Chapter VIII: Wolves and Salmon

When Mother White Bear saw that they could not get back to their own berg, she towed Sitka around the neighboring bergs to see if they could not find a new home among them. They were of course tiny bergs,--hardly deserving the name, but still affording them cool and comfortable shelter through the long daylight nights. But all were too steep to climb.

There was nothing for it, then, but to return to shore. As she swam back through the icy water, so pleasant after their hot day, she wondered where they could hide themselves in the strange brilliance of the Alaskan summer night. Nowhere along shore, certainly, with those Indians encamped so near, and the excursion steamers of the white men passing every now and again.

There seemed nothing for it but to return to the snow fields of the high mountains. So long as the summer lasted, there was food in plenty. Later the salmon streams would freeze, and they would have to seek their fish from the sea. But if they headed generally Northward in their wanderings, along the snow-capped range, they would soon be back in a land better suited to their heavy furs. Polar bears are, like all bears, great wanderers. It was the first time in her life that Mother White Bear had ever visited land in summer; but once in early winter she had ranged Southward over the pack ice, in which she had denned for her winter sleep. The breaking up of the pack in spring had left her to summer on an island with Sitka’s older brother, then a wee cub, though they had finally made their way back home by swimming many miles through the open sea.

Tonight as Sitka and his mother neared shore again, they were startled to hear the baying of wolves. They hid behind an up-jutting boulder just off shore, and waited to see what was going to happen. Through the meadows that here lay between woods and shore came a herd of deer, and from their enormous leaps and bounds Mother White Bear decided that it must be a matter of life and death.

Behind them the tall grass, man-high, moved here and there as if blown by a wind, but it must be something else that moved it. Then out on the rocky shore came the terror-stricken deer, and close at their heels, there emerged from the concealing grasses three great fierce white wolves. The deer were all but exhausted now, for they stumbled as they leapt. They must have come a great distance,--perhaps from the mountain-sides where they browsed in summer. But the wolves had gained on them and the race was nearly done.

Then the leader of the herd, raising his great antlers, leaped into the water. After him plunged the others, and away they swam, straight toward the rim of a green island that lay off-shore. The wolves stopped at the water’s edge, for they are not good swimmers, baying their disappointment till the fearful sound echoed and re-echoed from the tossing bergs.

But were the three wolves to go hungry? Sitka watched with frightened eyes as the trio seated themselves in a row and howled their disappointment to the curtain of light that now began to glow in the North. There was nothing else to do but to watch the wolves and the Aurora, for Mother White Bear would not venture ashore till they had gone.

Never would Sitka forget the shimmering silver folds of the curtain that hung from the Auroral arch, the star-strewn sky, and the midnight sun circling the horizon, glinting pink from the blue-white bergs that tossed in the purple sea. The grinding of berg on berg, the smell of sea-weed and the weird howling of the wolves, the slap-slap of the waves, comfortingly cold against the furry sides of the wanderers from the North, and the gurgling of the glacial salmon stream, all these things went to make up the scene. Then the silver curtain ceased to shimmer, and nothing remained but the long flames of white fire that sprang from the zenith.

As suddenly as they had appeared, the three wolves were gone, doubtless to chase rabbits for their breakfast.

Mother White Bear now led the way back along the same river they had explored before. Sitka was tired and sleepy, but she would not stop for him to rest till she had him back so high on the mountainside that they could burrow into a snow bank. “Now we are safe,” she told him “and we can take it leisurely.” Sitka drifted into dreams of catching mammoth salmon.

Now Unga’s tribe were of the Eskimos who hunt on the inland ice. Probably, no one knew how long ago, their people had come over the ice from Greenland, skirting the Arctic Ocean. Those there had been among them, the tale had been handed down to them, who, wandering Southward, had seen some of the Aleutian Islands born, spewed up as molten rock from volcanic depths. Within the memory of Unga’s father two of these islands had shot fire into the sky and covered all the sea with ashes. Strange sights had been seen in that strange land,--and might be seen again. For geography was still in the making.

It was also rumored that tribesmen who had ventured far in their bidarkas, venturing from one island to another, had found them leading in a chain straight across to Siberia, dividing Bering Sea from the Pacific. All this had been repeated around the fire of the council house.

Had Sitka and Mother White Bear but known it, they had drifted to one of the three great sounds of the West Coast, Bristol Bay, in the language of the white man. From this a chain of mountains reached North-East to a branch of the Yukon, which mighty river they later followed to the sea as it skirted another mountain range. For from the Bay, where the air was warmed and moistened by a branch of the current that crosses the ocean from Japan, they traversed many a hundred miles of mountainside before they reached that river whose red salmon tempted them to follow its length.

That river, cut deep by the rush of the spring ice, ran Westward across that mighty land to empty into Bering Sea, there to spread fan-wise amid a thousand wooded islands into Norton Sound.

But before Sitka and his mother had traversed its length, they had skirted the sheer cliffs of foaming gorges, and fought mosquitoes along miles of lake-dotted tundra. Their award was that they could often creep up on sleeping ducks or plover, who slept in countless thousands on these lakes as their clans gathered for the great migration Southward for the winter. The two bears were overjoyed when at last, after weeks of untiring travel, they could see the waves breaking in white mist against the spruce-dark shore. The iron mountains behind them shone rose-colored. They had feasted fat on the red and silver salmon, and the grayling and whitefish of the teeming river, and now at last the only barrier between them and the open sea was a series of sand-bars and whirlpools and an excursion steamer, all to be avoided with equal care. But that is getting ahead of our story.

The river which cascaded from high up the mountain-side was agleam with the shining bodies of samlets, young silver salmon with red spots and black markings on their sides. Such luscious fish the little white bear had never tasted as those they waded into the stream to catch.

In the spring the parent salmon,--huge, silvery fish with black spots on their sides,--had left the sea, with its teeming food supply, to swim up-stream to the spawning beds. The gold seekers of ’98 had often watched as the agile fish swam through the rushing torrents, leaping up the waterfalls as easily and gracefully as a kitten leaps to the top of a hedge. High in the mountains, where the stream runs shallow, they had laid their eggs and left their young to hatch. And now the stream was fairly alive with these samlets, some of them only a few months old, some as much as two years. The spring of their third year they would be large enough to go down to the sea.

Mother White Bear showed Sitka a salmon laying her eggs. First the great four-foot fish lay down in the gravel of the shallows and rounded out a nest with her side. There she left hundreds and hundreds of tough, elastic shelled eggs, hardly half the size of peas. Before they left the eggs to their fate, the parent fish would cover them over with gravel so that the water could not wash them away. Out of so many, many eggs, surely enough would hatch and survive to fill the river with samlets.