Seekers #6: Spirits in the Stars by Erin Hunter

smelled like the dead seal, and like Sura, but here the smell was so strong that it made Lusa’s eyes water and her belly flip over.
    “This place is really bad,” she choked out.
    Even Kallik was looking worried by now as she stared at the pipe and the oozing stuff. “You’re right, Lusa,” she murmured. “We have to tell Ujurak and Toklo about this.”

Chapter Eight
    Ujurak
    “Okay, little cub,” Ujurak said. He crouched down just outside the thornbushes that screened the entrance to their den, so that he was eye-to-eye with Kissimi. “I’m a seal. What are you going to do to me?”
    Kissimi let out a squeak of delight and pounced on Ujurak, batting at him with small, soft paws. Ujurak rolled over, paws in the air. “Oh! Oh! A big, fierce, white bear got me!”
    “Oh, please . . .” Toklo muttered from where he sat a little way up the hill from the mouth of the den. “You’re getting as bad as Kallik.”
    Ujurak sat up, shaking his pelt, and gently brushed the snow from Kissimi’s fine white fur. “We’re just playing,” he replied mildly. Affection washed over him as he glanced over at Toklo. He knew very well that whatever the big grizzly said, he wouldn’t let the little cub die. “I told Kallik I’d look after him, and—”
    He broke off as he spotted movement farther down the valley and made out Kallik and Lusa racing toward him.
    “Toklo! Ujurak!” Their agitated cries rang through the air.
    Toklo sprang to his paws, and Ujurak scanned the valley behind his two friends, half expecting to see some of the white bears chasing them. But nothing else moved in all the snowy landscape.
    “What’s the matter?” Ujurak asked as the two she-bears panted up to him and flopped down on the snow. Anxiety clawed at him as he saw the distraught expression in their eyes.
    “The white bears chased us,” Lusa panted. “Into a cove . . .”
    “There’s foul stuff leaking out,” Kallik added, stumbling over her words in her eagerness to tell the story. “Sickness!”
    “Sick seals! Sick bears!” Lusa wailed.
    “Calm down.” Toklo strode over to them, authority in his voice. He rested a paw on Lusa’s shoulder. “Start at the beginning.”
    As the two she-bears caught their breath, Kissimi wobbled over to Kallik, letting out squeaks of joy at seeing her again. Kallik let him climb onto her back and snuggle into her fur, while Lusa began the story.
    Ujurak listened with growing concern as he learned what Lusa and Kallik had discovered. He could see that Toklo, too, was finally taking Lusa’s ideas more seriously.
    “So we climbed out of the cove on the other side,” Kallik finished, “and sneaked past the no-claw dens so that the white bears wouldn’t see us.”
    “What are we going to do now?” Lusa asked.
    “That leaking stuff sounds really terrible,” Toklo said. “I feel like I can smell it now.”
    Ujurak raised his snout into the air and sniffed experimentally. “I can smell it!” he exclaimed, gagging as the rank smell drifted into his nostrils. “Lusa, do you have some on your fur?”
    Lusa twisted around, trying to see all her pelt at once. “Oh, yuck, I do!” she complained, rolling in the snow in an attempt to clean off a patch of her shoulder fur. “I don’t think I’ll ever get rid of it.”
    Ujurak reeled back from the stench, his mind spinning. That stuff is really bad. He remembered the last time he’d been a flat-face on the ice, helping to rescue the creatures who had been poisoned by oil from the rig. This must be a different kind of poison.
    “If the stuff smells as horrible as this,” he said, “it must be poisoning the seals and the fish and everything in the sea. And then the bears that eat them.” He paused, then added decisively, “We need to tell Aga.”
    Kallik rose to her paws. “We’ll have to find out where the white bears are denning. Come on.”
    “Hey, Kallik.” Toklo stopped the white bear before she had gone more than a couple of