The Haunters of the Silences: A Book of Animal Life. Roberts Charles G. D.
conspicuous even to the keenest and most suspicious eyes. It might pass for a fragment of ice with seaweed frozen into it, or for a bit of floating moss, save for the fact that it moved steadily through the dancing of the waves, paying no heed to tide or wind. As the seals were not expecting danger from the direction of the sea, they were not inclined to scrutinize a thing so insignificant as that steadily moving speck among the waves. Arriving within well calculated distance of the unsuspecting baskers on the ice-field, the old bear would fill her lungs, sink beneath the surface, and swim forward with all speed. At the very edge of the ice she would rise up, lunge forward, and strike down with her savage paw the nearest seal, before any of them had time to realize the direction from which death had burst upon them.
The old bear's triumph, however, was not always so complete. On one day in particular she was confronted by an experience which almost left her cub without a mother. The cub, watching solicitously from behind a jagged hummock of ice, received a lesson which never faded from his mind. He learned that in the wilds one must never let himself become so absorbed in any occupation as to forget to keep a watchful eye for what may be coming up behind one's back.
It was on one of the lean days, when all game was wide awake and the lichen-beds far away. On the jagged ice off the mouth of an inlet lay two walrus calves sunning their round, glistening sides while their mothers wallowed and snorted in the water beside them. The old bear eyed the calves hungrily for a minute or two. Then, ostentatiously turning her back upon the scene, she slouched off inland among the hummocks and rocks, the cub lurching along contentedly beside her.
Once hidden from the view of the walruses, she quickened her pace till the cub had to struggle to keep with her, swung around the head of the inlet, and crept stealthily down the other side toward the spot where the calves were lying. The wind blew softly from them, her padded feet made no sound, and she kept herself completely out of sight. Peering warily from behind a tilted ice-cake, she saw that one of the cows had crawled out of the water and lain down beside its calf for a noonday doze. Then she drew her head back, and continued her careful stalking by nose and ear alone.
At last she found herself within rushing distance. Not thirty yards away she could hear the loud breathing of the drowsy cow on the ice, the splashing of the one in the water. Turning upon the cub, she made him understand that he was to stay where he was till she was ready for him. Then gathering all the force of her muscles till she was like a great bow bent, she shot forth from her place of hiding and rushed upon the sleepers.
As the white shape of doom came down upon them without warning, the cow and one calf awoke in intuitive panic and with astonishing and instantaneous agility rolled off into the water. But the other calf was not in time. One sprawling struggle it made toward safety, and gave utterance to one hoarse bleat of despair, as if it knew that fate had overtaken it. Then a heavy stroke broke its neck; and as its clumsy legs spread out limp and unstrung upon the ice the bear clutched it and started to drag it back from the water's edge.
At this moment she was aware of a huge lumbering bulk crawling up upon the ice behind her. She took it for granted it was the dead calf's mother, and paid no heed. Walrus cows she despised as antagonists, though as game she held them in high consideration. She would attend to this one in a moment; and then her larder would be amply stocked for days.
An instant later, however, if she had deigned to look back, she would have seen a gigantic gray and brown, warty-skinned bulk, surmounted by a hideous face and grim, perpendicular tusks, rearing itself on huge flippers just behind her. The cub, peering from his hiding-place, saw the peril but did not comprehend it. The next moment the bulk fell forward, crushing the bear's hind-quarters to the ice, while those long tusks, which, fortunately for her, had failed to strike directly, tore a great red gash across her right shoulder.
With a grunting squeal of rage and pain the bear writhed herself free of the dripping mass of her assailant, and turned upon him madly. Blow after blow she struck with that terrible fore paw of hers, armed with claws like steel chisels. But the hide of the giant walrus was like many thicknesses of seasoned leather for toughness; and though she drew blood in streams at every tearing stroke, she inflicted no disabling wound. His little, deep eyes red with fury, the bull rearing himself on his flippers and lunging forward with awkward but irresistible force, like a toppling mountain, seeking to crush his enemy and at the same time catch her under the terrific downward thrust of his tusks. As he fought he bellowed hoarsely, and panted with great windy, wheezy breaths, while the walrus cows swam slowly up and down by the edge of the ice, watching the struggle with their small, impassive eyes.
