The three bears dove into the water and swam right over.

“Oh, great,” one of the men said. “Now there are four bears on our iceberg.”

“Don’t worry,” Fergus replied. “There’s plenty of fish for everyone. They won’t bother us.”

The bears spent the day feasting on fish, and when darkness fell, they slept together in a big pile, the people nestled among them. That night everyone was warm as could be—men, women, and children.

The following day, another three bears swam over from a passing iceberg, and the day after that, four more came. The people were starting to get nervous.

“Eleven bears are a lot of bears,” a woman said to Fergus. “What happens when they run out of fish to eat?”

“I’ll catch more,” Fergus replied.

He spent all that day and the next one staring out to sea, watching for another school of fish to appear, but he didn’t see any. Their supply of fish was nearly gone. Now even Fergus was starting to worry.

“We should have killed that bear when there was only the one,” an old man grumbled. “Instead, that peculiar boy brought us ten more—and now look at the mess we’re in!”

Fergus could feel the people beginning to turn on him. He wondered what would happen when the fish ran out. Perhaps they would feed him to the bears! That night they went to sleep in a contented and furry pile, but in the morning the people awoke to find eleven polar bears staring at them hungrily, having finished every last fish on the iceberg.

Fergus ran to the end of the iceberg and cast his gaze desperately out to sea. What he saw made his heart leap for joy—but it wasn’t a school of fish. It was land! In the distance was a snowy island. Better still, Fergus could see smoke rising from it, which meant it was inhabited. There would be people there, and food. Forgetting the danger of the bears for a moment, Fergus ran back to tell everyone the news.

They were unimpressed. “What good is land if we get eaten before we can reach it?” a man said, and then a bear approached him, picked him up by one leg, and shook him, as if hoping a fish might fall out of his pockets. The man screamed, but before the frustrated bear could take a bite of him, a gunshot rang out.

Everyone turned to see a man in white furs holding a rifle. He fired a second time, right over the bear’s head, and the bear dropped the dangling man and ran away. Then the rest of the bears ran away, too.

The man in furs had seen them through a spyglass from the island, he explained, and had come to rescue them. He gestured for the crowd to follow him, and brought them to a hidden cove in the iceberg where a flotilla of small, sturdy rowboats was waiting. The crowd wept with gratitude as they were ushered onto the boats and rowed to safety.