Polar Hunter

          Arctic winter is as beautiful as it is cruel.Ice hangs in the air cold enough to burn your lungs while the aurora dances a frivolous can-can high above and far into the east, shaking dust motes from her skirts. It is a landscape of ghostly shadows and smoke, of cobalt depths and inky puddles under a sapphire sky of midnight sunlight. Gone are the aquamarine and turquoise gems of Summer's sunlit waters and glistening diamond ice.
        A polar bear shifts in his den of ice. Something disturbed him. Was it the grumbling ice sheets, rubbing each other up the wrong way like bickering siblings, or was it the rumbling growl of his intestine complaining of emptiness?  The thought revealed to his conscious mind demands an answer and he is unable to ignore his desire for food or his curiosity any longer. His boot black nose twitches from side to side hoping for some hint of food in the crystalline air as he looks at the world anew. This is the night his mother said would come, the one that would feel like forever. Light would return when the corkscrew turned upon the earth, it was all part of nature's waltz. He should be deep in slumber, barely conscious of the cold but it is not so warm without the shared pelts of his mother and his brother.  This is his first winter alone, and just as was told in the stories of old it would be long and deep with darkness and discontent.
        His world, in its deeper shades of blue appears unsettled under the flirtatious peacock-sky, flaunting all the colour in her petticoat tails at the moon. The polar bear spreads the broad pads of his four paws flat against the earth to stop its dizzying tilt and heaves his body from slumber. Ice crystals swirl and eddy across the ice flats as he raises his nose to sniff the air for some hint of warmth, of life or death. He wonders half dazed across the ice, his thick pelt buffeting in the gusty winds, eyes squinting into the blue.
       There. Something on the air. He pads forward, to the left, right, and back to centre, pinpointing the direction he must go. He walks on for a few minutes, feeling the cold seeping through his paws, loath to leave the warmth of the den too long, and sniffs again. The smell is stronger, he is sure of it. Or is it desperation he is smelling? Eat or retreat. A wrong decision could be the death of him. He moves on and moments later feels a patch of ice give under his weight. He noses at the crust, inhaling the smell of warm seal cocooned within, thence wring on to his hind quarters he dashes down his front paws on the ice, instinct overriding everything. Over and over he repeats his attack on the snow, smashing down, feeling the crust of ice cracking, the smell of seal getting stronger. Adrenalin floods his muscles. This was a fight for food,a fight for survival. His head spins with anticipation and his mouth floods with saliva as the roof of the den caves in and he scoops at the warmth of the hollowed spaces. He falls forward into the den with his head and shoulders searching for the meaty morsel just in time to see the tail of a harp seal slip under the inky glass of icy water.
        As the adrenalin wanes to exhaustion he gazes at his reflection disturbed only by a stream of lazy bubbles rising to the surface of the water hole mocking his hungry reflection. He turnes on his heal following his own scent trail back to the den. The growl comes again. This time he knows it for what it is, the demanding echo of his cavernous stomach. He knows he must ignore: to go on hunting in this cold is a gamble he cannot take. Head down against the wind he walks away from disappointed exertion and back to warmth and a chance at Spring's rich pickings. For now he will bide his time in his ice hotel.