'Seekers Return to the Wild: River of Lost Bears' Erin Hunter - By Bobbie Lee Gover 8WE

This is a book by Erin Hunter which follows the journey of four bears - Toklo, a grizzly bear, Lusa, a black bear, and Kallik and Yakone, two polar bears. I wanted to read it because I had read the previous books, which I loved.

 

In this book, they have come off the arctic ice, and their journey is apparently over, with Toklo and Lusa looking for their true home with Kallik and Yakone accompaning them on the way - when Toklo and Lusa find their home, Kallik and Yakone will go back to Hudson Bay. They have to face the dangers of the land - cliffs, fierce rivers, territorial bears and most of all, humans.

 

Set in the present, in the forests, Toklo and Lusa are thriving, but Kallik and Yakone are struggling in the unfamiliar territory. They face the danger of a territorial bear named Hakan, who is bullying his sister, Chenoa. Toklo, feeling sorry for Chenoa, convinces her to join them on their journey, and Lusa and Chenoa become close friends. However, Chenoa is later killed when she falls off a waterfall, and Lusa descends into a dark mood. However, Lusa find Chenoa's 'spirit tree'. A spirit tree, to black bears like Lusa, is where the spirit of a bear goes when it dies. But humans cut it down, and put it in the river with other spirit trees. The bears manage to free them, and they continue on their journey. But then Yakone gets critically injured in a human footholder trap when he gets his paw caught. Coyotes begin to track them all, waiting for Yakone to die. They don't bother to attack, and are not afraid of any of them at all. Lusa organizes a plan - Yakone will act dead, and the rest of them will ambush the coyotes. The plan is sucessful - but then coyotes rejoin, with more then before. The bears have to jump onto a train to escape, and Toklo narrowly avoids being killed by the train, leaving the story to be continued in the next book. It is genuinly a story of mixed emotion; the genre is adventure and a bit of fantasy.

 

My favourite part was the coyote ambush. It was very clearly described, describing the difficulty of the fight and the feel of desparation to save Yakone's life.

 

Overall, the best book I have read in a long time. I would reccomend it - but you'd have to start with the first book of the first series to understand it