AllFreeNovel
Share Us
As it turned out, Fergus hadn’t quite saved them. Though they now had enough fish to last them weeks, that afternoon the temperature dropped and a blizzard blew in. As they huddled together for warmth, full but freezing, they realized that without blankets they would not live to see the morning. It was just turning dark when they heard a growl from outside their circle. The bear had returned.
“What do you want?” Fergus said, leaping up to confront it. “You’ve got all the fish you can eat, so leave us alone!”
But the bear’s attitude had changed. He didn’t seem desperate or dangerous now, as he had when he was starving. In fact, he seemed grateful, and he seemed to understand that Fergus and the others were in trouble.
The bear padded forward, lay down next to them, and went to sleep. The people exchanged tentative looks. Fergus tiptoed to the bear, sat down, and leaned carefully against him. The bear’s fur was luxuriously soft, and his body radiated heat. He didn’t seem to mind Fergus leaning against him at all.
One by one, the people approached. The children and the elderly snuggled right against the bear, the women nestled next to them, and ringing the outside were the men. Miraculously, though some were toastier than others, everyone survived the night.
The next day, the bear and the people were eating fish when another iceberg came floating past. There were three polar bears on it, and when the people’s bear saw them, he stood up and roared.
Hey, fellows! he seemed to say. There’s a boy here who can get us as many fish as we like. Come on over!
The three bears dove into the water and swam right over.
“Oh, great,” one of the men said. “Now there are four bears on our iceberg.”
“Don’t worry,” Fergus replied. “There’s plenty of fish for everyone. They won’t bother us.”
The bears spent the day feasting on fish, and when darkness fell, they slept together in a big pile, the people nestled among them. That night everyone was warm as could be—men, women, and children.
The following day, another three bears swam over from a passing iceberg, and the day after that, four more came. The people were starting to get nervous.
“Eleven bears are a lot of bears,” a woman said to Fergus. “What happens when they run out of fish to eat?”
“I’ll catch more,” Fergus replied.
He spent all that day and the next one staring out to sea, watching for another school of fish to appear, but he didn’t see any. Their supply of fish was nearly gone. Now even Fergus was starting to worry.
“We should have killed that bear when there was only the one,” an old man grumbled. “Instead, that peculiar boy brought us ten more—and now look at the mess we’re in!”
Fergus could feel the people beginning to turn on him. He wondered what would happen when the fish ran out. Perhaps they would feed him to the bears! That night they went to sleep in a contented and furry pile, but in the morning the people awoke to find eleven polar bears staring at them hungrily, having finished every last fish on the iceberg.
Fergus ran to the end of the iceberg and cast his gaze desperately out to sea. What he saw made his heart leap for joy—but it wasn’t a school of fish. It was land! In the distance was a snowy island. Better still, Fergus could see smoke rising from it, which meant it was inhabited. There would be people there, and food. Forgetting the danger of the bears for a moment, Fergus ran back to tell everyone the news.
They were unimpressed. “What good is land if we get eaten before we can reach it?” a man said, and then a bear approached him, picked him up by one leg, and shook him, as if hoping a fish might fall out of his pockets. The man screamed, but before the frustrated bear could take a bite of him, a gunshot rang out.
Everyone turned to see a man in white furs holding a rifle. He fired a second time, right over the bear’s head, and the bear dropped the dangling man and ran away. Then the rest of the bears ran away, too.
The man in furs had seen them through a spyglass from the island, he explained, and had come to rescue them. He gestured for the crowd to follow him, and brought them to a hidden cove in the iceberg where a flotilla of small, sturdy rowboats was waiting. The crowd wept with gratitude as they were ushered onto the boats and rowed to safety.
Fergus was thankful, too, but as they crossed the water he grew nervous that someone would tell the rescuer about his talent. It was bad enough that so many people already knew what he could do. But no one said a word about him—or to him. In fact, most of the people wouldn’t even meet his eyes, and those who did gave him nasty looks, as if they blamed him for all their misfortunes.
His mother had been right, Fergus thought bitterly. Sharing his secret had only ever caused him trouble. It made people see him as an object, a tool to be used when it suited them and then tossed away when he was no longer needed, and he resolved never, ever to share his talent again, no matter what.
The boats docked at a small harbor ringed by timber houses. Smoke rose from their chimneys and the smell of cooking food hung in the air. The promise of a hot meal by a warm hearth seemed tantalizingly close. The man in furs tied his boat and stepped out onto the dock. “Welcome to Pelt Island,” he said.
With a sudden chill, Fergus realized where he’d heard that name before: it was the fur-trading island Captain Shaw had been trying to reach when they were wrecked on the iceberg. Before he’d quite wrapped his mind around this, he saw something on the dock that astounded him even more: a weather-beaten lifeboat with the word Hannah on the side.
The captain and his men had reached the island after all. They were here.
A moment later, someone else noticed the lifeboat. Word spread quickly through the crowd, and soon a mob of angry people was demanding to know where Captain Shaw and his men were.
“They left us to die!” a woman shouted.
“They threatened us with pistols when we tried to save our children!” a man cried.
“They made us eat mouse-dropping soup!” said a scrawny young boy.
The man dressed in furs tried to calm them down, but the people were bent on revenge. They snatched his rifle, s
tormed into town, and discovered Captain Shaw and his men in the tavern, drunk as skunks.
A savage fight erupted. The crowd fought the captain and his men with anything they could find: rocks, pieces of furniture, even flaming logs pulled from the hearth. They were outgunned but the captain and his men were badly outnumbered, and finally, beaten and decimated, they fled into the snowy hills above the town.
The passengers had won. Several of them had been killed, but they had settled the score with evil Captain Shaw, and they’d reached dry land and civilization in the bargain. There was much to celebrate—but their cries of victory were soon interrupted by cries for help.
A fire had broken out.
The man in furs came running. “You idiots set our town on fire!” he shouted at the crowd.
“Well, put it out, then!” replied an exhausted fighter.
“We can’t!” the man said. “It’s the fire station that’s burning!”
They tried to help the fur traders fight the fire with buckets of seawater from the harbor, but there weren’t enough buckets and the flames were spreading fast. In desperation, the crowd turned to Fergus for help.
“Can’t you do something about this?” they begged him.
He tried to say no. He’d promised himself he would refuse. But when their pleas turned to threats, Fergus found himself in an impossible situation.
“Fine then,” he said angrily. “Stand back.”
Once everyone had retreated to high ground, Fergus used all his strength and power to summon a giant wave from the ocean. It crashed into the town and put out all the fires, but as the great surge of water retreated again, it lifted the houses from their foundations and took them along with it. The crowd watched in horror as the whole town was swept into the sea.
Fergus ran for his life. The crowd, furious, chased him through the streets and up into the hills, where he was finally able to evade them by hiding in a snowbank. When they had gone, he got out, frozen to the bone, and stumbled through the wilderness.
