The bears are gone. Their blood dries on hills and riversides. Indeed, by the turn of the next decade, they were no more, a whisper of the countryside woods. 

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In a dark nest of snow, a brown bear rolled around, unable to sleep. 

The warmth from her body melted the layer of snow around her, clearing it away as water which revealed another icy patch. The coldness seeped through her fatless skin into her bones. 

Cold. 

That was all she remembered. That was all she thought of as she stared up into the darkness beyond, blankly. There was no more energy in her muscles. She was weak, so weak that she had to crawl across the fields of ice on chilly nights. 

The only heat came from her pulsing heart. 

Though her pulse was also weakening, she knew her big heart was still young, still welling with profound passion, of wonderful memories of her childhood; when she was a cub, she used to sit on her mother’s shoulders and dream of scouring the wide, blue yonder. She used to hold on to her mother’s soft fur on her back and get the best view of the Aurora Borealis. She used to relish the warmth of the slick, creamy fat flesh of cods in their breeding season during the cold months of the year. 

When her mother was gone, everything the young bear had went along with her mother. 

She was left alone. 

And the poor young cub suddenly felt lost. 

Lost and lonely, shivering in the biting ice of blizzards. Cold. 

The young cub had never eaten any fresh flesh ever since. Her mother had left too early.  

She had never been taught the rule of the wilderness. She did not know how to hunt. 

And that, in the ruthless viciousness of the wild, meant only one thing: She will not thrive. 

The brown bear, now nearly adult, still bore the vivid images of that fateful day. The day that took her mother’s life. It was the coldest period of winter. She had always hated it. The ice was too frozen to be cracked for fish, the snowstorms too blinding to allow her mother to hunt for food at all. No caribou. No snow rabbits. Not even a small rodent.  

Those days meant extreme cold, pain, suffering… and sacrifice. Her poor, poor mother. 

And then came the day when the mother grizzly died. 

Down in the valleys, food was so scarce that the mother and cub were ravenous with hunger for days. Even the leaves of the trees were bare. They could eat everything, but there was nothing. At last, the mother grizzly ventured with her little cub up a tall hill. From the way snow leopards wistfully circled at the bottom of the hill and the many snowy owls diving into the snow-tipped hilltop at night, the cub, like her mother, knew there was an abundance of food within the smell of danger that encircled the hill. 

That smell of danger was common everywhere–in the blood of dead bear corpses, the snow around old campfires that littered the land, the skin of wolves that was dried out on the snow at the foot of such hills. If there was anything she was familiar with except the smell of her mother and herself, it would be that smell of danger. She knew it came from a black powder–if she were ever to touch it, it would be the moment when she died. 

The little cub and her mother reached the hilltop. Before joy could overwhelm them- for the snow was warm, signalling the presence of fatty rodents beneath, that detestable smell enveloped them.  

The cub remembered, clear as day, how the men’s guns scowled savagely underneath their arms. There was a glint off the tip of the long misshapen sticks–or so the young cub thought of them that time–then she was gazing into six small, black holes aimed at her flank, all around her. 

The first gun was shot. 

There was an eruption of feathers in the distance down the hill as the mother and her cub dodged. 

The two bears turned tail and fled for their lives. However, the sky continued raining bullets. 

Boom. Snow erupted around the cub as a cold wave washed her. “MOM!” The bear cub gasped. Her feeble scream was swallowed as a jolt sent her tumbling onto her back. The cub’s left hind heel was pierced – blood spurted out in torrents. Shocked, pained, and paralyzed with fear, the tiny bear collapsed to the ground. 

The men did not mean to scare the mother and her cub away. They had meant to kill. 

Their dark shadows scaled the snow swiftly like the wind towards the helpless little bear. 

Yes. The scent of blood. Instinct drew the mother bear’s attention to the smell of the air. It’s blood! She raised her head to catch a better whiff and at the corner of her eyes – a long trail of blood was seen streaking down the slope. Her hackles rose at the back of her neck with alarm. NO! She must turn back. 

With six guns surrounding them and the only bushes meters down the hill, there was no way of escape, no way out of that with her cub, alive. The mother knew she needed to save her cub. With a desperate roar, she charged. Her jaws snapped open… 

Three of the hunters escaped. Another one succumbed to the wrath of a mother protecting her young. But still, there were two hunters left. 

