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 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, 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.
FOOTNOTE
[2] The striped ground squirrels of North America.