THE BIRTH OF AN ICE-BERG
Like all explorers, Sitka and his mother knew not what unexpected
dangers might lie in their pathway, as they turned their noses
Northward. But like all explorers, they thrilled at thought of the new
scenes they might enjoy.
Their way lay first along the crest of the range,--the Northern
extension of that great mountain system which in California is called
the Sierra Nevada and in Oregon and Washington the Cascades and the
Selkirks. The same great upheavals of the earth’s crust, the same
glaciers and volcanoes, helped to build them all.
In the tonic coolness of the high peaks, Sitka raced and rolled like
a puppy, plunging whoofing, into the soft snow, or coasting when the
crust was hard. For a little while this land of sternness, hardship
and hunger, smiled in the sunshine, and life was not so serious as it
had been, and would be again. With the abundance of food and exercise,
Sitka was growing fast. His muscles were as hard as iron. He could go
for miles over the mountain-sides without tiring. At the same time his
mother was teaching him a million things a polar bear should know about
the world in which soon he would have to make his living and defend
himself against the elements.
They watched an Arctic fox to see how he caught the ptarmigan, those
brown and white grouse which are so abundant on the lower passes. These
wild hens of the Arctic, nesting in the snow banks, and gradually
changing their brown summer costumes for the white of winter, were not
so well hidden as they would be later, when their camouflage would be
complete. But try as he might, fat, clumsy Sitka could never creep up
on them as did the sly white Reynard. He could swim after his salmon
as the fox could not, but his mouth watered in vain for the ptarmigan.
They gobbled down luscious fungi, those fan-shaped mushrooms that grow
on birch trees, and they browsed like cattle on the juicy grass that
had sprung up in the paths of snow-slides. All that was delightful. But
the cub shivered at the weird, laughing cry of the great Northern loon
that haunted the glacial lakes.
He was fascinated, though, by the whistlers, (Arctic woodchucks), who
disappeared into their holes at his approach, peeking out at him, then
disappearing, peeking and disappearing, till Sitka was frantic with
the longing to catch one of them. But try as he might, he was never
quick enough for those little fellows. Their shrill, whistling calls
tantalized him on every side.
They saw moose and mountain goats, porcupines who gnawed the spruce
trees without even bothering to look up at them, and ermine who swam
after their fish, twisting and turning as lithe as eels. They crossed
glaciers, leaping the crevices and coasting down the slopes of these
almost motionless rivers of ice. On and on they wandered, through the
shortening days, now cooled by gray clouds which brought flurries of
soft snow to the higher slopes. By September they had gales of wind,
with sleet and hailstones, and the clouds were constantly forming on
the mountain-tops and sinking lower and lower, till all the tundra
between the mountains and the sea lay hidden by gray fog. But Sitka
loved the coldness of it, dressed as he was in his thick white furs,
and he was the happiest little bear in all Alaska when at last Mother
White Bear told him they were now far enough North to return to the sea
in safety.
How many hundreds of miles they had traveled they had no means of
knowing, but bears are tireless travelers, and polar bears are the most
tireless of all. The hardest was when they began following the rim
of one of the narrow ice-carved canyons, with its roaring river, and
innumerable falls that had to be circled about. But at last they came
out at a fiord of the sea. The wind of an icy rain was frosting the
gray-green waves of the great twenty-foot tide and blowing balls of the
scud into the tree-tops of the encircling woods. The air rang with the
cries of sea birds. Sitka leaped and frisked after the foam, glorying
in the salt smell of the sea.
Further out, there were the great bergs growling and grinding against
one another and making great waves in the fiord. A distant glacier
cracked with a sound like thunder as a mammoth chunk of it broke
off and a new berg was born, to toss and splash and cause even more
excitement among the lashing waves.
“Hurray!” whoofed Sitka. “This feels like home again.” And following
Mother White Bear, he plunged off the pink limestone cliff into the
water and started swimming with great, powerful strokes of his fore
paws.
Had anyone told the cub as he frisked so exuberantly in his favorite
element that anything ugly and dangerous inhabited those winging
waves, he would not have believed it. And yet at that very moment--but
that is another chapter!