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.
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, 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! 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. After a while he
stopped, and stooped to pick something off the ground. This hid him
from my sight, and from Kahwa's also, so she strained up on her tiptoes
to get another look at him. In doing so her feet slipped on the bark of
the log, and down she came with a crash that could have been heard at
twice his distance from us, even if the shock had not knocked a loud
'Wooff!' out of her as she fell. The man instantly stood up and turned
round, and, of course, found himself staring straight into our three
faces.
He did not hesitate a moment, but dropped his axe and ran. I think he
ran as fast as he could, but what Cinnamon said was true: he went, of
course, on his hind-legs, and did _not_ travel fast. It was downhill,
and running on your hind-legs for any distance downhill is an awkward
performance at best.
We, of course, followed our impulse, and went after him. We did not
want him in the least. We would not have known what to do with him
if we had him. But you know how impossible it is to resist chasing
anything that runs away from you. We could easily have caught him had
we wished to, but why should we? Besides, he might still have another
thunder-stick concealed about him. So we just ran fast enough to keep
him running. And as we ran, crashing through the bushes, galloping down
the hill, with his head rising and falling as he leaped along ahead of
us, the absurdity of it got hold of me, and I yelped with excitement
and delight. To be chasing man, of all things living--man--like this!
And I could hear my father 'wooffing' to himself at each gallop with
amusement and satisfaction.
Very soon, however, we smelled more men. Then we slowed down, and
presently there came in sight what we knew must be one of the
chopped-tree houses. So we stood and watched, while the man, still
running as if we were at his very heels, tore up to the house, and out
from behind it came three or four others. We could see them brandishing
their arms and talking very excitedly. Then two of them plunged into
the house, and came out with--yes, there could be no doubt of it; these
were the real things--the dreaded thunder-sticks themselves.
Then we knew that it was our turn to run; and we ran.
Back up the hill we went, much faster than we had come down; for we
were running for our own lives now, and bears like running uphill best.
On and on we went, as fast as we could go. We had no idea at how long
a distance man could hit us with the thunder-sticks, but we preferred
to be on the safe side, and it must have been at least two hours before
we stopped for a moment to take breath. And when a bear is in a hurry,
two hours, even for a cub, mean more than twenty miles.
So it was that we first met man. And how absurdly different from what
in our terrified imaginations we had pictured it!