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 by her too eager appetite. Moreover, she was in a bad temper, and felt that the strangers were intruders upon her own hunting-ground. They were insignificant-looking intruders, too, any one of whom she felt that she could settle at a single stroke of her paw. A green gleam came into her eyes, as with narrow, snaky head thrust forward and jaws half-parted savagely, she stalked down upon the group, expecting to see it scatter at her approach and leave her in undisputed possession of the prey.

As she drew near the men stopped work, stood up, and stared at her. For a moment they did nothing. Then, seeing that she meant business, two of them stepped aside and picked up what looked to her like two long sticks, which glinted in the sun. One man took a stride forward and pointed the stick at her in a way which seemed like a challenge. With a grunt of anger she charged straight at him.

From the point of the stick burst a flash and a roar, with a little puff of blue smoke that drifted off like a ghost over the waves. It might have been the ghost of the old bear herself, fading reluctantly back into the grim and desolate earth from which she had sprung; for at the instant of its appearing she plunged forward upon her nose and lay motionless, with a bullet through her brain.

It was a perfect shot; but the man who had made it took it as a matter of course. In a few moments the limp and warm body was being treated like that of the seal, for the pelt was a fine one and fresh bear-meat was a delicacy not to be despised by Arctic travellers. But the cub was not a witness of this red work of the shambles. When he saw his mother fall he shrank back in overwhelming terror behind the rocks, then turned and ran with all his might till he could run no longer. Finding himself in a little sheltered valley where he and his mother had often fed together on the sweet herbage, he crouched down under a rock and lay shivering for hours, afraid even to whimper.

At first the white cub suffered torments of loneliness and vague fear; but presently the more insistent torments of hunger gave him forgetfulness of his loss, and in hunting for his meals he gradually got himself adjusted to the new conditions. Naturally keen-witted and adaptable, he prospered, and when the approach of the long Arctic night began to throw its shadows over the ice and rocks his ribs were well covered with fat. When the herbage in the little valleys was all frozen to stone and sealed away under the first hard-driven snow, he yielded to a drowsiness which had been creeping into his nerves. With this drowsiness came a stirring of vague memory, and he turned his steps farther inland, far beyond the roar of waves and grinding floes, till he reached a place of tumbled rock, and cleft ravine, and imperishable ice. This was the place where he had been born; and here, in the very same sheltered crevice, he curled himself up for his winter's sleep. He was no more than fairly asleep, when the snow fell thick with the first of the unbroken night, and covered him away securely.

II

Through the months of dark, and storm, and ghostly, dancing lights, and immeasurable cold, the cub slept unstirring, and grew in his sleep. But when he woke, at the very first hint of awaking spring, he was wide awake all at once, and fiercely hungry. Fiercely he burst out from the sheltering snow, and shook himself, and hurried through the mystic glimmer of dawn to the seashore, where he hoped to find the seals.

He was trusting partly to memory, partly to instinct; but he did not know that this year he was a little ahead of the season. The ice inshore was still unbroken, and the journey to open water was leagues longer than he had anticipated. His cunning sharpened by his appetite, he stalked and killed an unwary seal beside its blow-hole, and lay there among the tumbled hummocks for some days, alternately eating and sleeping. Then, his strength and craft and self-reliance increasing hourly, he pressed forward league upon league, under the ethereal, bubble-tinted, lonely Arctic morning, seeking the open sea.

When, at last, he heard the waves breaking along the blue ice brink, and the clamour of the sea-fowl, and the barking of the seals, he felt that he had come home again. He forgot the solid land, here upon what seemed as solid as any land. He forgot the little inland valleys, where presently the snow would be melting and the tender grasses beginning to sprout. Here was good hunting, and easy; and here he stayed, making his lair among the up-tilted ice-floes, till the yellow and blue glory of full day was pouring over the waste.

It happened that year that no storms came to shatter and eat away the ice-fields along their outer edges. Only the tides and the slow assault of the sun did their work; and presently a vast area of unbroken ice parted from the land and went drifting southward in the grip of the polar current.

For days the young bear was quite unaware of this accident. The ice-field was too vast and too solid for its motion to convey any warning. The sea-birds, of course, knew all about it; and in a few days they disappeared, requiring solid ground for their nesting business. As for the seals, if they knew they didn't care, holding the ice safer for their domestic arrangements than the perilous and hostile shore. The young bear found good hunting. No storms came to vex him. And the warmth of summer fairly rushed to meet him. For several weeks he was altogether content.

