crimson and purple leaves, its slow sailing foam flakes. Then, by twos
and threes, small trout strayed in, and found the new region a good
place to inhabit. When, in the following spring, the fishermen came
back to the Clearwater, they reported the pool swarming with pan-fish,
hardly big enough to make it worth while throwing a fly. Then word
went up and down the Clearwater that the master of the pool was gone,
and the glory of the pool, for that generation of fishermen, went with
him.
[Illustration: "HE WOULD SIT BACK AND WHINE FOR HIS MOTHER."]
The Return to the Trails
Down from the rocky den under the bald peak of Sugar Loaf, the old
black bear led her cub. Turning her head every moment to see that he
was close at her heels, she encouraged him with soft, half-whining,
half-grunting sounds, that would have been ridiculous in so huge a
beast had they been addressed to anything less obviously a baby than
this small, velvet-dark, wondering-eyed cub.
Very carefully the old bear chose her path, and very slowly she moved.
But for all her care, she had to stop every minute or two, and
sometimes even turn back a few paces, for the cub was continually
dropping behind. His big, inquiring ears took in all the vague, small
noises of the mountainside, puzzling over them. His sharp little nose
went poking in every direction, sniffing the strange new smells, till
he would get bewildered, and forget which foot to put forward first.
Then he would sit back and whine for his mother.
It was the cub's first adventure, this journey down the world outside
his den. Hitherto he had but played about his doorway.
When the little fellow had somewhat recovered from his first
bewilderment, the old bear moved more rapidly, leading him toward a
swampy, grassy pocket, where she thought there might be roots to dig.
The way was steep, winding down between rocks and stunted trees and
tangles of thick shrubbery, with here and there a black-green spur of
the fir forests thrust up tentatively from the lower slopes. Now and
again it led across a naked shoulder of the mountain, revealing, far
down, a landscape of dark, wide stretching, bluish woods, with
desolate, glimmering lakes strung on a thread of winding river. When
these vast spaces of emptiness opened suddenly upon his baby eyes, the
cub whimpered and drew closer to his mother. The swimming deeps of air
daunted him.
Presently, as the two continued their slow journey, the mother bear's
nostrils caught a new savour. She stopped, lifted her snout, and
tested the wind discriminatingly. It was a smell she had encountered
once before, coming from the door of a lumber camp. Well she
remembered the deliciousness of the lump of fat bacon which she had
succeeded in purloining while the cook was out getting water. Her
thin, red tongue licked her lips at that memory, and, without
hesitation, she turned up the side trail whence came the luring scent.
The cub had to stir his little legs to keep pace with her, but he felt
that something interesting was in the wind, and did his best.
A turn around a thick clump of juniper, and there was the source of
the savour. It looked pleasantly familiar to the old bear, that lump
of fat bacon. It was stuck on the end of a pointed stick, just under a
sort of slanting roof of logs, which, in a way, reminded her of the
lumbermen's cabin. The cabin had done her no harm, and she inferred
that the structure before her was equally harmless. Nevertheless, the
man smell, not quite overpowered by the fragrance of the bacon, lurked
about it; and all the works of man she viewed with suspicion. She
snatched hastily at the prize, turning to jump away even as she did
so.
But the bacon seemed to be fastened to the stick. She gave it an
impatient pull,--and it yielded suddenly. At that same instant, while
her eyes twinkled with elation, that roof of massive logs came
crashing down.
It fell across her back. Weighted as it was with heavy stones, it
crushed the life out of her in a second. There was a coughing gasp,
cut off abruptly; and the flattened form lay still, the wide-open
mouth and protruding tongue jammed down among the mosses. At the crash
the cub had jumped back in terror. Then he sat up on his haunches and
looked on with anxious bewilderment.
* * * * *
When, early the following morning, the Indian who had set the deadfall
came, he found the cub near perishing with cold and fear and hunger.
He knew that the little animal would be worth several bearskins, so he
warmed it, wrapped it in his jacket, and took it home to his cabin.
Fed and sheltered, it turned to its captor as a rescuer, and acquired
a perilous faith in the friendliness of man. In fact, it speedily
learned to follow the Indian about the cabin, and to fret for him in
his absence.
