"Where on Kitlineq?" Powell demanded. "That's Victoria Island, right? It's a big place. Where exactly is it located?"

"I seem to have forgotten my GPS tracker," Raven said, exasperated.

"I don't even know what that is," Powell told the spirit. "Most likely Chey does, but it doesn't matter. Tell me how to find the silver ulu, and I'll let you go."

"I only know what it looks like from the air. If she lets me go, I can draw you a map."

"You forget I don't have any eyes to see it," Powell told him.

Raven gasped in frustration. "Your wives here can see it. Or Musquash. Look, there's no good way to just tell you. I need to draw a map, and I can't do that with a werewolf hanging on my neck."

"Alright. But if you try to fly off before I'm satisfied, you'll regret it."

"I'm sure," Raven said.

Lucie dropped down to her feet and let Raven go. Instantly the bird spirit tried to slip his arms inside his cloak so he could transform back into his animal form. Lucie didn't need to be told what to do. She grabbed one of his arms and twisted it up behind his back-hard enough that if he'd been human she would have dislocated his shoulder. Raven cried out pitiably and tears rolled down his cheeks.

"Please! Please! You've won," he moaned.

Chey looked over at Dzo, who just shook his head. He wasn't buying this act.

"Twist it again," she told Lucie.

Lucie complied.

"Alright! Alright. I'll draw your damned map. Then you let me go."

"Alright, Lucie," Powell said. "That's enough."

Lucie let go of Raven. The bird spirit shook his arm out, but it didn't appear to be broken. The tears were instantly gone from his face and he did little more than mutter as he grabbed a twig from the fire and started drawing in the snow. The light was bad, but Chey studied every aspect of the map as best she could.

"Here, there's a lake. It looks like a whale's flukes from above, yes? There's a hill over here, on the north side, and over here there's a pile of rocks sticking up out of the ground that resemble fingers."

"Is this what it looks like now, or what it looked like ten thousand years ago?" Chey thought to ask.

Raven scowled and scrubbed out the map he'd been drawing. "You can't blame an old trickster spirit for trying," he said. He started drawing again. The lake's shape had changed considerably, stretching itself out across the terrain. The hill was gone altogether, but the fingerlike stones remained. "Of course, they're smaller now, and this one, the index finger, has fallen over. Now, there's an island on the lake, and there's a cave on the island. At the bottom of the cave you'll find the ulu-and everything else you have coming to you. Got it?"

"I think so," Chey said.

"Good. Farewell!" Raven shoved his arms back into his cloak and it became a pair of wings. With a sarcastic "Caw!" he jumped into the air and turned into a bird. A bird that flew away at top speed.

Chey knelt down in the snow over the map, memorizing every line, trying to imprint every detail on her brain so she wouldn't lose it.

"I think-I think I can remember this," she told Powell. "I think we can do this! I don't believe I'm saying this. But I think we can find this thing. We can find the cure."

"Maybe we can," he told her. But there was something wrong with his voice. He didn't sound particularly happy. If anything, he sounded like his worst fear had just come to pass. He rolled over and turned his eyeless face away from her.

Chey was suddenly energized, excited at the prospect of the cure. She could be human again-even better, she could reverse the madness that had been consuming her, the depredations of her wolf on her humanity. She tried to ask a million questions about Victoria Island, and the best way to get there. Powell was very tired, though, and his wounds bothered him so much that he just wanted to curl up and rest.

"We've learned something valuable, yes," he agreed with her. "Though there are still problems to overcome. It won't be easy to find this place."

"What are you talking about?" she asked. "It should be easy. We have a map, now."

"We know it's on an island in a lake on Victoria Island," he said. "That's actually less useful than you seem to think. We still don't know exactly where this lake is."

"We don't? How many lakes can there be on one island?"

Powell grimaced. "Victoria Island has hundreds of them. It's a bigger place than you think it is."

"How big?"

"It's the size of England and Scotland. And we don't have a map."

Chey refused to have her mood dampened. "So we just need a guide. Dzo-what about you? You must know the place pretty well, right?"

Dzo waved his hands in the air. "Don't look at me. There's no musquashes on Victoria Island. Haven't been for a very long time. I've never been there, myself."

