Project Gutenberg's The Life Story of a Black Bear, by Harry Perry Robinson This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org/license Title: The Life Story of a Black Bear Author: Harry Perry Robinson Release Date: September 19, 2017 [EBook #55583] Language: English Character set encoding: UTF-8 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LIFE STORY OF A BLACK BEAR *** Produced by Mhairi Hindle and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) Transcriber’s Note Illustrations have been moved near to the text they illustrate and linked to the List of Illustrations. Chapters have been linked to the Table of Contents. Select “Enlarge” to access a larger version of the image. All variant spellings and variant hyphenation have been preserved. However, punctuation has been corrected where necessary. Cover HOW I TUMBLED DOWNHILL. [Enlarge] [i] Title Page THE LIF E STORY OF A BLACK BEAR BY H. PERRY ROBINSON LONDON ADAM·&·CHARLES·BLACK 1913 FOREWORD There is always tragedy when man invades the solitudes of the earth, for his coming never fails to mean the destruction of the wild things. But, surely, nowhere can the pathos be greater than when, in the western part of North America, there is a discovery of new gold-diggings. Then from all points of the compass men come pouring into the mountains with axe and pick, gold-pan and rifle, breaking paths through the forest wildernesses, killing and driving before them the wild animals that have heretofore held the mountains for their own. Here in these rocky, tree-clad fastnesses the bears have kinged it for centuries, ruling in right of descent for generation after generation, holding careless dominion over the coyote and the beaver, the wapiti, the white-tailed and the mule-eared deer. Except for the occasional rebellion of a mutinous lieutenant of a puma, there has been none to dispute their lordship from year to year and century to century. Each winter they have laid themselves down (or sat themselves up—for a bear does not lie down when hibernating) to sleep through the bitter months, in easy assurance that when they awoke they would find the sceptre still by their side. But a spring comes when they issue from their winter lairs and new sounds are borne to them on the keen, resin-scented mountain air. The hills ring to the chopping of axes; and the voices of men—a new and terrible sound—reach their ears. The earth, soft with the melting snows, shows unaccustomed prints of heavy heels. The coyote and the deer and all the forest folk have gone; the beaver-dams are broken, and the builders vanished. Dimly wondering at the strangeness of it all, the bears go forth, blundering and half awake, down the new-made pathways, not angry, but curious and perplexed, and by the trail-side they meet man—man with a rifle in his hand. And, still not angry, still only wondering and fearing nothing—for are they not lords of all the mountain-sides?—they die. H. P. R. First published September, 1905 Reissued Autumn, 1910; reprinted July, 1913 [ii] [iii] CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. HOW I TUMBLED DOWNHILL 1 II. CUBHOOD DAYS 9 III. THE COMING OF MAN 25 IV. THE FOREST FIRE 39 V. I LOSE A SISTER 57 VI. LIFE IN CAMP 71 VII. THE PARTING OF THE WAYS 93 VIII. ALONE IN THE WORLD 105 IX. I FIND A COMPANION 120 X. A VISIT TO THE OLD HOME 134 XI. THE TROUBLES OF A FATHER 147 XII. WIPING OUT OLD SCORES 163 XIII. THE TRAP 176 XIV. IN THE HANDS OF MAN 194 [iv] LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ‘HOW I TUMBLED DOWNHILL’ Frontispiece FACING PAGE ‘THE FATHER BEAR ASKED MY FATHER IF WE WERE NOT GOING TOO’ 49 ‘SLOWLY, YARD BY YARD, SHE WAS BEING DRAGGED AWAY FROM US’ 64 ‘AS I APPEARED THE YOUNG ONES RAN AND SNUGGLED UP TO HER’ 113 ‘SHE SAW ME, AND SAT UP AND LOOKED AT ME AMICABLY’ 128 ‘FROM THE MOMENT THAT I THREW MYSELF ON HIM HE NEVER HAD TIME TO BREATHE’ 177 ‘IT WAS EVIDENTLY A TRAP’ 192 ‘BY STANDING ON HER BACK I WAS ABLE TO SEE OVER’ On cover [1] THE BLACK BEAR CHAPTER I HOW I TUMBLED DOWNHILL It is not easy for one to believe that he ever was a cub. Of course, I know that I was, and as it was only nine years ago I ought to remember it fairly clearly. None the less, hundreds and hundreds of times I have looked at my own cubs, and said to myself: ‘Surely, I can never have been like that!’ It is not so much a mere matter of size, although it is doubtful if any young bear realizes how small he is. My father and mother seemed enormous to me, but, on the other hand, my sister was smaller than I, and perhaps the fact that I could always box her ears when I wanted to, gave me an exaggerated idea of my own importance. Not that I did it very often, except when she used to bite my hind-toes. Every bear, of course, likes to chew his own feet, for it is one of the most soothing and comforting things in the world; but it is horrid to have anyone else come up behind you, when you are asleep, and begin to chew your feet for you. And that was what Kahwa—that was my sister, my name being Wahka— was always doing, and I simply had to slap her well whenever she did. It was the only way to stop her. But, as I said, cubhood is not a matter of size only. As I look down at this glossy black coat of mine, it is hard to believe that it was ever a dirty light brown in colour, and all ridiculous wool and fluff, as young cubs’ coats are. But I must have been fluffy, because I remember how my mother, after she had been licking me for any length of