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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78351 ***
+
+
+
+
+        [Illustration: Along came a huge brown bear. --Page 32]
+
+
+
+
+                                 SITKA
+                             THE SNOW BABY
+
+                           By Allen Chaffee
+
+                 Author of “Unexplored”, “Lost River”
+              The “Twinkly Eyes Books” “Fuzzy Wuzz” Etc.
+
+                            Illustrated by
+                              PETER DA RU
+
+                        MILTON BRADLEY COMPANY
+
+                      Springfield, Massachusetts
+
+
+
+
+                            Copyright, 1923
+                       By MILTON BRADLEY COMPANY
+                      Springfield, Massachusetts
+
+                          All Rights Reserved
+
+
+                         Bradley Quality Books
+
+                  Printed in United States of America
+
+
+
+
+                                 _To_
+
+                              PETER DARU
+
+             _who knows and loves the Alaskan wilderness_
+
+
+
+
+FOREWORD
+
+
+Here, in story form, is the natural history of Alaska, our last great
+American wilderness.
+
+In the adventures of the wee white polar bear, who drifts down the
+coast on a floating berg, the young reader has a chance to see Southern
+Alaska, with its two months of lush summer verdure, as well as the long
+frozen winter under the Northern lights, and the later summers far out
+in Bering Strait.
+
+With the enterprising bear cub, he can watch Eskimos and reindeer,
+seals and walruses, migratory sea birds and the salmon who swim the
+inland waterways to spawn. He will witness the birth of an ice-berg and
+adventure amid the storms and glaciers of the polar night.
+
+There is also the story of a seal baby, who became the pet of the
+fisherman’s little boy.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+
+  SITKA, THE SNOW BABY
+
+  Chapter                              Page
+
+     I. THE LITTLE WHITE BEAR             1
+
+    II. UNGA, THE ESKIMO BOY              8
+
+   III. ADRIFT ON AN ICE-BERG            15
+
+    IV. THE WALRUS HERD                  22
+
+     V. SUMMER IN ALASKA                 29
+
+    VI. BLUEBERRIES AND MOSQUITOES       34
+
+   VII. AN ADVENTURE                     41
+
+  VIII. WOLVES AND SALMON                47
+
+    IX. THE BIRTH OF AN ICE-BERG         56
+
+     X. MONSTERS OF THE SEA              62
+
+    XI. TOOTH AND FANG                   68
+
+   XII. “LET THERE BE PEACE”             81
+
+
+  FINNY-FOOT, THE SEAL
+
+    I. THE WATER PUPPY                   88
+
+   II. PIETRO’S PET                      95
+
+  III. THE TRAINED SEALS                101
+
+   IV. FLAPPER THE FUR SEAL             108
+
+  GLOSSARY OF ALASKAN WORDS             116
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+THE LITTLE WHITE BEAR
+
+
+Sitka, the Snow Baby, opened his eyes on a world all blue-white
+ice-bergs and green-blue ocean under a sky that sparkled in the spring
+sunshine.
+
+He was as fat as butter and as fuzzy as a kitten, was Sitka, the little
+white bear. He looked for all the world like a big puppy, with his long
+white fur that was to keep him warm in this land of ice and snow. For
+his home was Alaska, that great Western frontier of the United States
+that reaches to the North Pole.
+
+Why was Sitka white, instead of black like his cousin Twinkly Eyes, of
+the deep, black-shadowed pine woods? One reason for his having white
+fur in that land of white was so that his enemies could not see him
+so plainly. For there were fierce white wolves that would have eaten
+him, had they found him, he was so little and soft and helpless. Of
+course his mother could protect him,--if there weren’t too many wolves,
+she was so big and fierce. Mother White Bear, like all the polar bear
+tribe, was at least twice as big as Mother Black Bear.
+
+Sitka had been born five weeks before in the cave in the ice-berg where
+his mother had slept the winter away. At first he had been naked and
+blind and helpless. Now his fur had grown and his eyes had opened, and
+he was ready to take a look at the world.
+
+My, how cold it was, even in spring, here in Alaska! His mother kept
+walking back and forth, back and forth, on the ice, because the minute
+she stopped her feet would have frozen fast, even though their soles
+were covered with fur. Sitka watched her for a few minutes, then he,
+too, began pacing back and forth, back and forth, without stopping.
+
+His mother had a longer neck than most bears, because it helped her to
+keep her nose above water when she swam. She was a great swimmer, for
+she lived on fish most of the time, and in her search for salmon and
+mackerel and shell-fish she often went far from shore, swimming from
+one ice-floe to the next through the open sea. The polar bear is often
+called the sea bear.
+
+Now this is what had become of Sitka’s father.--When the long, dark
+polar winter had set in and Sitka’s mother had curled herself up in
+the ice cave to hibernate, her mate had gone roaming over land and sea
+in search of good things to eat. He never slept the winter away as she
+did, and the cold gave him a ravenous appetite. Something must have
+happened to him during his wanderings, for he never came back. Perhaps
+an Eskimo killed him, to make his warm white fur into a rug for his
+igloo, as they call the little round snow houses these little brown
+people live in. Or perhaps he wanted a bear skin to make himself a
+parka, the hooded shirt they wear.
+
+Sitka’s mother had selected for her winter sleep a den on the ice-berg.
+This was when the sea froze over. When the spring sunshine began
+shining through the glassy walls of her retreat, and Sitka was strong
+enough to follow her, she burst her way through the icy door of
+her cave and led him forth, while she looked this way and that for
+something she could eat. The berg had broken away from the harbor ice,
+and floated this way and that through the open sea, as the wind blew it
+along. There wasn’t a thing she could eat on that ice cake, and she was
+starved after her winter’s fast.
+
+Most of the year she had to live on fish and clams, and the eggs of sea
+birds, because only in mid-summer were there berries and grasses. She
+loved salmon perhaps best of all. Once she found a good fishing ground,
+she could catch the great silver fish with her claws. But not one fish
+could she see in the water that broke in little waves against their
+floating island.
+
+Small sea-gulls were flying low above their heads. They were Arctic
+tern, and it made her mouth water to look at them. Leaping after one
+that flew low overhead, she made a grab at it with her paw, but failed
+to catch it. Wee Sitka also made a grab at them, but his fat legs
+slipped from under him, and over and over he rolled like a furry ball.
+The birds had been wintering in the South, and they had flown thousands
+of miles on their long wings to get back to Alaska. By and by, when
+the short Arctic summer came, it would be the most wonderful place in
+the world to raise their families and find the things they liked to
+eat. They had webbed feet, so that they could swim when their wings got
+tired, and their long bills were hooked at the tips to help them catch
+their slippery prey.
+
+Just now the circling birds wheeled at the call of their leader and
+went flapping Eastward toward the Alaskan shore. “That means they’ve
+seen something good,--perhaps a school of mackerel,” Sitka’s mother
+rumbled deep down in her throat. No wonder the Eskimos watch the tern
+for a sign of good luck, for the bright eyes of a flock of gulls are
+sure to see where the best fishing ground lies.
+
+Mother White Bear plunged into the icy water, bidding the snow baby
+follow her. Sitka dipped one fat paw into the icy tide, and squealed
+that he was afraid. “Come on,” she urged him. “Just catch hold of my
+tail and I’ll tow you along.” (For you know the polar bear has a wee
+stub of a tail.)
+
+“No-o-o-o!” he squealed, afraid. But wise Mother White Bear sank almost
+out of sight in the blue-green water. “Wa-i-t!” he wailed.
+
+Of a sudden she lifted her head high on its long neck, and sniffed the
+current of the wind. Sitka also sniffed, to find out what it was she
+smelled. Just then his feet slipped from under him, and off into the
+icy water slid the fat white cub. “Oosh! Huff--huff--huff!” he gasped,
+the plunge fairly taking his breath away. He felt sure that he was
+going under. Without once realizing that he was learning to swim, he
+struck out with all fours, just as if he were running, till he could
+make a grab for his mother’s tail. Then he clung to it with his teeth,
+while she swam strongly to the next great, floating ice cake. There she
+scrambled over the edge, and Sitka with her, and stood shaking her wet
+fur and sniffing the wind.
+
+“I smell birds’ nests,” she explained. “But I get a message about
+something else, too. It must be an enemy;” for the fur was rising along
+the back of her neck, the way it does when danger threatens.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+THE ESKIMO BOY
+
+
+The little white bear wondered why his mother wriggled her nose, with
+the fur rising so angrily on the back of her neck.
+
+It was only a boy,--Unga, an Eskimo lad, who, unlike Sitka, walked on
+his hind legs all the time. But Mother White Bear had been hunted so
+many times by these small brown people that her first instinct was to
+dive beneath the icy water and swim to safety. But with the wee, fat
+cub it would be hard to dive without drowning him. Of course, had she
+been alone, she could have handled the little Eskimo with one blow
+of her huge fore arm. But she knew he could throw a spear that might
+hurt Sitka. Then he would take the cub’s soft fur to make a fur coat.
+That had happened, once, to a polar cub. The thought made her growl
+ferociously, deep down in her throat.
+
+A moment more and the fur-clad little fellow came in sight. Fortunately
+for Sitka, he was alone. He had not brought one of the great, wolfish
+“husky” dogs that bears are so afraid of. His father was driving the
+dog-team to his sled that day.
