ter'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