time, used to be obliged to stop and wipe the fur out of her mouth with the back of her paw, just as my wife did later on when she licked our cubs. Every time my mother had to wipe her mouth she used to try to box my ears, so that when she stopped licking me, I, knowing what was coming next, would tuck my head down as far as it would go between my legs, and keep it there till she began licking again. Yes, when I stop to think, I know, from many things, that I must have been just an ordinary cub. For instance, my very earliest recollection is of tumbling downhill. Like all bears, I was born and lived on the hillside. In the Rocky Mountains, where my home was, there is nothing but hills, or mountains, for miles and miles, so that you can wander on for day after day, always going up one side of a hill and down the other, and up and down again; and at the bottom of almost every valley there is a stream or river, which for most of the year swirls along noisily and full of water. Towards the end of summer, however, the streams nearly dry up, just trickling along in places over their rocky beds, and you can splash about in them almost anywhere. The mountains are covered with trees—gorgeous trees, such as I have never seen anywhere else—with great straight trunks, splendid for practising climbing, shooting away up into the sky before the branches begin. Towards the summits of the bigger mountains the trees become smaller and grow wider apart, and if you go up to one of these and look around you, you can see nothing but a sea of dark-green tree-tops, rolling down into the valley and up the opposite slopes on all sides of you, with here and there the peaks of the highest mountains standing against the sky bare and rocky, with streaks and patches of snow clinging to them all through the summer. Oh, it was beautiful! In the winter the whole country is covered with snow many feet deep, which, as it falls, slides off the hillsides, and is drifted by the wind into the valleys and hollows till the smaller ones are filled up nearly to the tops of the trees. But bears do not see much of that, for when the first snow comes we get into our dens and go half asleep, and stay hibernating till springtime. And you have no idea how delightful hibernating is, nor how excruciatingly stiff we are when we wake up, and how hungry! The snow lies over everything for months, until in the early spring the warm west winds begin to blow, melting the snow from one side of the mountains. Then the sun grows hotter and hotter day by day, and helps to melt it until most of the mountain slopes are clear; but in sheltered places and in the bottoms of the little hollows the snow stays in patches till far into the summer. We bears come out from our winter sleep when the snow is not quite gone, when the whole earth everywhere is still wet with it, and the streams, swollen with floods, are bubbling and boiling along so that the air is filled with the noise of them by night and day. Our home was well up one of the hillsides, where two huge cedar-trees shot up side by side close by a jutting mass of rock. In between the roots of the trees and under the rock was as good a house as a family of bears could want— roomy enough for all four of us, perfectly sheltered, and hidden and dry. Can you imagine how warm and comfy it was when we were all snuggled in there, with our arms round each other, and our faces buried in each other’s fur? Anyone looking in would have seen nothing but a huge ball of black and brown fluff. It was from just outside the door that I tumbled downhill. It must have been early in the year, because the ground was still very wet and soft, and the gully at the bottom full of snow. Of course, if I had not been a cub I should never have fallen, for big bears do not tumble downhill. If by any chance anything did start one, and he found he could not stop himself, he would know enough to tuck in his head and paws out of harm’s way; but I only knew that somehow, in romping with Kahwa, I had lost my balance, and was going —goodness knew where! I went all spread out like a squirrel, first on my head, then on my back, then on my tummy, clutching at everything that I passed, slapping the ground with my outstretched paws, and squealing for help. Bump! bang! slap! bump! I went, hitting trees and thumping all the wind out of me against the earth, and at last—souse into the [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] snow! Wow-ugh![1] How cold and wet it was! And it was deep—so deep, indeed, that I was buried completely out of sight; and I doubt if I should ever have got out alive had not my mother come down and dug me out with her nose and paws. Then she half pushed and half smacked me uphill again, and when I got home I was the wettest, coldest, sorest, wretchedest bear-cub in the Rocky Mountains. Then, while I lay and whimpered, my mother spent the rest of the day licking me into the semblance of a respectable bearkin again. But I was bruised and nervous for days afterwards. That tumble of mine gave us the idea of the game which Kahwa and I used to play almost every day after that. Kahwa would take her stand with her back against the rock by our door, just at the point where the hill went off most steeply, and it was my business to come charging up the hill at her and try to pull her down. What fun it was! Sometimes I was the one to stand against the rock, and Kahwa tried to pull me down. She could not do it; but she was plucky, and