Chapter V: Summer in Alaska

The ice-berg on which Sitka and his mother had their den was drifting further and further South.

It was but one of many bergs, and a small one, at that. Huge, mountainous looking islets of the blue-white ice swam all about them, sometimes bumping against one another with a roar. Sea birds screamed above their heads, and the sun glinted from the water merrily, on days when it did not rain. Sitka felt that they were bound on a great adventure.

Sometimes the wee white bear watched the waves that broke in white foam against the floating bergs, and nowhere could he see anything but sea and sky. Again they floated close to shore, where steep granite cliffs jutted in long arms between the fiords,--the narrow inlets the ice had cut. In places, the cliffs were red with the cooled lava that had come pouring hot from some ancient volcano; and Mother White Bear would tell Sitka how, when the world was young, the mountain peaks that lined the shore had flamed and smoked and rumbled, and sent forth a fountain of fire and ashes. For that was the way new mountains were made. At such times Sitka’s eyes would grow round with wonder.

“Will it happen again?” he asked uneasily.

“Sometimes it happens even now,” his mother told him. “But it is nothing to be afraid of. We won’t go near.”

“But where does the fire come from?” he would ask.

“From away inside the earth. You know it was once all hot millions of years ago, but it has cooled until we have ice and snow.”

Their little berg soon began floating down a shore covered by green forest, which crept to the very water’s edge. Birds sang in the tree tops, and lovely waterfalls poured over the pink limestone cliffs. It was like paradise. Tall ferns and brilliant flowers embroidered the brook banks. Mother White Bear sniffed. She could smell ripening berries. It would be worth while to swim ashore and have a little change from fish. Sitka was the happiest little bear in all Alaska.

That day they feasted on clams and mussels and other shell-fish that they found among the rocks. They had juicy meadow grasses, too, and lilies with roots like onions. The days were growing longer and longer, till there were just a few hours of darkness, and all the rest was day. For it was the land of the midnight sun. “In winter Sitka’s mother reminded him, it was dark almost all day, where they came from,--so near the North Pole.

Sometimes Mother White Bear would lead the way along the beach till they came to the river. It began just behind the falls that shot over the cliff in rainbow-tinted spray. Along that river was a bear-path beaten hard into the soft soil by the feet of hundreds of other bears black and brown and gray, who fished every year along the bank. There the two explorers would catch salmon and leaping trout, and sometimes they found great piles of fish that had been washed ashore by the spring floods. These expeditions were a bit of a risk for a polar bear, and Sitka’s mother was conscious that their white coats no longer blended with the background of white ice that Mother Nature intended them to live on. Still, they could always return to their cave on the berg to sleep. It floated so slowly that they could ramble all day on shore, and still swim back to it when night came. For Mother White Bear could swim as fast as a motor boat when she wanted to.

One thing she always avoided, and that was the settlements where Indians, and sometimes white men, lived. When they passed a town, she would “lay low.” For it was not of other animals she was afraid, so long as she was with Sitka to protect him, but of the red men.

She was, however, careful to keep out of the way of the huge brown bears that lived along the shore. One day they had smelled ripe blueberries, and she had led Sitka cautiously ashore for a taste of the fruit. It was boggy where they grew. The heavy rains had left the ground soaked with moisture, and they had to keep to the firm ground around the edge. Even then, sometimes, the cub would slip on a soft bit of moss and sink to his armpits in the oozy swamp or tundra, before his mother could yank him out by the scruff of his neck.

Here they felt the first mosquitoes Sitka had ever known. But they couldn’t do much damage, through his thick fur, except around his face. By and by, along came a huge brown bear, a kadiak bear, larger than Mother White Bear. Sitka’s mother promptly hid him in a thick clump of alders, but the kadiak never even looked in their direction. He was following his nose to the blueberry bog.

Now they had noticed how thick the mosquitoes were, out over the bog. There were black clouds of them. Mosquitoes are worse in the short Alaska summer than anywhere else in the whole United States, because the ground is so wet and the sun so hot. The big brown bears and the little black bears that live in Southern Alaska always go to the mountains for the summer to get away from the mosquitoes, because on the cool, windy mountainsides the maddening insects cannot live. But it is a great temptation to come down sometimes and go blueberrying, where the berries are thickest.

This old brown bear, Sitka’s mother whispered to him, as they stood hiding in the alder thicket, was very likely on his way to the mountains for the two hot months. But first he was going to cross the bog. “And the mosquitoes will eat him alive.”

Sitka wondered how such tiny insects could harm such a great, shaggy brute as the kadiak bear.

“Suppose we watch and find out,” his mother suggested.