Katara is a waterbending master, born in the Southern Water Tribe to Chief Hakoda and his wife Kya. During her childhood, she was the only waterbender living in the South Pole and lived a peaceful life with her family. When Katara and Sokka were young, an attack on the Southern Water Tribe took the life of their mother. When Katara was thirteen, her father went with the men of the Southern Tribe toward the southern tip of the Earth Kingsom  to defend it from the Fire Nation. As the two years passed, Katara practiced her waterbending by herself, as there was no other waterbender in the Southern Tribe since her grandmother's friend, Hama, was taken away. When Katara and her brother went on a hunting expedition for their village, she practiced waterbending near their boat at an iceberg but lost control of the water, but accidentally got Sokka soaked. Katara told Sokka that her bending had improved and she had thought about their mom that time, but Sokka told her to stop bending water around him because he always gets wet. They both followed Tiger-Seal tracks leading them to an empty field of flat ice. Katara noticed a glowing patch of ice beneath her feet. Sokka knelt down and struck the ice three times with his boomerang. Suddenly there was a sound of ice cracking and huge cracks began to appear in the ice. They ran away and avoided the cracks. They turned around just in time to see a huge sphere of ice burst out of the ground and the first thing Katara noticed about the ice sphere was that there seemed to be a person frozen inside. Sokka prepared to leave thinking it was a "Fire Nation trick" but Katara grabbed his boomerang and struck the sphere of ice causing a huge crack to appear in it. She hit it a second time and the crack burst open. A blast of air shot out of it and Katara was blown across the ice and slammed into Sokka, knocking him down. A beam of white-blue light shot into the sky as it cracked open. Inside this iceberg Katara and Sokka discovered a sleeping boy and decided to carry him to their village with his "bison creature" following them along the icy shoreline. When the boy awakens Katara had a conversation with him, finding out that he ran away from home but now needed to go back.