used to come at me so ferociously that I often wondered for a minute whether it was only play or whether she was really angry. Best of all was when mother used to play with us. Then she put her back to the rock, and we both attacked her at once from opposite sides, each trying to get hold of a hind-leg just above the foot. If she put her head down to pretend to bite either of us, the other jumped for her ear. Sometimes we would each get hold of an ear, and hang on as hard as we could, while she pretended we were hurting her dreadfully, growling and shaking her head, and making as much fuss as she could; but if in our excitement either of us did chance to bite a little too hard, we always knew it. With a couple of cuffs, hard enough to make us yelp, she would throw us to one side and the other, and there was no more play for that day. And mother could hit hard when she liked. I have seen her smack father in a way that would have broken all the bones in a cub’s body, and killed any human being outright. Father did not romp with us as much as mother. He was more serious, but, on the other hand, he did not lose his temper nearly so quickly. She used to get angry with him over nothing, and I think he was afraid of her. And it was just the same later on with me and my wife. I always knew that I could have eaten her up had I wanted to, but, somehow, a bear cannot settle down in earnest to fight his own wife. If she loses her temper, he can pretend to be angry too, but in the end he surely gets the worst of it. I do not know why it is, but a she-bear does not seem to mind how hard she hits her husband, but he always stops just short of hurting her. Perhaps it is the same with human beings. But to Kahwa and me both father and mother were very gentle and kind in those first helpless days, and I suppose they never punished us unless we deserved it. Later on my father and I had differences, as you will hear. But in that first summer our lives, if uneventful, were very happy. [7] [8] [9] CHAPTER II CUBHOOD DAYS When they are small, bear-cubs rarely go about alone. The whole family usually keeps together, or, if it separates, it is generally into couples—one cub with each of the parents; or the father goes off alone, leaving both cubs with the mother. A cub toddling off alone in its own woolly, comfortable ignorance would be sure to make all manner of mistakes in what it ate, and it might find itself in very serious trouble in other ways. Bears, when they live far enough away from man, have absolutely nothing to be afraid of. There are, of course, bigger bears—perhaps bigger ones of our own kind, either black or brown (‘cinnamon,’ as the brown members of our family are called), or, especially, grizzly. But I never heard of a grizzly bear hurting one of us. When I smell a grizzly in the neighbourhood, I confess that it seems wiser to go round the other side of the hill; but that is probably inherited superstition more than anything else. My father and mother did it, and so do I. But I have known several of our cinnamon cousins in my life, and have been friendly enough with them—with the she-bears especially. Apart from these, there lives nothing in the forest that a full-grown black bear has any cause to fear. He goes where he pleases and does what he likes, and nobody ventures to dispute his rights. With a cub, however, it is different. I had heard my father and mother speak of pumas, or mountain lions, and I knew their smell well enough—and did not like it. But I shall never forget the first one that I saw. We were out together—father, mother, Kahwa, and I—and it was getting well on in the morning. The sun was up, and the day growing warm, and I, wandering drowsily along with my nose to the ground, had somehow strayed away from the rest, when suddenly I smelled puma very strong. As I threw myself up on my haunches, he came out from behind a tree, and stood facing me only a few yards away. I was simply paralyzed with fear—one of the two or three times in my life when I have been honestly and thoroughly frightened. As I looked at him, wondering what would happen next, he crouched down till he was almost flat along the ground, and I can see him now, his whole yellow body almost hidden behind his head, his eyes blazing, and his tail going slap, slap! from side to side. How I wished that I had a tail! Then inch by inch he crept towards me, very slowly, putting one foot forward and then the other. I did not know what to do, and so did what proved to be the best thing possible: I sat quite still, and screamed for mother as loud as I could. She must have known from my voice that something serious was the matter, because in a second, just as the puma’s muscles were growing tense for the final spring, there was a sudden crash of broken boughs behind me, a feeling as if a whirlwind was going by, and my mother shot past me straight at the puma. I had no idea that she could go so fast. The puma was up on his hind-legs to meet her, but her impetus was so terrific that it bore him backwards, without seeming to check her speed in the least, and away they went rolling over and over down the hill. But it was not much of a fight. The puma, willing enough to attack a little cub like me, knew that he was no match for my mother, and while they were still rolling he wrenched himself loose, and was off among the trees like a shadow. When mother came back to me blood was running over her face, where, at the moment of meeting, the