“But why?” Kate asked. “I mean, why do you need them? You’re not invaders, are you?”
“Course not.” Suddenly the heron sounded oddly embarrassed. “We’re just—you know. We’re migrating. That sort of thing. You know how we animals do that.”
Something about the silence that followed made Kate wonder if she was really getting the whole story. But the train was slowing down again.
“All right,” Kate said. “Excuse me, I think the train needs conducting.”
Walking forward to the passenger cars, she looked out the window and got a shock: The train was now traveling over open water. Miles and miles of gray waves, with no land anywhere. The air was cold and tasted like salt, and she put her conductor’s blazer back on, then went and got the winter coat too.
The train slowed and stopped, right there in the middle of the ocean. She looked around for a station, but there was nothing except water. Swells sloshed around the train’s wheels. Was it a mistake? Had they overshot the platform somehow? She leaned out as far as she could and looked forward, then back. Nothing.
A chilly wind ruffled her hair. She could see her breath in the air.
And what were the train tracks resting on? She looked down but she couldn’t see that, either. Pontoons? Some kind of underwater ridge? She had that same creepy feeling she had at the last stop: Something was off here.
We should go, she thought. She closed the doors—but as soon as the train started again, she heard a shout.
“Wait!” It was Tom, somewhere way down at the other end. “Wait! Stop the train!”
What now? Leaning out, she could see him standing on the flat car, waving frantically and pointing at something in the water. Kate ran back to join him.
He was crouched down, peering over the edge of the flat car into the ocean, so Kate looked too.
“I just saw it,” he said. “A second ago.”
“What?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. It was—”
Something big and white came rushing up at them from underwater. Kate was so shocked she fell over backward. For a second she was sure it was a great white shark leaping out of the water to devour them both in one mouthful.
But that didn’t happen. It wasn’t a shark. It was a polar bear.
The poor thing looked exhausted—she was desperately paddling to keep her black nose above the water. With the last of her strength, the bear lunged upward and got her head and paws onto the edge of the car.
Kate and Tom grabbed double handfuls of her cold, thick, wet fur and pulled as hard as they could. The bear managed to get a hind foot onto the car, and Kate pulled on that, too. They heaved and heaved, and for a good minute there it felt like the poor thing would never make it, but finally the bear rolled and scraped and lumbered the rest of her body up onto the flat car, and all three of them collapsed, breathing hard.
Kate’s shin burned where she’d skinned it on the edge of the car. The polar bear was sopping wet, and even though she was incredibly heavy, she looked strangely thin for a bear. You could practically see her ribs. She didn’t move. Kate wasn’t even sure she was alive.
“I sure hope you have a ticket,” she said.
14
Tom Was Right
KATE RAN OFF TO THE PASSENGER CARS TO RECRUIT ANY animals who might be strong enough to help move the polar bear. She came back with a mountain lion, a couple of fellow bears, and a squad of very determined badgers, and together they rolled the polar bear onto a blanket and dragged her into the shelter of an empty boxcar. It probably would’ve been impossible if the poor thing hadn’t been half-starved.
She did have a ticket, though, clamped in her powerful jaws.
Kate very carefully extracted it and punched it. She couldn’t help but think that something had gone badly wrong here, but she wasn’t sure exactly what. She got some towels and more blankets from the sleeper car, and together she and Tom dried the bear and got her as warm as they could. Finally Kate fetched a heaping bucket of fish and a big bowl of water from the kitchen and left them on a tray by the bear’s head for when she woke up.
Kate put a wary hand on the polar bear’s cold shoulder. Her fur was coarse and wiry.
“You’ll be okay,” she said. “You’re safe now.”
She hoped it was true.
By then it was dinnertime, and she went to the dining car to eat with the gang from the library. Tom came, too. The mood was subdued.
“I hope she’ll be all right,” Kate said.
“Sure she will,” the heron said.
“Polar bears are tough,” said the cat. “Very hard to kill.”
“I could probably kill a polar bear,” the snake said. “Couldn’t eat one, though, so what would be the point?”
Everybody stared at her.
“Anyway, she’ll probably be fine.”
It occurred to Kate that they hadn’t all been properly introduced, not the way humans did it anyway. So she and Tom told the animals a little about themselves and where they came from, and the animals told her and Tom about themselves, too.
The snake was an eastern green mamba from South Africa. (“Another ridiculous name. Mamba—I can hardly say it! Only a creature with lips would think of a name like that.”) He spent most of his time in trees. He insisted that in spite of his fearsome reputation he was rather shy and generally kept to himself.
The bird was a white-bellied heron from a river in India, and she was about a yard tall and incredibly beautiful—her neck was long and curvy, and her feathers were a million fine shades of gray. She had a thin, rather tasteful silvery crest on the top of her head, and, as advertised, a pure-white belly.
“We used to be called great Indian herons, or imperial herons,” she said. “Come to think of it, I can’t think why we changed. Those both sound much better.”
Kate took the opportunity to ask her about something that had always bothered her, which was how herons could walk with knees that bent backward. It turned out that the heron’s knees worked exactly the same way human knees did, you just couldn’t see them because they were tucked up under her feathers. What looked like the heron’s knee was actually her ankle, and what looked like her lower leg was actually a long, skinny foot.
Kate found that explanation almost equally unsettling.
“I always thought if I ever went on an adventure with talking animals, it would be with bunnies and mice and that sort of thing,” Kate said. “I mean, no offense.”
“None taken,” said the porcupine (who was just a very grumpy North American porcupine from Michigan). “Though you’re lucky. Rabbits and mice are incredibly boring. All they talk about is vegetables and seeds.”
For dinner the heron and the cat both ate fish. The porcupine worked his way through a big heap of clover, then gnawed on a branch. The mamba didn’t eat at all.
“I swallowed a wild gerbil a few days ago,” he explained, “and I’m still digesting. Besides, the sight of a mamba feeding is too awe-inspiring for most animals to watch.”
“It’s probably the way you inject your prey with horrible venom,” the porcupine said, “that makes them suffocate in their own skin.”