+
+Sitka’s mother turned. The odor of the birds’ nests was very near now.
+Following that wonderful nose of hers straight across the ice, she swam
+another bit of open water, hoping to leave the boy behind her. Again
+she crossed an ice-floe, Sitka close behind, and again she swam an open
+lane of water. That way, they came to a rocky islet that was covered
+thick with eider ducks. The great, handsome birds had plucked the soft
+feathers,--the eider down--from their own breasts to line their rocky
+nests, and in these nests were hundreds and thousands of pale eggs. The
+whole rocky islet was covered with these nests.
+
+“Um!” sniffed Mother White Bear hungrily. “I think we have left that
+boy behind, and I am going to have eggs for supper.” With Sitka close
+at her heels, she shuffled along between the nests, taking here an egg
+and there an egg and crunching it in her great jaws. The meal put new
+strength into her; it would enable her to nurse her furry baby when she
+put him to sleep.
+
+The ducks quacked and scolded, but there were so many eggs that there
+would be plenty left to hatch into ducklings.
+
+So busy had Mother White Bear been at her feast that she had almost
+forgotten about the Eskimo boy. Of a sudden she saw him paddling around
+the islet in his seal-skin boat. At the same instant he saw wee, fuzzy
+Sitka galloping along behind his mother, trying his best to keep up
+with her. The boy raised his spear to hurl it at the Snow Baby.
+
+At that moment Sitka’s life was certainly in danger. But great, nine
+foot Mother White Bear, catching a whiff of the wind that blew
+straight to her wonderful nose from the dirty, greasy Eskimo lad,
+turned back just in time. Furiously she batted the spear with her
+powerful forearm as it came whistling through the air. In another
+instant it would have struck her baby. Growling awful threats, she
+rushed at Unga to drive him back.
+
+The little white bear, terrified by the battle that seemed about to be
+fought over his small person, turned tail and ran for all he was worth.
+From a point that jutted from the rocky islet he scrambled aboard a
+blue-white chunk of ice. The next thing he knew, the ice cracked with
+a sound like the roar of a cannon, and the floe he was on split off
+and began floating away. Sitka whimpered in fright as he watched the
+blue-green water rush in between him and the isle.
+
+But his mother saw him and came racing across the rocks, stepping,
+smash! all over the birds’ nests in her hurry. Swimming the strip of
+open water, she scrambled up beside him, and began nuzzling him all
+over to see if he was hurt. The Eskimo boy would trouble them no more.
+They could see him paddling away in his skin canoe.
+
+Sitka was to have an even more exciting time later that spring. Awaking
+in his mother’s warm, furry arms to a morning of golden sunshine and
+blue sky, with gulls flying overhead crying “que-ok, que-ok, que-ok!”
+and the ice-bergs that rose like blue-white mountain peaks to seaward,
+he was startled by a rumbling like thunder. All about them it began
+sounding, for the ice cakes were breaking apart, floating this way and
+that and grinding against one another. But their own berg, so snug
+and safe with its cave in which they always slept, towered among the
+up-ending ice cakes as secure as a miniature mountain peak.
+
+Away off in the open water they could see little spouts of water.
+Sitka’s mother said it was whales “blowing.”
+
+“What are whales?” the cub demanded, round eyed with wonder.
+
+“Whales,” said his mother, “are great fish-like creatures, ever and
+ever and ever so much bigger than the biggest polar bear that ever
+lived. But the queer thing is that they are not fish, really, though
+they spend their lives in the ocean, because they have fur instead of
+scales, and the mother whale nurses her baby just as a cat does her
+kitten.”
+
+“Oo! Aren’t you afraid of whales?” Sitka marvelled.
+
+“No. They have the tiniest mouths. But whale meat is delicious. These
+little brown men hunt them for their blubber, as they call the fat that
+lines their sides, and I’d love nothing better than to find a strip
+of blubber. Let’s go a little nearer.--Um! I smell blubber now. I do
+believe those Eskimos have been whale-hunting. If we could just find
+where they’ve been cutting blubber, what a feast it would be!”
+
+The Snow Baby was happy to go exploring. Climbing a steep, icy slope
+to the ridge of the next ice pan, they could see, away across the ice,
+which had frozen in ridges like the waves of the sea, a huge dark body
+that Mother White Bear’s nose said was a whale. But further out, a
+horde of the fur-clad little brown men were racing toward another
+whale in their seal-skin boats, with spears raised. Mother White Bear
+hesitated. She hated to take Sitka too near these Eskimos. But the
+odor of whale meat came tantalizingly to her nostrils, and she was
+dreadfully hungry. Cautiously she padded forward, and Sitka after her,
+ready at a moment’s notice to run for their lives. But they reached the
+meat in safety.
+
+She had just begun to eat ravenously when a sudden shout went up. One
+of the little brown men had seen her, and turned in pursuit.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+ADRIFT ON AN ICE-BERG
+
+
+No sooner had Mother White Bear seen the Eskimo turn to pursue her
+than she started running back over the ice floe, urging the fat cub to
+follow.
+
+Sitka raced as best he could, but his fat forelegs were so much shorter
+than his hind legs that he stepped on his own feet and fell, and rolled
+this way and that. Again and again he fell, till Mother White Bear came
+back and tried to carry him by the scruff of the neck. But he was too
+heavy for that now. And all the time the little brown man was coming
+closer. At last the Eskimo raised his spear to hurl it at Sitka.
+
+Mother White Bear had just come to the top of a steep, slippery place
+on the ice-floe where it sloped to the sea.[1] In desperation, the
+great, furry mother took wee Sitka in her almost human forearms, and
+sitting down at the top of the slide, coasted straight down the ice-pan
+into the white-capped waves. By the time the Eskimo had climbed to the
+top of the slide, where he could see what had become of them, they were
+swimming rapidly away, the cub holding fast to his mother’s tail.
+
+[1] Note--A polar bear seen on the broken ice off Wrangel Island was
+seen to climb to the top of an uptilted ice-pan, lay down on his side,
+and pushing himself off with one hind foot, coast down head foremost
+to the water thirty of forty feet below, states E. W. Nelson in a
+publication of the National Geographic Society.
+
+Another time he saw a mother bear shelter her cub from flying bullets
+by taking him between her fore legs and swimming away with him.
+
+Even then the little brown man could have thrown his spear and struck
+them, but Mother White Bear, suspicioning as much, made a dive under a
+floating cake of ice. They came up on the other side, where he could
+not see them, their noses just barely out of water,--and there they
+waited till long after the little brown man had given up and gone back
+to the whale hunt.
+
+There followed delightful days on Egg Island, as they called the rocks
+on which they had found the eider ducks. It rained a good deal, but
+they did not mind. The days were getting longer now. There were only
+a few hours of darkness between sunset and sunrise. The ice of inland
+rivers was thawed through in spots, where the Eskimos had chopped holes
+to catch salmon. Mother White Bear would sit all day at one of these
+salmon holes, watching for the big red fish. When she saw one, biff!
+would go her fore arm, claws out like five ivory fish hooks, to nab the
+slippery fellow. Then how she did feast! Sitka watched every move she
+made, because by and by he, too, wanted to be a mighty fisherman.
+
+One day she took him to visit Seal Rocks. From far away they could hear
+the dog-like barking of the queer creatures, as they lay basking in the
+noonday sun. Now and again one would come swimming along with a fish in
+his jaws, clambering up on the rocks with his flippers.
+
+Long ago, when the world was young, Mother White Bear told Sitka, the
+seals all lived on land, and had legs, but they found it so much easier
+to get their food from the sea that they became expert swimmers. That
+meant that Mother Nature had to flatten their fore-legs into flippers,
+with webbed fingers, so that they could use them as paddles, as a fish
+does his fins. Their hind legs she turned into flappers that they could
+hold snug together and use, like a fish’s tail, to steer with. This
+makes it hard for them to get about on land, and Sitka thought it was
+the funniest sight in the world to see them humping themselves along
+over the rocks. But they were wonderful at swimming and diving and
+catching fish.
+
+Mother White Bear would not swim too near Seal Rocks today, however,
+because the great bull seals, the fathers and grandfathers, were there
+to protect the little ones. And my, how those old bulls did bark at
+them! For they feared that Mother White Bear might like the flavor of
+baby seal. Nearly every cow-seal had a baby with soft, woolly white
+fur, though when it grew up it would be brown and tan. Mother White
+Bear would have liked to take Sitka a little nearer, but though the cow
+seals were not much bigger than big dogs, the bulls were almost as huge
+as herself. That, she told the inquiring cub, was because every bull
+had to protect at least a dozen cows and their babies. The young bulls
+are killed for their skins, and that makes the numbers uneven.
+
+The seals had all been South for the winter. In May the bull seals had
+returned to the islands, swimming through the icy water so fast that
+the cows could not keep up with them. For several weeks the bulls had
+held contests, and fought among themselves to see who was strongest,
+and who should have the best home sites on the islands. In June their
+mates had come, and almost the same day, the seal pups had been born.
+It is still cold in Alaska in early summer, but the seals have such
+thick fur--these Alaska seals--that they do not mind. Of course the
+best deep sea fishing cannot be found so near shore, and the mother
+seals often had to swim for miles to find food. Then they would come
+back and nurse their babies. By fall the little ones would be able to
+fish for themselves, and they would all go South for the winter.