puma had managed to give her one wicked, tearing claw down the side of her nose. So, as soon as my father and Kahwa joined us, we all went down to the stream, where mother bathed her face, and kept it in the cold water for nearly the whole day. It was probably in some measure to pay me out for this scrape, and to give me another lesson in the unwisdom of too much independence and inquisitiveness in a youngster, that my parents, soon after this, allowed me to get into trouble with that porcupine. One evening my father had taken us to a place where the ground was full of mountain lilies. It was early in the year, when the green shoots were just beginning to appear above the earth; and wherever there was a shoot there was a bulb down below. And a mountain lily bulb is one of the very nicest things to eat that there is—so sweet, and juicy, and crisp! The place was some distance from our home, and after that first visit Kahwa and I kept begging to be taken there again. At last my father yielded, and we set out early one morning just before day was breaking. We were not loitering on the way, but trotting steadily along all together, and Kahwa and I, at least, were full of expectation of the lily bulbs in store, when, in a little open space among the trees, we came upon an object unlike anything I had ever seen before. As we came upon it, I could have declared that it was moving—that it was an animal which, at sight of us, had stopped stock still, and tucked its head and toes in underneath it. But it certainly was not moving now, and did not look as if it ever could move again, so finally I concluded that it must be a large fungus or a strange new kind of hillock, with black and white grass growing all over it. My father and mother had stopped short when they saw it, and just sat up on their haunches and looked at it; and Kahwa did the same, snuggling up close to my mother’s side. Was it an animal, or a fungus, or only a mound of earth? The way to find out was to smell it. So, without any idea of hurting it, I trotted up and reached out my nose. As I did so it shrank a little more into itself, and became rounder and more like a fungus than ever; but the act of shrinking also made the black and white grass stick out a little further, so that my nose met it sooner than I expected, and I found that, if it was grass, it was very sharp grass, and pricked horribly. I tried again, and again it shrank up and pricked me worse than ever. Then I heard my father chuckling to himself. That made me angry, for I always have detested being laughed at, and, without stopping to think, I smacked the thing just as hard as I could. A moment later I was hopping round on three legs howling with pain, for a bunch of the quills [10] [11] [12] [13] [14] had gone right into my paw, where they were still sticking, one coming out on the other side. My father laughed, but my mother drew out the quills with her teeth, and that hurt worse than anything; and all day, whenever she found a particularly fat lily bulb, she gave it to me. For my part, I could only dig for the bulbs with my left paw, and it was ever so many days before I could run on all four feet again. All these things must have happened when I was very young—less than three months old—because we were still living in the same place, whereas when summer came we moved away, as bears always do, and had no fixed home during the hot months. Bear-cubs are born when the mother is still in her winter den, and they are usually five or six weeks old before they come out into the world at all. Even then at first, when the cubs are very young, the family stays close at home, and for some time I imagine that the longest journey I made was when I tumbled those fifty feet downhill. Father or mother might wander away alone in the early morning or evening for a while, but for the most part we were all four at home by the rock and the cedar-trees, with the bare brown tree-trunks growing up all round out of the bare brown mountain- sides, and Kahwa and I spending our time lying sleepily cuddled up to mother, or romping together and wishing we could catch squirrels. There were a great many squirrels about—large gray ones mostly; but living in a fir-tree close by us was a black one with a deplorable temper. Every day he used to come and quarrel with us. Whenever he had nothing particular to do, he would say to himself, ‘I’ll go and tease those old bears.’ And he did. His plan was to get on our trees from behind, where we could not see him, then to come round on our side about five or six feet from the ground, just safely out of reach, and there, hanging head downwards, call us every name he could think of. Squirrels have an awful vocabulary, but I never knew one that could talk like Blacky. And every time he thought of something new to say he waved his tail at us in a way that was particularly aggravating. You have no idea how other animals poke fun at us because we have no tails, and how sensitive we really are on the subject. They say that it was to hide our lack of tail that we originally got into the habit of sitting up on our haunches whenever we meet a stranger. Kahwa and I used to make all sorts of plans to catch Blacky, but we might as well have tried to catch a moonbeam. He knew exactly how far we could reach from the ground, and if we made a rush for him he was always three inches too high. Then we would run round on opposite sides of the tree in the hope of cutting him off