That same autumn the Indian took the cub into Edmundston and sold him
for a price that well repaid his pains; and thence, within three or
four months, and by as many transfers, the little animal found his way
into the possession of a travelling circus. Being good-natured and
teachable, and inclined, through his first misunderstanding of the
situation which had robbed him of his mother, to regard mankind as
universally beneficent, he was selected to become a trick bear. In the
course of his training for this honour, he learned that his trainer,
at least, was not wholly beneficent, and toward him he developed a
cordial bitterness, which grew with his years. But he learned his
lessons, nevertheless, and became a star of the ring; and for the
manager of the show, who always kept peanuts or gingerbread in pocket
for him, he conceived such a warmth of regard as he had hitherto
strictly reserved for the Indian.
Valued and well cared for, he grew to a magnificent stature, and up to
the middle of his fifth year he never knew what his life was missing.
To be sure, it was exasperatingly monotonous, this being rolled about
the world in stuffy, swaying cage-cars, and dancing in the ring, and
playing foolish tricks with a red-and-white clown, and being stared at
by hot, applauding, fluttering tiers of people, who looked exactly the
same at every place he came to. His memory of that first walk down the
mountain, at his great mother's heels, had been laid to sleep at the
back of his curiously occupied brain. He had no understanding of the
fierce restlessness, the vague longing, which from time to time, and
especially when the autumn frosts began to nip and tingle, would take
possession of him, moving him almost to hatred of even his special
friends, the manager and the clown.
One vaporous, golden afternoon in early autumn, the circus drew into
the little town of Edmundston, at the mouth of the Madawaska River.
When the noise of the train stopped, the soft roar of the Little Falls
grew audible,--a voice at which all the weary animals pricked their
ears, they knew not, most of them, why. But when the cars and cages
were run out into the fields, where the tents were to be raised, there
drew down from spruce-clad hills a faint fragrance which thrilled the
bear's nostrils, and stirred formless longings in his heart, and made
his ears deaf to the wild music of the falls. That fragrance,
imperceptible to nostrils less sensitive than his, was the breath of
his native wilderness, a message from the sombre solitudes of the
Squatook. He did not know that the lonely peak of Sugar Loaf was but
thirty or forty miles away. He knew only that something, in the air
and in his blood, was calling him to his own.
The bear--well-taught, well-mannered, well-content--was not regarded
as even remembering freedom, let alone desiring it. His fetters,
therefore, were at times little more than nominal, and he was never
very closely watched. Just on the edge of evening, when the dusk was
creeping up the valley and honey-scents from the fields mixed with the
tang of the dark spruce forests, his opportunity came. His trainer had
unhitched the chain from his collar and stooped over it to examine
some defect in the clasp.
At this instant that surge of impulse which, when it does come,
shatters routine and habit to bits, seized the bear. Without
premeditation, he dealt the trainer a cuff that knocked him clean over
a wagon-pole and broke his arm. Before any of the other attendants
could realize what had happened, the bear was beyond the circle of
wagons, and half-way across the buckwheat-fields. In ten minutes more
he was in the spicy glooms of the spruce-woods.
His years of association with men had given the bear a great
confidence in their resources. He was too crafty, therefore, to
slacken his efforts just because he had gained the longed-for woods.
He pressed on doggedly, at a shambling, loose-jointed, but very
effective run, till it was full night and the stars came out sharply
in the patches of clear, dark sky above the tree-tops. In the friendly
dark he halted to strip the sweet but insipid fruit of an Indian
pear, which for a little assuaged his appetite. Then he rushed
on,--perhaps aimlessly, as far as conscious purpose was concerned,
but, in reality, by a sure instinct, making toward his ancestral
steeps of Sugar Loaf.
All night he travelled; and in the steely chill of dawn he came out
upon a spacious lake. The night had been windless, and now, in the
first of the coming light, the water was smooth like blue-black oil
under innumerable writhing wisps and streamers of mist. A keen smell,
raw but sweet, rose from the wet shores, the wet spruce and fir woods,
and the fringe of a deep cedar swamp near by. The tired animal sniffed
it with an uncomprehending delight. He did not recognize it, yet it
made him feel at home. It seemed a part of what he wanted.
