Joaquin Miller

“ No, don’t despise the bear, either in his life or his death. He is a kingly fellow, every inch a king; a curious, monkish, music-loving, roving Robin Hood of his somber woods—a silent monk, who knows a great deal more than he tells. ”

“ But a railroad has now taken the place of that tortuous old packtrail, and you can whisk through these wild and woody mountains, and away on down through Oregon and up through Washington, Montana, Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin and on to Chicago without even once getting out of your car, if you like. Yet such a persistent ride is not probable, for fish, pheasants, deer, elk, and bear still abound here in their ancient haunts, and the temptation to get out and fish or hunt is too great to be resisted. ”

“ The soil along the river bank is so rich that weeds, woods, vines, trench close and hard on the heels of the plowman. A plantation will almost perish from the earth, as it were, by a few years of abandonment. And so it is that you see miles and miles on either side—parishes on top of parishes, in fact—fast returning to barbarism, dragging the blacks by thousands down to below the level of brutes with them, as you descend from New Orleans toward the mouth of the mighty river, nearly one hundred miles from the beautiful “Crescent City.” And, ah, the superstition of these poor blacks! ”

“ Woof!” snorted a bear within ten feet of him, invisible in the thicket. His heart thumped and his rifle lock clicked, together, and which sound was the louder he could not tell. For a few seconds he stood at the edge of the thicket with his rifle ready, expecting the rush of the bear, but the animal was not in a warlike mood and did not rush, and the hunter cautiously backed away about twenty yards up the steep side of the ravine. The cracking of brush indicated that bruin was moving in the thicket, but nothing could be seen in the gathering gloom. ”

“ Into the water leaped a black bear.—Page 26.
The beautiful yellow beast was not at all disconcerted, but with the serenest dignity lifted her yellow folds, coiled and uncoiled slowly, curved high in the air, arched her glittering neck of gold, widened her body till broad as your two hands, and so slid away over the water to the other side through the wild white rain. The cloudburst put out the fire instantly, showing that, though animals have superhuman foresight, they don’t know everything before the time. ”

“ I gave them each a silver dollar—very bright was the brand new silver from the mint of New Orleans, but not nearly so bright as the moon away down there by the glowing rim of the Mexican seas where the spectacled bear abides in the classic land, Barra Tarra, Kingdom of Sancho Panza. ”

“ They loaded down the willows till they bent into the water, and the terrified little creatures floated away without the least bit of noise or confusion. And still the black skies were filled with the solemn boom of thunder. In fact, we had not yet heard any noise of any sort except thunder, not even our own voices. There was something more eloquent in the air now, something more terrible than man or beast, and all things were awed into silence—a profound silence. ”

“ INTRODUCTORY NOTES. The bear is the most human of all the beasts. He is not the most man-like in anatomy, nor the nearest in the line of evolution. The likeness is rather in his temper and way of doing things and in the vicissitudes of his life. He is a savage, of course, but most men are that—wild members of a wild fauna—and, like wild men, the bear is a clumsy, good-natured blunderer, eating with his fingers in default of a knife, and preferring any day a mouthful of berries to the excitement of a fight. ”

“ Cheap sugar and high wages, as compared with old times of slavery—but then the enormous cost of keeping up the levees, and above all, the continued peril to life and property, with a mile of swift, muddy water sweeping seaward high above your head—these things are making a desert of the richest lands on earth. We are gaining ground in the West, but we are losing ground in the South, the great, silent South. ”

“ As he is not fit to eat because he lives on fish and oysters, sportsmen will not fire at him; and as the poor, superstitious, voodoo-worshiping negroes, and their dogs, too, run away as soon as he is seen, he has [Pg 121] quite a habit of stopping and looking at you through his queer spectacles as long as you are in sight. He looks to be a sort of second-hand bear, his shaggy, faded, dirty coat of hair looking as if he had been stuffed, like an old sofa, with the stuffing coming out—a very second-hand appearance, to be sure. ”

“ The grizzly was not only every inch a king, but he had, in his undisputed dominion, a pretty fair sense of justice. He was never a roaring lion. He was never a man-eater. He is indebted for his character for ferocity [Pg 114] almost entirely to tradition, but, in some degree, to the female bear when seeking to protect her young. Of course, the grizzlies are good fighters, when forced to it; but as for lying in wait for anyone, like the lion, or creeping, cat-like, as the tiger does, into camp to carry off someone for supper, such a thing was never heard of in connection with the grizzly. ”