when he came down. But when we did that he never did come down, but just went up instead, till he reached a place where the branches of our trees nearly touched those of his own fir, and then jumped across. We always hoped he would miss that jump, and Kahwa and I waited down below with our mouths open for him to drop in, but he never did. We used to try and persuade mother to go up his tree after him, but she knew very well that she could neither catch him nor get out on the thin branches where his nest was. There is only one way in which a bear can catch squirrels, and that is by pretending to be dead or asleep; for squirrels are so idiotically inquisitive that sooner or later they are certain to come right up to you if you do this, and sit on your nose. Some bears, I believe, are fond of squirrels, but I confess I never cared for them. There is so much fluff and stringy stuff in them, and so little to eat. Chipmunks[2] are different. Though smaller than squirrels, they are much less fluffy in proportion, and taste almost as nice as mice. Next to Blacky, our most frequent visitor was Rat-tat, the woodpecker. The air in the mountains is very still, so that you can hear sounds a long way, and all day long from every direction the ‘rat-tat-tat-tat!’ of the woodpeckers was ringing through the woods. In the evening when the sun was going down, they used to sit on the very tops of the trees, and call to each other from hill to hill—just two long whistles, ‘whee-whoo, whee-whoo.’ It was a sad noise, but I liked Rat-tat. He was so jauntily gay in his suit of black and white, with his bright red crest, and always so immensely busy. Starting near the bottom of a tree, he worked steadily up it—rat-tat-tat-tat! and up—rat-tat-tat-tat! till he got to the top; then down like a flash to another, to begin all over again. Grubs he was after, and nothing else mattered. Grubs—rat-tat-tat- tat! rat-tat-tat-tat! grubs! and up and up he went. One of our cedars was dead at the top, and Rat-tat used to come there nearly every day. Little chips and splinters of wood would come floating down to us, and once a lovely fat beetle grub that he had somehow overlooked came plump down under my very nose. If that was the kind of thing that he found up there, I was not surprised that he was fond of our tree. I would have gone up too, if I could; but the dead part would never have been safe for me. Very soon we began to be taken out on long excursions, going all four together, as I have said, and then we began to learn how much that is nice to eat there is in the world. You have probably no idea, for instance, how many good things there may be under one rotting log. Even if you do not get a mouse or a chipmunk, you are sure of a fringe of greenstuff which, from lack of sunlight, has grown white and juicy, and almost as sure of some mushrooms or other fungi, most of which are delicious. But before you can touch them you have to look after the insects. Mushrooms will wait, but the sooner you catch beetles, and earwigs, and ants, and grubs, the better. It is always worth while to roll a log over, if you can, no matter how much trouble it costs; and a big stone is sometimes nearly as good. Insects, of course, are small, and it would take a lot of ants, or even beetles, to make a meal for a bear; but they are good, and they help out. Some wild animals, especially those which prey upon others, eat a lot at one time, and then starve till they can kill again. A bear, on the other hand, is wandering about for more than half of the twenty-four hours, [15] [16] [17] [18] [19] except in the very heat of summer, and he is eating most of the while that he wanders. The greater part of his food, of course, is greenstuff—lily bulbs, white camas roots, wild-onions, and young shoots and leaves. As he walks he browses a mouthful of young leaves here, scratches up a root there, tears the bark off a decaying tree and eats the insects underneath, lifts a stone and finds a mouse or a lizard beneath, or loiters for twenty minutes over an ant-hill. With plenty of time, he is never in a hurry, and every little counts. But most of all in summer I used to love to go down to the stream. In warm weather, during the heat of the day, bears stay in the shelter of thickets, among the brush by the water or under the shade of a fallen tree. As the sun sank we would move down to the stream, and lie all through the long evening in the shallows, where the cold water rippled against one’s sides. And along the water there was always something good to eat—not merely the herbage and the roots of the water-plants, but frogs and insects of all sorts among the grass. Our favourite bathing-place was just above a wide pool made by a beaver-dam. The pool itself was deep in places, but before the river came to it, it flowed for a hundred yards and more over a level gravel bottom, so shallow that even as a cub I could walk from shore to shore without the water being above my shoulders. At the edge of the pool the same black and white kingfisher was always sitting on the same branch when we came down, and he disliked our coming, and chirred at us to go away. I used to love to pretend not to understand him, and to walk solemnly through the water underneath and all round his branch. It made him furious, and sent him chirring upstream to find another place to fish, where there were no idiotic bear-cubs who did not know any better than to walk about among his fish. Here, too, my father