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offspring taking their first tentative steps together. It is an emotion echoed by Thorsten Milse in
Little Polar Bears:
When the moment finally arrives, I'm always gripped by excitement: a den in the middle of the snow ... a small black nose ... you hold your breath ... and then a white face appears. Cautiously and with some curiosity, a polar bear cub peeks out. Behind the cub, the mother's head gradually appears. For that one moment, I forget about everything else around me; as if in a trance, I press the shutter release of the camera. The endless wait has been worthwhile, the many hardships are forgotten—and I am suffused with a feeling of indescribable happiness.
    Milse's book is a compilation of beautiful images of bear mothers and cubs in the Wapusk National Park in Manitoba, home to some 1,200 den sites, the principal denning area for the bears of Hudson Bay, and the largest denning area in the world. Although most dens worldwide—such as the one filmed by Salisbury and Miles—are within a few miles of the coast, for the bears that den in Wapusk, it is a forty-mile trek to the ice of Hudson Bay.
    "Once she comes out of her den, she doesn't automatically leave right away," says Mike Spence. "The cubs need to become adapted to the environment. They've got a long journey ahead of them. It all depends on what condition the cubs are in. It depends on what condition she's in. They'll play, they'll get their muscles going, and then one day she'll decide it's time to go, and off she'll go."
    Tom Smith has found that in Alaska, mothers and cubs tend to tarry at their dens on average two days before heading out for the sea ice, although some do so on the same day they emerge. During that time, if Smith and colleagues are able to watch the bears outside the den for one hour out of every twenty-four, they consider themselves fortunate. Often, he says, bears "will spend mere minutes per day outside the den. But then, why go outside? The environment is hostile and being outside also signals where the den is. They almost never nurse outside but again, why bother?"
    Smith notes that staying at the den is both costly, in that it prevents the mother from hunting for food, and dangerous, as it advertises the den's location. At the same time, to leave too early, before the cubs are ready, would condemn them to certain death. "I'm convinced that the only reason mothers tarry at dens is to monitor cubs' growth and development," he says. "Once it meets some standard written in her genes, off they go."
    The mother, desperately depleted after four months without food, nudges the young cubs onward, but for tiny legs that have hitherto been accustomed only to a small cave in the snow, it is a difficult journey. At times, particularly when danger may be near, the cubs clamber onto their mother's back. The travelers repeatedly stop and rest, the cubs nursing from their mother's milk and all three taking advantage of opportunities to nap and gather their strength. Eventually, they reach the shores of Hudson Bay, and the cubs gingerly follow their mother as she strides out, away from the beach and across the fractured and mangled ice, in search of seals to break her long fast.
    Even as they reach the ice, danger abounds. Although the rate appears to vary by location, studies have shown that as few as 45 to 65 percent of polar bear cubs survive their first year. In Hudson Bay, where an abundant spring is followed by the completely barren months of late summer and early fall, the survival rate of cubs may be as much as 20 percent below that of cubs in the Beaufort Sea.
    The first few days are especially dangerous. It is a jarring conversion from the quiet warmth of their den to the subzero temperatures of an Arctic spring. Sea ice terrain is uneven and treacherous. And along the coasts and on the ice, danger lurks.
    Adult male polar bears have been known to kill and eat young cubs, although how often they do so is unknown, and why they