+
+The two bears next swam past some rocks where they saw a herd of huge
+fat walruses. These leather-skinned old fellows, who looked as if they
+might be second cousins to the seals, had great tusks that curved from
+their jaws to the very ground. Sitka was terribly afraid when he saw
+those ivory tusks. But his mother only laughed and bade him watch and
+see what they did with their ferocious-looking weapons. Then she led
+him over the rocks, past the lazy, lubberly creatures, who eyed them
+stupidly, to where one old fellow was busy just off shore. To Sitka’s
+immense surprise, the monster was digging clams with his tusks. He had
+quite a pile of them waiting for his supper.
+
+Sitka watched with twinkling eyes till the old fellow’s back was
+turned. Then he made a dash to see what those clams were like. My, how
+that walrus roared at him! He made for him with his tusks, but Sitka
+dodged to one side too quickly for his clumsy lunge.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+THE WALRUS HERD
+
+
+On a bare, flat island of the ice pack sprawled a herd of walruses.
+Sitka stared!
+
+They were the fattest, ugliest, fiercest looking monsters the little
+white bear had ever seen. They were not as fierce as they looked,
+however, as Mother White Bear knew, for they lived on clams and
+shell-fish. Their fierce appearance came partly from the long ivory
+tusks with which they dug their clams.
+
+They were enormous creatures, some of the old bulls weighing fully
+two thousand pounds. Like seals, their legs consisted of flappers.
+But there the resemblance ended. Instead of silky fur, they had ugly,
+hairless, warty-looking hides, tough and wrinkled and of a muddy brown.
+
+Neither have they the brains of the seal tribe: for they had found the
+life of the clam digger so easy that they had no need of brains, and
+Nature takes back what we do not use. Their thick necks ended in heads
+so shallow that there seemed to be nothing there but a pair of tiny
+eyes and the whiskers at the roots of their tusks.
+
+On land these ungainly monsters were almost helpless in their
+fatness,--instead of being agile like seals. But in the sea they were
+marvelous swimmers, their layers of fat blubber helping there to float
+them.
+
+However, like all mammals, they will fight fiercely when their babies
+are in danger.
+
+As Sitka and his mother approached the ice where lay a herd of mother
+walruses and their young, the mothers eyed them angrily, and the moment
+they scrambled aboard the floe, several of them charged with the utmost
+ferocity, bellowing and rearing themselves high on their hind quarters
+as if to fling themselves on the intruders and crush them flat, as,
+indeed, they might have done, had not Mother White Bear given Sitka the
+signal to dive off into the water again. Dearly would she have loved
+to treat him to walrus calf, but it was plain they would have to try
+strategy in capturing such prey.
+
+For a time they swam around, not too close to the mother walruses. The
+fathers were digging clams, heaping great piles of them on shore, then
+settling to their feast, or sometimes eating as they dug. Sitka eyed
+these clam piles with envy and a little mischief. “Mother, I’m going to
+try it again!” he announced. And before she could utter a warning, he
+had made a dash for the breakfast a huge old bull was looking forward
+to, as he dug away in the shallow water.
+
+With a bellow of wrath the old fellow reared his monstrous head and
+eyed the white cub with a gleam of anger. “Come back!” whoofed Mother
+White Bear. But Sitka did not hear. The next moment the ivory tusks
+would have come down straight into the middle of Sitka’s back, but that
+he dodged, and slid into the water with no more than a red gash on his
+white side.
+
+“Just wait till I’m a little bigger!” he roared at the walrus. “You
+just wait!”
+
+It was therefore with huge interest that he watched his mother, towards
+dusk that afternoon, prepare to creep up on a walrus calf. Bidding
+Sitka remain in hiding behind a chunk of ice, she flattened herself
+like a cat creeping up on a bird, and waited till it should be wholly
+dark. She had fixed on a calf who, with his mother, lay a little to
+one side of the main body of the herd, and in order to take them by
+surprise, she and Sitka had made their approach by swimming first out
+to sea, then doubling back and approaching with nothing showing above
+water-line save the black tips of their noses.
+
+In that interval just between sundown and the first stars, when it
+was darkest, she began creeping slowly forward. Once her foot scraped
+the ice, and the walrus cow looked up suspiciously, and Mother White
+Bear held as still as a rock till the cow had gone to sleep again.
+Then forward she crept, nearer, nearer, nearer, nearer! Sitka could no
+longer see her white bulk for the darkness, nor could he hear aught but
+the wind and the waves.
+
+With a sudden dash she had broken the calf’s neck with a blow and was
+dragging his huge weight back over the ice. The walrus cow was roused
+now and rearing this way and that, trying to overtake them. But so
+awkward are walruses on land that she could make no headway compared
+with agile Mother White Bear; and though her bellowing awoke the herd
+and they raised the most terrific alarm, they were still farther away
+than she. In the inky darkness they only tumbled over one another in
+their awkwardness, searching in vain for the cause of the disturbance.
+Had Mother White Bear met them in the water, it would have been a
+different story. But she did not take to the water till she had reached
+the place where she had left Sitka. Then, softly, softly, they slipped
+over the edge of the ice and began towing the fat body of the calf to
+shore. It meant feasting for many days.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was only a week later that they watched, themselves safely hidden,
+their black noses just barely out of water, while a band of Eskimos
+went walrus hunting, and Sitka marveled to see what cowards walruses
+could be. As the little brown men approached in their kyacks (fearless
+in these frail skin boats), the whole herd simply rushed terrified into
+the water and swam for their lives. Even then it was simple enough for
+the hunters to make a kill with their bone-pointed spears. Had the
+walruses not been such cowards, it would have been the easiest thing in
+the world for them to have reared their tusked heads out of the water
+and crushed the boats.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+SUMMER IN ALASKA
+
+
+The ice-berg on which Sitka and his mother had their den was drifting
+further and further South.
+
+It was but one of many bergs, and a small one, at that. Huge,
+mountainous looking islets of the blue-white ice swam all about them,
+sometimes bumping against one another with a roar. Sea birds screamed
+above their heads, and the sun glinted from the water merrily, on
+days when it did not rain. Sitka felt that they were bound on a great
+adventure.
+
+Sometimes the wee white bear watched the waves that broke in white foam
+against the floating bergs, and nowhere could he see anything but sea
+and sky. Again they floated close to shore, where steep granite cliffs
+jutted in long arms between the fiords,--the narrow inlets the ice had
+cut. In places, the cliffs were red with the cooled lava that had come
+pouring hot from some ancient volcano; and Mother White Bear would tell
+Sitka how, when the world was young, the mountain peaks that lined the
+shore had flamed and smoked and rumbled, and sent forth a fountain of
+fire and ashes. For that was the way new mountains were made. At such
+times Sitka’s eyes would grow round with wonder.
+
+“Will it happen again?” he asked uneasily.
+
+“Sometimes it happens even now,” his mother told him. “But it is
+nothing to be afraid of. We won’t go near.”
+
+“But where does the fire come from?” he would ask.
+
+“From away inside the earth. You know it was once all hot millions of
+years ago, but it has cooled until we have ice and snow.”
+
+Their little berg soon began floating down a shore covered by green
+forest, which crept to the very water’s edge. Birds sang in the tree
+tops, and lovely waterfalls poured over the pink limestone cliffs.
+It was like paradise. Tall ferns and brilliant flowers embroidered
+the brook banks. Mother White Bear sniffed. She could smell ripening
+berries. It would be worth while to swim ashore and have a little
+change from fish. Sitka was the happiest little bear in all Alaska.
+
+That day they feasted on clams and mussels and other shell-fish that
+they found among the rocks. They had juicy meadow grasses, too, and
+lilies with roots like onions. The days were growing longer and longer,
+till there were just a few hours of darkness, and all the rest was day.
+For it was the land of the midnight sun. “In winter Sitka’s mother
+reminded him, it was dark almost all day, where they came from,--so
+near the North Pole.
+
+Sometimes Mother White Bear would lead the way along the beach till
+they came to the river. It began just behind the falls that shot over
+the cliff in rainbow-tinted spray. Along that river was a bear-path
+beaten hard into the soft soil by the feet of hundreds of other bears
+black and brown and gray, who fished every year along the bank. There
+the two explorers would catch salmon and leaping trout, and sometimes
+they found great piles of fish that had been washed ashore by the
+spring floods. These expeditions were a bit of a risk for a polar bear,
+and Sitka’s mother was conscious that their white coats no longer
+blended with the background of white ice that Mother Nature intended
+them to live on. Still, they could always return to their cave on the
+berg to sleep. It floated so slowly that they could ramble all day on
+shore, and still swim back to it when night came. For Mother White Bear
+could swim as fast as a motor boat when she wanted to.
+
+One thing she always avoided, and that was the settlements where
+Indians, and sometimes white men, lived. When they passed a town, she
+would “lay low.” For it was not of other animals she was afraid, so
+long as she was with Sitka to protect him, but of the red men.
