Sitka, the snow baby

"Sitka, the snow baby" by Allen Chaffee is a children’s nature-adventure story written in the early 20th century. It likely blends fiction and natural history, following a polar bear cub named Sitka through Alaska’s seas, shores, and mountains while observing wildlife, weather, and Indigenous life, and then shifts to a second tale about a seal pup and a fisherman’s son. The focus is on vivid animal adventures that teach how creatures live, travel, and survive in the North.

The opening of the book traces Sitka’s birth on an iceberg, his first swim, and early scrapes with an Eskimo boy, seabirds, seals, and walruses, as he and his fierce, resourceful mother hunt for food and drift south before returning inland to summer berries, salmon rivers, and snowy heights. He narrowly escapes being crushed between bergs, watches wolves and deer, follows salmon upriver, and sees glaciers calve icebergs and orcas prowl the sea. As winter closes in, he and his mother live on the pack ice, match wits with seals, blunder into an igloo village, battle husky dogs, survive a blizzard, and feast from an explorers’ cache, after which Sitka grows into a strong young bear. The sequence culminates when Sitka and his long-time pursuer Unga fight off a wolf pack together and wordlessly part in peace. The narrative then begins a new story about Finny-Foot, a harbor seal pup threatened by killer whales, caught in a fisherman’s net, kept as a pet by Pietro, briefly shown off for coins, and finally set free when captivity dims his spirits, ending with his strenuous swim back toward the open sea.