Two Degrees

Sue yells for Akira to hurry up as the house blazes behind her. Dodger still won’t move, even as the wooden arbor above the pool begins to burn. Sue finds an apple in her backpack and calls to the horse, who immediately climbs out of the pool at the sight of food. As soon as Akira and Dodger leave the pool the arbor collapses behind them. The girls mount the horse and begin riding him away from the house.

As they ride along the road, Akira and Sue are surprised to find that everything around them is already burned. The world is gray and lifeless. Akira begins to realize that they must be trapped between multiple fires, and they might come face to face with the flames at any moment. Sue begins to describe a science experiment from school where her teacher cooked a pot of ravioli until all the water burned off. The ravioli dried up and then combusted. She compares the ravioli to California, which makes Akira think again about climate change. As they make their way higher up the mountain, they find a burned pickup truck, almost melted into the pavement. Inside there are three blackened corpses.

Akira and Sue are horrified by the bodies. They think about their dads and wonder if the men are in similar condition somewhere on the mountain. Knowing there is nothing they can do, and they ride on and find two more vehicles full of burned passengers. They can barely look away; they are now face to face with the devastation that the fire has caused. Sue encourages Akira to keep moving, and soon they see another pickup truck, this time driving along the road.

The pickup stops and a crying woman asks if Akira and Sue have seen a man in a blue SUV, her husband. They have not, and she has not seen their fathers. She introduces herself as Vicki and, when Akira explains that Sue is hurt, asks them to get in the truck, saying that they will never make it through the fire on Dodger. Sue complies but Akira remains on Dodger, she cannot imagine leaving him to fend for himself again.

Without the snowmobile, George and Owen begin walking toward Hudson Bay, hoping to get their bearings and find Churchill before nightfall. George shares that his grandmother told him that the Inuit believe polar bears, called Nanuq, are able to fly and shape-shift. When a bear goes into an igloo, it becomes a human. They laugh about people they believe to be polar bears, and agree that Suzy Tookome, a girl from their school who was attacked several years earlier, is definitely a bear. Owen laments that he lost his tips from the tourists on the snowmobile, since he planned to use it to buy a snowmobile of his own. George tells him not to worry, since he wastes all his money on frivolous things. They stop to rest but soon hear a wolf howling and realize they need to continue.

The boys walk through the frozen tundra, thinking about all the animals that make their home there, hidden from the tourists who see it as a frozen wasteland. They come across a strange sight, a grove of burned trees, which they realize is from a rare tundra wildfire the previous summer. As they silently make their way through the charred landscape, Owen slips and falls into a hole under the snow.

At first, Owen thinks he has fallen into a lake but hears George laughing and realizes it is only a waist-deep burrow between two trees. Although he is able to crawl free, the wound on his leg is ripped open and he begins to bleed. The boys investigate the hole, which is larger than they realize, and conclude that it is an empty polar bear den. Owen realizes he has been to the spot before, as it is a common polar bear nesting spot and Owen’s family often takes tourists there to photograph babies. As they continue on, Owen makes George promise that he won’t tell anyone he panicked from falling into the hole.

Owen thinks about a client he calls the Weather Lady, a polar bear expert who his family brought to the tundra several years in a row. She told him that polar bears use the same dens for hundreds of years and he feels sorry for the next year’s mothers who will return to their historic nesting ground to find all the trees burned away. When the boys come to a frozen bog, he sees more signs of a changing landscape. He falls on the bog’s edge, and the icy land around it disintegrates, spilling all of the water down a hillside. George jokingly asks him how many more habitats he plans to destroy, which makes Owen announce that it is time for an insult contest. Despite their dire situation, George accepts.

George and Owen love insult contests, a game they have based off a longstanding Inuit tradition in which people write mocking songs and perform them in front of each other. In the boys’ version, the loser is the first person to laugh. The boys launch into a string of lighthearted jabs at one another. Soon, though, it becomes serious. George begins yelling about all the things Owen did wrong during the bear attack, then moves on to all the things wrong with him in general. Owen, holding back tears, yells back, asking why George suddenly hates Churchill so much. In response, George tells him that he doesn’t actually want to leave, but his dad has lost his job.

The mood changes quickly as George explains that the port where his dad works has steadily been losing business and just laid many workers off. His parents plan to move to Newfoundland, although none of them want to leave. Owen suggests that maybe once the sea ice melts the Churchill port will become busy again. This only makes George more upset because he has to hope for more climate change to save his dad’s job. As Owen is formulating a response, they realize that the Nanuq (polar bear) is watching them from a nearby hillside.

The water in the ship steadily rises, and the occupants realize they have to leave as soon as possible, or they will sink. Natalie cannot imagine going back into the water. She distracts herself by thinking about Mariposa but can only imagine it being swept up in a raging storm like the model back at her house. She thinks about Mama and Tía, hoping they managed to escape. Derek looks outside and sees tall buildings. He tells everyone on the boat to be ready to leave if they hit something they can climb onto. When they hear a loud scraping sound, they prepare to disembark.

The boat slams against an apartment balcony, and Derek calls for his sons to help hold them in place while everyone leaves the boat. Natalie and Javari are the last ones aboard. Just as she is about to step onto the balcony, a huge fiberglass flamingo blows into the boat. The jolt causes Derek to lose hold of the boat’s railing, and she falls back onto the deck. She sees Javari fall into the water and is soon swept away as Derek and Marcus yell and reach to try to help them. Once again, she and Churro are alone.

Scanning the darkness for any means of escape from the sinking boat, Natalie spots an alligator swimming nearby. Then, she sees a Burmese python. Both could easily kill her, but they don’t seem interested in attacking a girl or a chihuahua, as they are struggling against the storm just like she is. To her relief, the boat soon hits a rooftop that is still above water, and she climbs onto it. As she searches the roof for a dry place to hide, she is hit by a wave and swept underwater again.

At first, Natalie thinks she is back at the mercy of the storm, but she realizes she can taste chorine and her hands feel a strange smooth wall. With relief, she realizes she is in a rooftop pool. She finds the ladder and climbs out, only to realize that a manatee was also in the pool. She feels connected to the animal, both of them in an unknown environment, swept away from home by the storm. Wishing the manatee good luck, she runs to a small storage shed to hide from the wind. As soon as she gets inside, the shed’s roof begins to peel off, and Natalie begins to feel rage toward the storm. She yells for it to stop and to her shock, it does.