+
+She was, however, careful to keep out of the way of the huge brown
+bears that lived along the shore. One day they had smelled ripe
+blueberries, and she had led Sitka cautiously ashore for a taste of
+the fruit. It was boggy where they grew. The heavy rains had left the
+ground soaked with moisture, and they had to keep to the firm ground
+around the edge. Even then, sometimes, the cub would slip on a soft bit
+of moss and sink to his armpits in the oozy swamp or tundra, before his
+mother could yank him out by the scruff of his neck.
+
+Here they felt the first mosquitoes Sitka had ever known. But they
+couldn’t do much damage, through his thick fur, except around his face.
+By and by, along came a huge brown bear, a kadiak bear, larger than
+Mother White Bear. Sitka’s mother promptly hid him in a thick clump of
+alders, but the kadiak never even looked in their direction. He was
+following his nose to the blueberry bog.
+
+Now they had noticed how thick the mosquitoes were, out over the bog.
+There were black clouds of them. Mosquitoes are worse in the short
+Alaska summer than anywhere else in the whole United States, because
+the ground is so wet and the sun so hot. The big brown bears and the
+little black bears that live in Southern Alaska always go to the
+mountains for the summer to get away from the mosquitoes, because on
+the cool, windy mountainsides the maddening insects cannot live. But it
+is a great temptation to come down sometimes and go blueberrying, where
+the berries are thickest.
+
+This old brown bear, Sitka’s mother whispered to him, as they stood
+hiding in the alder thicket, was very likely on his way to the
+mountains for the two hot months. But first he was going to cross the
+bog. “And the mosquitoes will eat him alive.”
+
+Sitka wondered how such tiny insects could harm such a great, shaggy
+brute as the kadiak bear.
+
+“Suppose we watch and find out,” his mother suggested.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+BLUEBERRIES AND MOSQUITOES
+
+
+Yes, sir, those mosquitoes will almost eat him alive!” Sitka’s mother
+assured him.
+
+Sitka, wondering greatly, watched, as the huge old kadiak bear lumbered
+across the bog. Sure enough, the mosquitoes followed him in swarms.
+A black cloud of them hung over him, singing their horrid song. They
+settled black on his fur, but that did him no harm. They could not
+reach through to his hide. But there was, of course, no fur to protect
+his eyes and nostrils, and the insects began settling on his eyelids
+and on the tip of his nose till he had to paw them off angrily. And my,
+how they could sting! Every time they poked their beaks into him for
+a drop of blood, they left a tiny drop of poison in the wound, and
+made it burn and swell. By and by the poor old fellow’s eyelids were so
+swollen that he could not open his eyes to see where he was going. He
+just wandered around and around in the bog, till he thought he never
+would find his way out again. He had come that way for the berries, but
+his lips and tongue were now so swollen from the mosquito bites that he
+could not even enjoy the fruit.
+
+But at last he happened to wander near the edge of the bog. Then he
+heard the sound of roaring water, where a river came rushing down the
+mountainside to the sea. Making blindly for the sound, he plunged into
+an icy pool, where he could cool his fevered face. And there he stayed,
+just the tip of his nose above water so he could breathe, until the
+swelling had gone down and he could see to go on up into the mountains.
+
+“Once upon a time,” Sitka’s mother told him, “a big brown bear tried to
+cross the swamp, and the mosquitoes bit him till he couldn’t see, and
+he just wandered around and around in that swamp till he starved to
+death. And all the time, the mosquitoes kept pricking him for the tiny
+drop of his blood that each one got. That is what I meant when I said
+they could fairly eat one alive,--tiny as they are, when there are so
+many of them.”
+
+Sitka looked back wonderingly at the kadiak bear that had had such a
+narrow escape. He was shuffling rapidly up the mountainside.
+
+The next time the polar cub and his mother went exploring, they saw
+a band of Indians camping on the river bank. The women and children,
+dressed in bright hued calicoes, were fishing and gathering berries,
+and cooking fish over little fires. Now fire was something that Sitka
+had never seen before, and it looked so pretty that he wanted to feel
+of one. But Mother White Bear was terribly afraid of fire, because it
+was something she did not understand, and she kept him in hiding among
+the tall ferns. It was dangerous enough, she said, for a white bear to
+go into the woods at all, when the red men were about.
+
+By and by they saw a band of Indian men start up the mountainside.
+When they had passed out of sight, Sitka’s mother began leading him up
+another way. Far ahead, they could see the peaks and hollows filled
+with snow, and she thought it would feel good to roll in the snow
+again. Their fur was much too warm for this kind of weather. Besides,
+she smelled wild mushrooms, and she meant to have a feast. In the snow
+they could hide perfectly, should the red men come near.
+
+There were choice berries and other good things along the way to eat.
+They started following the river, where the rainbow trout leapt out
+of the water every now and again. They padded along as soundlessly
+as possible on their furry feet. The clouds were gathering about the
+peaks, throwing cool shadows over the woods. It would probably rain by
+and by, but they didn’t mind in the least. They really enjoyed being
+out in the rain.
+
+At first their way lay along the bear path where the earth had
+been beaten hard along the river bank. On one side, the icy water
+swirled over rocks and fallen logs, or slid in smooth sheets over the
+gold-specked sands. For this was a land where much gold was found. On
+the other side of the path, rank meadow grass grew high on the moist
+soil, and even Sitka’s mother could not see above its waving tops. The
+cub slipped into the soft black mud, till no one would have believed,
+when his mother fished him out, that he had ever been a little white
+bear.
+
+In this tall grass they could hear queer rustlings,--little squeals and
+scufflings, and Sitka wondered what could be going on in there. By and
+by the grass was not so tall. It was only about as high as Mother White
+Bear. They were on a steep slope now, where the trees had all been
+burned to blackened stumps, and the bunch grass grew. Suddenly a sound
+of many hooves thudded along the ground, and Mother White Bear drew
+Sitka into hiding between two granite boulders. A few minutes later,
+a herd of reindeer went leaping and bounding over the grass and up the
+mountainside. These Alaskan caribou can stand weather 60 degrees below
+zero. But in summer they enjoy three months of feasting on the bunch
+grass.
+
+At last the two bears reached a ridge where they could see ever and
+ever so far. They could look back along the way they had come, across
+the level stretch of grass and down the river glinting in the sun. They
+could even see where the ocean beat against the cliffs in white foam,
+and beyond, where the white bergs drifted. Up here the wind was cold,
+and snow lay in the shady places.
+
+Then that same band of reindeer went leaping across the side of the
+mountain opposite, and on up the steep slopes. After them came racing
+the Indians, trying to head them off and capture them. They use
+reindeer for both horses and cows,--driving them, milking them, and
+using their hide to make their clothing, boats and houses. That is,
+they do, when they capture them. They had all passed out of sight in
+a twinkling and Sitka never knew whether they caught them or not. He
+hoped the beautiful brown animals had escaped.
+
+But that night he found he had troubles of his own.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+AN ADVENTURE
+
+
+I do hope our ice-berg doesn’t drift too far away!” said Mother White
+Bear. “We’d spend another day on the mountain, if I thought it was safe
+to.”
+
+“Let’s stay,” begged Sitka.
+
+The way now grew steeper, and the river grew narrower and swifter,
+until the bunch grass gave way to tall ferns and the ground was soft
+with pretty colored mosses. In winter the reindeer paw the snow away
+with their feet and eat these mosses. Next came pale green willows and
+dark green spruce and cedar trees. The Snow Baby, sniffing their piny
+fragrance, rolled delightedly on the soft ground beneath them.
+
+Later the slopes were all wet moss, into which the wee fellow sank so
+deep that his mother tried to lead him along the fallen tree trunks.
+But they too were slippery with moss, and every now and again he would
+slide off and have to be rescued. But then, there were the finest, big,
+juicy berries! Blue-berries, thimble-berries, fat ripe huckleberries,
+tart cranberries, and mild, sweet service-berries. It was a paradise
+for bears!
+
+There were mushrooms, too, growing around the hollow logs, and
+Mother White Bear knew just which it was safe to eat, and which were
+poisonous. My, how she did love mushrooms!
+
+“Mother,” Sitka begged, “let’s stay here all the time.”
+
+But she explained that the summer is very short, just July and August,
+here in this part of the world, and soon would come ice and snow again,
+and they would have to go back to sea, where they could fish. Besides,
+she preferred the sea.
+
+Sitka found it hard to imagine it ever being cold there, where the sun
+shone so hot! But by September, she told him, would come the long
+rains, and the days would grow shorter and shorter, till in mid-winter
+it was terrifically cold on these mountains.
+
+Returning the way they had come, they found the Indians still singing
+and laughing about their little cook-fires. Along the river bank stood
+their baskets heaped with red and purple berries, and Sitka grabbed a
+pawful every chance he got. But Mother White Bear led him away around
+the Indian camp, as softly as she could walk, for “Safety First” was
+her motto where the red men were concerned.
+
+Sitka was exhausted now, and they were eager to get back to their
+cave in the ice-berg. But the little berg, which Mother White Bear
+recognized by its shape, was away off behind two smaller bergs. Her
+first thought was to swim clear around them, but the cub was by now so
+tired and sleepy that he began whimpering and begging her to carry him.
+How she longed to get back to the safety of their cave, where he could
+sleep away the strange, sunlit night.
+
+As the bergs were drifting in the blue summer sea, there was a narrow
+lane of water they might swim between the two new bergs, to reach
+their home. Well, she decided, she would chance it. She was a powerful
+swimmer, and Sitka could cling to her tail. If only those huge chunks
+of ice would stop drifting about so!