Being thirsty as well as hungry, he pushed through the bushes,--not
noiselessly, as a wild bear moves, but with crashing and tramplings,
as if there were no need of secrecy in the wilds,--and lurched down to
the gravelly brink. Here, as luck would have it, he found a big, dead
sucker lying half-awash, which made him a meal. Then, when sharp
streaks of orange along the eastern horizon were beginning to shed a
mystic colour over the lake, he drew back into the woods and curled
himself up for sleep behind the trunk of a big hemlock.
When the sun was about an hour high he awoke, and made haste to
continue his journey. Along the lake shore he went, to the outlet;
then down the clear, rushing Squatook; and in the afternoon he came
out upon a smaller lake, over which stood sentinel a lofty, beetling
mountain. At the foot of the mountain, almost seeming to duplicate it
in miniature, a steep island of rock rose sharply from the water.
The bear halted on the shore, sniffed wistfully, and looked up at the
lonely mountain. Dim memories, or emotions too dim to be classed as
memories, began to stir in the recesses of his brain. He hurried
around the lake and began to climb the steeps. The lonely mountain was
old Sugar Loaf. The exile had come home.
It was his feet, rather than his head, perhaps, that knew the way so
well. Upward he toiled, through swamps and fir woods, over blueberry
barrens and ranges of granite boulders, till, looking down, he saw the
eagle flying far below him. He saw a vast, empty forest land, beaded
with shining lakes,--and a picture, long covered up in his brain, came
back to him. These were the great spaces that so long ago had
terrified the little cub creeping at his mother's heels. He knew now
where his den was,--just behind that whitish gray rock with the
juniper shrub over it. He ran eagerly to resume possession.
It was now, for the first time, that he found the wilderness less
empty than he had imagined it. Another bear was in possession of the
den,--and in no mood to be disturbed.
He flung himself upon the intruder with a savage roar. The next moment
the two, clutched in a madly clawing embrace, went crashing through a
fringe of bushes and rolled together down a twenty-foot slope of bald
rock. They landed in a crevice full of roots, with a violence that
half-stunned them and threw them apart. As they picked themselves up,
it was plain that the exile had had the best of the tussle. His rich
black fur, to be sure, was somewhat torn and bloody, but he showed no
other signs of battle; while his antagonist breathed heavily and held
one paw clear of the ground.
[Illustration: "THE EAGLE FLYING FAR BELOW HIM."]
The exile was quite fearless, and quite ready to fight for what he
wanted, if necessary. But he was not conscious of any particular
ill-will toward his assailant. What he wanted was possession of that
den. Now, instead of taking advantage of his adversary's partly
disabled condition, he clambered with undignified haste up the steep
rock and plunged into the cave. It was certainly much smaller than he
had imagined it, but it was, nevertheless, much to his taste. He
turned around in it two or three times, as if to adjust it to himself,
then squatted on his haunches in the entrance and looked out
complacently over the airy deeps. The dispossessed bear stood for a
few minutes irresolute, his small eyes red with wrath. For a moment or
two he hesitated, trying to work himself up to the attack. Then
discretion came to his rescue. Grumbling deep in his throat, he turned
and limped away, to seek new quarters on the other side of the
mountain.
Now began for the returned exile two or three months of just such a
life as he had longed for. The keen and tonic winds that blew around
the peak of Sugar Loaf filled his veins with vigour. Through his lack
of education in the lore of the wilderness, his diet was less varied
than it might have been; but this was the fat of the year, and he
fared well enough. When the late berries and fruits were all gone
there were sweet tubers and starchy roots to be grubbed up along the
meadow levels by the water. Instinct, and a spirit of investigation,
soon taught him to find the beetles and grubs that lurked under
stones or in rotting logs,--and in the course of such a search he one
day discovered that ants were good to eat. But the small animals with
which a wild bear is prone to vary his diet were all absent from his
bill of fare. Rabbits, woodchucks, chipmunks, wood-mice, they all kept
out of his sight. His ignorance of the law of silence, the universal
law of the wild, deprived him of many toothsome morsels. As for the
many kinds of fungus which grew upon the mountain, he knew not which
were edible and which poisonous. After an experiment with one
pleasant-smelling red-skinned specimen, which gave him excruciating
cramps, he left the whole race of fungi severely alone.