and mother taught us to fish; but it was a long time before I managed to catch a trout for myself. It takes such a dreadful lot of sitting still. Having found where a fish is lying, probably under an overhanging branch or beneath the grass jutting out from the bank, you lie down silently as close to the edge of the water as you can get, and slip one paw in, ever so gradually, behind the fish, and move it towards him gently—gently. If he takes fright and darts away, you leave your paw where it is, or move it as close to the spot where he was lying as you can reach, and wait. Sooner or later he will come back, swimming downstream and then swinging round to take his station almost exactly in the same spot as before. If you leave your paw absolutely still, he does not mind it, and may even, on his return, come and lie right up against it. If so, you strike at once. More probably he will stop a few inches or a foot away. If you have already reached as far as you can towards him, then is the time that you need all your patience. Again and again he darts out to take a fly from the surface of the water or swallow something that is floated down to him by the current, and each time that he comes back he may shift his position an inch or two. At last he comes to where you can actually crook your claws under his tail. Ever so cautiously you move your paw gently halfway up towards his head, and then, when your claws are almost touching him, you strike—strike, once and hard, with a hooking blow that sends him whirling like a bar of silver far out on the bank behind you. And trout is good—the plump, dark, pink-banded trout of the mountain streams. But you must not strike one fraction of a second too soon, for if your paw has more than an inch to travel before the claws touch him he is gone, and all you feel is the flip of a tail upon the inner side of the paw, and all your time is wasted. It is hard to learn to wait long enough, and I know that at first I used to strike at fish that were a foot away, with no more chance of catching them than of making supper off a waterfall. But father and mother used to catch a fish apiece for us almost every evening, and gradually Kahwa and I began to take them for ourselves. Then, as the daylight faded, the beavers came out upon their dam and played about in the pool, swimming and diving and slapping the surface with their tails with a noise like that of an osprey when he strikes the water in diving for a fish. But though they had time for play, they were busy folk, the beavers. Some of them were constantly patching and tinkering at the dam, and some always at work, except when the sun was up, one relieving another, gnawing their way with little tiny bites steadily through one of the great trees that stood by the water’s edge, and always gnawing it so that when, after weeks of labour, it fell, it never failed to fall across the stream precisely where they wanted it. If an enemy appeared—at the least sign or smell of wolf or puma—there would be a loud ringing slap from one of the tails upon the water, and in an instant every beaver had vanished under water and was safe inside the house among the logs of the dam, the door of which was down below the surface. Us bears they were used to and did not mind; but they never let us come too near. Sitting safely on the top of their piled logs, or twenty feet away in the water, they would talk to us pleasantly enough; but—well, my father told me that young, very young, beaver was good eating, and I imagine that the beavers knew that we thought so, and were afraid, perhaps, that we might not be too particular about the age. As the dusk changed to darkness we would leave the water and roam over the hillsides, sometimes sleeping through the middle hours of the night, but in summer more often roaming on, to come back to the stream for a while just before the sun was up, and then turning in to sleep till he went down again. Those long rambles in the summer moonlight, or in the early dawn when everything reeked with dew, how good they were! And when the afternoon of a broiling day brought a thunderstorm, the delight of the smell of the moist earth and the almost overpowering scent of the pines! And when the berries were ripe—blueberries, cranberries, wild- raspberries, and, later in the year, elderberries—no fruit, nor anything else to eat, has ever tasted as they did then in that first summer when I was a cub. [20] [21] [22] [23] [24] [25] CHAPTER III THE COMING OF MAN Summer was far advanced. We had had a week or two of hot, dry weather, during which we had wandered abroad, spending the heat of the days asleep in the shadow of cool brushwood down by the streams, and in the nights and early mornings roaming where we would. Ultimately we worked round to the neighbourhood of our home, and went to see if all was right there, and to spend one day in the familiar place. It was in the very middle of the day—a sultry day, when the sun was blazing hot—that we were awakened by the sound of somebody coming through the bushes. The wind was blowing towards us, so that long before he came in sight we knew that it was a bear like ourselves. But what was a bear doing abroad at high noon of such a day, and crashing through the bushes in that headlong fashion? Something extraordinary must have happened to him, and we soon learned that indeed something had. Coming plunging downhill with the wind behind him, he was right on us before he knew we were there. He