Midnight Snack and Other Fairy Tales Read Online Free PDF Page A

places in the wood where fir needles crowded so close that no snow ever fell.
    The hunter was a silent sort, and used to being alone. But he intended not to be that way forever. His idea was to find some strange beast in the wood, and tame it. Then he would take it down south to the King of Denmark, and sell it to him for a great price, and so make his fortune; buy a house, and settle down, and have friends who would come to call.
    The hunter kept his grey eyes open, and traveled far and wide. Once late in the year his wanderlust took him far out of the woods, closer to the seashore, where the snow fell fierce and bergs climbed the beach on the backs of bitter waves. And it was on such a beach, white with sand and snow, that the hunter found the white bearcub, all alone and crying for its lost mother.
    It was very small. That was as well for the hunter, for a polar bear much older than a cub sees only one use for man—food—and cannot be tamed. But this one was hardly weaned as yet. The hunter caught it without hurting it, and fed it his own dried meat soaked in water, and (when he could get it from the farmers he guested with) he gave it milk from farmstead cows. The milk made the little bear glad, and the hunter was pleased. He thought that when spring and summer and fall had come and gone again, the bear would be big enough to sell. Then he would take it south to the King’s great seaport market-city—the Cheaping-haven, as it was called—and offer the bear to the King. He would make his fortune, and be famous, and settle somewhere far from the white wastes.
    So spring and summer and fall went by, and the hunter and the white bear cub travelled the length and breadth of the Northern countries together. In Spring they fished in bitter-cold streams just breaking free of the ice; the bear was better than the hunter at this, and caught them many a fat trout. In the long days of summer they stayed in the cool of the shadowy forests, moving at their ease, while the hunter caught martens for their fur, and red deer for venison. In fall they lingered to enjoy the last of the fair weather, raiding the occasional bee-tree for honey: and they met trappers moving north, who looked at the bear with wonder.
    And at last winter came round again, and they began to make their way south together, the hunter and the white bear. It was no longer the tiny cub it had been. It was a great shaggy-coated beast, blue-eyed and wise-eyed, that followed the hunter like a dog. The hunter began to be sore of heart. He was a poor man, with nothing to live on but what he caught and could sell or eat. The bear was always hungry, so it was a trouble to keep fed, and its sale would bring him a great deal of money. But when he looked at the bear across the campfire of an evening, and it ate what meat he could find, and licked his hand afterwards: when he turned in the night and found its broad warm back bumped up against his: when it nosed him awake in a silent morning, breathing bear-breath on him, and pawed him merrily to get up and greet the day—at those times the hunter did not want to sell the bear, not for all the gold in the Cheapinghaven, not for the King’s own crown.
    But still they went south together—the hunter partly out of habit, the bear because its friend was going that way. The year grew very old, and the days very short. In those high northern parts of the world, when Midwinter grows near, the Sun only rides above the horizon for four or five hours out of the twenty-four. Dark things come out of the woods then, reveling in the shadows and troubling the houses of men. Those nights, when the hunter fell asleep, many a time he woke in the starlight to see the great white bear drowsing by the fire like a great shaggy toy, one half-closed blue eye resting on him; and he was very glad the bear was with him still.
    They were still travelling when it got to be Yuletide—that time of year which is Christmas now, but was just starting to be