Читать книгу The Haunters of the Silences: A Book of Animal Life - Sir Charles G. D. Roberts - Страница 4

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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.