was one of our brown cousins—a cinnamon—and we saw at once that he was hurt, for he was going on three legs, holding his left fore-paw off the ground. It was covered with blood and hung limply, showing that the bone was broken. He was so nervous that at sight of us he threw himself up on his haunches and prepared to fight; but we all felt sorry for him, and he soon quieted down. ‘Whatever has happened to you?’ asked my father, while we others sat and listened. ‘Man!’ replied Cinnamon, with a growl that made my blood run cold. Man! Father had told us of man, but he had never seen him; nor had his father or his grandfather before him. Man had never visited our part of the mountains, as far as we knew, but stories of him we had heard in plenty. They had been handed down in our family from generation to generation, from the days when our ancestors lived far away from our present abiding-place; and every year, too, the animals that left the mountains when the snow came brought us back stories of man in the spring. The coyotes knew him and feared him; the deer knew him and trembled at his very name; the pumas knew him and both feared and hated him. Everyone who knew him seemed to fear him, and we had caught the fear from them, and feared him, too, and had blessed ourselves that he did not come near us. And now he was here! And poor Cinnamon’s shattered leg was evidence that his evil reputation was not unjustified. Then Cinnamon told us his story. He had lived, like his father and grandfather before him, some miles away on the other side of the high range of mountains behind us; and there he had considered himself as safe from man as we on our side had supposed ourselves to be. But that spring when he awoke he found that during the winter the men had come. They were few in the beginning, he said, and he had first heard of them as being some miles away. But more came, and ever more; and as they came they pushed further and further into the mountains. What they were doing he did not know, but they kept for the most part along by the streams, where they dug holes everywhere. No, they did not live in the holes. They built themselves places to live in out of trees which they cut down and chopped into lengths and piled together. Why they did that, when it was so much easier to dig comfortable holes in the hillside, he did not know; but they did. And they did not cut down the trees with their teeth like beavers, but took sticks in their hands and beat them till they fell! Yes, it was true about the fires they made. They made them every day and all the time, usually just outside the houses that they built of the chopped trees. The fires were terrible to look at, but the men did not seem to be afraid of them. They stood quite close to them, especially in the evenings, and burned their food in them before they ate it. We had heard this before, but had not believed it. And it was true, after all! What was still more wonderful, Cinnamon said that he had gone down at night, when the men were all asleep in their chopped-tree houses, and, sniffing round, had found pieces of this burnt food lying about, and eaten them, and—they were very good! So good were they that, incredible as it might seem, Cinnamon had gone again and again, night after night, to look for scraps that had been left lying about. On the previous night he had gone down as usual after the men, as he supposed, were all asleep, but he was arrested before he got to the houses themselves by a strong smell of the burnt food somewhere close by him. The men, he explained, had cut down the trees nearest to the stream to build their houses with, so that between the edge of the forest and the water there was an open space dotted with the stumps of the trees that had been felled, which stuck up as high as a bear’s shoulder from the ground. It was just at the edge of this open space that he smelled the burnt food, and, sure enough, on one of the nearest stumps there was a bigger lump of it than any he had ever seen. Naturally, he went straight up to it. Just as he got to it he heard a movement between him and the houses, and, looking round, he saw a man lying flat on the ground in such a way that he had hitherto been hidden by another stump. As Cinnamon looked he saw the man point something at him (yes, unquestionably, the dreadful thing we had heard of—the thunder-stick—with which man kills at long distances), and in a moment there was a flash of flame and a noise like a big tree breaking in the wind, and something hit his leg and smashed it, as we could see. It hurt horribly, and Cinnamon turned at once and plunged into the wood. As he did so there was a second flash and roar, and something hit a tree-trunk within a foot of his head, and sent splinters flying in every direction. [26] [27] [28] [29] [30] Since then Cinnamon had been trying only to get away. His foot hurt him so that he had been obliged to be down for a few hours in the bushes during the morning; but now he was pushing on again, only anxious to go somewhere as far away from man as possible. While he was talking, my mother had been licking his wounded foot, while father sat up on his haunches, with his nose buried in the fur of his chest, grumbling and growling to himself, as his way was when he was very much annoyed. I have the same trick, which I suppose I inherited from him. We cubs sat shivering and whimpering, and listening terror- stricken to the awful story. What was to be done now? That