The ground began to rise and they left the marsh behind, scrambling up a steep thickly forested ridge. Raia waited at the top of the ridge for Ysbel and Goodwill to catch up and turned without a word and led them through trees and rocks to the edge of a steep drop above what was either a loop of the river they had crossed earlier, or one of its tributaries. The water was broad and shallow, rippling amongst rocks and sand bars; trees overhung the opposite bank, where, according to Raia, her friend was waiting.

‘Stand either side of me, so that he can get a good look at you,’ she told Ysbel and Goodwill.

Ysbel did as she was told, feeling foolish and exposed. After a brief interval there was a stir of movement in the shadows under the trees on the far side. A figure balanced upright in a comically small basin of a boat, using a long pole to push out into the river’s currents.

‘It seems I was wrong to think he was a trapper,’ Goodwill told Ysbel.

The figure was definitely too tall to be a native, clad in a hooded cape sewn of small patches of fur, mostly grey and brown, and trousers pieced from leather. Tall, broad-shouldered, face hidden by the deep folds of the cape’s hood.

‘Who is he?’ Ysbel said to Raia. ‘And what is he doing out here?’

‘Someone who knows more about bears than I ever will.’

Ysbel wondered if it was someone who had gone native – not just living amongst them, as she did, but disappearing into the back country. Wilding, some called it. Abandoning responsibilities and duties, severing all contact with other humans, and often with natives, too. Dressed in clothes made from animals he had presumably trapped and killed, he leaned into the pole as he pushed his little craft across the river, spinning completely around in a strong current before regaining control and pushing on, at last stopping close to the foot of the steep drop and looking up at the three people standing above him.

Goodwill gave a cry, and grabbed Ysbel’s arm.

‘There’s nothing to be afraid of,’ Raia said.

‘Of course there is!’

‘What’s wrong?’ Ysbel said, and then the figure below her reached up and pushed back the hood and she saw his face.

Not a native, no. And not a man either.

Raia’s friend was a bear.

17.

Raia introduced the bear to Ysbel and Goodwill, telling them that his name was Seven, and Seven pressed his hands to his chest and bowed and said that it wasn’t, of course, his real name.

‘Only I know that. The name I gave myself when I escaped into the world and began my long journey of discovery. Seven is what I was called before that. A significantly low number, for I was one of the first of the articulate bears.’