“ He was an audacious marauder and killed his beef almost within sight of the camp-fire. Often at night a cow or steer could be heard bellowing in terror, and in the morning a freshly killed animal would be found in some hollow not far away, bearing marks of bear’s claws. Whitened bones scattered all over the hills showed that the bear had been the boss butcher of General Beal’s ranch for a long time. His average allowance of beef appeared to be about two steers a week, but he usually ate only half a carcass, leaving the rest to the coyotes and vultures. ”

“ You see, in the old days, out here in California, when the Sierras were full of bold young fellows hunting for gold, quite a number of them had hand-to-hand battles with bears. For when we came out here “the woods were full of ’em.”
Of course, the first thing a man does when he finds himself face to face with a bear that won’t run and he has no gun—and that is always the time when he finds a bear—why, he runs, himself; that is, if the bear will let him. ”

“ He had evidently been terribly tangled up and disgusted while in the bush and jungle, and now, well out of it, with the foamy, rumbling, roaring Sacramento River only a few rods beyond him, into which he could plunge with his glossy coat, he seemed to want to turn about and shake his huge fists at the crescent of fire in the pine-quills that had driven him down the mountain. He threw his enormous bulk back on his haunches and rose up, and rose up, and rose up! Oh, the majesty of this king of our continent, as he seemed [Pg 41] to still keep rising! ”

“ When the berries are ripe and there are fish in the streams, the preparation for winter begins, the fur is sleek and greasy-looking again. Mr. Bear is fat and contented and ready to go into his long sleep.
When he awakes one of the first things he does is to suck his feet. ”

“ Put yourself in his place and see how much of manhood or kinghood would be left in you with a muzzle on your mouth, and only enough liberty left to push your nose between two rusty bars and catch the peanut which the good little boy has found to be a bad one and so generously tosses it to the bear. ”

“ No noise, no moaning or groaning at all, no clutching at the ground, as men have seen Indians and even white men do; as if they would hold the earth from passing away—nothing of that sort. He lay [Pg 43] quite still, head down hill, on his left side, gave just one short, quick breath, and then, pulling up his great right paw, he pushed his nose and eyes under it, as if to shut out the light forever, or, maybe, to muffle up his face as when “great Cæsar fell.”
And that was all. I had killed a grizzly bear; nearly as big as the biggest ox. ”

“ This canyon was formerly a beautiful camping spot, and was resorted to by many persons who believed that bathing in sulphur water would restore their health, but about three years ago a cloudburst uprooted all the trees and converted the green cienaga into a rocky desolate flat, as barren and unattractive as the sharp, treeless peaks surrounding the canyon. A few mountain sheep inhabit the mountains about the Hot Springs, and occasionally one is seen standing upon some high and inaccessible cliff, but it is very seldom that a hunter succeeds in getting a pair of big horns. ”

“ No other zoölogical garden in the world has a California grizzly, and it would be a great loss to the menagerie to be established in the Park if the Monarch should die.
It is not surprising that many people cannot tell a grizzly bear, even when they see one, as many zoölogists even differ widely in regard to the characteristics of the king of bears. It is astonishing how little is really known in regard to the grizzly bear. Many text-books contain only a general notice of the great animal, while those naturalists who have written descriptions of him do by no means agree. ”

“ Wherever bait was dragged over the mountain, and it was dragged many miles for the purpose of enticing bear to the trap, the lions followed the trail, but they would not go into the trap. Still it is not safe to generalize from this fact and assume that the cougar or mountain lion never will go into a trap, for he is a most erratic and uncertain beast. Sometimes he is an arrant coward, and again he is as bold as a genuine lion. Generally a dog will keep cougars away from a camp or house, but once in a while the cougar hunts the dog and kills him. ”

“ The grizzly is the only one of the Ursidae that moves his toes and fingers independently of one another just like a man. Also the bear walks with his foot full upon the ground. In further proof the grizzly, when young, and all other bears, except one, descend a tree backward and head up, as a man would. The clown bear, or spectacled bear, will sometimes descend head down and enjoy a good laugh over it. At least he seems to laugh. After the grizzly has attained bulk and weight with age, he cannot climb trees, as his claws are not strong enough to sustain his weight. ”

“ XIV. THE BEAR-SLAYER OF SAN DIEGO.
Let us now leave the great grizzly and the little marsh bear in spectacles behind us and tell about a boy, a bear-slayer; not about a bear, mind you. For the little fish-eating black bear which he killed and by which he got his name is hardly worth telling about. This bear lives in the brush along the sea-bank on the Mexican and Southern California coast and has huge feet but almost no hair. I don’t know any name for him, but think he resembles the “sun bear” (Ursus Titanus) more than any other. ”

