At this, the bear made a deep noise in the back of its throat. After glaring at it for a moment, the fox said, “Heavy it was, that hammer. Heavier than people dream. It weighed as much as a small mountain. Too heavy to carry, if you are not Thor. And yet, not too much for my genius. I took off my shoes, which, as I said, can walk on the air, and I tied them, one to the handle and one to the head. Then I snapped my fingers and the hammer followed me.

“This time I hurried to the gates of Asgard. I unbarred them and I walked through—followed, I do not need to tell you, by the hammer.

“The maiden was there. She was sitting on a boulder and she was weeping.

“‘Why the tears, O loveliness itself?’ I asked.

“At that, she looked up at me with a tear-stained face. ‘I weep because once I saw you, great and noble lord, I knew I could never love another. And yet I am doomed to give my heart and my caress only to he who lets me touch the Hammer of Thor.’

“I reached out a hand and touched her cold, wet cheek. ‘Dry your tears,’ I told her. ‘And behold…the Hammer of Thor!’

“She stopped crying then, and reached out her delicate hands and held the hammer tightly. I had reckoned I could have my fun with the lady and still get the hammer back into the hall before Thor woke up. But we would need to get a move on.

“‘Now,’ I said. ‘About that kiss.’

“For a moment I thought she had begun to cry once again, and then I knew that she was laughing. But the noise she made was not a sweet, tinkling, maidenly laugh. It was a deep, crashing noise, like an ice sheet grinding against a mountainside.

“The maiden pulled my shoes from the hammer and dropped them to the ground. She held the hammer as if it was a feather. A wave of cold engulfed me, and I found myself looking up at her, and to make matters worse she wasn’t even a she any longer.

“She was a man. Well, not a man. Male, yes. Yet big as a high hill, icicles hanging from his beard. And she—he, rather—said, ‘After so long, all it took was one drunken, lust-ridden oaf, and Asgard is ours.’ Then the Frost Giant peered down at me, and he gestured with the Hammer of Thor. ‘And you,’ he said in a deep and extremely satisfied voice, ‘you need to be something else.’

“I felt my back pushing up. I felt a tail pushing its way out from the base of my spine. My fingers shrank into paws and claws. It wasn’t the first time I had turned into animal form—I was a horse once, you know—but it was the first time it was imposed on me from the outside, and it wasn’t a nice feeling. Not a nice feeling at all.”

“It was worse for us,” said the bear. “One moment you are fast asleep, dreaming about thunderstorms, and the next you’re being scrunched into a bear. They turned the All-father into an eagle.”

The eagle screeched, startling Odd. “Rage!” it said.

“The giant laughed at us, waving my hammer around the while, and then he forced Heimdall to summon the Rainbow Bridge and exiled the three of us here to Midgard. There’s no more to tell.”

There was silence then in the tiny hut. Only the crackle and spit of a pine branch on the fire.

“Well,” said Odd, “Gods or not, I can’t keep feeding you, if this winter keeps going. I don’t think I can keep feeding me.”

“We won’t die,” said the bear, “because we can’t die here. But we’ll get hungry. And we’ll get more wild. More animal. It’s something that happens when you have taken on animal form. Stay in it too long and you become what you pretend to be. When Loki was a horse—”

“We don’t talk about that,” said the fox.

“So is that why the winter isn’t ending?” said Odd.

“The Frost Giants like the winter. They are the winter,” said the bear.

“And if spring never comes? If summer doesn’t happen? If this winter just goes on forever?”

The bear said nothing. The fox swished its tail impatiently. They looked to the eagle. It tilted its head back, and with one fiery yellow eye it stared at Odd. Then it said, “Death!”

“Eventually,” added the fox. “Not immediately. In a year or so. And some creatures will go south. But most of the people and the animals will die. It’s happened before, back when we had wars with the Frost Giants at the dawn of time. When they won, huge ice sheets would cover this part of the world. When we won—and if it took us a hundred thousand years, we always did—the ice sheets would retreat and the spring would return. But we were Gods then, not animals.”

“And I had my hammer,” said the bear.

“Well then,” said Odd. “We’ll set off as soon as it gets light enough to travel.”

“Set off?” said the fox. “For where?”

“Asgard, of course,” said Odd, and he smiled his infuriating smile. Then he went back to his little bed, and he went back to sleep.

“WHAT’S THAT YOU’VE GOT there?” asked the fox.

“It’s a lump of wood,” said Odd. “My father began to carve it into something years ago, and he left it here, but he never came back to finish it.”

“What was it going to be?”

“I don’t know,” admitted Odd. “My father used to say that the carving was in the wood already. You just had to find out what the wood wanted to be, and then take your knife and remove everything that wasn’t that.”

“Mm.” The fox seemed unimpressed.

Odd was riding on the bear’s back. The fox trotted along beside them. High above them, the eagle rode the winds. The sun shone in a cloudless blue sky, and it was colder than it had been when there was cloud cover. They were heading towards higher ground, along a rocky ridge, following a frozen river. The wind hurt Odd’s face and ears.

“This won’t work,” said the bear gloomily. “I mean, whatever it is, it won’t.”

Odd said nothing.

“You’re smiling, aren’t you,” said the bear. “I can tell.”

The thing was this: You got to Asgard, the place the Gods came from, by crossing the Rainbow Bridge, which was called Bifrost. If you were a God, you simply wiggled your fingers and a rainbow appeared, and you walked across it.

Easy, or so the fox said, and the bear morosely agreed. Or at least, it was easy until you didn’t have fingers. Which they didn’t. Still, even if you didn’t have fingers, Loki pointed out, you could normally still find a rainbow and use it. Rainbows turned up after it rained, didn’t they?

Well, they didn’t in midwinter.

Odd thought about it. He thought about the way rainbows appeared on rainy days, when the sun came out.

“I think,” said the bear, “as a responsible adult, I should point a few things out.”

“Talk is free,” said Odd, “but the wise man chooses when to spend his words.” It was something his father used to say.

“I just thought I should point out that we are wasting our time. We don’t have any way of getting to the Rainbow Bridge. And if by some miracle we crossed it, look at us—we’re animals, and you can barely walk. We can’t defeat Frost Giants. This whole thing is hopeless.”

“He’s right,” said the fox.

“If it’s hopeless,” said Odd, “why are you coming with me?”

The animals said nothing. The morning sun sparkled up at them from the snow, dazzling Odd, making him squint.

“Nothing better to do,” said the bear after a while.

“Up here!” said Odd. He clung tightly to the bear’s fur as they clambered up the side of a steep hill. They could see the mountains beyond.

“Stop,” said Odd. The waterfall was one of his favorite places in the world. From spring until midwinter it ran high and fast before it crashed down almost a hundred feet into the valley beneath, where it had carved out a rocky basin. In high summer, when the sun barely set, the villagers would come out to the waterfall and splash around in the basin pool, letting the water tumble onto their heads.