Guardians of Ga'Hoole 09 - The First Collier

with my balance.”
    The claws had not evidently wreaked havoc with Theo’s ability to talk. He kept up a steady stream as he circled over the forge. I mean, yak yak yak! No one could talk like that lad. I thought that perhaps I shouldn’t worry for his safety. He could probably just talk a hagsfiend to death, should he meet one.
    I knew that to nudge him out of the thermal drafts, I was going to have to be up there—right by his side. So I took off and quickly slid in next to him. “Now come on, lad, let’s get you out of the thermals.”
    “I don’t know, Grank. These things are heavy.”
    “Look, we’ll just sort of slide into it very slowly.”
    “All right,” he replied in a shaky voice. “Aiyeee!” He began to stagger in flight.
    “Steady there! Steady!” I gave him a little bit of a wing prop by flying under him and pumping my own wings hard, sending up some puffy little pillows of air forsupport. “All right, you’re doing fine now.” Better than fine, actually. Theo was a beautiful flier. It was one of the first things that I had noticed about him shortly after he arrived. And for more than a minute now he had been flying smoothly with the added weight of the battle claws.
    “I think I’ll try ruddering,” he said.
    Ah, I thought. He is rising to the challenge. He began to rudder and performed an excellent banking turn.
    As we settled down after our practice session, I could see that Theo was quite pleased with himself. “I don’t think you need any more practice. You’re a natural.”
    “Natural what? Killer?”
    “No, no, lad, a natural flier.”
    “Technically speaking, we are all natural fliers, Grank.”
    I churred. “I’m finished arguing with you, lad. Now, on your way and here’s my coal bag. Bring back a lot of rocks.” I paused. “And Glaux speed!”
    “Thank you, Grank. Thank you so much for everything.” He paused. “And do you know what you are?”
    “No, lad, what am I?”
    “You’re a natural-born teacher.”
    This indeed brought a tear to my eye.
    I watched Theo take off and followed his flight as bestI could until he dissolved into a fog bank that was looming offshore. Fog sometimes unnerved me, and this one certainly did. Who knew what might be lurking beyond those swirling downy plumes of mist that could instantly wrap a world in a thick impenetrable whiteness?

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Siv Learns to Fly Again
    “ H ardly a wobble, now try a banking turn…little more rudder with the tail feathers, Siv.”
    Talk about natural-born teachers! I was nothing compared to Svenka. Imagine, if you will, Dear Owl, a polar bear teaching an owl to fly, in particular, one with a severely damaged wing. Indeed, a wing that was almost half gone!
    It was most uncanny that at practically the same moment I was coaching Theo to fly with battle claws, Svenka the polar bear was attempting to teach Siv to fly again. How I first found out, or suspected this, is in itself an interesting story. For the first time in several days, I was alone. Almost as soon as Theo departed I felt a loneliness as I had never before experienced. It was not a simple loneliness. It had weight. And this weight was almost crushing me. The egg, I knew, was still several days from hatching. I decided to build a fire, not for coaxing metal out of rock but for plucking some images from the flames. For a longtime I had been unwilling to peer into the flames to search for anything at all. I had become accustomed to building fires purely for utilitarian purposes. Theo was learning so fast and his research about metal was so fascinating that I had nearly forgotten that I had abilities for interpreting the flames. And to be quite frank, I was frightened. What if the fire revealed that Siv, my beloved Siv, was really dead? What then?
    But within hours after Theo had left, my loneliness had turned to such despair that I built a fire. As I gazed at the soft yellow part of the flame where I often found the first glimmerings of a form I did see something. It was large and white. I peered in closer. The heat licked my face. I never had to be this close when forging, but reading was a different story. And a story was indeed unfolding before my eyes.
    It was a polar bear floating lazily on her back near a large iceberg. The bear was calling instructions to a smudge in the sky high above her. As the bird spiraled down closer toward the water, I gasped. It was an owl with a badly mangled port wing and yet it was flying.