and we were speeding through a completely foreign country.
    Only once did the white bear speak. It was soon after our sea crossing. We were moving through a lush, rocky valley crowded with rushing streams and slippery boulders.
    "Are you afraid?" came the words from deep inside the bear's massive chest.
    "No," I answered, and it was true. I had been too busy watching and listening; absorbing all the sensations, from the wind on my face, to the rhythmic rocking of the sightless underwater world, to the rich, flowery smells of the air as we moved southward. I had been caught up in the easy grace of the bear's motion and had given little thought to where we were going or to what would happen once we got there.
    But later, during the fifth or sixth night, I did begin to think of those things. I must have sensed that we were nearing the end of our journey.
    The moon had waned since that first night we set out, but it was still bright and I could clearly see the landscape around me. The land was mountainous in places, though the mountains were small and green rather than towering and jagged as in Njord. There were no pines at all; instead there were lush, broad-leaved trees, some with splashes of bright-colored blossoms. The smell was different, too—a thicker, richer smell of earth and flower and ripe fruit.
    I was suddenly very hungry and thirsty, and found myself wondering if the white bear was hungry, too. The thought crossed my mind that
I
was to be the beast's meal, at the end of a long journey. I shivered, though the air was warm.
    We were moving along the base of a small mountain, through a thick forest of some kind of pungent, wide-spreading tree I had never seen before. Though I could not make out any sign of a path, the white bear was surefooted. I had the feeling he had gone this way many times.
    Without warning he stopped, and after seven days and nights of constant