Sitka, the snow baby

By Allen Chaffee

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Title: Sitka, the snow baby

Author: Allen Chaffee

Illustrator: Peter DaRu


        
Release date: April 3, 2026 [eBook #78351]

Language: English

Original publication: Springfield: Milton Bradley Company, 1923

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78351

Credits: Alan, Charlene Taylor and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/American Libraries.)


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        [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.



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