For perhaps a month he had the solitudes to himself, except for the
big, scornful-looking eagle which always spent a portion of every day
sitting on the top of a blasted pine about a hundred feet above the
den. But, at length, one crisp morning, when he was down by the
lakeside fishing, he found a mate. A young she-bear came out of the
bushes, looked at him, then turned as if to run away,--but didn't. The
exile stopped fishing, and waited civilly to see if the newcomer
wanted to fight. Evidently she had no such desire.
The exile took a few steps up the beach,--which action seemed to
terrify the newcomer almost into flight. Seeing this, he sat down on
his haunches amiably, and waited to see what she would do. What she
did, after much hesitation and delay and half-retreat, was to come up
to his side and sniff trustfully but wonderingly at the great
iron-studded leather collar on his neck. After that the two soon
reached an understanding; and for the next six weeks or so they spent
most of their time together.
Under his mate's instruction, or else by force of her example, the big
bear made some progress in woodcraft, and gained some inklings of the
lesson of silence. He learned, also, to distinguish between the
wholesome and the poisonous fungi. He learned the sweets of a
bee-tree, and how a bear must go to work to attain them. Moving
through the shadows more quietly, he now had glimpses of rabbits and
chipmunks, and even caught sight of a wood-mouse whisking into his
hole under a root. But before he had acquired the cunning to capture
any of these shy kindreds, his mate wandered away, on her own affairs
intent; and he found himself once more alone. Frosts by this time were
binding swale and pool. Ice was forming far out from the edges of the
lake. The first snows had fallen and the great snows were threatening.
And the little she-bear was getting ready to creep into a hole and
curl up for her winter's sleep. She no longer wanted company,--not
even the company of this splendid, black comrade, whose collar had so
filled her with admiration.
When, at length, the winter of the north had fairly settled down upon
the Squatooks, the exile's ribs were well encased in fat. But that
fortunate condition was not to last long. When the giant winds, laden
with snow and Arctic cold, thundered and shrieked about the peak of
Sugar Loaf, and in the loud darkness strange shapes of drift rode down
the blast, he slept snugly enough in the narrow depths of his den. But
the essential winter lore of his kind he had not learned. He had not
learned to sleep away the time of storm and famine. As for instinct,
it failed him altogether in this emergency. During his five years of
life with the circus, he had had no chance to gratify his winter
drowsiness, and gradually the power to hibernate had passed away from
him. The loss was irremediable. By this one deprivation his contact
with man had ruined him for the life of nature.
When man has snatched away from Nature one of her wild children,
Nature, merciless in her resentments, is apt to say, "Keep him! He is
none of mine!" And if the alien, his heart aching for his own,
insists upon returning, Nature turns a face of stone against him.
Unskilled in hunting as he was, and unable to sleep, the bear was soon
driven to extremes. At rare intervals he succeeded in capturing a
rabbit. Once or twice, after a fierce frost had followed a wet sleet
storm, he had climbed trees and found dead birds frozen to their
perches. But most of the time he had nothing but starvation rations of
wood-ants and buds. In the course of a few weeks he was lean as a
heron, and his collar hung loose in his fur. He was growing to hate
the icy and glittering desolation,--and, as he had once longed for an
untried freedom, now he longed for the companionship of men.
He was now wandering far afield in his daily quest for food, sometimes
not returning for three or four days at a time. Once, on an excursion
over into the Madawaska Valley, he came upon a deadfall temptingly
baited with pork. He rushed forward ravenously to snatch the
bait,--but just in time that scent called up an ancient memory. The
horror and the shock of that far-off day when such a trap had crushed
his mother's life out, came back upon him. It was not the scene,
exactly, that came back, but rather the memory of an anguish. Obscure
as it was, it had power to master his appetite and drive him to
another foraging-ground. Thenceforth he foraged no more in the
Madawaska Valley.
In such a desolate fashion the exile dragged through the frozen weeks,
till February came in with deeper snows and fiercer frosts. At this
time hunger and loneliness drove him far over to the valley of the
Toledi; and here, one still and biting day, he came upon a human
trail.
