How I made The Ice Bear – in pictures

The bears were born in the blue ice cave and for the first few weeks of their lives this was all the world they knew, curled warm against the white fur of their mother bear, growing fast and strong on bear milk. They dreamed together. Photograph: Jackie Morris

The bears formed a circle around the lost child, like white petals on a daisy. This was the image where the whole book began. I had wanted to work on a book about polar bears for a long time, but wasn’t sure where to start. But no story begins in just one place. A story is like a river that is fed by streams, trickling in, small at first until it becomes a river of words. The image of the child in the circle of bears was strong. My job was to work out how he had arrived there, and then to get him out, safely. Photograph: Jackie Morris

The boy and the seven bears moved over the ice. In the top corner there is an arctic fox. The fox is the totem animal of the child’s mother. They follow the bears, arctic foxes, because the bears feed only on the fat of a kill. The meat they leave for scavengers. If you look through the book there are many places where the child seems alone out on the ice, but his mother’s totem is often there, in the background, letting him be, but watching. Photograph: Jackie Morris

To the boy the great bear is like a hill of snow, until she lifts her sorrowful head and drew in the warm scent of the child, deep into her heart. This image is a homecoming, for both hearts. And they are watched by the seven bears and the small fearful fox. Photograph: Jackie Morris

The mother bear wraps her bear child in her great paws, but in the background his human father comes, across the ice. He has followed the paw tracks made by the river of bears and he searches for the bears who have killed his child. Blinded by grief and tears he raises the bone spear to kill the great she bear. Photograph: Jackie Morris

As I said, there are many small streams of ideas that join to make a story. I write on the hill top above my house. Ravens fly over head. In some ways I have always felt that it was the ravens who told me this story about the raven who steals away a child and so creates the first shaman. For at it’s heart that is what this story, set long ago and far away, is about. Photograph: Jackie Morris

And then the child has to chose. Should he stay with the people, who have raised him from a child, or return to the bear people, where he was first born. Only he can say, and both bear and man hope that he will chose wisely. Photograph: Jackie Morris

This picture, almost the last in the book, was the last image that I found, and for a long time I didn’t know what to paint. In my mind the hunter and his wife went on to have many more children, she with her fox totem, the boy who is also a bear, and the hunter whose totem is the white owl. If you look in the book you will find him. Here the bears, now nine of them, including the mother and the child, bring the hunter home, safe across the ice. But this isn’t the end of the story but the beginning of a new one. What will the bear boy do now? How much will he learn from these wild fierce creatures? Will it be enough?

The Ice Bear is published by Frances Lincoln. Photograph: Jackie Morris