+
+She had swum perhaps half this narrow channel when she suddenly became
+aware that the walls of ice that towered on either side were closer
+than when she had started. The two bergs were floating together, and
+the spray that dashed against their sides began to fill her eyes with
+mist, and her ears with the sound of the surf. Sitka, paddling wearily
+along behind her, with her stub of a tail in his mouth, began to squeal
+that he was being drowned, for the waves were chopping right over his
+head.
+
+Mother White Bear redoubled her efforts, knowing that if they did not
+get through the channel quickly, they would surely be crushed between
+those two walls of ice. Anxiously she measured the distance that lay
+ahead, then with a backward glance she made a hasty estimate of the
+distance that lay behind them. Yes, they must be just about half way
+through the channel.
+
+But ahead the space was narrowed till it seemed as if the icy walls
+must clash together before they could pass them. And the tide was all
+against her. Swim as she might, she could not seem to swim fast enough.
+How she wished now that she had taken the long, safe way around. But it
+was too late.
+
+But was it?--If only she were headed the other way, the tide would help
+instead of hinder her. She glanced behind once more. To her surprise,
+the way was widening, instead of narrowing, behind them. In fact, the
+icy walls were drifting together in a V, and they were headed toward
+the point of the V.
+
+Quick as thought, she turned, and began towing the tired Sitka back the
+way they had come. Then the ice ahead came together with a grinding
+roar, and the wave chop nearly strangled them. But she swam on, and the
+wee cub behind her, till they were out in open water. One last mighty
+effort and they were safe! An instant later the icy walls clashed
+again, grinding together until the channel was entirely closed. But
+they were safe!
+
+
+
+
+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.
+
+[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.
+
+
+
+
+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!
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+MONSTERS OF THE SEA
+
+
+On a sea ruffled to purple in the wind, Mother White bear, busy
+catching fish, glimpsed three large black fins.
+
+Three piratical black fins, farther out at sea, approached like the
+sails of so many fishing dories, all in a row. That, she knew, meant
+orcas--killer whales! With a loud whoof she summoned Sitka to turn back
+and make for shore. He responded with that swift obedience she had
+taught him. But though he was swift, the orcas were swifter. But he was
+not far from a high rock that jutted up out of shoal water. When he had
+scrambled up beside his mother, his legs were trembling and his breath
+quite gone.
+
+When the disappointed orcas had swum away again, their great black
+fins rising from the curve of their backs, and the two white streaks
+on their sides shouting a warning to those that could read it, Mother
+White Bear was reminded of a battle she had once seen between an orca
+and a cachalot, one of the giant sperm whales. Of course Sitka wanted
+the story.
+
+“Fortunately,” said Mother White Bear, “cachalots never come as far
+North as this. It was the time I drifted so far South on the ice that
+I saw this battle. A cachalot mother had come to a quiet inlet off
+the coast of Southern Alaska to rear her baby. It must have been an
+exceptional case, for though I have heard of orcas going far South, I
+never knew of but the one cachalot to come so far North. But a traveler
+such as myself sees many an unusual happening.”
+
+“I’m going to be a traveler, too,” vowed Sitka.
+
+“You certainly will, if you grow up into a regular bear,” she agreed.
+“But first you know that whales are mammals, like bears and dogs, and
+nurse their babies.”
+
+“Honestly?” marvelled Sitka.
+
+“Yes. And the orca mother has a way of carrying her calf tucked behind
+her left flipper, or as it were, in her left arm, and nursing it as
+she lies floating on a quiet sea. Both she and her calf are cream
+colored on their under sides, so that the fish below cannot see them so
+plainly. For of course they live largely on fish.
+
+“She herself is content to eat the great, sluggish fish that live in
+shallow seas, though she is also fond of seals, and I have seen her
+devour one whole. The one I saw and I suppose they are all alike, was
+lean and quick, and could dive and swim with marvelous agility. The
+Eskimos would have found very little blubber on her. And unlike the
+great, stupid, lubberly creatures you saw the Eskimos hunting, this
+particular whale is a good fighter, as you shall see, and cunning too.
+But with all this, she loves her calf.”
+
+“What happened?” begged Sitka impatiently.
+
+“I was watching from a cliff,” continued Mother White Bear. “First I
+saw this cachalot mother nursing her calf under her left flipper, and
+I was amazed that such a huge creature could be so gentle. For this
+giant creature had a head nearly a third of her entire size, and she
+could open her jaws till you and I could have found room to den up for
+the winter right in her mouth. And that huge mouth was armed with teeth
+that could have crunched you in one bite.” Sitka shuddered.
+
+“Then I saw a band of orcas coming. She saw them, too, and started out
+to meet them, but it meant leaving her calf behind, and she turned back
+to the little fellow, perhaps afraid that something might come by and
+eat him while her back was turned. But if she stayed, the orcas would
+get him. So she turned once more to meet their advancing front. Picture
+that row of black fins coming all in a row!
+
+“Well, that cachalot just simply opened that huge mouth of hers and
+snapped her jaws on the first orca she could reach, and the water
+turned red around them!--The other orcas,--there were five of them in
+that pack,--tried to swim around either side of her, at a good safe
+distance, but she was so afraid they would reach her calf that she
+chased them ferociously, without a thought for her own safety, and you
+would have laughed to see these same orcas, these dread killer whales,
+turning tail and admitting their defeat, five to one that they were!
+But they would have stood not a chance with those great jaws of hers,
+swift and fierce as the orcas were.”
+
+“Everything is afraid of something else, isn’t it, Mother?” said Sitka.
+
+“There is nothing I fear for myself save wolves,” said Mother White
+Bear.
+
+“I am afraid of that Eskimo boy,” Sitka admitted.
+
+“And perhaps he is afraid of you.”
+
+“And of orcas?” the little bear surmised.
+
+ Note--The Eskimos around Bering Sea believe that the killer whales are
+ wolves in sea form. They tell it that when the world was young the
+ wolves of the land used to enter the sea, changing their form as they
+ did so and becoming orcas. When they returned to land, they changed
+ back to wolves. To this day the little brown men fear the orca as the
+ wolf of the sea.
+
+A sweep of her paw and Mother White Bear had landed a shining fish,
+which she proceeded to eat, bidding Sitka go catch one for himself. For
+he needed practice.
+
+After they had both dined and slept, and felt ready to go on, they swam
+about thirty miles fairly close to shore. A polar bear can swim forty
+miles at a stretch if she has to. Sitka tired, and his mother allowed
+him to tow himself along by her tail once in a while to rest him. And
+again they caught fish and climbed aboard a floating ice pan to sleep
+the lengthening night away.
+
+That was their program for many days,--swimming so close to shore that
+they could see the ragged outline of the pointed green-black firs when
+it was not too foggy. The thunder of the surf was in their ears, and
+the taste of the bitter brine was in their nostrils, for the wind blew
+the sea into foam.
+
+Then one day, their first sunny day in weeks, they came to the edge of
+the pack ice.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+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.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+“LET THERE BE PEACE”
+
+
+Once the next fall Sitka again met the Eskimo, who again pursued him
+with his spear. This time the little bear made a great dive into the
+sea and swam to safety under water.
+
+But apparently the little brown boy was determined to have his
+hide,--as determined as the little white bear was to keep it. For Unga
+had boasted in his village that he meant to get that bear. He had vowed
+to have Sitka’s great fur coat.
+
+The next year, when Sitka had grown larger still, and Mother White Bear
+was too busy with his new little brother to pay him any attention, the
+Eskimo nicked his ear with his bone-pointed spear. After that he knew
+him by that nicked ear. The year after he grazed Sitka’s side, and
+Sitka turned and pursued him angrily, as determined now to get the boy
+as the boy was to get the bear.
+
+Year after year went by, while Sitka grew into a huge white monster,
+and Unga developed into a lithe little brown-faced man clad in the fur
+of his kill. And it came to pass that the Eskimo’s one great desire
+was to carry Sitka’s pelt to his igloo and deliver his boast to the
+admiring eyes of his village. And Sitka knew that the Eskimo youth
+would never leave him in peace while they both should live.
+
+One autumn when Sitka was ten years old and the Eskimo twenty, they had
+both gone far inland over the Arctic barrens, and both for the same
+reason, in the hope of securing some reindeer meat. As it happened, a
+hoard of the great, white Arctic wolves had also followed the deer.
+
+One night Sitka stood gazing at the most wonderful Aurora he had ever
+seen. Brilliant bars of light colored like the rainbow marched across
+the Northern sky-line,--always from West to East. Suddenly across the
+glowing North stalked a row of seven of the great white wolves. Failing
+to find the reindeer, and seeing Sitka so far from his native seas,
+they began circling toward him; and though the lone bear knew better
+than to hope to fight off so many foes, and though he took to his heels
+with all swiftness, the wolves were swifter, and soon he was baring
+fang and claw to a circle of famished green eyes and slavering jaws.
+Sitka reared himself on his great haunches, towering tall above them,
+that he might sell his life dearly.
+
+But Unga had also seen the seven wolves, white against the ruddy sky.
