Excerpt & Giveaway: JOURNEY OF THE PALE BEAR

Hauk was dragging me toward the bear. I saw what he intended to do now and struggled to get loose. I yelled, I kicked, I beat at him with the rabbit haunch. He tore my knapsack from my shoulder, then grasped both of my arms and pinned them behind me.

       The bear let out a long breath, a sort of moan.

       “No,” I said. “Don’t do it. I’ll give you back your meat, I’ll—”

But Hauk turned me sideways and began to stuff me between the bars. At first, I thought I wouldn’t fit, but then my shoulders slipped partway through, and then my head, and then my hips. I staggered into the cage and, tripping, slammed my knees against the floor.

       When I looked up, the bear had gone still at the far end of the cage. It was staring straight at me.

       Its eyes, small and dark, were alert, curious, aware. I felt the faint stirring of its breath against my cheeks. I drew in the rich, ripe scent of bear until I seemed to sink down below the surface of it, drowning. From somewhere far away I heard Hauk and the lantern boy arguing, but the sounds fell away behind the throbbing of my bloodbeat in my ears. 

       The bear rumbled deep in its throat.

       I rose to my feet, stepped back, and felt the iron bars press cold against me. I kept my eyes fixed on the pale, wide face, as if the force of my gaze could prevent the bear from lunching at me with its enormous jaws or raking me with its claws—claws that I could see out of the corners of my eyes, massive claws, claws from a nightmare of monsters.

Twitching. The big black nose was twitching, snuffling, searching. There was a thrumming in the air that came to lodge within my bones and sang there. Slowly, the bear’s head reached toward me, and I saw there was something loose and flapping off one shoulder—a harness. And then the dark eyes shifted away from mine to peer at the center of my chest. I looked down and saw my fingers clutched round the rabbit haunch. That’s what the bear was sniffing.  Carefully, I moved the meat away from my chest. It seemed that I might just hold it out and offer it, as you would hand a dropped thimble to your mother. But the bear took a step closer, and I felt a spasm of fear jolt through me. I tossed the haunch as hard as I could, off to one side. It smacked against the bars and hit the floor of the cage with a splat.

For the merest instant, the bear’s expression shifted. The great head swiveled to gaze straight into my eyes with something like reproach—seeming to say that it hadn’t been necessary to throw the food, that that had been beneath the bear’s dignity and mine.

Then it turned, snatched up the rabbit leg in its great jaws, and snapped it in twain.

I let out my breath in a rush.