And there her cubs were born. Two of them there were. The good Mrs. Bear was so delighted with their beauty that she was impatient for the warm days to come when she could take them out and show them to her relatives and friends.
"Perhaps, too, their father will be back by the time summer comes," she thought.
And then she was suddenly glad that he was not around just now; for he was very quick-tempered, and if the babies annoyed him at all, he would be pretty sure to cuff them. And one blow of Mr. Bear's paw would finish the career of any baby bear in the world.
So the two little creatures, clad in the whitest of fur from head to foot, their claws as black as ebony, and their wide eyes as yellow as amber, lay snuggled against the great warm body of their mother for all the weeks of the departing winter.
Suddenly, as they rolled over and looked upward through the snow cavern, they saw for the first time what seemed to them a great big eye staring down at them.
"That's only the hole in the roof," Mrs. Bear explained. "And pretty soon you will see that it is all blue and beautiful above that window—and then we will go out and away."
What that meant they did not know; for life so far as they had known it consisted of meals and sleep and endless playtime on the icy floor of their cavern. But they were to know more about it very soon. A white wing flashed by one morning, and a land voice called down the depths of their cave.
It was Mr. Burgomaster, the good-natured gull. He had come purposely to call on Mrs. Bear, for he had two stirring pieces of information to give her.
He perched by the edge of her skylight, and wasted no words in relating the news.
"There's a whale being driven ashore; and the mists have hidden the birds."