+And he had seen the great white bear prints, and knew that his old-time
+foe was near. Now, he told himself with chagrin, the wolves would get
+the bear, not he,--and he could never bring the great white pelt to his
+village in the pride of his long-time boast.
+
+Like the flight of a falling star a bright idea shot into his head. He,
+armed as he was with the musket the white men had given his father,
+would fight the wolves off the bear! Then he would still have a chance,
+some day, of getting the bear himself.
+
+With the fire-arm that spoke death from afar, he came running to meet
+the wolves. With his musket that out-marvelled the sharpest spear he
+brought down the foremost wolf. But the shot only wounded that great
+beast, so white against the surrounding whiteness,--it did not stop
+him long. The surprise of that gave the little brown man pause. A new
+thought appalled him. Should his gun fail too often, might he not find
+himself in danger?
+
+On came the ravening wolf pack, and back fell the Eskimo with his
+weapon that here broke a leg and there caused the red blood to flow,
+but did not stop the wolves. Soon Unga was standing back to back with
+the great white bear, within the narrowing circle of their foes, aware
+that not the bear’s life alone, but his own, lay largely in Sitka’s
+fighting powers.
+
+But though the great bear unaided could not have felled so many foes,
+who darted now on this side, now on that, under his guard in intent to
+ham-string him, nor could the Eskimo alone have handled so many with
+even the best of weapons, between them they put first one, then another
+of the attacking hoard to rout. Where the great bear was taken at a
+disadvantage, the Eskimo came to the rescue. Where the little brown man
+would have been overwhelmed, the mailed white forearm of his furry foe
+sent one more of their common foes to writhing in an agony of deep-cut
+wounds. Now the leader wolf had turned the brunt of his ferocity on the
+weaker animal, which was the man. But Unga’s musket, pointed close,
+blew the old wolf’s head off. Then the next in leadership of the wolf
+pack approached the bear, keen to dart under his mailed fist, that
+guarded his vitals, and out again before punishment descended. But the
+lightning swiftness of that mailed fist was aided by the roar of the
+man-made weapon close at his head, and he was done for.
+
+All this while the little brown man recognized with amazement that for
+himself as well as the bear it had become a matter of life and death.
+They two stood back to back, comrades of battle, with Sitka, red-eyed
+and furious, turning the tide of battle in his favor. And twin to the
+thought, he also recognized that, were it not for his musket, the bear
+would soon have been laid low on the snow instead of the mangled wolves.
+
+The bear also was bleeding, as was the little brown man, but both would
+heal quickly, as the wounds were not deep. But the wolves lay dead at
+their feet.
+
+The bear stood licking his wounds, while the Auroral curtain shot
+beauty across the frozen sky, as if nothing but beauty could exist in
+all the white Arctic world. Sitka was too blinded with blood to see
+his remaining enemy,--his life-long enemy, more feared by far than the
+wolves had ever been. Unga could have got him then. But he didn’t!
+
+He had fought side by side with this great furry fellow, with their two
+lives in the balance. He had fought to save the bear, and the bear’s
+good fight had saved his own life. They were fellow fighters! They had
+fought together,--and won!
+
+It came to him then that he no longer wanted the pelt of the plucky
+brute. He no longer cared to make it his boast in the village nor wear
+it before his igloo. Why, he owed a debt of gratitude to that bear, and
+the bear was already his in the sense that he had saved him. Besides,
+the great white beast, whom he had watched from the days of his wee,
+fat cub-hood,--this dumb brute who would now be so helpless against the
+pointing of the man-made musket,--had he not fairly won his life and
+freedom?
+
+“Do you go your way, and I will go mine,” he said in his heart, and by
+some strange telepathy, Sitka in his heart understood. “Henceforth, let
+there be peace between us!”
+
+The little brown man sped away into the Arctic night, to the East where
+the reindeer herded, and Sitka shambled off toward the West, where the
+fish of the sea never failed him.
+
+
+
+
+FINNY-FOOT
+
+I. THE WATER PUPPY
+
+
+Finny-Foot first opened his round, wondering eyes on a world of
+sun-kissed waves, deep blue beneath a deep blue sky.
+
+The waves slapped in white foam against the rocks, and the sky foamed
+with white wind clouds. The rocks were slippery with sea-weed, and
+shone as sleek as the wet brown fur of the seals. Finny-Foot’s woolly
+white coat, which is what Harbor Seal babies always wear their first
+spring, made him look like just another of the fat white balls of foam
+that the April wind tossed up and down the yellow sand of the beach.
+But the gray gulls flying over-head knew, and called to one another to
+see the new water puppy.
+
+His parents, like the aunts and uncles and grandfather of the little
+colony, wore gray, like the ocean on a dull day, with spots of darker
+gray. But the new young cousins were all white like Finny-Foot.
+
+In the beginning, while Mother Nature was still trying first one kind
+of animal, and then another, to see which made the best pattern, these
+water puppies had lived on land, and had outside ears like any other
+dog, and four short legs on which to carry their fat, furry bodies.
+Then their great-great-ever-so-great grand-parents had decided to live
+on the rocks of the harbors up and down the sea-shore, where it would
+be easier to catch the fish on which they lived. Of course then Mother
+Nature changed their legs to “flippers” or fin-feet, so that it would
+be easier for them to swim. That is why seals look so much like fish,
+with their fore flippers for fins and their hind ones held together
+like a tail.
+
+They bark like dogs, though, and those finny-looking fore-feet help
+them to crawl about on land, as well as swim. Of course now that they
+have become water animals, their ears are all covered with fur, so that
+you might think they didn’t have any ears at all. But they can hear a
+fish swim by, for all that.
+
+At first Finny-Foot cried when he was hungry, in a voice almost like
+that of a human baby, and was nursed like any other puppy. Then he
+learned to eat the tender young sea salmon that his mother caught for
+him,--and the clams and scallops that she found and shelled for him.
+It was a pleasant life. He had nothing to do but tumble about with the
+other seal babies, or lie watching the gulls that circled back and
+forth with the big, salt-smelling waves, singing in their hoarse voices
+that sounded so like rusty hinges, and watching for fish they might
+grab.
+
+One day, too, the whole sky seemed covered with a mammoth flock of
+ducks, (Surf Scoters), who were going to Alaska for the summer, where
+they would not find it so crowded when their young were hatched. For
+hours the V-shaped flocks swept Northward in a gray-black cloud,
+while the air rang with their musical whistle. Finny-Foot stared, his
+puppy-like eyes round with wonder, but at last they all disappeared
+into the blue distance. There must have been hundreds and thousands and
+millions of them. How he wished he, too, might travel and see the world
+beyond those rocks! He little dreamed how soon his wish was to come
+true, nor in what an amazing fashion.
+
+His mother kept his oily fur sleek and shining, so that he could slide
+through the water easily, and he had no trouble at all about learning
+to swim. Soon he could catch a tiny fish in his jaws, if he swam after
+it fast enough, and his fur turned gray in leopard-like spots.
+
+One day, though, these happy, quiet times came to a sudden end. At
+first the only thing he noticed was a row of half a dozen long black
+fins cutting through the waves, far out at sea. Swiftly the black fins
+came nearer, then an up-toss of their heads showed the circling gulls a
+row of mammoth jaws, armed with the most murderous-looking teeth. It
+was a band of killer whales, and at the sight, every seal on the rocks
+started swimming for shore as fast as he could go.
+
+Finny-Foot’s mother towed him with her when his strength gave out, and
+so great was her fright that she never stopped till she had him far up
+on the sandy beach, where the whales could not follow. Those of their
+colony who were not swift enough got caught, and were devoured by the
+fish-shaped monsters who were not fish, and whose ugly black sides bore
+white patches that glistened in the sun. Each one had a fin on the
+middle of his back that stuck straight up, so that you could see it a
+long way off. It was that that had given them warning.
+
+All afternoon they waited on the beach. Then at last the row of black
+fins headed out to sea, and it was deemed safe by Grandfather Seal to
+return to the rocks and fish for supper. And to hear them barking under
+the moon that night, watching the white foam blowing down the beach in
+the wind, no one would have known the bloody fate that they had so
+narrowly escaped.
+
+[Illustration: She never stopped till she had him on the sandy beach.]
+
+But the killer whales came back next day, and this time took them so
+nearly by surprise that there was not time to swim to shore, and those
+who could not scramble to the highest point of the highest rock were
+swallowed whole. How they huddled together upon that high rock, while
+the killers swam around and around them watching to see if one of
+them would not fall off into the water where they could reach them!
+Finny-Foot’s mother tucked him into a crevice and stood over him. No
+use for his father, and the other fathers, even to put up a fight
+against the killers. They wouldn’t have had a chance in the world.
+But once more the whales swam back to sea, and this time they did not
+return; for they, too, were on their way to Alaska, where they hoped to
+catch the fur seals as they migrated Southward.
+
+One day that summer, when Finny-Foot’s mother and her neighbors felt
+quite sure there were no killers about, (Grandfather had been watching
+the sea all day with his big, round eyes), they decided to have a
+picnic, and explore some rocks further out in Monterey Harbor, where
+the painted boats of the fishermen pass.
+
+It proved to be a wonderful fishing-ground. Finny-Foot, forgetting his
+mother’s command to stay close by her side, swam out to the dories, his
+round eyes bulging with wonder at the way they pulled up their netfuls
+of fish. Then he saw a big salmon that he wanted to catch.
