Harry Perry Robinson

“ So you turn to the bank at your side and begin to grub; and as you grub you wander on, eating the roots that you scratch up and the young shoots of plants that are appearing here and there. And all the time the day is growing, and the sensation is coming back to your limbs, and your hunger is getting satisfied, and you are wider and wider awake. And, thoroughly interested in what you are about, before you are aware of it, you are fairly started on another year of life.
That is how a bear begins each spring. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Then, in the night we wandered abroad finding lily roots, and the sweet ferns, and camas, and mushrooms, with another visit to the river in the early morning and perhaps a trout to wind up with before the sun drove us under cover again. And above all there was the berry-patch.
The mere smell of a berry-patch at the end of summer, when the sun has been beating down all day, so that the air is heavy with the scent of the cooking fruit, is delicious enough, but it is nothing to the sweetness of the berries themselves. ”

“ Had I not again and again, when in the town, dodged round the corner of a building, and waited while he passed a few yards away, or stood immovable in the dark shadow of a building, and looked straight at him while he went by utterly unconscious that I was near? Nothing could live in the forest for a week with no more eyesight, scent, or hearing than a man possesses, and without his thunder-stick he would be as helpless as a lame deer. ”

“ We never passed a dam without asking about man, and always it was the same tale. Men had been there a week ago, or the day before, or when the moon last was full. And the kingfishers and the ospreys told us the same things. So we kept on our way southward.
As the days went on I grew to think less of Kahwa; the memory of those nights spent in the town, with the lights, and the strange noises, and [98] the warm man-smell all about me, began to fade until they all seemed more like incidents of a dream than scenes which I had actually lived through only a few weeks before. ”

“ Now, by standing up on our hind-feet, our heads—even mine and Kahwa's—were clear of the bushes, and there, not fifty yards away from us, was man. He was chopping down a tree, and that was the noise that we had heard. He did not see us, being too intent on his work. Chuck! chuck! chuck! He was striking steadily at the tree with what I now know was an axe, but which at the time we all supposed to be a thunder-stick, and at each blow the splinters of wood flew just as Cinnamon had told us. ”

“ Looking back, I saw that the line of flame had already swept far away, and was even now surmounting the top of the next high ridge; and it was, I knew, at that moment [51] devouring the familiar cedars by our home, just as it had devoured the trees on either side of the beavers' pool. On all sides of us the bigger trees were still in flames, and from everywhere thick white smoke was rising, and over all the mountain-side, right down to the water's edge, there was not one green leaf or twig. Everything was black. The brushwood was completely gone. ”

“ At last you begin to roll from one side to the other, and try to stretch each hind-leg in turn; then cautiously letting yourself drop on all fours, you give a step, and before you know it you have staggered out into the open air.
It is very early in the morning, and the day is just breaking, and all the mountain-side is covered with a clinging pearly mist; but to your eyes the light seems very strong, and the smell of the new moist earth and the resinous scent of the pines almost hurt your nostrils. ”

“ We bears comes 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, [12] 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. ”

“ No bear, when hungry, could afford to fish for his food, for [116] it takes too long; but I had all my time to myself, and nearly every morning and evening I used to get my trout for breakfast or for supper. At the end of a long, hot day, I know nothing pleasanter than, after lying a while in the cold running water, to stretch one's self out along the river's edge, under the shadow of a bush, and wait, paw in water, till the trout come gliding within striking distance; and then the sudden stroke, and afterwards the comfortable meal off the cool juicy fish in the soft night air. ”

“ Two or three times I met a grizzly, and always got out of the way as fast as I could. Once only I found myself in the neighborhood of man, and I gave him a wide berth. Many times, of course—in fact, nearly every day—I met other bears like myself, and sometimes I made friends with them, and stayed in their company for the better part of a day, perhaps at a berry-patch or in the wide shallows of a stream. But there was no place for me [118] —a strong, growing he-bear, getting on for two years old—in any of the families that I came across. ”

