Harry Perry Robinson

“ As we came near we knew that the fight could not be altogether over, for there was still a sound of snarling and the angry stamping of a stag, and the sight that at last met our eyes was one that it did us good to see.
There was a wide circular open space, in which every living thing had been trampled down, and the ground was all scored and furrowed with the mark of hoof and antler; and in the middle stood the stag, erect and defiant. Before him on the ground lay the body of the he-wolf, covered with blood and stamped almost beyond recognition. ”

“ 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. ”

“ At last a day comes when you wake into something more like complete consciousness than you have known since you shut yourself up. There is a new feeling in the air; a sense of moisture and fresh smells are mingling with the warm dry scent of your den. And you are aware that you have not changed your position for more than a quarter of a year, but have been squatting on your heels, with your back against the wall and your nose folded into your paws across your breast; and you want to stretch your hind-legs dreadfully. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Wahka, especially, gave promise of growing into a splendid bear, while Kahwa was the very image of her mother, even down to the little white streak on her chest, though that did not appear until she got her second year’s coat.
They were good, straightforward, rollicking youngsters who got all the pleasure out of life that there was to be got, and enjoyed amazingly everything that was good to eat. I shall never forget the first time that we introduced them to a berry-patch; and their first wild-raspberries drove them nearly crazy. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 the warm man-smell all about me, began to fade until they all seemed more like incidents of a dream [98] than scenes which I had actually lived through only a few weeks before. ”

“ I never met young bears of my own age that did not seem like cubs to me. Many times I came across bears who were one and even two years older than myself, but who had certainly no advantage of me in height, and, I think, none in weight. But I had no occasion to test my strength in earnest that summer, and when winter came, and the mountain-peaks in the neighbourhood showed white again against the dull gray sky, I was still a solitary animal, and acutely conscious of my loneliness. ”

“ Again the thunder-stick spoke, and I heard what I knew was Wooffa charging. I heard her growling in her throat in what was almost a roar, and the crashing of bushes and the shouts of the man’s voice, and more crashing of bushes, which died away in the distance down the hillside. Then all was silent except where somewhere in the rear of the house, little Kahwa whimpered miserably to herself.
All this I heard, and most of it I understood, [191] standing motionless and helpless inside the trap, powerless to help my wife and children when in such desperate straits within a few yards of me. ”

“ We kept crossing well-worn trails over the mountains, on which we sometimes saw men, and often when we were lying up during the day we heard the noise of mule-trains passing, the clangle-clangle-clang of the bell round the neck of the leading mule, and the hoarse voices of the men as they shouted at them. Now, also, many of the houses were like the one we had seen by the pool at the beaver-dam, with clearings round them in which cows lived and strange green things were growing. ”

“ Never again would he stand to face a full-grown bear. For years he had made everything that he met move aside from his path in the forest, and he had used his strength always for evil, to domineer and to crush and to tyrannize. Thenceforward he would know what it was to be made to stand aside for others, to yield the right of way, and to whine and fawn on his fellows; for a bear once broken in body and spirit, as I broke him, is broken for good.
I was not hurt beyond a few flesh wounds, which Wooffa licked for me before we slept ”

“ 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. ”

“ After a long hot day, during which we had been sleeping in the shade, what could be more delightful than to go and lie in the cool stream, where it flowed only a foot or so deep, and as clear as the air itself, over a firm sandy bottom? ”

“ Father and mother had become so changed that they were gruff and bad-tempered; and all the pleasure and light-heartedness seemed to have gone out of our long rambles. There was no more romping and rolling together down the hillsides. If Kahwa and I grew noisy in our play, we were certain to be stopped with a ‘Woof, children! be quiet.’ The fear of man was always with us, and his presence seemed to pervade the whole of the mountains. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. All this I understood, and was not afraid that, if our paths should cross again, I should not be well able to take care of myself. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 neighbourhood 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—a strong, growing he-bear, getting on for two years old—in any of the families that I came across. Parents with young cubs did not want me. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 [5] 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We were nobody’s enemy; least of all was little Kahwa. 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? ”

“ But a bear is no match for men. They appeared to give up all attempts to put ropes on me, until a few days later they brought a lump of wool on the end of a long stick, and pushed it into my face till I bit at it and worried it. It was soaked in something the smell of which choked me and made me dizzy, and when I could hardly see, somehow they slipped a sack over my head that reeked with the same smell, and the next thing I knew was that I must have been asleep for an hour or more and the ropes were on all my legs again. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Elk are jealous animals, and, like all deer, in spite of their timidity, will fight to protect their young; and with his tremendous antlers and great strength a big stag is a person to be let alone.
Wahka knew nothing about all this, and went straight towards the fawn in the friendliest and most confiding way. Fortunately, the stag was some yards away, and we were able to put Wahka on his guard in time. But it was a narrow escape, and I do not think the stag’s antler missed his tail by half an inch. Wooffa jumped in the stag’s way, and for a minute it looked as if there would be a fight. ”

“ 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. ”