“Hardly. We’d scent them first,” Toklo reminded her.

Kallik twitched her ears, refusing to be comforted. “And how can you fight in such tight spaces? You’d constantly be banging into trees, or getting tripped up by brambles.”

“You just have to make sure the other bear is the one banging into trees, or getting tripped,” Lusa told her, giving Kallik a friendly nudge.

Kallik let out a snort, resolutely unamused, and dropped back to walk beside Yakone again. Her nervousness made Toklo even more careful to keep checking for signs of other bears as they plodded on through the forest. But he saw less evidence of them than he had expected: no scent, no scraps of discarded prey, no scratches on trees to mark the boundaries of territory.

That’s good, he thought hopefully. Though he had spoken with optimism about finding part of the forest that no bear had claimed, he had never seriously believed that he would be able to establish a territory without fighting for it. Now he began to wonder if it might be possible after all.

But why are there no other brown bears? he asked himself after a while. Did they all leave to find new territories, like I did? And if so, does that mean there’s plenty of prey here? Or did they leave because there’s a shortage of prey?

“What about food?” Kallik called out to Toklo as if she knew what he was thinking. “Aren’t we ever going to stop to hunt?”

“We need to find water first,” Toklo replied.

While keeping a lookout for other bears, Toklo had also been searching for the glint of water in the undergrowth, and listening for the sound of running streams, but so far he hadn’t found either. Now he remembered how his mother, Oka, had taught him to look for thick growths of fern, telling him that they always grew best in the wettest parts of the forest.

Trudging to the top of a rise, Toklo paused to look down into the valley beyond. The trees were thinner here, the forest floor covered with grass interspersed with bramble thickets. At the very bottom he spotted the lush ferns he’d been looking for.

“Down there—a stream,” he croaked, his mouth feeling drier than ever at the thought of the cool water just waiting for them. I hope I’m right.

Lusa ran ahead of him down the slope, stumbling and skidding in her haste to quench her thirst. By the time Toklo reached the valley she was grubbing happily among the ferns, her muzzle slick with water.

“Fern roots!” she exclaimed, clawing one up and crunching it in her jaws. “Delicious!”