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.