Eva Padlyat lived in an Inuit village on Ungava Bay in northern Canada. In winter, when people wanted mussels to eat, they searched along the bottom of the seabed. Eva had often walked on the bottom, helping her mother, but today—for the very first time—she was to go down below the thick sea ice herself. Her mother went with her to the shore and out onto the ice. The time was just right. The outgoing tide had pulled the seawater away, leaving only the ice above and the rock-strewn seabed below.

Eva lowered herself through a hole in the ice and, by candlelight, had soon collected a pan full of mussels. There was still time to explore, she decided. But she stumbled and her candle went out. She was alone in darkness, and the tide had turned. When, at the end of her adventure, she is safe with her mother again on top of the ice, she says, "that was my very last first time for walking alone on the bottom of the sea."

Together, Jan Andrew's text and Ian Wallace's extraordinary full-color illustrations capture the eerie, fantastic world that lies between the bottom of the sea and the ice above and let the reader share a very special experience of a small Inuit girl.

From the dust jacket