That night Neewa had a hard attack of Mistu-puyew, or stomach-ache.
Imagine a nursing baby going direct from its mother's breast to a
beefsteak! That was what Neewa had done. Ordinarily he would not have
begun nibbling at solid foods for at least another month, but nature
seemed deliberately at work in a process of intensive education
preparing him for the mighty and unequal struggle which he would have
to put up a little later. For hours Neewa moaned and wailed, and Noozak
muzzled his bulging little belly with her nose, until finally he
vomited and was better.
After that he slept. When he awoke he was startled by opening his eyes
full into the glare of a great blaze of fire. Yesterday he had seen the
sun, golden and shimmering and far away. But this was the first time he
had seen it come up over the edge of the world on a spring morning in
the Northland. It was as red as blood, and as he stared it rose
steadily and swiftly until the flat side of it rounded out and it was a
huge ball of SOMETHING. At first he thought it was Life--some monstrous
creature sailing up over the forest toward them--and he turned with a
whine of enquiry to his mother. Whatever it was, Noozak was unafraid.
Her big head was turned toward it, and she was blinking her eyes in
solemn comfort. It was then that Neewa began to feel the pleasing
warmth of the red thing, and in spite of his nervousness he began to
purr in the glow of it. From red the sun turned swiftly to gold, and
the whole valley was transformed once more into a warm and pulsating
glory of life.
For two weeks after this first sunrise in Neewa's life Noozak remained
near the ridge and the slough. Then came the day, when Neewa was eleven
weeks old, that she turned her nose toward the distant black forests
and began the summer's peregrination. Neewa's feet had lost their
tenderness, and he weighed a good six pounds. This was pretty good
considering that he had only weighed twelve ounces at birth.
From the day when Noozak set off on her wandering TREK Neewa's real
adventures began. In the dark and mysterious caverns of the forests
there were places where the snow still lay unsoftened by the sun, and
for two days Neewa yearned and whined for the sunlit valley. They
passed the waterfall, where Neewa looked for the first tune on a
rushing torrent of water. Deeper and darker and gloomier grew the
forest Noozak was penetrating. In this forest Neewa received his first
lessons in hunting. Noozak was now well in the "bottoms" between the
Jackson's Knee and Shamattawa waterway divides, a great hunting ground
for bears in the early spring. When awake she was tireless in her quest
for food, and was constantly digging in the earth, or turning over
stones and tearing rotting logs and stumps into pieces. The little gray
wood-mice were her piece de resistance, small as they were, and it
amazed Neewa to see how quick his clumsy old mother could be when one
of these little creatures was revealed. There were times when Noozak
captured a whole family before they could escape. And to these were
added frogs and toads, still partly somnambulent; many ants, curled up
as if dead, in the heart of rotting logs; and occasional bumble-bees,
wasps, and hornets. Now and then Neewa took a nibble at these things.
On the third day Noozak uncovered a solid mass of hibernating vinegar
ants as large as a man's two fists, and frozen solid. Neewa ate a
quantity of these, and the sweet, vinegary flavour of them was
delicious to his palate.
As the days progressed, and living things began to crawl out from under
logs and rocks, Neewa discovered the thrill and excitement of hunting
on his own account. He encountered a second beetle, and killed it. He
killed his first wood-mouse. Swiftly there were developing in him the
instincts of Soominitik, his scrap-loving old father, who lived three
or four valleys to the north of their own, and who never missed an
opportunity to get into a fight. At four months of age, which was late
in May, Neewa was eating many things that would have killed most cubs
of his age, and there wasn't a yellow streak in him from the tip of his
saucy little nose to the end of his stubby tail. He weighed nine pounds
at this date and was as black as a tar-baby.
It was early in June that the exciting event occurred which brought
about the beginning of the big change in Neewa's life, and it was on a
day so warm and mellow with sunshine that Noozak started in right after
dinner to take her afternoon nap. They were out of the lower timber
country now, and were in a valley through which a shallow stream
wriggled and twisted around white sand-bars and between pebbly shores.
Neewa was sleepless. He had less desire than ever to waste a glorious
afternoon in napping. With his little round eyes he looked out on a
wonderful world, and found it calling to him. He looked at his mother,
and whined. Experience told him that she was dead to the world for
hours to come, unless he tickled her foot or nipped her ear, and then
she would only rouse herself enough to growl at him. He was tired of
that. He yearned for something more exciting, and with his mind
suddenly made up he set off in quest of adventure.
In that big world of green and golden colours he was a little black
ball nearly as wide as he was long. He went down to the creek, and
looked back. He could still see his mother. Then his feet paddled in
the soft white sand of a long bar that edged the shore, and he forgot
Noozak. He went to the end of the bar, and turned up on the green shore
where the young grass was like velvet under his paws. Here he began
turning over small stones for ants. He chased a chipmunk that ran a
close and furious race with him for twenty seconds. A little later a
huge snow-shoe rabbit got up almost under his nose, and he chased that
until in a dozen long leaps Wapoos disappeared in a thicket. Neewa
wrinkled up his nose and emitted a squeaky snarl. Never had
Soominitik's blood run so riotously within him. He wanted to get hold
of something. For the first time in his life he was yearning for a
scrap. He was like a small boy who the day after Christmas has a pair
of boxing gloves and no opponent. He sat down and looked about him
querulously, still wrinkling his nose and snarling defiantly. He had
the whole world beaten. He knew that. Everything was afraid of his
mother. Everything was afraid of HIM. It was disgusting--this lack of
something alive for an ambitious young fellow to fight. After all, the
world was rather tame.
