“So would you.”
“I would not!”
The boys continued to argue. They were passing through a small pocket of level ice among lower cakes, while the Kabluna, who had just caught a glimpse of them, ran up a neighboring valley in their direction.
“You think you’re some hunter,” Kak insisted. “But what have you ever done alone? Now I——”
“Ah, cheese it!” his cousin laughed in great good humor. “I guess if we saw a bear right here, without a dog, or a bow and arrow, or a spear or anything, we’d both drop dead.”
“Speak for yourself——”
“Chrrrrrrrrr——!”
The sound stabbing Kak’s sentence sounded much like a cat on a back fence, only horribly loud and near. If you had heard it in the city you might have taken it for the grinding of motor gears; or in the country for an angry gander. To the Eskimos it meant but one thing.
Both boys leaped about three feet off the ice, turned while leaping, and came down the other way round face to face with a huge polar bear. He was standing above them on the ridge, his massive front paws almost near enough to reach out and knock them over. The beast’s small eyes glistened; his yellow teeth showed under a curled lip below his sharp, black nose; and his head swung from side to side as if he were asking himself:
“Which shall I eat first; or shall I tackle both at once?”