The wet, chill first of the spring, its blackness made tender by the
lilac wash of the afterglow, lay upon the high, open stretches of the
stump lots. The winter-whitened stumps, the sparse patches of juniper and
bay just budding, the rough-mossed hillocks, the harsh boulders here and
there up-thrusting from the soil, the swampy hollows wherein a coarse
grass began to show green, all seemed anointed, as it were, to an ecstasy
of peace by the chrism of that paradisal colour. Against the lucid
immensity of the April sky the thin tops of five or six soaring ram-pikes
aspired like violet flames. Along the skirts of the stump lots a fir wood
reared a ragged-crested wall of black against the red amber of the
horizon.
Late that afternoon, beside a juniper thicket not far from the centre of
the stump lots, a young black and white cow had given birth to her first
calf. The little animal had been licked assiduously by the mother’s
caressing tongue till its colour began to show of a rich dark red. Now it
had struggled to its feet, and, with its disproportionately long, thick
legs braced wide apart, was beginning to nurse. Its blunt wet muzzle and
thick lips tugged eagerly, but somewhat blunderingly as yet, at the
unaccustomed teats; and its tail lifted, twitching with delight, as the
first warm streams of mother milk went down its throat. It was a
pathetically awkward, unlovely little figure, not yet advanced to that
youngling winsomeness which is the heritage, to some degree and at some
period, of the infancy of all the kindreds that breathe upon the earth.
But to the young mother’s eyes it was the most beautiful of things. With
her head twisted far around, she nosed and licked its heaving flanks as
it nursed; and between deep, ecstatic breathings she uttered in her
throat low murmurs, unspeakably tender, of encouragement and caress. The
delicate but pervading flood of sunset colour had the effect of blending
the ruddy-hued calf into the tones of the landscape; but the cow’s
insistent blotches of black and white stood out sharply, refusing to
harmonise. The drench of violet light was of no avail to soften their
staring contrasts. They made her vividly conspicuous across the whole
breadth of the stump lots, to eyes that watched her from the forest
coverts.
The eyes that watched her—long, fixedly, hungrily—were small and red.
They belonged to a lank she-bear, whose gaunt flanks and rusty coat
proclaimed a season of famine in the wilderness. She could not see the
calf, which was hidden by a hillock and some juniper scrub; but its
presence was very legibly conveyed to her by the mother’s solicitous
watchfulness. After a motionless scrutiny from behind the screen of fir
branches, the lean bear stole noiselessly forth from the shadows into the
great wash of violet light. Step by step, and very slowly, with the
patience that endures because confident of its object, she crept toward
that oasis of mothering joy in the vast emptiness of the stump lots. Now
crouching, now crawling, turning to this side and to that, taking
advantage of every hollow, every thicket, every hillock, every aggressive
stump, her craft succeeded in eluding even the wild and menacing
watchfulness of the young mother’s eyes.
The spring had been a trying one for the lank she-bear. Her den, in a dry
tract of hemlock wood some furlongs back from the stump lots, was a snug
little cave under the uprooted base of a lone pine, which had somehow
grown up among the alien hemlocks only to draw down upon itself at last,
by its superior height, the fury of a passing hurricane. The winter had
contributed but scanty snowfall to cover the bear in her sleep; and the
March thaws, unseasonably early and ardent, had called her forth to
activity weeks too soon. Then frosts had come with belated severity,
sealing away the budding tubers, which are the bear’s chief dependence
for spring diet; and worst of all, a long stretch of intervale meadow by
the neighbouring river, which had once been rich in ground-nuts, had been
ploughed up the previous spring and subjected to the producing of oats
and corn. When she was feeling the pinch of meagre rations, and when the
fat which a liberal autumn of blueberries had laid up about her ribs was
getting as shrunken as the last snow in the thickets, she gave birth to
two hairless and hungry little cubs. They were very blind, and
ridiculously small to be born of so big a mother; and having so much
growth to make during the next few months, their appetites were
immeasurable. They tumbled, and squealed, and tugged at their mother’s
teats, and grew astonishingly, and made huge haste to cover their bodies
with fur of a soft and silken black; and all this vitality of theirs made
a strenuous demand upon their mother’s milk. There were no more bee-trees
left in the neighbourhood. The long wanderings which she was forced to
take in her search for roots and tubers were in themselves a drain upon
her nursing powers. At last, reluctant though she was to attract the
hostile notice of the settlement, she found herself forced to hunt on the
borders of the sheep pastures. Before all else in life was it important
to her that these two tumbling little ones in the den should not go
hungry. Their eyes were open now—small and dark and whimsical, their ears
quaintly large and inquiring for their roguish little faces. Had she not
been driven by the unkind season to so much hunting and foraging, she
would have passed near all her time rapturously in the den under the pine
root, fondling those two soft miracles of her world.