He set off at a new angle, came around the edge of a huge rock, and
suddenly stopped.
From behind the other end of the rock protruded a huge hind paw. For a
few moments Neewa sat still, eyeing it with a growing anticipation.
This time he would give his mother a nip that would waken her for good!
He would rouse her to the beauty and the opportunities of this day if
there was any rouse in him! So he advanced slowly and cautiously,
picked out a nice bare spot on the paw, and sank his little teeth in it
to the gums.
There followed a roar that shook the earth. Now it happened that the
paw did not belong to Noozak, but was the personal property of Makoos,
an old he-bear of unlovely disposition and malevolent temper. But in
him age had produced a grouchiness that was not at all like the
grandmotherly peculiarities of old Noozak. Makoos was on his feet
fairly before Neewa realized that he had made a mistake. He was not
only an old bear and a grouchy bear, but he was also a hater of cubs.
More than once in his day he had committed the crime of cannibalism. He
was what the Indian hunter calls uchan--a bad bear, an eater of his own
kind, and the instant his enraged eyes caught sight of Neewa he let out
another roar.
At that Neewa gathered his fat little legs under his belly and was off
like a shot. Never before in his life had he run as he ran now.
Instinct told him that at last he had met something which was not
afraid of him, and that he was in deadly peril. He made no choice of
direction, for now that he had made this mistake he had no idea where
he would find his mother. He could hear Makoos coming after him, and as
he ran he set up a bawling that was filled with a wild and agonizing
prayer for help. That cry reached the faithful old Noozak. In an
instant she was on her feet--and just in time. Like a round black ball
shot out of a gun Neewa sped past the rock where she had been sleeping,
and ten jumps behind him came Makoos. Out of the corner of his eye he
saw his mother, but his momentum carried him past her. In that moment
Noozak leapt into action. As a football player makes a tackle she
rushed out just in time to catch old Makoos with all her weight full
broadside in the ribs, and the two old bears rolled over and over in
what to Neewa was an exciting and glorious mix-up.
He had stopped, and his eyes bulged out like shining little onions as
he took in the scene of battle. He had longed for a fight but what he
saw now fairly paralyzed him. The two bears were at it, roaring and
tearing each other's hides and throwing up showers of gravel and earth
in their deadly clinch. In this first round Noozak had the best of it.
She had butted the wind out of Makoos in her first dynamic assault, and
now with her dulled and broken teeth at his throat she was lashing him
with her sharp hind claws until the blood streamed from the old
barbarian's sides and he bellowed like a choking bull. Neewa knew that
it was his pursuer who was getting the worst of it, and with a squeaky
cry for his mother to lambast the very devil out of Makoos he ran back
to the edge of the arena, his nose crinkled and his teeth gleaming in a
ferocious snarl. He danced about excitedly a dozen feet from the
fighters, Soominitik's blood filling him with a yearning for the fray
and yet he was afraid.
Then something happened that suddenly and totally upset the maddening
joy of his mother's triumph. Makoos, being a he-bear, was of necessity
skilled in fighting, and all at once he freed himself from Noozak's
jaws, wallowed her under him, and in turn began ripping the hide off
old Noozak's carcass in such quantities that she let out an agonized
bawling that turned Neewa's little heart into stone.
It is a matter of most exciting conjecture what a small boy will do
when he sees his father getting licked. If there is an axe handy he is
liable to use it. The most cataclysmic catastrophe that cam come into
his is to have a father whom some other boy's father has given a
walloping. Next to being President of the United States the average
small boy treasures the desire to possess a parent who can whip any
other two-legged creature that wears trousers. And there were a lot of
human things about Neewa. The louder his mother bawled the more
distinctly he felt the shock of his world falling about him. If Noozak
had lost a part of her strength in her old age her voice, at least, was
still unimpaired, and such a spasm of outcry as she emitted could have
been heard at least half a mile away.
Neewa could stand no more. Blind with rage, he darted in. It was chance
that closed his vicious little jaws on a toe that belonged to Makoos,
and his teeth sank into the flesh like two rows of ivory needles.
Makoos gave a tug, but Neewa held on, and bit deeper. Then Makoos drew
up his leg and sent it out like a catapault, and in spite of his
determination to hang on Neewa found himself sailing wildly through the
air. He landed against a rock twenty feet from the fighters with a
force that knocked the wind out of him, and for a matter of eight or
ten seconds after that he wobbled dizzily in his efforts to stand up.
Then his vision and his senses returned and he gazed on a scene that
brought all the blood pounding back into his body again.
Makoos was no longer fighting, but was RUNNING AWAY--and there was a
decided limp in his gait!
Poor old Noozak was standing on her feet, facing the retreating enemy.
She was panting like a winded calf. Her jaws were agape. Her tongue
lolled out, and blood was dripping in little trickles from her body to
the ground. She had been thoroughly and efficiently mauled. She was
beyond the shadow of a doubt a whipped bear. Yet in that glorious
flight of the enemy Neewa saw nothing of Noozak's defeat. Their enemy
was RUNNING AWAY! Therefore, he was whipped. And with excited little
squeaks of joy Neewa ran to his mother.