was the question. How far away, we asked, were the men? Well, it was about midnight when Cinnamon was wounded, and now it was noon. Except the three or four hours that he had lain in the bushes, he had been travelling in a straight line all the time, as fast as he could with his broken leg. And did men travel fast? No; they moved very slowly, and always on their hind-legs. Cinnamon had never seen one go on all fours, though that seemed to him as ridiculous as their building houses of chopped trees instead of making holes in the ground. They very rarely went about at night, and Cinnamon did not believe any of them had followed him, so there was probably no immediate danger. Moreover, Cinnamon explained, they seldom moved far away from the streams, and they made a great deal of noise wherever they went, so that it was easy to hear them. Besides which, you could smell them a long way off. It did not matter if you had never smelled it before: any bear would know the man-smell by the first whiff he got of it. All this was somewhat consoling. It made the danger a little more remote, and, especially, it reduced the chance of our being taken by surprise. Still, the situation was bad enough as it stood, for the news changed the whole colour and current of our lives. Hitherto we had gone without fear where we would, careless of anything but our own inclinations. Now a sudden terror had arisen, that threw a shadow over every minute of the day and night. Man was near—man, who seemed to love to kill, and who could kill; not by his strength, but by virtue of some cunning which we could neither combat nor understand. Thereafter, though perhaps man’s name might not be mentioned between us from one day to another, I do not think there was a minute when we were not all more or less on the alert, with ears and nostrils open for an indication of his dreaded presence. Though Cinnamon thought we could safely stay where we were, he proposed himself to push on, further away from the neighbourhood of the hated human beings. In any emergency he would be sadly crippled by his broken leg, and—at least till that was healed—he preferred to be as remote from danger as possible. After he was gone my father and mother held council. There was no more sleep for us that day, and in the evening, when we started out on our regular search for food, it was very cautiously, and with nerves all on the jump. It was a trying night. We went warily, with our heads ever turned up-wind, hardly daring to dig for a root lest the sound of our digging should fill our ears so that we would not hear man’s approach; and when I stripped a bit of bark from a fallen log to look for beetles underneath, and it crackled noisily as it came away, my father growled angrily at me and mother cuffed me from behind. I remember, though, that they shared the beetles between them. I need not dwell on the days of anxiety that followed. I do not remember them much myself, except that they were very long and nerve-racking. I will tell you at once how it was that we first actually came in contact with man himself. In the course of my life I have reached the conclusion that nearly all the troubles that come to animals are the result of one of two things—either of their greediness or their curiosity. It was curiosity which led me into the difficulty with Porcupine. It was Cinnamon’s greediness that got his leg broken for him. Our first coming in contact with man was the result, I am afraid, of both—but chiefly of our curiosity. During the days that followed our meeting with Cinnamon, while we were moving about so cautiously, we were also all the time (and, though we never mentioned the fact, we all knew that we were) gradually working nearer to the place where Cinnamon had told us that man was. I knew what was happening, but would not have mentioned it for worlds, lest if we talked about it we should change our direction. And I wanted—yes, in spite of his terrors—I wanted to see man just once. Also—I may as well confess it—there were memories of what Cinnamon had said of that wonderful burnt food. Some ten or twelve days must have passed in this way, when one morning, after we had been abroad for three or four hours, and the sun was just getting up, we heard a noise such as we had never heard before. Chuck! chuck! chuck! chuck! It came at regular intervals for a while, then stopped and began again. What could it be? It was not the noise of a woodpecker, nor that which a beaver makes with its tail. Chuck! chuck! chuck! chuck! It was not the clucking of a grouse, though perhaps more like that than anything else, but different, somehow, in quality. Chuck! chuck! chuck! chuck! I think we all knew in our hearts that it had something to do with man. The noise came from not far away, but the wind was blowing across us. So we made a circle till it blew from the noise to us; and suddenly in one whiff we all knew that it was man. I felt my skin crawling up my spine, and I saw my father’s nose go down into his chest, while the hair on his neck and shoulders stood out as it only could do in moments of intense excitement. Slowly, very slowly, we moved towards the noise, until at last we were so close that the smell grew almost overpowering. But still we could not see him, because of the brushwood. Then we came to a fallen log and, carefully and silently we stepped on to it—my father and mother first, then I, then Kahwa. Now, by standing up on our hind-feet, [31] [32] [33] [34] [35]