B25C24 - Polar Bear Facts

Now we were feeling pretty good. Better than we had since arriving here in Popsicle World.

We had the morph for this place. Like being a tiger in the jungle or a crocodile in a swamp, we owned this place now.

Owned it!

I've been a gorilla. I've been a rhinoceros. I've felt power before. But this was new.

I stood nearly ten feet tall, reared up. I weighed maybe fifteen hundred pounds. And if those numbers don't mean anything to you, think about it this way. I was three feet taller than Shaquille O'Neal. I weighed five times as much as him.

I could have dribbled Shaq the length of the court and stuffed him. I was mighty. I was seriously mighty.

My front paws were a foot wide. Each had five webbed toes with long, black claws. My powerful front legs could have flipped over a pickup truck.

And the cold?

What cold? If the thick layer of blubber underneath my skin wasn't enough, my body had made other adaptations for warmth.

My fur looked white, but it wasn't. It was transparent. Transparent and hollow. Every bristle was like a little greenhouse, turning sunlight into warmth, which was absorbed by my black skin.

I could see just as well as I did as a human, maybe a little better. Far better than poor Rachel in her grizzly morph. My hearing was only average, but my sense of smell was awesome. I could smell seals all over the place.

Not much else to smell, when you think about it.

The bear mind that lay just beneath my human consciousness was no bubbling stew of emotions, no panic, no fanatic hunger. Nanook was calm. Completely without fear. What was there to fear?

He could go for weeks without eating. Hunting was more about play than survival. He actually spent more time lounging around than he did looking for food.

We sauntered back toward the Yeerk base with the cockiness of Clint Eastwood going into the town saloon.

It was a long walk, punctuated by refreshing plunges into the icy water. We ended up having to demorph, of course, and that was no fun at all. But then it was back to being Lords of the Ice.