While Farder was talking to the other leaders, she took the tin to lorek Byrnison and explained her idea. It had e to her when she remembered his slig so easily through the metal of the engine cover.
He listened, and then took the lid of a biscuit tin aly folded it into a small flat der. She marveled at the skill of his hands: unlike most bears, he and his kin had opposable thumb claws with which they could hold things still to work on them; and he had some innate sense of the strength and flexibility of metals which meant that he only had to lift it once or twice, flex it this way and that, and he could run a claw over it in a circle to score it for folding.
He did this now, folding the sides in and in until they stood in a raised rim and then making a lid to fit it. At Lyras bidding he made two: ohe same size as the inal smokeleaf tin, and another just big enough to taiin itself and a quantity of hairs and bits of moss and li all packed down tight to smother the noise. When it was closed, it was the same size and shape as the alethiometer.
When that was done, she sat o lorek Byrnison as he gnawed a haunch of reihat was frozen as hard as wood.
「lorek,」 she said, 「is it hard not having a daemon? Dont you get lonely?」
「Lonely?」 he said. 「I dont know. They tell me this is cold. I dont know what cold is, because I dont freeze. So I dont know what lonely meaher. Bears are made to be solitary.」
「What about the Svalbard bears?」 she said. 「Theres thousands of them, ent there? Thats what I heard.」
He said nothing, but ripped the joint in half with a sound like a splitting log.
「Beg pardon, lorek,」 she said. 「I hope I ent offended you. Its just that Im curious. See, Im extra curious about the Svalbard bears because of my father.」
「Who is your father?」
「Lord Asriel. And they got him captive on Svalbard, you see. I think the Gobblers betrayed him and paid the bears to keep him in prison.」
「I dont know. I am not a Svalbard bear.」
「I thought you was....」
「No. I was a Svalbard bear, but I am not now. I was sent away as a punishment because I killed another bear. So I was deprived of my rank and my wealth and my armor a out to live at the edge of the human world and fight when I could find employment at it, or work at brutal tasks and drown my memory in raw spirits.」
「Why did you kill the other bear?」
「Ahere are ways among bears of turning away er with each other, but I was out of my own trol. So I killed him and I was justly punished.」
「And you were wealthy and high-ranking,」 said Lyra, marveling. 「Just like my father, lorek! Thats just the same with him after I was born. He killed someooo and they took all his wealth away. That was long before he got made a prisoner on Svalbard, though. I dont know anything about Svalbard, except its in the farthest North....Is it all covered in ice? you get there over the frozen sea?」
「Not from this coast. The sea is sometimes frozen south of it, sometimes not.
You would need a boat.」
「Or a balloon, maybe.」
「Or a balloon, yes, but then you would he right wind.」
He ghe reindeer haunch, and a wild notion flew into Lyras mind as she remembered all those witches in the night sky; but she said nothing about that.
Instead she asked lorek Byrnison about Svalbard, and listened eagerly as he told her of the slow-crawling glaciers, of the rocks and ice floes where the bright-tusked walruse