Chapter IX: 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!