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 t