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Started: 01:43:10 - Mar 31, 2010 by: RodRaglin
Spirit Bear
(Environmental Romance)
From Devine Destinies
http://www.devinedestinies.com
NOW AVAILABLE
Royalties donated to environmental organizations. For more info visit http://rodraglin.com
Kimberley James is hoping her new assignment will jumpstart her stalled career with a New York corporate relations firm. Her client wants to develop a mega ski resort in northern Canada. Her job is to convince the current owners of the land to sell. With millions of dollars to be made, it seems like a done deal.
Until she runs up against Jonah Baker.
Baker is part owner of a lodge on the land and an ardent environmentalist. He’s not about to permit a development that threatens ancient rainforests and the habitat of the rare and endangered Spirit Bear for any price.
Kim begrudgingly respects his principles before profit, but cannot allow a tree-hugging, bear- loving zealot to derail her fast track to success.
Jonah admires her determination and worldliness, but will fight to the end to stop a materialistic corporate climber from destroying something rare and unique.
Will their mutual attraction to one another be a catalyst that helps develop an understanding? Will the mythical, white Spirit Bear survive, and what role will it play in resolving what appears to be irreconcilable differences?
EXCERPT/PROLOGUE
Extremely low temperatures accentuate sound but despite the stinging cold, there was silence. No wind stirred the naked branches with its frosty breath. The ice that sealed the lake ceased to moan and crack. There was no song, call or footfall on the frozen white ground. It was as still as it was before Creator, the Raven, gave voice to the rainforest. All life seemed suspended in anticipation.
Then it fell. Whimsically it drifted down from an opaque sky and simultaneously was caressed and carried by the first puff of air. Randomly it fluttered, buffeted now by the increasing breeze, slipping between evergreen boughs, finally coming to rest. The white tailed doe licked the snowflake from her nose. She stood, and her twin fawns that were nestled close beside her, did as well. A glance from their mother left them motionless in the glade as she gracefully moved to the forest edge and gazed across the lake.
The mounting wind sent the crisp leaves scattering across the steel gray surface. Clouds the color of a fresh bruise, threatened the pale sun, imprisoned as it was in a nimbus of ice crystals. It was time to move deeper into the forest and away from the numbing wind that raced unopposed across the exposed expanse.
Blinking the now frequent flakes from her eyes, the mother returned to her family and they began the perilous journey to a haven she knew and hoped would protect them from the breaking storm and ever present predators.
Without further preliminaries, the mid-winter storm exploded. The air was filled with snow falling neither up nor down, but whipped in the direction of a lashing wind. The ancient trees creaked and moaned as they withstood the furious onslaught and the void of silence that had encompassed the Great Bear Rainforest of northwest British Columbia, Canada, was filled with the roar of the gale.
The family of deer was moving too slowly across the open area. The mother used her body as a plow to create a path through the deepening drifts but the fawns still found it difficult. With each step their spindly legs sank into the soft snow up to their chests. Her son, stronger and more determined, was doing better than his sister, who seemed close to exhaustion. The doe moved to her side, licked the delicate face clean of white flakes and prodded the panting flank with her head. As a result of the encouragement, the frail youngster managed to get her front legs clear.
A hissing sound distracted the pair and they both looked toward the other fawn a hundred meters ahead and now nearing the edge of the forest. One moment he was there, valiantly struggling to get through the drifts, the next he was gone.
Instinctively knowing what was about to happen, the doe tried to get between the advancing avalanche and her surviving offspring, but she was no match for the tons of speeding snow and ice that engulfed them.
The wind-packed slopes had released their load farther up the mountain and now a large outcrop of rock split the torrent into two channels. Protected by the bluff was a single, prehistoric, Yellow Hemlock. Battered and broken, it still survived, with roots securely entwined after centuries among the boulders and chunks of granite. This symbiosis of living wood and constant rock had formed a shallow cavern, where now, sheltered from the mayhem of the mid-winter onslaught, a miracle of life was taking place, just as one was ending.
Inside the cavern the blackness was absolute. The entrance, shored up with earth and covered with fir boughs, was now topped off with two feet of insulating snow. The floor was soft with leaves, meadow grass and pine needles. The excavation had been completed in early October and the decorating throughout that month.
Now in her tenth year, Sitka had mated for the third time in the late spring, but she had never had an opportunity to raise cubs. Born while she was in hibernation, the pair from her first pregnancy had suffocated when she had inadvertently rolled on them. The poor salmon run the following fall prevented her from gaining the necessary body weight for the fertilized embryos to develop. Sitka still carried the disappointment of waking in the spring with no babies.
This year the Creator had favored her. In June she had been courted by a very large, very attentive, gentle black male. For several days he kept a respectable distance, smelling her day beds and sniffing her urine to see how receptive she was. When he got too close, she would run away, and then turn to see if he was following. Because of his patience with her “hard to get” antics, in time, she allowed him to get closer and closer.
When she entered her estrous period they became inseparable. The ensuing days were filled with wrestling, nuzzling, playfully chewing on each other’s head and repeated mating. Then, with a swat in the face that made his ears ring and nose run, Sitka let him know it was time to be on his way.
In late August the salmon returned. Tens of thousands of adult fish churned the river shallows as they fought to make it to their spawning grounds. She waded right in amongst the masses, selecting just the females, fat with eggs. She had gorged herself on the rich roe, gaining nearly a third more body weight in six weeks.
Winter came early in the northern latitudes and by the end of October she was snuggled up in her cozy den. As she slipped into her long winter sleep her heart rate dropped from between 40 to 50 beats per minute, to eight to ten. She would not eat or drink, neither would she urinate nor defecate during the next five months. The fat put on during the fall would metabolize and she would lose 30 per cent of her body weight in the ensuing months.
Sometime in January her cubs had been born. Just one-tenth the weight of a human baby, they would struggle to find a tit, then alternately nurse and sleep until their mother arose in April.
This was the miracle taking place as the avalanche swept the family of deer to an icy death. Deep in its heart, the old tree protected its precious tenants as they suckled the nutrient rich milk and dreamed the dream of the pure, the innocent and the sacred.
For these were no ordinary bears. These were Moksgm’ol, spirits of the Great Bear Rainforest to the First Nations Tsimshian people. Their legend says that Creator, the Raven, decided to create a reminder of when the world was once covered with ice and snow. To do this, he flew among the black and brown bear people and turned every tenth one white.
Ursus Americanus Kermodei, is a rare subspecies of the black bear that, due to the result of a double recessive gene, is pure white. Rare as they are, what had taken place in the den beneath the old growth giant was rarer still. Not only was the mother a Kermode, so were both her offspring. Biologists would say this was an impossibility. But to the Creator, the Raven, nothing was impossible. And he had a special reason for bringing these three creatures to life. They would play a pivotal role in saving the sacred old growth rainforest.
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