The frost cycle sealed the rainforest route three days after Ugh reached the falls. He walked back to the river mouth to check. Ice crusted the passage. The way home was shut. He counted his dried food and found enough for maybe five days. He would be stranded here far longer than that. The route would not open until the frost broke. Ugh did not panic. He sat on a cold rock and spread his chart across his knees. He could not leave. So he would work. If he was stuck on the far shore, he would log every living thing on it. He wrote a new goal at the top of a blank page: catalog the far shore. Béyla found him there at dusk. She was his partner now, the beekeeper who had crossed the forest to raise her colony where the last keeper died. She carried her bone pry bar on her hip. She looked at his supply case, then at the sealed route behind him. "Stuck," she said. It was not a question. "Until the thaw," Ugh said. "Then we eat from the trees." She pointed her chin toward the forage grounds. "I know where the food grows. You know what kills you. We trade." They worked for days. Béyla led him to a stand of purple-blue trees heavy with glowing berries and bright shelf fungi. Her bees crawled the yellow blooms above. Ugh pressed a berry cluster between two sheets. He sketched the twisting bark and the vines wrapped around it. Béyla cut a slab of the yellow fungus and tasted the edge. "Safe," she said. "Bitter. It fills you." He logged it as food. She showed him a silver-barked tree with violet leaves and green-glowing nuts. Ugh cracked one open. The meat inside was dense and oily. He checked it against every poison case he had memorized. Nothing matched. "We can eat these," he said. Béyla filled a basket while he drew the tree onto his chart. Deeper in, they found it. A fungus taller than both of them, its rose-pink caps spread in wide layers. Spores drifted down like dust. Ugh raised a hand to stop Béyla. "Don't breathe close," he said. He knew this shape from the exposure records. The spores could cripple a mind. He sketched it from six paces back and marked it in red: do not touch. Béyla stepped away without a word. By the eighth day his chart held eleven new species. Three were food. His supply case was empty, but the baskets were full. The far shore would feed them until the thaw. That night Béyla crouched at the hive. Her glow had gone from calm green to sharp blue. "My bees aren't coming back full," she said. "Something's stripping the far blooms before they reach them." She pointed at the giant pink fungus on his map. "And I think it came from near that."

Ugh crossed the ridge beyond the lunanut grove at first light. He needed one fact. How many bears roamed the far slope? Until he knew, his chart of safe forage stayed open, and Béyla's hives faced another raid. He moved slow, reading the ground. He found old tracks, scat full of lunanut husks, and claw marks on three frostbark trunks. All matched the one bear he had already redirected. He searched for a second set and found none. Then the ground changed. The grass turned purple and stiff. Ugh pushed through a stand of frostbark and stopped. A herd fed in the open below him. Tall, sleek animals with armored coats and sweeping chitin crests. A stag lifted its head, antlers branching violet, thermal tips glowing. A doe near him turned, cyan light steady around her dark eyes. Males and females both. He had never logged this species. He crouched and drew fast, crest shape, leg joints, the glow lines along their flanks. The herd grazed the purple grass, not the frostbark. That mattered. These grazers would not compete with the bees. Ugh wrote it down and smiled. A whole new animal, male and female, and no threat to Béyla. A short, heavy bird burst from the grass ahead. Chitin scales, violet sheen, green eyes that glowed. It scolded him and ran. Ugh followed its path to a nest woven from frostbark twigs and purple grass. Six eggs lay inside, faintly glowing, laced with frost. He took two for his pack and left the rest. A male of the same kind stood guard on a rock, crest rigid, coat like gray metal. Both sexes logged. Breakfast too. He climbed higher to finish the survey. From the top of the slope he saw the whole far side at last. Grass, frostbark stands, the herd, the birds. And no other bears. One animal ranged here. The tracks, the scat, the clawed trees, all led back to the single bear he had already moved. The far slope held no hidden raiders. Ugh opened his chart on a flat stone. He drew the slope's edge. He marked the grazing herd and the nesting birds as harmless to the bloom. He wrote the count that had stayed blank for days. One bear. The chart of safe forage was complete. He sat with it and saw the trouble inside the answer. One bear was the whole slope's bear. The lunanut grove could not feed it the season. When the fruit ran out, that bear had nowhere else to turn but back to the meadow and Béyla's frostbark. No second bear meant no rival to hold it off, and no other range to draw it away. Ugh closed the chart. The far slope was mapped. The count was known. But Béyla's six hives had already dropped to four since the last raid, and the one bear was coming back. He had to feed it or lose the bloom.