+
+The fish made a sudden dive, and Finny-Foot, taking a deep breath, dove
+after him. The next thing he knew, he was all tangled up in something.
+Then he was lifted straight into the air, in the midst of a netful of
+wriggling, flapping fish.
+
+“Father!” cried a black-eyed little boy. “See what I’ve caught!
+Oo!--May I have it?”
+
+
+
+
+II. PIETRO’S[2] PET
+
+
+When Finny-Foot, the seal baby, found himself in the fisherman’s net,
+he never once thought how easy it would be to catch one of the fish
+wriggling all about him.
+
+[2] Note--Pronounce Pya tro.
+
+His first thought was surprise that he should be rising out of the
+water against his will. Then he was afraid. He had never seen a human
+being so close before. Sometimes he had barked, with the family group
+on seal rocks, as people came to watch them from the beach. Then he
+would swim to the other side of the rocks to wait till all was safe
+once more.
+
+It was a boy of nine whose black eyes first spied Finny-Foot as the net
+was emptied. “Pietro” his father called him. His cheeks were flushed
+with the kiss of the California sun, and his black curls blew in the
+breeze, as he stood bare-footed in the fishing-boat. This boy spoke
+words that Finny-Foot, of course, could not understand. But he read the
+kindness in his tones, and he felt the gentleness with which the boy
+stroked his furry head, and he was no longer quite so frightened.
+
+The boy must have asked his father if he might have the seal for a pet,
+because in another moment he was hugging him joyously, both arms tight
+around him, while the fish squirmed at their feet, and the man and his
+partner set sail for home.
+
+But though Finny-Foot was no longer so afraid of being killed and
+eaten, as the killer whales would have eaten him, swallowing the little
+fellow whole, he suddenly realized that he was a long way from home and
+mother. Putting his fore flippers on Pietro’s shoulder, he began to
+cry, and you would never believe how much it sounded like a human baby
+crying for its mother.
+
+Pietro stroked his wet, oily, fishy-smelling fur, which was as soft as
+a kitten’s, and tried to comfort him, but still the seal baby wailed
+his loneliness.
+
+His mother heard him, too, and came swimming after the boat, her great
+eyes questioning his round, frightened eyes, as he peered over Pietro’s
+shoulder. But when he struggled to get free, the boy only held him the
+tighter, and Pietro and the men had their eyes on the course ahead, for
+the stiffening wind was carrying them along at a great rate. But she
+followed as far as she could, then sadly gave it up and went back to
+tell the colony what had happened.
+
+By and by it occurred to Pietro that his pet might be hungry, and he
+offered him a little fish. Finny-Foot ate it eagerly, and the boy
+laughed at his round, puppy-like head, and kitten-like whiskers, and
+the clever fore fins that he had instead of arms. He looked like a
+fish, in one way, too, with his hind flippers held back close together
+like a tail.
+
+When they had landed at Fisherman’s Wharf and Pietro had carried the
+pale, spotty-coated little fellow to the shack where the nets hung
+drying, young Finny-Foot surprised the boy by walking across the
+porch. It was a funny walk, but we will have to call it that, because
+it certainly was not swimming. First the seal would raise himself on
+his fore nippers, then draw himself forward, with a hump of his back.
+Sometimes he used his hind flippers, and sometimes he kicked them
+together straight up in the air. The other fishermen’s children greeted
+this performance with shrieks of laughter; and they offered him fish
+till Pietro had to put a stop to it, for fear Finny-Foot would over-eat.
+
+He got his mother’s wash-tub and filled it with sea water for his
+strange visitor; then, with the help of some of his young neighbors, he
+rolled a great rock up on the porch beside it, in the sunshine. There,
+he felt, the little seal might feel at home. Then he hooked the screen
+door on the inside, so that no one could get in to tease him.
+
+Finny-Foot was a tiny fellow. His mother had been only five feet long,
+for she was a harbor or leopard seal, not a fur seal. Her tribe, an
+old sailorman told Pietro, are found everywhere, from the Arctic Ocean
+to South Carolina on the Atlantic side and Southern California on the
+Pacific. All up and down the coast, this old sailor had seen harbor
+seals, barking on the rocks and fishing on the sandy bars. He had heard
+they even swam away up some of the big rivers and into the Great Lakes.
+They have been seen off the coast of the British Isles, and as far away
+as Japan.
+
+Finny-Foot soon learned to know the boy as his friend, and inside of
+a week was genuinely fond of him. He loved to have Pietro stroke his
+silky fur. He would come humping himself along to where the boy sat in
+the sunshine, mending his father’s nets, and lay his round, white head
+against his arm, and make a funny puppy-like sound that the boy came to
+understand meant: “Please come and play with me!”
+
+Then Pietro would teach him to fetch and carry a stick, or some other
+simple trick. He longed to try throwing the stick in the water for
+Finny-Foot to retrieve, but he never felt quite sure that his odd pet
+would swim back to him.
+
+An old seaman used to watch the seal at his antics. One day he offered
+the boy a dollar for his pet. He said he wanted to take Finny-Foot on
+board the whaling vessel for a mascot, to bring them luck. But the boy
+would not part with him.
+
+The next day the old sailor offered him five dollars, but still Pietro
+would not listen. His ship was to sail the next day at dawn, and the
+boy heaved a sigh of relief when, with a final offer of seven dollars,
+the old man said goodbye. The money would have meant needed clothes to
+the fisherman’s boy, but he would not part with his pet.
+
+Then as Pietro was looking at a newspaper that someone had left on the
+wharf, his eyes caught the picture of a troupe of trained seals rolling
+barrels. They were to be in next week’s vaudeville show, and Pietro
+resolved to find a way to see it.
+
+
+
+
+III. THE TRAINED SEALS
+
+
+“I’ve got a trained seal,” Pietro told the man at the ticket window, as
+he stood on tip-toe to buy his seat. He had earned the quarter mending
+a net for a neighbor on Fisherman’s Wharf.
+
+“What’s that?” demanded a sharp-eyed man behind him, who happened to be
+the owner of the show.
+
+Pietro told him about Finny-Foot.
+
+“Where do you live?” the man asked, with a peculiar gleam in his eye.
+But the boy was too over-awed by the mirrored magnificence of the
+theatre to wonder at the question.
+
+The whole program, the usual vaudeville, entranced him. But when the
+trained seals appeared, his heart thrilled with delight. The curtain
+rose on a row of the clumsy fellows seated in a circle on up-turned
+barrels, barking in chorus.
+
+First came a barrel-rolling contest, at which the audience applauded
+mightily, as it is rare to see trained seals. Pietro assured himself
+Finny-Foot did as well as the best of them. There was a trick seal who
+was always hiding from the showman. There was a mother seal in trailing
+skirts and plumed hat, holding her baby in her flappers. (The little
+seal looked too cunning in his white bonnet and long dress). There
+were other tricks, and every move the animals made, with their awkward
+flappers, sent the audience into gales of laughter. There was even a
+seal orchestra, which set Pietro wondering how they could hold their
+violins. He could not see that both instrument and bow were tied in
+place. The showman rewarded each performer with a fish, just as Pietro
+did Finny-Foot. The big bull seal at the kettle drums would hammer away
+with all his might till he saw the man approach, then he would open his
+jaws for his fish and eat it, before again taking part in the symphony.
+
+But the thing everyone enjoyed the most was when a large glass tank
+was drawn on the stage. On an up-standing rock in the middle lay three
+seals, barking just as they might have off the shore of Monterey. The
+showman threw in a fish, and all three dove for it. He threw them
+another, and another, then a whole handful of small, silver-shining
+fingerlings, and the seals dove again and again for them, bringing them
+up in their jaws and holding them down with one flapper while they ate,
+if they were too large to swallow whole.
+
+Pietro went home as proud as a peacock to think that his seal could do
+tricks as good as those people paid to see.
+
+That evening, just as he had seated himself on the porch in the sunset
+glow, with Finny-Foot scrambling awkwardly for his supper, the showman
+appeared.
+
+“Now where is that seal?” he asked briskly.
+
+Finny-Foot was put through his paces, the boy proud and flattered by
+the showman’s interest.
+
+“What will you take for him?” the man asked at last. “I need another
+seal for my pyramid act.”
+
+“What’s that?” Pietro’s father called through the window.
+
+“I’ll give you five dollars for that seal,” said the showman, holding
+out a green-back.
+
+“But I don’t want to sell him,” said Pietro promptly.
+
+“Better take it,” advised his father. “It will buy a new coat for
+school.”
+
+“Do I have to, Father?”
+
+“As you please. It is your seal.”
+
+The showman added a dollar to the five in his hand. Pietro looked at
+the money, then at his ragged jacket. Six dollars would mean a lot to
+him. Then he looked down at Finny-Foot, whose round, puppy-like eyes
+were fastened on his trustingly. He wondered if the showman was kind to
+his seals. Then he remembered the whip he had snapped at them when they
+were slow to obey a command. Besides, how could a seal be happy so far
+from the ocean he loved? He remembered the old seal who lay all day on
+the side-walk of the Cliff House beach.
+
+“No!” decided the fisherman’s boy. Nor did the offer of more money
+change his mind. He only hugged his pet to his ragged coat and shook
+his curly head. Nor could the showman persuade Pietro’s father to
+interfere.
