Chapter XI: Tooth and Fang

The winter sun circled lower and lower about the horizon as the ice packed more and more solidly in the bay. By the first of November it was forty degrees below zero. But Sitka and his mother loved it.

They had fed fat all fall, in preparation for their long winter sleep. Then Sitka had grown amazingly. He could now swim under ice, if he had to escape the lunge of some infuriated walrus, or he could fell a seal with one blow of his powerful fore-arm.

Now that they were back on the pack-ice, they often saw Unga, the Eskimo boy who had tried to capture Sitka as a wee cub. Mother White Bear could not forgive that escapade. Sometimes the boy tried to creep up on the white cub when he was a little separated from his mother, and the lad vowed to the boys of his village that the cub’s fur should be his.

The little Eskimo and his tribe lived on a peninsula that reached far out into the polar sea, now all pack-ice, which rose in ridges like the waves of the sea it covered. Their igloos were cunningly fashioned of stone blocks into huts as round as bee-hives, and had to be entered by stooping low through a winding tunnel, and finally getting down on hands and knees. But once inside, they were as warm as the lamp of blubber with its wick of moss could make it, and these hardy people half hibernated comfortably enough through weather sixty below zero.

Unga, like all Eskimos, had to make it his chief concern in life to find enough to eat,--and he loved bear meat best of all. Second, he had to have warm clothing, and warm bedding, or he would die. Bear fur was his favorite blanket, and bearskin the material of which his tribe fashioned their knickerbockers. After his fourteenth year he used to join the bands who went out, for weeks and sometimes months at a time in summer, taking skin tents on their dog sleds, in search of the great white bears, and the half-human track of one of these in the snow, plainly visible even in the blue moonlight of the Arctic dusk,--would send a thrill of delight down Unga’s spine. The black eyes and nose tip, which was all that could be seen of the snowy animals against the snow, unless they moved, was the signal for setting the dogs on their trail. But Sitka always had the presence of mind to run against the wind, so that the dogs could not scent him. Most of the time he kept well out at sea.

When the ice lay shiny and free of snow, however, bears and Eskimos alike used to go seal hunting in the famine of spring. That way, Sitka and Unga often met. Their method of hunting was curiously alike, for Unga tied fur to his feet and his tread was noiseless. As a seal would come up to its breathing hole in the ice, a series of loud blowing sounds meant that it was filling its lungs for a dive. At this time the hunter boy or bear, could approach unheard. Between whiles he laid low behind a furrow of the ice. If the seal took alarm, the boy, lying flat on his stomach, would cunningly move his feet like seal’s hind flippers and so deceive his intended victim. Sitka learned that trick of him. Then would come the boy’s harpoon, or the bear’s harpooning claws, thrust through the hole into the head of the disappearing seal.

In their igloos these stubby, fur-clad little brown people, who were Unga’s people, would spend the winter half starving and half feasting on their occasional catch of seal or bear meat. Sitka often used to see them racing through the twilight of the autumn day behind their dog-sleds, the crackling of their whips echoing from the great bergs.

The water, where it lay open, now shone blue-black under the long night, and the seals remained somewhere below the ice-pack, save when they came to poke their noses through their air-holes. Sitka found he was just able to scramble through the larger air holes.

One day the air was such a mist of falling flakes that Sitka and his mother could not see two steps before them. The swirl and drift of the on-coming blizzard fairly carried them off their feet. Then came sharp ice spicules that filled the air blindingly and cut into their nostrils. “It is high time we found a place to hibernate,” decided Mother White Bear. But wander as they would, through the dark and the drift, they could find neither cave nor shelter. Sitka grew terribly sleepy, and would have curled up on the naked ice, but that his mother insisted on keeping up the search for a few days longer.

Then one day--the first warning came as a swirl of snow. In five minutes the wind from the mountains had lifted them bodily and flung them down on the ice. Nor would the on-coming storm allow them to rise to their feet again, but blew them along, till, with a roar that nearly split their eardrums, black darkness pressed upon them. In that same instant they went over the edge of a fissure that cut a deep V in the ice.

Note--In the face of storms like these, Peary and other white explorers (aided by the Eskimos) have sought to make their way into our “farthest North.”

Their fall was softened by the snow that filled the crevice, and turning their misfortune into good, they welcomed the shelter it gave them from the freezing wind, and huddled together till the storm should have done its worst. The snow drifted in upon them, but the warmth of their breathing kept a little air space melted about their faces. But Mother White Bear knew better than to spend the winter in such a dangerous place.

Later they had a dreadful time scrambling up the slippery sides of their prison, but they clung with their steel claws to every roughness of the ice walls, and finally flung themselves over the edge.

Another time it was the Eskimo village they unwittingly wandered into in the storm. It was an igloo with its winding entrance tunnel against which they had taken shelter, and within that igloo--as luck would have it--lived the boy who had set his heart on having Sitka’s fur.

When, three days later, the two bears were awakened by hearing a savage snarling as the husky dogs began digging them out, they realized that it was to be tooth and fang if they were to get out of the place alive.