With the killing of three lambs—at widely scattered points, so as to
mislead retaliation—things grew a little easier for the harassed bear;
and presently she grew bolder in tampering with the creatures under man’s
protection. With one swift, secret blow of her mighty paw she struck down
a young ewe which had strayed within reach of her hiding-place. Dragging
her prey deep into the woods, she fared well upon it for some days, and
was happy with her growing cubs. It was just when she had begun to feel
the fasting which came upon the exhaustion of this store that, in a
hungry hour, she sighted the conspicuous markings of the black and white
cow.
It is altogether unusual for the black bear of the eastern woods to
attack any quarry so large as a cow, unless under the spur of fierce
hunger or fierce rage. The she-bear was powerful beyond her fellows. She
had the strongest possible incentive to bold hunting, and she had lately
grown confident beyond her wont. Nevertheless, when she began her careful
stalking of this big game which she coveted, she had no definite
intention of forcing a battle with the cow. She had observed that cows,
accustomed to the protection of man, would at times leave their calves
asleep and stray off some distance in their pasturing. She had even seen
calves left all by themselves in a field, from morning till night, and
had wondered at such negligence in their mothers. Now she had a confident
idea that sooner or later the calf would lie down to sleep, and the young
mother roam a little wide in search of the scant young grass. Very
softly, very self-effacingly, she crept nearer step by step, following up
the wind, till at last, undiscovered, she was crouching behind a thick
patch of juniper, on the slope of a little hollow not ten paces distant
from the cow and the calf.
By this time the tender violet light was fading to a grayness over
hillock and hollow; and with the deepening of the twilight the faint
breeze, which had been breathing from the northward, shifted suddenly and
came in slow, warm pulsations out of the south. At the same time the
calf, having nursed sufficiently, and feeling his baby legs tired of the
weight they had not yet learned to carry, laid himself down. On this the
cow shifted her position. She turned half round, and lifted her head
high. As she did so a scent of peril was borne in upon her fine nostrils.
She recognised it instantly. With a snort of anger she sniffed again;
then stamped a challenge with her fore hoofs, and levelled the
lance-points of her horns toward the menace. The next moment her eyes,
made keen by the fear of love, detected the black outline of the bear’s
head through the coarse screen of the juniper. Without a second’s
hesitation, she flung up her tail, gave a short bellow, and charged.
The moment she saw herself detected, the bear rose upon her hindquarters;
nevertheless she was in a measure surprised by the sudden blind fury of
the attack. Nimbly she swerved to avoid it, aiming at the same time a
stroke with her mighty forearm, which, if it had found its mark, would
have smashed her adversary’s neck. But as she struck out, in the act of
shifting her position, a depression of the ground threw her off her
balance. The next instant one sharp horn caught her slantingly in the
flank, ripping its way upward and inward, while the mad impact threw her
upon her back.
Grappling, she had her assailant’s head and shoulders in a trap, and her
gigantic claws cut through the flesh and sinew like knives; but at the
desperate disadvantage of her position she could inflict no disabling
blow. The cow, on the other hand, though mutilated and streaming with
blood, kept pounding with her whole massive weight, and with short
tremendous shocks crushing the breath from her foe’s ribs.
[Illustration: “SHE STRUGGLED STRAIGHT TOWARD THE DEN THAT HELD HER
YOUNG.”]
Presently, wrenching herself free, the cow drew off for another battering
charge; and as she did so the bear hurled herself violently down the
slope, and gained her feet behind a dense thicket of bay shrub. The cow,
with one eye blinded and the other obscured by blood, glared around for
her in vain, then, in a panic of mother terror, plunged back to her calf.
Snatching at the respite, the bear crouched down, craving that
invisibility which is the most faithful shield of the furtive kindred.
Painfully, and leaving a drenched red trail behind her, she crept off
from the disastrous neighbourhood. Soon the deepening twilight sheltered
her. But she could not make haste; and she knew that death was close upon
her.
Once within the woods, she struggled straight toward the den that held
her young. She hungered to die licking them. But destiny is as implacable
as iron to the wilderness people, and even this was denied her. Just a
half score of paces from the lair in the pine root, her hour descended
upon her. There was a sudden redder and fuller gush upon the trail; the
last light of longing faded out of her eyes; and she lay down upon her
side.
The merry little cubs within the den were beginning to expect her, and
getting restless. As the night wore on, and no mother came, they ceased
to be merry. By morning they were shivering with hunger and desolate
fear. But the doom of the ancient wood was less harsh than its wont, and
spared them some days of starving anguish; for about noon a pair of foxes
discovered the dead mother, astutely estimated the situation, and then,
with the boldness of good appetite, made their way into the unguarded
den.
As for the red calf, its fortune was ordinary. Its mother, for all her
wounds, was able to nurse and cherish it through the night; and with
morning came a searcher from the farm and took it, with the bleeding
mother, safely back to the settlement. There it was tended and fattened,
and within a few weeks found its way to the cool marble slabs of a city
market.
[Illustration: THE KING OF THE MAMOZEKEL]