Meanwhile the sun and the sea were making inroads upon the strength of the ice-field. One day when the bear was prowling along its edges, a mass of perhaps a quarter-acre in area broke off, lurching on the long swell. Astonished and a little alarmed, the bear hurried across, swam the narrow but rapidly widening strait, and clambered out upon the main field. The incident in some way stirred up a latent instinct, and he became uneasy. Setting his pace northward and landward, he stalked straight ahead for hours, – and where he expected a familiar ridge of rocks he came upon open sea. Much disturbed, he kept on his vain search for land, forgetting to eat, and soon had circumnavigated his voyaging domain. There was no land anywhere to swim to. There was nothing to be done but accept the situation with such composure as he could command. The seals were still with him, and he was not compelled to go hungry.

Then came a storm, with blinding flurries of snow out of the north, and huge waves piling upon the weakened ice; and the field began to break up. The seals fled away from the turmoil. Frantic with terror, the bear was again and again overwhelmed among the warring floes, and only by sheer miracle of good luck escaped being crushed. Clever swimmer that he was, again and again he succeeded in crawling out upon a larger floe, ploughing its way more steadily through the tumult. But every such refuge went to pieces after a time, crumbling into chaos under the shocks of pounding wave and battering ice. At last, and not too soon, when his young courage was almost worn out and his young strength all but gone, he was so fortunate as to gain a particularly tough and massive floe which withstood all the storm's assaults. It was almost a young berg in its dimensions and solidity; and in its centre, crouched in a crevice, the bear felt, for the first time since the uproar began, something like a sense of security.

The drift of the current had by this time carried the ice so far south that the unchanging light of the Arctic day was left behind. Each night, for a little while, the sun dipped from sight below the naked horizon. For three days the great floe voyaged on through unrelenting storm, riding down the lesser ice-cakes, and taking the waves with ponderous lurch and slide. Little by little the lesser ice disappeared, till the great floe rode alone. Then the wind died down; and last of all the waves subsided. And the bear found himself sailing a steel-blue, sparkling, empty sea, under a cloudless sky and a sun that burned with a warmth he had never known.

It was now came the terrific trial of hunger to the young bear. For days together he had no taste of food, no comfort to his throat but the licking of the ice and lapping of the fresh water in the pools. Once only did he taste meat, – a blundering gannet which alighted within a foot of his motionless head and never knew the lightning doom that smote it. This made one meal; but no more birds came, and no seals appeared, and no fish came near enough for the bear to have any hope of striking them. Day by day he grew thinner and weaker, till it was an effort to climb the slopes of icy domain; and day by day the floe diminished, till it grew to be a race between the ice and the animal, as to which should first fade back into the elements.

But here fate intervened to stop this unnatural rivalry. By this time the ice had drifted down into the track of occasional ships; and one day, as a tramp steamer was passing near the floe, some one on deck discerned the crouching bear. The sea was calm, and the captain in a mood of leisure; so a boat was lowered and the crew set out for a bear hunt.

Having heard much of the ferocity of the polar bear, the men went well armed and full of excitement. But the reception which they met disarmed them. Too hopeless for fear, or hate, or wonder, the despairing animal turned upon them a look of faint appeal which they could not misunderstand. With a not unnatural distrust of such amenability they lightly bound and muzzled him, and took him aboard ship. There the cook admitted him to his special favour, gave him a little warm broth, and gradually, by careful dieting, coaxed him back to health.

The young bear, as soon as he recovered himself, became the admiration of the whole ship's company. His coat was rich and fine, its whiteness tinged with a faint golden dye. His teeth and claws were perfect, and in the small, inscrutable eyes with which he followed the business of the ship gleamed an unusual intelligence. Nevertheless, though he showed no ill-temper, no one, not even his kind attendant the cook, could penetrate his impregnable reserve. To each individual who approached him he showed complete indifference, while, on the contrary, his interest in whatever was going on seemed unfailing. Chained to an iron stanchion near the galley, he would stand swaying from side to side and swinging his narrow, snake-like head for hours. But nothing that took place, alow or aloft, escaped his keen observation. His indifference was plainly not stupidity, so every one on the ship, from the captain down, regarded him with vast respect. When at length, after a quiet voyage, the ship reached port, this respect was enhanced by the price which he commanded from the directors of the zoological gardens.