+
+After that the boy fell to thinking. Soon school would begin, and he
+must have shoes. One bright morning he took Finny-Foot in his arms,
+and made his way to the Ferry Building, where he sometimes earned a
+dime carrying someone’s suitcase. He was followed by a troupe of small
+boys and a dozen older people, who closed in about him in a circle
+when he set the seal on the ground. Borrowing an empty barrel from
+a man he knew at a fruit-stand, he began putting the seal through
+his barrel-rolling trick. Then he passed his hat. Nickels, dimes and
+pennies came pouring in,--mostly from the grown-up portion of his
+audience. When the next ferry-boat landed, pouring a new audience into
+the facade, he repeated his show. A third time he put Finny-Foot
+through his paces, and then passed the hat.
+
+A policeman stopped him. It seemed that there were several reasons why
+he could not give another show. But he had already earned enough money
+to buy the new shoes.
+
+After that Pietro had to leave Finny-Foot shut up all day while he went
+to school, and the young seal did not thrive. No longer would he caper
+joyously after the fish that were thrown him. No longer did his fur
+gleam velvety and his brown eyes shine. Pietro realized that a seal
+does not belong on dry land. He needs to live on the rocks off-shore,
+where he can dive for his dinner. Finny-Foot might even be homesick for
+the other seals. The boy’s heart ached with pity.
+
+Then he had an idea! When Saturday came, he went with his father in the
+fishing dory, and with them went Finny-Foot.
+
+They were not heading toward where Pietro had found his pet, but he
+waited till he had scanned the water in every direction to make sure
+there were no sharks, then he gave Finny-Foot one last pat on his
+puppy-like head, and hugged him, and let him slip into the water.
+
+The young seal, joyous with the feel of the salt tide, and never once
+thinking that he was leaving his friend, struck out for a point of
+rock he could just see above the wave tops. His muscles were soft from
+disuse,--but just let him reach those rocks, and rest awhile, and he
+would see if he could not find his way home!
+
+
+
+
+IV. FLAPPER THE FUR SEAL
+
+
+It was “sink or swim” for Finny-Foot,--and it was a long swim to the
+point of rock he had seen.
+
+He had almost given up, when the tide turned and carried him right
+toward it. But where was his mother, and the others he had left? Here
+was no sound of barking seals, though over on the yellow ribbon of
+beach sand the wee sandpipers ran up and down with the waves, just as
+they had at Monterey, and the gulls creaked and curveted overhead.
+
+“I want to go home!” wept Finny-Foot, in his voice like a human baby’s
+wail. But the only answer he received was the slap of the waves against
+his rock and the creak of gulls overhead.
+
+He caught a fish and ate it before he hid himself in a cranny of
+the rocks to take a nap. He awoke to an ocean deep blue under the
+California sun, and a cloudless sky that seemed to bend down to meet it
+everywhere except where the beach met the never-ending waves with its
+yellow sand dunes. He caught another fish, and took another nap, and
+when he awoke this time he felt much better.
+
+He was just wondering if he could find Seal Rocks if he were to swim
+along close to shore, when he spied the up-standing fins of a band of
+killer whales. They were far out at sea, but he remembered what had
+happened to the seal colony when the killers had pursued them, and for
+days afterward he dared not make the venture.
+
+Then one morning, when the sea was calm, he sighted a big rock shining
+black and wet, further down the coast, and swam for it. This rock was
+even better for basking in the sunshine and diving for passing fish.
+But it was not home, and Finny-Foot was even lonelier now than he had
+been with Pietro. Again and again he started swimming further South,
+where he seemed to feel that home ought to be. But always he saw
+sharks, and had to hide himself behind the nearest rock. Sometimes,
+too, after a long, tiring swim, he failed to find a good fishing ground
+and had to go hungry to sleep. Then he came to another town, where he
+was afraid to go too close to shore, and waited long days on a point of
+rock that looked far out to sea. There were always plenty of fish, but
+would he have to live all his life alone?
+
+One day he saw a sleek dark form swimming just off shore. Now
+Finny-Foot’s own family, like all harbor seals the world over, were
+gray spotted when full grown. But the newcomer was a rich dark brown
+and ever so much larger. Still, Finny knew he was a seal by the way he
+swam, and himself swam out to greet him.
+
+The visitor proved to be an Alaska fur seal, a young fellow who had
+migrated South with the other fur seals, but who had been wounded
+by a shark and had to go ashore till his wound was healed. He told
+Finny-Foot of that land of ice and snow where his own colony made its
+home. Finny-Foot decided that it must be the need of keeping warm so
+near the North Pole that gave him such wonderful fur, for he would need
+it there to keep him from freezing.
+
+There were millions of them where Flapper the Fur Seal came from. Every
+spring, he said, they started North, after a winter along the coast
+of Canada and as far South as Northern California. Often for days and
+weeks at a time they had to swim through a sea that was beaten into
+giant waves by the storm winds. Often rain and snow and sleet pommeled
+the sea all about them, and the sky hung low and gray with clouds,
+and they could hardly see for the gray fog that hung over everything.
+Sometimes they had to dodge between drifting ice-bergs that roared and
+cracked in the most terrific manner. Sometimes a storm would raise the
+waves so high that they were nearly drowned.
+
+But at last, just in time for the short Alaskan summer, they would
+reach the small, fog-hidden Pribilof Islands, where the mother seals,
+hundreds of them together, would raise their babies. The fish are so
+plentiful that the season is one long feast.
+
+The fur seal babies are a woolly black. And here the seal youngsters
+would play like puppies, racing and tumbling about together with their
+funny, awkward flappers, diving and swimming and leaping from the
+water, all in the merriest way imaginable.
+
+But even there the killer whales pursued them. Then, too, there were
+men who killed them for their fur, (Flapper said). There were great
+white polar bears who tried to catch them, and Eskimos and Indians,
+who kill them both for food and fur, so that a fur seal has to be
+continually on the alert.
+
+But all this danger and hardship had made Flapper unusually well able
+to take care of himself, and he thought that if Finny-Foot wanted to
+come along, they ought to be able to keep out of harm’s way until they
+found the little colony off Monterey. He himself, thought Flapper,
+ought now to wait until he saw some band of migrants returning to
+Alaska, and join them for the two thousand mile journey home.
+
+Finny-Foot invited him to join the colony at Monterey, but Flapper said
+the warm climate was beginning to make him feel itchy in his heavy
+furs, and if he did not find his people within a few days more, he was
+going to swim back North by himself, at least as far as Canada.
+
+One curious thing he told Finny-Foot. Instead of each family having
+just one mother, as harbor seals did, there in Alaska a family might
+have a hundred mothers all bringing up their children on the same rocky
+islet. But that was because of several reasons. First, so many things
+happened to the more adventurous father seals, who had to fight off
+intruders, that often there weren’t enough to go around. Then the bull
+seal is so large, (four or five times as large as his mates), that he
+can easily protect a whole colony of mothers and babies.
+
+Finny-Foot thought he would much prefer to have the kind of families
+his own colony believed in. But then, of course, everything is so
+different in Alaska, where it means a struggle just to keep alive, that
+he supposed it must be necessary.
+
+One day he and Flapper had been playing together, Flapper leaping high
+above the water in great, glistening curves that Finny-Foot could not
+begin to imitate, when Flapper gave a bark of amazement. There, on a
+cluster of rocks in a curving harbor, above which the gulls creaked
+and curveted as they watched for fish, he could see a number of gray
+objects moving awkwardly about or diving into the tide.
+
+“Look!” he urged Finny-Foot. “I’ll bet that’s your colony!” But the
+little seal could not see. “Come on, let’s find out!” Flapper urged,
+almost as glad as if it had been his own people that he had found. And
+sure enough, there on the very rock on which Finny-Foot had spent his
+babyhood, a snow white pup, he saw his gray spotted mother, all alone.
+
+Just at first she did not recognize him, for he had grown so large and
+had turned gray spotted like herself. When she did realize that it was
+her son, whom she had given up for gone, she barked so joyously that
+every member of the colony came crowding around them, barking their
+welcome to him.
+
+
+(THE END.)
+
+
+
+
+GLOSSARY
+
+
+ Aurora Borealis--Northern Lights.
+
+ Bidarka--Eskimo canoe.
+
+ Cache--A hiding-place for food supplies.
+
+ Fiord--A narrow inlet of the sea between steep cliffs.
+
+ Glacier--A river of slow-flowing ice.
+
+ “Husky”--Alaskan wolf-dog.
+
+ Ice Berg--A huge chunk of ice that has broken off a glacier and floats
+ in the sea.
+
+ Ice Floe--A smaller chunk of ice.
+
+ Ice Pan--The ice where the sea has frozen over.
+
+ Igloo--Eskimo house.
+
+ Lava--Molten rock from a volcano.
+
+ Samlet--A young salmon.
+
+ Tundra--Alaskan bog.
+
+ Volcano--A mountain that spouts fire and lava.
+
+ Zenith--The region of the North pole.
+
+
+
+
+  Transcriber's Notes:
+
+  Italics are shown thus: _sloping_.
+
+  Variations in spelling and hyphenation are retained.
+
+  Perceived typographical errors have been changed.
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 78351 ***