The instruments that I liked the most were the flautos and recorders, especially the lovely flauto in the box with blue velvet. It was so beautiful I had been shy about even touching it, but one day I worked up my courage and took it out of the cabinet. I placed the mouthpiece to my lips and blew. A loud ringing note came out, startling me so that I almost dropped the instrument. But I held on and tried again. As that second note died away, the white bear entered the room. I fought down the instinct to hide the flauto behind my back as though I were a naughty child caught playing with grown-up things. As he came closer I could read a sort of yearning in his eyes. He lay down on the rug near the cabinet and looked up expectantly, as he did in the weaving room when he was ready to hear a story.

I shook my head. "I don't know how to play," I explained, my cheeks a little red.

"Play," he said.

"I can't." But he just stared at me with those yearning eyes. So I tried.

And though the tone of the instrument was lovely, my playing sounded like two birds of different pitch scolding each other.

The white bear closed his eyes and flattened his ears against the sound.

"Well, I warned you," I said.

Then he got up and crossed to a polished wooden chest and, using a large paw, pushed the top up. I could see bundles of paper inside, some bound, some tied with ribbon. I knew what the papers were.

"I cannot read music," I said.

The white bear sighed. Then he turned and left the room.

After he'd gone I went to the chest and sat down beside it, taking out a bundle of the papers with music written on them.

It became my new project, learning to read music. I was lucky to find a book in the chest that showed which note corresponded to which hole on the flauto.

Occasionally the white bear would come into the music room and sit and listen while I practiced, which made me self-conscious. But he never stayed long. It was as if he could only take it so long, hearing the music he knew mangled beyond all recognizable shape.

Meanwhile, the nighttime routine had taken up where it had left off. My first night back I saw that the white nightshirt was neatly folded at the foot of the bed. I picked it up, shook it out, and then carefully laid it on the side of the bed.

When the lights went out (and I still stubbornly kept at least one lamp or candle lit each night, just in case the enchantment might fail), I felt my visitor climb into bed and pull up the covers. I thought I heard a sigh, the kind of sigh a child would give after a thunderstorm is over, a sound that said that everything was once again all right. My throat grew tight with sympathy, and I felt pangs of guilt thinking of how cold and lonely the bed must have felt in my absence. I wondered if he had worn the nightshirt.

I began to have dreams about my nightly visitor. The first was actually a pleasant dream in which I awoke in the morning to find the white bear by the side of the bed, wearing the nightshirt (which had magically expanded to fit his large frame), and he was telling me he would take me home. So I climbed onto his back and we floated up into the air and flew above the land until I could spy my family's farmhouse below. We began to descend, too fast I thought, but the white bear said, "You are safe," and we landed softly in a field of snowdrops.

When I actually awoke in the morning after that dream, I half expected to see the white bear standing by the bed, but in the dim light from the lamps in the hall, I saw only the empty space beside me.

Sometime later I had another dream that was very different. In the dream I had managed to light one of the oil lamps. When I brought the lamp close to the stranger, I saw that its face was green and scaly and had a long, thin tongue that slithered in and out of its mouth while it breathed. I let out a cry and the monster awoke, opening a pair of hideous yellow eyes. Its tongue then brushed across my face and I woke up screaming, this time for real.

Again it was morning and I could see in the dim light that my visitor was gone, but I shuddered. What if it was a monster that lay beside me every night?

Tuki must not have said anything to the woman about our first encounter, for the next morning he appeared in the room where I sat waiting for him.

We went through much the same routine as before, teaching each other new words. I wasn't at all sure we would ever get to a point where we could actually converse and I could ask him questions about the white bear, but I felt I must try. And I believed the most important thing about my getting to know Tuki was the feeling I was finally doing something.

This went on for several weeks, though I was constantly worried that one day the woman would figure out what was going on and put a stop to it. Tuki seemed to trust me, even like me, and I was growing fond of him. He was so like a child—eager to please, sometimes impatient, and always wishing to be praised and petted.

We ran out of things to point to, and not wanting to upset our routine by shifting to another room, I began to use books, pointing to illustrations in them to continue our makeshift language lessons. Tuki was not a quick learner, but his eagerness to please kept him trying, and he was starting to remember some of the words I was teaching him, like Rose and hello and good-bye.

I found his language difficult but was beginning to understand parts of it. I made a little dictionary, to which I added new words every evening before bed. I kept it hidden in the closet, in my pack from home.

Finally I decided the time was right to introduce the subject of the white bear, and in preparation I went through practically every book in both libraries until I came across a book on animals that had a small picture of a white bear. I took it with me to the room on the second floor.

When we began our game that morning, I casually picked up the book about animals and began to leaf through it. I pointed to pictures of a wolf ("susi"), a beaver ("majava"), a rabbit ("kaniini"), and then finally came to the page with the white bear on it.

"White bear," I said.

"Lumi karhu" he said, then added, "vaeltaa." Then he looked at me a little uneasily. I cast about in my mind for words he might recognize that would help me ask him about the white bear. But I realized that nearly all the words I had learned were objects, not verbs. Annoyed with myself for not being better prepared, I decided I would have to settle for knowing the name for white bear in Tuki's language. It was a start.

"Lumi karhu?" repeated. "Or is it 'vaeltaa'?" He nodded at both, and I got the impression that they were two separate names for white bear. I wished I could press him, but I could tell he was uneasy. To distract him I pointed to more animals and we resumed our game.

The next time I brought a book of maps I'd found in the library. It was a beautiful volume entitled Ptolemy's Geographica, and in addition to the maps, which had been wrought in vivid colors and gold leaf, there were detailed drawings depicting the various regions of the world. I had heard of Ptolemy from my father; he was a Greek who had lived centuries before and was one of the first mapmakers. I thought of Father with a pang. How he would have treasured such a book.

I opened to a map of Njord and pointed to the spot where the village of Andalsnes would be found. "Rose from here," I said.

He stared down at it, shaking his head, mystified.

"Tuki from where?" I asked, riffling through the pages of the atlas, a questioning look on my face.