The old bear was lame and aching from that first crushing assault, and her hind-quarters felt almost useless. Nevertheless she was much too active for her clumsy adversary to succeed in catching her again at a disadvantage. As she yielded ground before his blundering charges she led him farther and farther across the ice, farther and farther from the element wherein he was at home and invincible. Had she been herself unhurt she would eventually have vanquished his ill-directed valour, wearing him out and at last reaching his throat. But now she found herself wearing out, with loss of blood and the anguish of her bruised hind-quarters. As soon as she realized that her strength was failing, and that presently she might fail to avoid one of her enemy's great sprawling rushes, she was seized with fear. What would become of the cub if she were killed? She wheeled swiftly, ran to where the cub stood waiting and whimpering, nosed him solicitously, and led him away through the blue and sparkling hummocks.
After this misadventure the mother bear did no more hunting for a week or two, but kept inland among the sunny valleys, and nursed her wounds, and fed on the young roots and tender herbage which sprouted hurriedly wherever the snow left bare a patch of earth. On such clean and blood-cooling diet her hurts speedily healed. Then with renewed vigour and a whetted craving for red flesh-food, she went back to her keen hunting of the seals. But the walruses she haughtily ignored.
The Arctic summer, meanwhile, with its perpetual sun, poured down upon the world in swift, delicious heat; and the desolate world began to laugh, with vivid greenery about the bubbling sources of the springs, and sudden fringes of bloom, yellow and pink, along the edges of the perpetual ice, and the painted fluttering of butterflies in every southward-sloping hollow where there was earth enough to hold the roots of flowers. The little winged adventurers would sometimes flit abroad over the snow, questing perilously beyond the narrow confines of their home. These rash wanderers, as a rule, would fall chilled, and die on the snow before they could get back; and the cub, attracted by the flecks of gay colour on the expanse of gray-white barrenness, would run gleefully to snap them up and eat them.
Throughout the summer the cub and his mother kept very much to themselves, seldom consorting with the other bears which roamed the rocks and floes or came to the sunny valleys to feed on the ephemeral herbage. The cub, meanwhile, having all the nourishment and care that was usually divided between two, was growing swiftly in stature and in the lore of the north. With his mother's example before him he learned to hunt seals, to creep up on the dozing sea-birds, to scoop the unwary fish from the sea, to waylay the stupid hare or the wary fox. But he was peculiarly averse to swimming, and never entered the water except under the compulsion of his mother's firm paw. The wise old bear, knowing how much his success in the battle of life must depend on his mastery of the water, would push him in from time to time, and keep him there in spite of every whimpering protest. In this way he learned his needed lessons. But his preference was all for land hunting, and it was obvious that only the extreme of hunger would ever lead him to follow the seals in their own element. As a matter of fact, since that memorable day when his mother had been beaten by the great walrus, the cub had grown to regard the sea as the peculiar domain of the walruses, and he felt a certain diffidence about trespassing.
When the summer was beginning to fade away as hurriedly as it had come, the cub was suddenly left alone in his grim world. It happened in this way. On a certain hungry day, when his mother's hunting had been unsuccessful, the wind brought over a ridge of rock a pungent and ravishing smell of fresh blood. As cautiously as a cat the old bear crept around the ridge, the cub creeping at her heels. The sight that met them was one they had never seen before. Close at the water's edge three men were busy skinning and cutting up a couple of seals. The cub stopped short. A natural, inborn caution warned him that man was a dangerous animal. But the old bear, to whom man was as unknown as to her cub, had her intuitions obscured at that moment