“ As a matter of fact, determined by experience and observation, a grizzly will do none of the things laid down as rules of conduct for him by the wise men of the mountains, but will do pretty much as he pleases, and act as his individual whim or desire moves him. It is a mistake to generalize about bears from the actions of one of the species. One bear will be bold and inquisitive, and will walk right into a camp to gratify his curiosity, while another [Pg 195] will carefully avoid man and all his works. ”

“ As the Polar bear is able to obtain food all through the Arctic winter, there is not the same necessity, as in the case of the vegetable-eating bears, for hibernating. In fact, the males and young females roam about through the whole winter, and only the older females retire for the season. These—according to the Eskimo account, quoted by Captain Lyon—are very fat at the commencement of winter, and on the first fall of snow lie down and allow themselves to be covered, or else dig a cave in a drift, and then go to sleep until the spring, when the cubs are born. ”

“ The practical mountaineer will tell you of some three or four species in California that have been given notice of as the young of another species, or that have never been mentioned by the learned gentlemen who usually study bear life in the seclusion of a library or with the help of a strong field telescope. A glance at the teeth of the bear will tell you that they incline rather to the vegetable diet. Their ferocity is almost always exaggerated. Their courage is desperate [Pg 243] in self-defense, but it is seldom that they become the aggressor. ”

“ The grizzly is the boxer. A game old beast he is, too, and would knock down all the John L. Sullivans you could put in the Sierras faster than you could set them up. He is a kingly old fellow and disdains familiarity. Whatever may be said to the contrary, he never “hugs” if he has room to box. In some desperate cases he has been known to bite, but ordinarily he obeys “the rules of the ring.”
The cinnamon bear is a lazy brown brute, about one-half the size of the grizzly. He always insists on being very familiar, if not affectionate. ”

“ But I am bound to say that I have found much that is pathetic, and something that is almost half-human, in this poor, shaggy, shuffling hermit. He doesn’t want much, only the wildest and most worthless parts of the mountains or marshes, where, if you will let him alone, he will let you alone, as a rule. Sometimes, out here in California, he loots a pig-pen, and now and then he gets among the bees. Only last week, a little black bear got his head fast in a bee-hive that had been improvised from a nail-keg, and the bee-farmer killed him with a pitchfork ”

“ But poor Joe had been sober for a long time, and his eyes fairly danced in delight at having $50 in his own hand and right to spend it down at the post.
And so the two Italians muzzled the big, pretty pets and led them kindly down the trail toward the city, where they were to perform in the streets, the man with the big nose following after the twins on a big white mule.
And what became of the big black twin babies? They are still performing, seem content and happy, sometimes in a circus, sometimes in a garden, sometimes in the street. ”

“ Nature had gradually helped them out in these weapons of defense. They had grown to be slim and trim in body, and were as supple and swift as deer. They were the deadly enemies [Pg 87] of all wild beasts; because all wild beasts devoured their young.
When fat and saucy, in warm summer weather, these cattle would hover along the foothills in bands, hiding in the hollows, and would begin to bellow whenever they saw a bear or a wolf, or even a man or boy, if on foot, crossing the wide valley of grass and blue camas blossoms. ”

“ For the bear is a shy old hermit and is rarely encountered in his wild state by anyone save the hardy hunter, whose only interest in the event is to secure the skin and carcass.
Of course, now and then, a man of science meets a bear in the woods, but the meeting is of short duration. If the bear does not leave, the man of books does, and so we seldom get his photograph as he really appears in his wild state. ”

“ As a rule, the modern bear is not a bloody, bad fellow, whatever he may have been in Bible days. You read, almost any circus season, about the killing of his keeper by a lion, a tiger, a panther, or even the dreary old elephant, but you never hear of a tame bear’s hurting anybody. ”

“ The battered and gray old miners are poor, lonely and discouraged, but they are honest, stout-hearted still, and of a much higher type than those that hang about the towns. It is hot down on the river—too [Pg 69] hot, almost, to tell the truth. Even here under Mount Shasta, in her sheets of eternal snow, the mercury is at par.
This Mount Sinai is not a town; it is a great spring of cold water that leaps from the high, rocky front of a mountain which we have located as a summer home in the Sierras—myself and a few other scribes of California.
This is the great bear land. ”