Chey frowned. "Well-we just have to get a good map, then."

Lucie laughed. "And how shall we do that, jeune fille? Perhaps we find some nice Eskimo nearby and say, give us your maps or we tear out your throat? A solution that has worked for me before, I will admit, though I doubt Monty will allow it."

"You know damned well I won't," he agreed.

Fuming with frustration, Chey sat down hard by the fire and hugged herself. "This would be so easy if we could just Google it."

The rest of them stared at her as if she'd suddenly started speaking in Sanskrit.

She stared back. "What?" Then she shook her head, realizing she was the only one in the camp less than a hundred years old. "Right. None of you have ever used the Internet. You've probably never even heard of it."

"Is it like one of those ... GPS boxes Raven mentioned?" Dzo asked.

"Non, non, non. I think-yes, I believe I heard something of this Internet, when I was in Russia," Lucie admitted. "It is a new kind of television, yes? It was all the rage."

Chey laughed. "Yes, that's exactly what it is." She scrubbed at her face with her hands. "Oh, my God. Look, there's this program-this-this Web page-" She stopped because she was getting a lot of blank looks. "Okay, imagine a map, a really, really good map of the world. It's based on satellite images, so it's up to date and it shows everything. You know what satellites are, right?"

"Oh, yes," Lucie said, beaming. "Like Sputnik."

"Yeah," Powell said, sitting up a little. "I remember Sputnik. Drove the Americans crazy. They thought it would rain bombs on them. That didn't ever happen, though, right?"

" ... Right," Chey confirmed. "This is going to take a long time to explain. They have a lot of satellites now, and some of them have cameras on them, to take pictures of the Earth from above. By combining all those pictures they can make a photographic map of the entire planet. Including Victoria Island. With a computer, you can access those pictures. If we could get to a computer, we could look at the pictures of Victoria Island and find this lake. It would be pretty easy, actually."

"You would have to pore over thousands of pictures with a magnifying glass," Powell said, shaking his head. "It could take weeks."

"No it wouldn't," Chey said. "There are some benefits to progress, really." She hugged her knees against her chest. "Listen," she said, because she'd had a sudden thought. "Powell, when you went hunting for that seal, you said you saw there were towns up on the coast."

"Yes," he agreed.

"Well, any of those towns would do. Any of them is likely to have at least some kind of Internet connection."

"Really?" he asked. "Are you sure? A lot of them don't have running water or sewers. And there are no roads up here."

"Trust me, even a place that still uses outhouses will already have the Internet. People have to get their porn somehow. If we could go to one of those towns, we could ask to borrow somebody's computer for a couple hours. We could find this place on Victoria Island, figure out exactly how to get there. Then we just leave, and nobody gets hurt."

"What if we don't find it before we transform?" Powell asked. "I don't think this is a very good idea."

"It's going to be four more days before we change again," Chey pointed out. "Trust me, that's more than enough time."

"I don't know," he said. "It's dangerous. I don't think I can allow this."

Chey felt anger flush through her. Her cheeks burned as she stood up and loomed over him. "Listen," she said. "When we're wolves, you're the alpha pack leader head honcho whatever," she told him, "but right now I'm human, and I don't need you telling me what to do."

"You don't?" he asked. He honestly looked surprised.

"I'm going. My mind's made up. I'm doing this. For once I'm going to be the one in charge. You can try to stop me, but it'll be pretty hard tracking me without any eyes."

"That's a cruel thing to say," he told her.

She didn't bother addressing that. "Lucie-you watch him while I'm gone. If anything happens to Powell before I get back, I'm holding you personally responsible."

"I shall nurse him back to health, like my own baby," Lucie assured her.

"Creepy. But I guess it'll have to do. Dzo, you come with me. Do you know where the nearest town is?"

The musquash spirit shrugged. "Yeah, I guess so. There's one about twenty kilometers east of here. Just a couple hundred people, almost all of them Inuit. They're probably all buttoned down for the winter."

"Perfect," Chey said, and without further ado, she started walking east through the snow.

Chey and Dzo trudged on in silence for a while, covering a lot of ground. She was in a hurry to get to this town and find a computer. He kept up with her easily, his feet barely sinking into the powdery snow. He looked sad, though, and after a while she had to ask. "What's up?" she said. "We're finally on the right track. Isn't that a good thing?"