Delightedly he sniffed at the familiar scent, which to him, as
pleasant memories of food and companionship welled up in his heart,
represented nothing but kindliness. His little disagreements with his
trainer were forgotten. He remembered only his unfailing friends, the
manager and the clown. The trail was a broad and mixed one,--the trail
of oxen, and of men with larriganed feet. It led toward a camp of
lumbermen, near the river. Joyously and confidently the exile followed
it. Soon he heard men's voices, and the familiar clank of chains. Then
a biting breeze drew through the forest,--biting, but sweet to the
bear's nostrils. It carried a savour of richness from the cook's
steaming boilers. It was dinner-hour at the camp.
For the second time in his life, the bear felt that he had come home.
Captive, indeed, he had been among men,--but a captive always highly
valued and heedfully cared for. He never for a moment doubted that
these men-creatures, who had always wanted him, would want him now.
They would chain him up, of course,--for fear he would change his mind
and leave them again. But they would feed him,--all he could eat; and
stare at him; and admire him. Then he would dance for them, and do
foolish things with a gun, and perhaps stand on his head. Whereupon
they would applaud, and laugh, and feed him with peanuts and
gingerbread. His famished jaws dripped at the thought.
Within the camp one of the hands, glancing from the window, saw him
just as he came in view. In an instant every man was looking out. The
boldness of the animal stirred up a great excitement. His terrible
leanness was noticed. He was coming straight for the door,--evidently
savage, insane with hunger! And such a big fellow, too!
Men seized their axes. The boss snatched down his big-bore Snider
rifle, slipped in a cartridge, and coolly threw open the cabin door.
He was a tall, ruddy-faced, wide-mouthed man, much like the kindly
manager of the show. At sight of him, standing there in the door, the
bear was overjoyed, and broke into a shuffling run.
Seeing what seemed to them such reckless ferocity, the lumbermen cried
out in amazement, and shouted hoarse warnings to the boss. But the
boss was a man of nerve. Raising his rifle to the shoulder, he stepped
right out clear of the door. He was a dead shot, and very proud of the
fact. When the bear was within thirty paces of him, he fired.
The massive bullet sped true; and the exile fell forward on his snout
without a gasp, shot through the brain.
The men gathered about the body, praising the shot, praising the
prize, praising the reckless audacity which had led the beast to rush
upon his doom. Then in the long, loose fur that clothed his bones they
found the heavy collar. At that they all wondered. The boss examined
it minutely, and stood pondering; and the frank pride upon his face
gradually died into regret.
"I swan, boys," said he, presently, "if that ain't the b'ar that run
away from the circus las' fall! I heard tell he was reckoned always
kind!"
The Little Wolf of the Pool
The bottom of the pool (it was too small to be called a pond) was
muddy, with here and there a thicket of rushes or arrow-weed stems.
Down upon the windless surface streamed the noon sun warmly. Under its
light the bottom was flecked with shadows of many patterns,--circular,
heart-shaped, spear-shaped, netted, and barred. There were other
shadows that were no more than ghosts of shadows, cast by faint,
diaphanous films of scum which scarcely achieved to blur the clear
downpour of radiance, but were nevertheless perceived and appreciated
by many of the delicate larval creatures which made a large part of
the life of the pool.
For all its surface tranquillity and its shining summer peace, the
pool was thronged with life. Beneath the surface, among the weeds and
stalks, the gleams and shadows, there was little of tranquillity or
peace. Almost all the many-formed and strange-shaped inhabitants of
the pool were hunting or being hunted, preying or being preyed
upon,--from the goggle-eyed, green-throated bullfrog under the willow
root, down to the swarming animalculae which it required a microscope
to see. Small crawling things everywhere dotted the mud or tried to
hide under the sticks and stones. Curled fresh-water snails moved up
and down the stems of the lilies. Shining little black water-bugs
scurried swiftly in all directions. In sheltered places near the
surface, under the leaves, wriggled the slim gray larvae of the
mosquitoes. And hither and thither, in flickering shoals, darted
myriads of baby minnows, from half an inch to an inch and a half in
length.