Guardians of Ga'Hoole 09 - The First Collier

kept coming and coming and coming, mindlessly racing across the land.”
    We were quiet for a long time after Siv had finished telling me this sad story. “You know,” she finally said, “we could not have a proper Final ceremony.”
    “But you had one?” I asked, somewhat surprised.
    “Yes. I could not bear the thought of doing nothing.”
    “What did you do?”
    “It might seem odd, but you must understand that I still could not fly. So I climbed on top of Svenka’s head and asked her to stand up. She is so tall, I might as well have been flying. The sheer immensity of this bear will never cease to amaze me. I perched as erect as I could and, holding the feather in my talons, I recited a poem I had composed in honor of Myrrthe. Then I released the feather to the winds. It floated away on the curl of a katabat, a lively, wonderfully boisterous katabat wind.”
    “Would you recite the poem for me now, Siv?” I asked.
    “I’ll try,” she said, and began.

I see her in the wind,
    I see her in moon’s light,
    I see whiteness in the dark,
    I see her day and night.
    When the dawn meets the morning,
    when twilight slips to night,
    I think of dearest Myrrthe,
    a bird so white, so bright.
    She is the snow of the N’yrthghar,
    her whiteness curls in breaking seas.
    She is everywhere I look,
    but she still is lost to me.
    She is the song in my heart,
    she is the wind beneath my wing.
    Her mercy knew no bounds,
    her faith as deep as any sea.
    She is everywhere I look,
    yet she still is lost to me.

CHAPTER NINETEEN
The First Battle Claws
    A nd in the far firthkin, in the ice cave of the berg while Siv herself was steeped in grief over the loss of Myrrthe, I had my talons full with young Theo. I knew that this Great Horned was an owl of unusual intelligence and extreme stubbornness. He could be absolutely maddening at times, but I had never seen an owl learn faster. To be observed by Theo is an experience in itself. He seemed to see with his entire body. If there was such a thing as a gizzard with eyes—well, that would be Theo. I, of course, kept him away from my hollow and the schneddenfyrr. Despite all the lessons and my experiments with fire, I managed to keep a close eye on the egg—so as not to arouse Theo’s suspicions.
    I myself knew a lot about coals and embers and flames, but Theo seemed to understand rock in ways I never imagined. First of all, he classified rocks into all sorts of categories that went way beyond the hard and soft groups into which Fengo and I used to separate the rocksduring our initial experiments. He knew which rocks to use to split other rocks, and he seemed to sense just how these rocks would break when struck.
    Theo often went off to look for the special rocks that he sought, ones that were extremely hard and that contained a peculiar element he called “redmor.” These were the ones he wanted, and they were most often found in what Theo referred to as “weathering regions” that were near the surface of the earth. The only problem with these rocks was that the fires had to be made much hotter than normal. Oh, what I would have given for a good bonk coal! My work would have gone a lot faster. But I worked hard to keep the fires going. One day as Theo was banging away, I imagined something very different emerging from the lumpy mass he was striking.
    “Theo,” I said, “that prong you’ve got coming out there?”
    “Yes,” he replied. “What about it?”
    It reminded me of a talon but I wasn’t going to tell Theo that. Theo loved a challenge. “Can you make three more just like it? And join the four at the top?”
    “Sure,” he said.
    One of the first tools that Theo had made were pincers, which he called “tongs.” Clever gadgets, they allowed him to manipulate what he was making in the fire and then tohold it and dip it into the snow to cool it down. With his pincers, he now dipped the four-pronged object into the snow and held the finished piece up. “Pretty good, eh?”
    “Excellent, lad. You are brilliant!” Theo’s eyes beamed and a shiver of joy riffled through his feathers. Sometimes I wondered what kind of life Theo had had. He was so obviously smart, but had no one ever praised him? I had no idea, because Theo never spoke of his family except for that one time when he told me of his uncle the teacher. “All right. Now I have a real challenge for you.”
    “What is it?” His eyes blazed as brightly as the fire.
    “I want you to curve those