He was gone before Mrs. Bear could so much as thank him for coming; and she was, indeed, deeply obliged. No one but good Mr. Burgomaster would ever have taken such pains.
What he said sounded strange enough, but it meant everything to Mrs. Bear. When a whale was disabled in the far depths of the sea, or had been caught in the currents and gales in such a way that he must surely drift to shore, he was as good as dead and devoured. For in shallow water he would be helpless and once his enormous bulk was stranded on the rocks or the jagged capes of ice he could only give himself up to his enemies.
Mrs. Bear, however, would have been very cautious about venturing to the scene of the banquet, if the great flocks of birds, which were sure to be on hand, were not hidden from view as they hovered above it. Clouds of excited gulls that came nearer and nearer to the shore were a signal of what was about to happen. And the bears, the foxes, and the wolves were not the only ones who knew it. Men, with their ferocious packs of dogs, their long lassos of walrus hide, and their terrible spears, knew well enough what the noisy birds were announcing.
But all would be well if the fogs hung low, and the gathering flocks of sea-birds were thereby hidden.
Mrs. Bear explained the situation to her cubs.
"Of course, your mother would not have built her nursery here," she ended, "if she thought those terrible creatures with the wolfish dogs and the ropes were within miles and miles of the spot. But you can never tell when they may turn up. They come with their dogs over endless tracks of snow and ice to find us, and they travel fast. You must lie as quietly as you can while I am gone. Amuse yourselves in only the quietest way. Don't call out at all; and go to sleep again, like good children."
With that Mrs. Bear rose to her hind feet and reached upward along the snow walls of her house. Then, balancing herself on a ridge of the ice which was for all the world like a side shelf, she made a ponderous leap through the opening into broad daylight. For at last it was the real day, and a glorious glimmer of sunlight behind the fogs showed that summer was coming.
It was good to breathe the free air, and Mrs. Bear shook herself violently to straighten out the creases of her heavy coat. She would have liked to roar, loud and long, but she was trained by experience never to speak in a fog.
"You can't tell who's hearing you," her own mother used to say.
So she only trundled her mighty bulk downward across the ice and snow, to its very edge, where it suddenly broke off and formed an embankment. Below this there was a narrow beach, or what appeared to be one—a strip of confused and tumbled blocks of ice and jagged rocks.