The first crack fired hit her mother’s left shoulder, where it spread into a sphere of sticky red blood. She, the cub, gun-shy and barely managing to stagger to her three good feet, stood rooted to the ground, immobilised and confused. Ignorant of the numbing pain and her inability to fight, the weakened mother bear groped about the whiteness to reach her cub.  

The only way was to shield her cub with her very own body. She was desperately trying to save her cub’s life, with little regard for her own.  

The second shot hit the bull’s eye. 

The rifle’s bullet buried itself in the mother’s heart. 

With one last roar of anguish, the mother willed herself to fall towards her cub, trying to protect it even in her moment of death. YOU MUST RUN! That single roar struck the cub awake. She was startled at the sight, jumping up before the two hunters can react and took off down the hill, slipping in the snow and tumbling furiously. She was too heavy, the slope was too steep, the speed of her descent was too fast, and her left hind heel was in a great pain that blinded her thoughts. 

She was gone in a matter of seconds, far, far away, a hundred times faster than those hunters tearing across the snow in pursuit.  

Hidden behind the massive patch of green bush, she, the now orphaned cub, had waited in agony and sorrow for one whole hour. The hunters didn’t appear. Perhaps…perhaps they decided to give up the chase.  

Her heart had already cracked at the thought of her mother lying at the top of the hill. Was she dead? The innocent little bear was still waiting for her mother to come tearing down the slope back to her. Mom… she’s strong.  

That’s right! She was still grasping onto that sliver of hope that her mother might be still alive. Maybe the silver things that fired from the guns were not poisonous. After all, the cub thought, her mother couldn’t die with a few spurts of blood, could she? 

So, determined, she thrashed free from the tangle of branches and shrapnels of ice and tore up the hill. The last sight of the fateful place had been etched in her mind’s eye. She knew where it was, and what it should look like. 

But…IT LOOKED DIFFERENT. 

Where was the patch of red? The little cub swore from her heart that her mother should have…should be…here. But it had changed. 

Her mother was gone. 

Gone from the living; gone from the snowy hilltop into men’s hands; gone from the world of the young cub. 

Forever. 

And now, as she replayed the bloody images right before her eyes as she lay there in the snow nest, she felt the cold growing rawer than before. It was now biting right into her heart. Her heart was also beginning to freeze up like the rest of her body. 

She was now so frail, so weak, and so prone to the icy wilderness that she could snap with a strong gust of the wind. The brown bear could feel no more warmth or energy in her. She had not eaten nor drunk for a week. She had not touched any other source of warmth ever since her mother died.  

Too feeble to open them, she closed her eyes slowly. The last strand of heat was ebbing away from her. Unable to feel her body anymore, she suddenly realized she felt so light. And in shock and joy at the lightness, she tried to get up or even lift a paw. But they were nowhere to be found. 

Just then, a band of white light enveloped her vision as she tried desperately to open her eyes. She could not, so she gave up and focused on that white light. Up close, the blinding beam was so hot. 

Heat! Oh! she seemed to have yearned for it for years.  

In her vision, she saw her paws grappling for it, closer, closer… 

The surroundings suddenly grew so hot. A blast of heat blew onto her face as she neared that flaming line of white. With a surprised gasp, she inhaled deeply, feeling the softness of warm air sweeping into her lungs. 

Oh, yes, yes! A small roar escaped her throat in delight. 

Breathe them all in! 

The bear thought she might break into a sweat anytime now–it was flaming and scorching as the seconds ticked by. Yet, she did not want to leave this mystifying and misty place. It felt so sweet, so like home, with the heavy, long-lost scent of her mother. Suddenly, the white vision vaporised, morphing into pitch-black darkness where the wind whizzed past her muzzle as she sensed herself returning from and falling swiftly towards an unknown below. However, she did not cry for the loss of that white light––because another source of warmth embraced her. She fell wrapped in velvety softness. 

So peaceful. 

Mother?  

That was the last thing the little brown bear thought. Her mother’s figure was standing in the snow, warm, calling out to her. 

And thus, in a cold December winter, down in the snowfields, at the root of a pine tree, in a nest of snow–another brown bear was gone.