The Tales of Jackson Stone

[nOmnomnOm]

Chapter 5


Friend or Food

Looking out into the horizon it was basically all the same. White. for miles on end. Still, I remembered while flying down that there were bodies of water close by. After looking around a bit more I noticed a change in the horizon and decided to head there.

Getting my hunting rifle out designed for Minor's weather, I set out to see if I could spot some game where the water was. The wind had died down enough so that it was easier to navigate and I peered in my scope from time to time to see what I could spot.

Peering through the rifle's scope it all seemed to same. Just landscape. Nothing else. As I was about to give up trying something caught my eye. It thought I was something move but was not quiet sure myself of it. Checking again I couldn't really spot it... until I saw a black dot move. At first I thought it was only a fault of the scope. Dust or something. But when I stopped moving the gun it was clear that was no dot. It was a nose.

Waiting and looking at it move I could then make out a grey object being dragged with it at the same speed. Looking closely it looked like a seal and there was some red it was leaving behind. Definitely blood. It was a bear alright. And an adult one at that too.

Getting closer I could make it out more. There were no cubs with it. Just a lone bear. So I assumed it was a male. His face was spotted with blood from the seal apparently but I noticed it was a small one. The bear could easily eat two or three of those before it was no longer hungry. He was definitely starving and didn't look like it had much energy. The bear walked slowly carrying his probably last meal with him.

Without thinking I got closer, watching the bear as it pulled the carcass along the snow. As one point though he stopped and sniffed the air. I suddenly froze. He had detected me.

The animal then looked my way and I could see hunger in his eyes. I stood frozen facing a starving bear that was about to rip me apart. The bear started to walk towards me, leaving the seal behind him. I could tell that he would even try to outrun me just to get more food. I stood there watching as he got closer, and then started to circle around me. He was inspecting me; evaluating his soon to be kill.

The thought kept on coming back to me to shoot him before I would get hurt, but my gut told me I shouldn't. If I was to get a bear it would be stupid to throw away this opportunity. instead of shooting him I straightened up and raised my gun and hands in the air as high as I could. I watched as the bear did the same, standing up on two feet and as if towering over me. I then shot my gun in the air. I regretted that decision instantly.

Instead of backing away and running however, the bear attacked, tackling me easily and making me hit the snow instantly. Pressing his weight on my arms and pinning me down he bared his teeth and growled. He then sniffed one more time and suddenly his mood changed. Instead of biting my flesh away the polar bear started to lick my face as if I was his best friend. I didn't know at the time what had influenced him to do so until later where I noticed I still had the scent of Snowball still on my fur coat from the last time I had visited California Minor. Even if the scent was weak after all this time the bear had managed to pick it up.

It was funny that even after Snowball's death, he still managed to save my life.

The bear after a while got off me and walked back to his meal, starting to it hungrily. I watched from a distance as he devoured the meal and watched the blood splatter on the pure white snow. That could have very will been me I thought.

Walking back slowly trying to give him as much space as possible, I watched him finish and then he looked up and started walking towards me. Not in an attacking manor but a causal one. I started walking backwards and kept watching him come nearer and nearer until he was next to me. We walked for a while and the bear kept his pace following behind. I looked around trying to find where my ship was. In the horizon as i looked and saw a faint gimps of the Igloo, I looked and in the distance I saw a heard of deer around my camp. The bear must have noticed to because he was sniffing the air and picking up his pace. I noticed though that he didn't have enough strength yet to actually hunt them. I hadn't heard of bears being very proficient at killing deer anyway. But that didn't stop the bear form being interested and through his hunger, wanting to at least try to grab another meal.

It came to me that he needed me to survive and since he hadn't eaten me, i guess I should pay him back. I aimed at the heard, picked my shot, the biggest one out of the whole pack, and fired. A loud bang broke the silence and stillness of the tundra and I saw the heard disperse. The one I shot however trotted a few meters and then fell dead. The bear was watching with curiosity through the whole thing and when he saw the deer drop he went into a dead run after the corpse.

When I finally caught up to him he was already devouring the meal with half of his body covered in blood from the animal. While the bear ate I went back to my ship and got a hunting knife. Cutting the deer into pieces I managed to lure the bear onto my ship while feeding it.

To normal people it would have seemed a crazy idea to bring a wild bear onto a ship. But then again, who said he would be wild for long?

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I named the bear Fluffy. I don't really know why, but it suited him well. I guess from my first encounter with him he had from then thought of him as a friendly and tame creature. Most of the time anyway.

It took about a week of training to finally be able to trust Fluffy to walk around the ship and not be tied down by a chain leash to a wall. Slowly though, he became to be as faithful as any dog would be. He had grown on me and I started to relish the thought of loosing him to another Rogue idiot.

I decided I would have to do something to protect him so that would never happen. On a junker base I found a man that was good at mechanical engineering and such. When I proposed an idea of protecting my bear, the man was intrigued by the idea and got to work. The outcome was Fluffy being mechanically modified to be resistant to gun fire and blade wounds through installing metal plates under his skin, enclosing his body and protecting him. Although it made him heavier, Fluffy quickly got accustomed to the extra weight and operated normal after a few weeks. When shot, the bullets ricoshaded off his body doing minor damage.

After each day we became more and more close together. One could argue we became almost insuperable.