Guardians of Ga'Hoole 15 - The War of the Ember

your own good maybe.”
    Dumpy blinked. She might be right, he thought. “Uh…listen, I got to go.”
    “Go where?” asked the Chubster.
    “I’m not sure,” Dumpy said.
    “Imnotsure! A fabulous place!” the Chubster exclaimed. “Heard all about it. Great fishing.”
    “Uh, well, I better be off.” Dumpy spread his wings and lifted off the edge of the cliff. He heard the Chubster yelling at his pufflings. “Wave bye-bye to Uncle Dumpy. He’s going to Imnotsure.”
    Pulkie was back in the ice nest, sorting fish. She and the pufflings turned and looked wistfully at Dumpy as he dissolved into the fog bank over the Ice Narrows.
    Oh my, fog. Which way do I go? Dumpy thought. Finally, he carved a turn and headed north toward the end of summer gathering place for the bears. He knew where that was. Not far from the Ice Narrows. But what should he tell them? He tried to order the facts in his disorderly mind. First there was the strange blue owl. And the owl with the frightening face. But worse than what they looked like was what they said. Hagsfiends. What were hagsfiends? Another kind of bird? Definitely not apolar bear. The faint dark memory stirred again, like a shadow invading his being.
    Dumpy must have been flying faster than he thought, for soon he was looking down at the remnants of summer ice in the Everwinter Sea. He followed the floes up the Firth of Fangs. He hoped the polar bears were still there and had not begun their long swim north to the more remote firths and small channels where they hibernated for the winter. He spiraled down, and to his great delight saw several bears swimming about and some reclining on floes with their cubs. Many of the floes were bloody with freshly killed seals. The polar bears were fattening up for their long winter sleep.
    The firth was quite narrow at this point, and Dumpy saw one bear slip off an ice floe and swim toward the base of the cliffs where there appeared to be a cave. Dumpy hovered outside. It was hard to understand these bears, with their thick Krakish accent. Thankfully, many of them spoke a mixture of Hoolian and Krakish, and Dumpy was catching a few words here and there.
    “Gunda grunuch and see you in two years…Eeh, Sveep?” Then the most enormous head Dumpy had ever seen poked out of the cave and roared in a clear voice. “Svarr, you are about as romantic as a mess of seal guts. Love ’em and leave, huh?”
    “Well, mating season doesn’t last forever, and I’m getting sleepy. The katabats are blowing early,” replied a male bear who was treading water outside the cave.
    “You just want to skedaddle.”
    “Here, I’ll get you something to eat before I go.” The bear swooped an immense paw through the water and snatched up a large fish. “Bluescale—token of my affection.” He slapped it down on the rock ledge by the cave.
    “Great Ice!” Dumpy sputtered. The two bears looked up.
    “What do you want?” the bears roared.
    “That fish—that fish. Never saw one that color. Sky. I mean blue,” Dumpy said, alighting on the ice floe the male bear had just vacated. “I saw an owl that color. Blue…” Dumpy repeated the word softly, almost as if he were tasting it.
    “I’m out of here,” Svarr said. “Same time, same place, two years from now.” He yawned and began to swim off. “Hope you get some cubs. I’m sure they’ll be cute, just like their mum.”
    The female sighed. “As if he’ll ever bother to visit them.”
    “You mean he’ll never see his cubs?” said Dumpy.
    “Never.”
    “That’s very sad,” Dumpy said. “I mean, he doesn’t know what he’s missing.”
    The bear blinked. “What is your name, puffin?”
    “Dumpy.”
    “Well, Dumpy, mine is Sveep, and I think that is very astute of you.”
    “What’s ‘astute’?”
    “Smart, keen.”
    Now it was Dumpy’s turn to blink. “No…no one has ever called me—or any a puffin—smart, keen, or…or astute.”
    “Well, I’m calling you that. Now tell me, what is this about a blue owl?”
    Dumpy hoped he could give a halfway intelligible recitation of what he had seen. He began slowly. “There is this cave in the Ice Narrows. Two owls came to it. One had these feathers that you call blue, and the other…the other…”
    When Dumpy had finished the story, Sveep was silent for several seconds, then finally she spoke. “This does not sound good. Not good at all. But it’s owl business.”
    “What should I do?”
    “You must seek out the owls,”