The Great White Bear by Kieran Mulvaney Read Free Book Online Page A

inquisitive male. Now she welcomes her suitors' advances and rejects her cubs' attempts to seek sanctuary from their presence.
    Scared, the cubs retreat from their mother and the approaching male. Confused, they look longingly after the retreating figure that has been the central focus of their entire lives. They start toward her, stop, look anxiously in the direction of the new arrival, and hesitatingly move away.
    Finally, instinctively, they understand. They pace nervously back and forth, and they subconsciously move closer to each other as they moan uncertainly. The first phase of their lives, in which they relied almost entirely on their mother for nourishment and protection, is over. Now they must begin the second phase, the most dangerous few years of a polar bear's life. In the wind and snow, they huddle closer.
    For the present, they have each other.
    Otherwise, for the first time in their young lives, they are entirely alone.

Bear
    The warming rays of the sun have long since dipped beneath the horizon; the cold and the dark hold the Arctic in their thrall, and the sea has frozen into a largely solid mass.
    Across the Northern Hemisphere, the sun's gradual withdrawal heralds a gathering calm, a comparative stillness as a season of plenty yields to one of paucity. Summer's kaleidoscope of colors and cacophony of bird song surrender to winter's monochrome quiet. Priority is placed on the conservation of energy, rather than its exuberant expression. Resources are at such a premium that many mammals choose to enter a form of stasis, a metabolic depression known as hibernation, in which the body temperature drops and breathing slows. It is commonly assumed that among those species that hibernate are North America's bears, but the assumption is inaccurate. Both grizzlies and black bears do submit to periods of prolonged sleep during which they can, if undisturbed, sleep without stirring for much of the winter. But their body temperature falls only a few degrees, and they can be easily roused. It is not true hibernation.
    The winters from which brown and black bears shelter are mild compared to the one that two young polar bears are about to experience, but for them there is no hibernation. In fact, winter, while lacking the abundance of spring, is not for polar bears the harshest season; in contrast to the experiences of their relatives, that distinction falls to summer, when ice is at its minimum, water is at its maximum, and the seals on which they prey are hard to reach. For these two bears, the onset of winter is a good omen; as they huddle against each other for warmth, looking not as fat as perhaps polar bears should, they could, were they able to consider such things, comfort themselves with the knowledge that the worst was over. They had survived their first summer alone. Now they needed only to make it through the long polar night, and soon they would be witnessing the new dawn of spring.
    As they bed down, one of them lifts his head into the air. He is sniffing, thinking that he has perhaps caught a tempting smell drifting on the wind. As he sniffs, he does not see, in the clear night sky, the stars twinkling far above, or that one star appears to stand almost overhead hour after hour, night after night, seemingly never moving even as the others circle perpetually around it.
    In recognition thereof, it is dubbed Polaris, the pole star; and in the imaginative menagerie of celestial creatures compiled by ancient, wondering eyes, it is at the tail of a small bear, which we know by the Latin name of Ursa Minor. Nearby, another loose assemblage of stars that in reality are billions of miles apart have been stitched together to create Ursa Major, the Great Bear; * and while the polar bears that stride across the ice below are the unquestioned rulers of the northern realm, it is Ursa Major after which their kingdom is named.
    The ancient Greeks, analytical observers of worlds both celestial and terrestrial, determined