Savage as wolves were the great gray dogs of Unga’s father’s sledge team. Savage and hungry!--And fond of bear meat!--It was a circle of fangs they faced as they rose on their haunches to meet the foe. But Sitka and Mother White Bear had fangs of their own, and what was more to their advantage, each powerful fore-paw was armed with a set of razor-sharp claws, and each fist could have felled any dog on whose skull it could land a blow.

Fortunately for the two bears, Unga was asleep in the igloo when the trouble started. “Snap!” went the jaws of the foremost husky dog, the leader of the team, a savage brute, half wolf.--Sitka’s paw barely escaped. Then “swish” went Sitka’s right fore-paw, ripping the husky’s side in a long red gash. “Snap!” “Snap!” “Swish!” raged the combat, the two bears just holding their own against a semicircle of five huskies. Mother White Bear could handle four to Sitka’s one.

It all happened in a twinkling. Then just as Mother White Bear gave the cub the signal to make a dash with her for the open, on came two more huskies who had broken loose from a team that stood harnessed within sound of the rumpus.

“Slash! slash!” went Mother White Bear, sending the two new dogs howling. “Biff, biff, biff!” and she had keeled over three more of her foes. “Slash!” went Sitka, nearly finishing another of the huskies. Just as he wheeled to follow his mother, Unga appeared at the door of the tunnel, bone-tipped spear in hand. “Biff!” went Sitka, whirling like a spinning top, just happening to knock the spear out of his enemy’s hand.

In that instant of time, Mother White Bear had disappeared, doubling and dodging through the igloos with one dog nipping at her heels. Sitka sped frantically to one side, knowing nothing of where he was headed. By one of those chances, so-called, that sometimes happen, he came to a seal hole. It was a tight squeeze, but he just managed to dive through it before two of the huskies he had wounded would have been upon him.

It was the cache of the white explorers that finally reunited Sitka, the little white bear, and his mother.

The ship of the white men lay frozen fast in the harbor, till Spring should once more come to the Arctic Circle; and two weeks travel by dog-sled, a ton of dried salmon to be fed to their sledge dogs lay beneath a rock pile. But though the fish lay hidden beneath rock and ice and snow, it was not hidden from the sharp noses of Sitka and Mother White Bear. No sooner had the great storm subsided than those noses, which peopled the Alaskan world with a million odors no human being could detect,--those wonderful noses of theirs caught the odor of that salmon. And my! how they clawed away the rocks with their powerful claws, and my! how they feasted! Their furry white sides fairly stuck out before they had finished. Though it was time for their long winter sleep, they could keep alive on that through all the bitter polar night. It was a rare piece of good fortune for the two travelers.

After that they found a cave in the ice, tiny, but snug, and large enough for the pair of them to curl up together comfortably.

In the spring Sitka discovered that he had grown enormously while he slept. He could now tease the old bull walruses to his heart’s content, mischievously stealing their clams every time their clumsy backs were turned, with no fear of being overtaken and punished.

He even caught himself a bellowing walrus calf for dinner. Life would no longer be so serious to young Sitka, for there remained absolutely nothing in all the seas that he feared.

Of course, on land, there were the fierce Arctic wolves and the wolfish husky dogs. But he had little intention of going near either of these.

He feared neither cold nor darkness now, nor anything in all that white world save one living creature. He remembered the Eskimo lad with his spear, and his strange way of walking on his hind legs and wearing other animals’ fur, and him he did fear when next they met, with such a fear when again the boy pursued him that the little bear ran for his life.

Mother White Bear finally decided that they should spend the summer far out at sea. They could ramble over the ice floes as far as Bering Strait, catching fish along the way and keeping a sharp eye out for any such delicacy as a chunk of whale blubber left behind at the Eskimo hunting grounds.

As the sun circled higher and higher, they began to come across bird colonies on the rocky islets,--auks sitting in prim rows along the edge of the cliffs, gulls robbing the little puffins, with a clamor of their shrill “ka-ka-ka,” of their catch of herring, sometimes the auks robbing the nesting gulls of their one precious egg. Again the pirate skuas darted hawklike to rob the auks of their one precious egg. It was a hard land, and bird and beast were hard of heart, for it was a bitter struggle just to keep alive.

Sitka and his mother had fine times breakfasting on birds’ eggs.

How the little white bear loved the thunder of the surf, the crackle of floes breaking from the ice-fields, and the roar of ice-berg grinding against berg!

He loved the gray fog and the smell of the bitter brine, and the sleety rain of which they had so much. In his warm white furs he would have found sunshine uncomfortable. He enjoyed this trip better than their accidental visit of the summer before on the South-floating berg.

Never did he tire of staring at the Auroras, and the glaciers glowing with the reflection of the stars.

Later in the summer Mother White Bear became acquainted with a handsome great nine-foot polar bear who was a champion in several ways. He could swim forty miles through the icy seas, and he had come off victorious in many a battle with wolves and Eskimos. As the long daylight warmed the air, they two used to go on long fishing trips, leaving Sitka behind,--though the first thing that youngster knew, he was so big and self-reliant that he really preferred to explore the ice floes by himself.