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.
[Illustration: The wolves stopped at the water’s edge.]
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.