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hackles up and his bark punctuated by growls. The other dogs, restless because of their leader, did the same. I saw what unsettled them. Far along the horizon, a band of dark clouds crouched . . . and as I looked on, they crept forward, bit by bit, headed in our direction.
    Fear jabbed at me. A winter storm, just as I’d feared. If we couldn’t outrace it, it would blot out what little sun we had, it would hide the stars, and it would freeze us where we stood. It would kill us. I whirled to face Ataneq.
    “Let’s go,” I murmured.
    The sun moved, and we moved. Afternoon lengthened into an early evening, and the sun set a little earlier than it had the day before. We ran through the lengthening darkness, following the stars, until I stopped us in exhaustion. Hurriedly, I gathered what little dried moss I could, then started a fire. The warmth reassured me somewhat as I wiggled my frozen fingers and toes before it. Behind us, the band of dark clouds loomed, closer now than it had been this morning. A part of me wanted to jump up and force the dogs onward — force us on through the entire night. But that was impossible. We needed to rest. I untied one of the
maktak
packages from the sled, thawed it out before the fire, and sliced it up for the dogs. I kept a piece for myself. My eyes closed as I savored the rich fat. I would have to be careful with our portions. I finished mine, then crawled into my furs. The clouds loomed in the back of my thoughts, haunting me. If we couldn’t beat the storm, all the food supplies in the world wouldn’t save us.
    A strange noise woke me this time. It was the sound of a splash.
    I opened my eyes and looked over at the dogs, but they did not stir. The fire had burned low, and the embers glowed red in the night. Ice crystals flaked from my lashes. I shivered. Perhaps I had been dreaming.
    Then the splash came again, some distance into the tundra. I glanced behind me. Water? But we’d left the coast behind yesterday. Were we headed in the wrong direction?
    I crawled out of my furs. I listened a moment longer, then started to head toward the splashing sound. Behind me, Ataneq woke and watched me go with a curious tilt of his head. He whined, but I held a hand up, reassuring him that I was all right. I cut the strings from last night’s
maktak
package into short pieces. I tied these to tiny patches of dry grass and lichen as I went, so that I would remember my path back. The splashing grew louder. Finally, something appeared ahead, a black patch that stood out solidly against the snow. I furrowed my brows. It was a hole in the ground, and the darkness was water.
    I swallowed hard, then backtracked a few steps. It was hard to tell, but I had made my way onto the edge of an enormous frozen lake, hidden under the snow. The ice trembled slightly under my weight. A death trap. We would have headed this way come morning. We could have ended up in the water.
    Another splash came from the hole in the ice. When I looked closer, I saw a faint white cloud of mist floating in the air. I squinted at the source of the spray.
    The largest seal I had ever seen poked its head out of the water.
    I gasped. The beast turned its head toward me, its huge eyes gleaming gold in the night. The water around it glowed a faint sapphire, as if lit by something from the depths, and the surface of the water glittered with a thousand tiny lights, as if the stars had shattered into the sea. They lit the seal, outlining its dark silhouette beneath the waves and adding a blue hue to its stormy-gray hide.
    “The Seal King rose from the depths,” I whispered, “to claim the hearts of drowning hunters.” And now it seemed as if it had woken me to tell me about the lake.
    The seal did not swim away. Instead, it stared back at me with unblinking eyes. I felt, for a moment, as if I looked into the face of my father. There was something wise there, something
human.
My lips trembled.
    “Thank you,” I whispered. “For the