Now began for the young bear a life which, after the first annoying novelty of it had worn off, almost broke his spirit by its cramped monotony. His iron cage was spacious, – for a cage, – and built under the shadow of a leaning rock; and a spring-fed pool at the base of the rock kept the heat of the southern summer from growing utterly intolerable. But the staring, grinning crowds which passed endlessly before the bars of his cage filled him with weary rage; and day by day a fiercer homesickness clutched at his heart. The food which his keeper gave him he ate greedily enough, but through some inexplicable caprice he scorned the peanuts which the crowd kept throwing to him through the bars. He saw the other bears, in neighbouring cages, devour these small, dry things and beg for more; but he would have none of them. He was ceaselessly irritated, too, by the noisy sparrows which would flit impudently within a foot of his nose; and once in a while the stroke of his inescapable paw would descend upon one of them, easing for the moment his sense of injury. Such small trophies he would eat with a relish which the choicest of his jailers' gifts could not excite. The only moments when his homesick heart could even pretend to forget its longing for the desolate spaces, the lifeless rock ridges, the little, snow-rimmed flower valleys, and the call of the eternal ice, were when, in the solitary lilac-gray of dawn, he wallowed unobserved in his sweetly chilly pool, and dreamed that the barking of the seals from their tank across the garden was the authentic voice of his lost home. But the coming of the first drowsy attendants would shatter this illusion, and send him back under his rock to stand sullenly swaying and swinging his head all day.

In this way the summer dragged along, and then the fine, dry fall; and instead of becoming reconciled the young bear grew more moody. His appetite began to fail and his fine coat lose its live, elastic quality. The keepers were disappointed in him. At first they had expected to win him over easily, because of his apparent amenableness and that look of intelligence in his eyes. But now they gave him up as an irreconcilable, and set themselves to keep him from pining away.

When winter came with raw rains, and sleet, and some sharp frosts, the exile sniffed the air hopefully for a few days, then relapsed into a deeper gloom. Then came a flurry of snow. As the great flakes fell about him he grew wild with excitement, running with uplift head about his cage, plunging in and out of the pool, and rearing himself against the bars in a sort of play. While the flurry lasted he saw no one, and forgot to eat. But in a day this tender snow had vanished, and he found no sufficient consolation in the thin ice which came afterward to encrust the edges of his pool. He seemed to feel himself cheated in his dearest hopes, and grew more obstinately dejected than ever; till finally came days when nothing would persuade him from the deepest corner of his den. Some of the attendants thought this meant no more than the drowsiness which, in his own home, might precede the desire for hibernation. But one, more understanding of the wild kindreds than the rest, declared that it was the very disease of homesickness, and that the exile was eating his own heart out for desire of his frozen north.

The city of the young bear's exile was not so far south but that sometimes, once in a long while, it found itself in the track of a wandering northern blizzard. One day, with terrific suddenness, on the heels of a gusty thaw, such a blizzard came. In half an hour the pool was frozen and a fine snow was drifting in fierce whirls about the cage.

The unhappy bear lifted his head and looked forth from his den. But he was not going to let himself again be cheated. He had no faith in this alien storm; and turning his back upon it, he once more buried his nose between his paws.

Meanwhile the cold deepened swiftly; the wind grew savage and shrieked over the cages and the roofs; and the snow, dry and hard like the driven needles of the Arctic night, thickened so that one could not see ten paces before his nose. Through the throbbing drift the attendants went hurrying about the open cages, fixing shelter for the animals that needed it. The cold, the savage noises of the wind, the sharp buffets of snow that struck into his den, at last brought the bear to his feet. He turned slowly, and came out into the storm.

He found himself, now, actually alone, and in what seemed almost his own world. This storm was convincing. He could not refuse to believe in the icy driven crystals which cut so deliciously upon his tongue and against his open jaws. This was really snow, that whirled and heaped about him. This was really ice, which crashed about him as he plunged in and out of his pool. Around and around his cage he romped, biting the snow in ecstasy, rolling in it, breathing it, whimpering to it. When his keeper came and looked in at him with wonder, and spoke to him with sympathetic comprehension, he neither saw nor heard. To his eyes the storm was volleying over the illimitable fields of the ice. In his ears the raving of the wind held the crash of grinding floes. To his heart it was the summons of the north, – and suddenly his heart answered. He stood still, with a strange bewilderment in his eyes, as if transfixed by some kind of tremendous shock. Then he swayed on his legs; and sank in a lifeless heap by the drifted brink of his pool.