“ We are not as the wolves, the coyotes, the pumas, or the weasels, which live on the lives of other animals, and which every other thing in the woods regards as its sworn foe. Still, smaller animals are mostly afraid of us, and the carcass of a dead bear means a feast for a number of hungry things. If a bear cannot defend his own life, he will have no friends to do it for him; and while, as I have said before, a full-grown bear in the mountains has no need to fear any living thing, man always excepted, in stand-up fight, it is none the less necessary to be always on one's guard. ”

“ Without the thunder-sticks we should have had no difficulty in meeting them, but with those weapons in their hands it would only be sacrificing our lives in vain to attempt a rescue. So there we had to stand and watch, my mother all the time whimpering and my father growling, and sitting up on his haunches and rubbing his nose in his chest. We dared not show ourselves in the open, so we followed the edge of the patch, keeping alongside of the men, but in the shadow of the trees. ”

“ Why could not men live in peace with us as we were willing to live in peace with them?
Long before it was dusk next evening we were in the woods as near to the men's houses as we dared to go, but we could hear no sound of my sister's voice. There appeared to be only one man about the place, and he was at work chopping wood, until just at sunset, when the other three men came back from down the stream, and we noticed that they carried long ropes slung over their arms. Were those the ropes with which they had dragged Kahwa the night before? ”

“ The beavers, and the kingfishers, of course, know everything that goes on along the rivers. Nothing can pass upstream or down without going by the beaver-dams, and the beavers are always on the watch. You might linger about a beaver-dam all day, and except for the smell, which a man would not notice, you would not believe there was a beaver near. But they are watching you from the cracks and holes in their homes, and in the evening, if they are not afraid of you, you will be astonished to see twenty or thirty beavers come out to play about what you thought was an empty house. ”

“ Changes of temperature do not reach you, and you sit and croon to yourself and mumble your paws, and all sorts of thoughts and tangled scraps of dreams go swimming through your head until, before you know it, you have forgotten everything and are asleep again. ”

“ A bear may have much fighting in the course of his existence, or he may have comparatively little, depending chiefly on his own disposition; but at least once [123] he is sure to have one fight on which almost the whole course of his life depends. And that is when he fights for his wife. Of course he may be beaten, and then he has to try again. Some bears never succeed in winning a wife at all. Some may win one and then have her taken from them, and have to seek another; but I do not believe that any bear chooses to live alone. Every one will once at least make an effort to win a companion. ”

“ In fighting all other animals except those of his kind, a bear's natural weapons are his paws, with one blow of which he can crush a small animal, and either stun or break the neck of a larger one. But he cannot do any one of these three things to another bear as big as himself, and only if one bear is markedly bigger than the other can he hope to reach his head, so as either to tear his face or give him such a blow as will daze him and render him incapable of going on fighting. ”

“ Even the thought of man himself gave me no uneasiness. I was sure that no human beings were as yet within many miles of my home, and I knew that I should always have abundant warning of their coming. Moreover, I already knew man. He was not to me the thing of terror and mystery that he had been a year ago, or that he still was to most of the forest folk. ”

“ When I smell a grizzly in the neighborhood, 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. Apart from these, there lives nothing in the forest that a full-grown 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. ”

“ We did not stop to sleep, but travelled on all through the day, going as fast as we could along the rocky edges of the stream, which was now almost wide enough to be a river, when suddenly we heard strange noises ahead of us, and we knew what the noises were, and that they meant man again. Men were coming towards us along the bank of the stream, so we had to leave it and hurry into the woods. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The new mining town or camp of the Far West has no long rows of houses or paved streets. The houses are built of logs or of boards, rarely more than one story high, and are set down irregularly. There maybe one more or less well-defined "street"—the main trail running through the camp—but even along that there will be wide gaps between the houses; while, for the rest, the buildings are at all sorts of angles, so that a man or a bear may wander through them as he pleases, regardless of whether he is following a "street" or not. ”

“ 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 [31] 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. ”

“ 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, 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. ”