-c- 2008 Mcgraw-hill Ryerson Limited -

“You’re not my mother,” he said.

He packed a backpack: tent, dehydrated meals, a satellite messenger (his father insisted), a rifle for polar bears, and the compass. He left a note on the kitchen table: Gone to find Tivon. Back in two weeks.

That night, Elias couldn’t sleep. The compass sat on his nightstand. At 2:17 a.m., he picked it up. The needle, which all day had spun lazily, snapped rigid. It pointed not north, but northeast—straight through his bedroom wall, across the hayfield, toward the dark line of the boreal forest.

Elias climbed into the plane. “I found something.” -C- 2008 mcgraw-hill ryerson limited

On the sixth evening, he found the first sign: a tin cup, rusted into a cleft of rock. The stamp on the bottom read MONTREAL, 1927 . Elias held it carefully. Tivon Arkell had drunk from this cup. Had maybe sat on this exact boulder, watching the same endless sky.

“I could be,” she whispered. “For you. Stay, Elias. The valley is kind to those who stay. August knows. He sent you here. Didn’t he?”

Elias held up the compass. The needle pointed northeast across the tundra. “You’re not my mother,” he said

The compass never wavered. It pointed northeast, always northeast, even when they crossed a bog that sucked at his boots, even when a sudden hailstorm forced him to huddle under his tent for six hours.

Elias buried him under the big spruce tree at the edge of the hayfield. He did not mark the grave with a stone. Instead, he planted a compass flower— Lupinus arcticus —whose seeds had lain frozen in the tundra for ten thousand years before blooming.

On the flight back, he didn’t speak. He watched the tundra scroll beneath them—lakes like shattered mirrors, rivers like silver scars. He thought about his mother, the real one. He thought about Tivon Arkell, who had followed a broken compass into a valley that didn’t exist. He thought about Grandfather August, who had known exactly what he was sending his grandson to find. Back in two weeks

“Wedged inside a cairn of stones. Two hundred kilometers north of Baker Lake.” August tapped the compass. “The needle doesn’t point to magnetic north, boy. It points to wherever Tivon’s last camp was. I’ve tested it.”

“Where did the biologist find it?” Elias asked.