"I guess," he said.

"So what's wrong?"

He shrugged and pulled down his wooden mask. It was something he did when he felt like human weirdness was getting to be too much for him, she knew. "I'm very happy for you and Powell," he told her. "Really. I just wonder what's going to happen to me after you're gone."

"We're not going anywhere," she told him. "We're just going to be human again."

He shrugged. "Sure. And maybe-maybe you'll let me come stay with you? I'm not real good with cities. Too much stuff going on all at once."

"I imagine we won't be moving to Toronto anytime soon, either," she told him. "I've almost started to like this place. Well, not this tundra." She looked out across the frozen waste. She saw little but a barren snow field stretching to the horizon. There were a few hills to the south, but they did little to break up the monotony. "We'll go back to Great Bear Lake. Maybe we'll head down to Yellowknife every once in a while for a beer. You can definitely come along." It was a rosier picture than she really believed in, of course. She and Powell had done enough horrible things that they were more likely to be sent to jail as soon as they set foot back in civilization. But eventually they would be let out again, if they were model prisoners and showed real remorse, she thought. "We'll live together like a happy family."

"Sure," he said. "Until you die."

She stopped in her tracks. "What?"

"You'll be human. You'll be mortal again." He threw his hands up in the air. "Do you even understand how long I've been alive already? How much longer I'm going to live? It's like, forever. That's years and years yet. I'm sure you two will be real nice to me, but you'll be gone before I even notice, really."

Chey exhaled long and hard. Then she rushed over and hugged him, her arms sinking into the depths of his furs. He stood stiffly in her arms for a moment, then laid his head against her chest.

"We'll have good times before then, I promise," she said. "And ... and maybe you can hang out with, you know. Our children."

Now there was a crazy thought.

It was weird. Chey had been doubtful at best about this cure when Powell had mentioned it before. Now she believed in it-completely. She was certain that she would be human again, and that it wouldn't be long in coming.

The wolf in her brain howled at the thought, but her good mood was enough to keep it from getting out.

They stopped after a couple hours and rested for a while, or rather, Chey rested while Dzo stood guard. He didn't sleep, as far as she knew, nor did he ever tire. She supposed there were real advantages to being the collective soul of a rodent species.

When they started up again, dawn was breaking-a long, drawn-out process that involved lots of pink clouds. The early light made the snow buzz a fluorescent blue that made her head fizz just to look at it. Before the sun was fully up, however, she caught her first sight of the town.

It didn't look like much. Just a couple dozen low, square buildings, half buried in snow. The rooftops were completely covered except for where chimney pots and radio aerials stuck up out of the accumulations. There were roads, or at least places where someone had plowed the snow back, leaving wide striped tire marks in the white. At every corner a light on a tall pole loomed over the buildings, shedding sickly yellow illumination that bounced off icicles and windows alike.

As the two of them walked cautiously into the town's main road, they didn't see a single human being. Occasionally they heard a snatch of music from a distant radio, and once they had to step back into a snowdrift to let a rumbling pickup truck glide past. Chains on its tires jangled and its lights painted the walls it passed by, but there was so much half-scraped snow on the windshield that they couldn't see the driver.

Chey found herself glad that they'd arrived so early. The fewer people they came across, the less likely they were to get into trouble. Powell had been a jerk for telling her she couldn't do this, but she knew he was right-this was a dangerous mission behind, in a sense, enemy lines. She kept her head down in case anyone was looking out of a window, and she studied the buildings they passed, anxious to get this over with.

It didn't take long to find the place they were looking for. It was one of the largest buildings in town and it had a handicapped ramp out front of a wide pair of double doors. The brown-painted front of the building was adorned with a hand-painted mural that showed a smiling Inuit family, dressed in parkas with fur-lined hoods. In the middle of the mural was a big sign in yellow type that read: HAMLET OF UMIAQ, NU.

Town Offices, Fire Brigade,

Post Office, Northern Store,

Community Center, Health

Clinic & Public Library

-welcome!- She shook the snow off her feet and headed inside, Dzo trailing after her.