Kroof, the She-bear
Spring came early to the clearing that year. Kirstie’s autumn furrows,
dark and steaming, began to show in patches through the diminished snow.
The chips before the house and the litter about the barn, drawing the
sun strongly, were first of all uncovered; and over them, as to the
conquest of new worlds, the haughty cock led forth his dames to scratch.
“Saunders,” Miranda had called him, in remembrance of a strutting beau
at the Settlement; and with the advent of April cheer, and an increasing
abundance of eggs, and an ever resounding cackle from his complacent
partlets, his conceit became insufferable. One morning, when something
she did offended his dignity, he had the presumption to face her with
beak advanced and wide-ruffled neck feathers. But Saunders did not know
Miranda. Quick as a flash of light she seized him by the legs, whirled
him around her head, and flung him headlong, squawking with fear and
shame, upon his own dunghill. It took him a good hour to recover his
self-esteem, but after that Miranda stood out in his eyes as the one
creature in the world to be respected.
When the clearing was quite bare, except along the edges of the forest,
and Kirstie was again at work on her fencing, the black-and-white cow
gave birth to a black-and-white calf, which Miranda at once claimed as
her own property. It was a very wobbly, knock-kneed little heifer; but
Miranda admired it immensely, and with lofty disregard of its sex,
christened it Michael.
About this time the snow shrank away from her hollow under the pine
root, and Kroof came forth to sun herself. She had lived all winter on
nothing but the fat stored up on the spaces of her capacious frame.
Nevertheless she was not famished—she had still a reserve to come and go
on, till food should be abundant. A few days after waking up she bore a
cub. It was the custom of her kind to bear two cubs at a birth; but
Kroof, besides being by long odds the biggest she-bear ever known in
that region, had a pronounced individuality of her own, and was just as
well satisfied with herself over one cub as over two.
The hollow under the pine root was warm and softly lined—a condition
quite indispensable to the newcomer, which was about as unlike a bear as
any baby creature of its size could well manage to be. It was blind,
helpless, whimpering, more shapeless and clumsy-looking than the
clumsiest conceivable pup, and almost naked. Its tender, hairless hide
looked a poor thing to confront the world with; but its appetite was
astounding, and Kroof’s milk inexhaustible. In a few days a soft dark
fur began to appear. As the mother sat, hour by hour, watching it and
suckling it, half erect upon her haunches, her fore legs braced wide
apart, her head stretched as far down as possible, her narrow red tongue
hanging out to one side, her eyes half closed in rapture, it seemed to
grow visibly beneath her absorbing gaze. Before four weeks had passed,
the cub was covered with a jet black coat, soft and glossy. This being
the case, he thought it time to open his eyes and look about.
He was now about the size of a small cat, but of a much heavier build.
His head, at this age, was shorter for its breadth than his mother’s;
the ears much larger, fan-like and conspicuous. His eyes, very softly
vague at first, soon acquired a humorous, mischievous expression, which
went aptly with the erect, inquisitive ears. Altogether he was a fine
baby—a fair justification of Kroof’s pride.
The spring being now fairly forward, and pale, whitish-green shoots
upthrusting themselves numerously through the dead leaves, and the big
crimson leaf-bud of the skunk-cabbage vividly punctuating the sombreness
of the swamp, Kroof led her infant forth to view their world. He had no
such severe and continued education to undergo as that which falls to
the lot of other youngsters among the folk of the ancient wood. For
those others the first lesson, the hardest and the most tremendous in
its necessity, was how to avoid their enemies. With this lesson
ill-learned, all others found brief term; for the noiseless drama, in
which all the folk of the forest had their parts, moved ever, through
few scenes or through many, to a tragic close. But the bear, being for
the most part dominant, had his immunities. Even the panther, swift and
fierce and masterful, never deliberately sought quarrel with the bear,
being mindful of his disastrous clutch and the lightning sweep of his
paw. The bear-cub, therefore, going with its mother till almost full
grown, gave no thought at all to enemies; and the cub with such a
giantess as Kroof for its mother might safely make a mock even at
panthers. Kroof’s cub had thus but simple things to learn, following
close at his mother’s flank. During the first blind weeks of his cubhood
he had, indeed, to acquire the prime virtue of silence, which was not
easy, for he loved to whimper and grumble in a comfortable little
fashion of his own. This was all right while Kroof was at home; but when
she was out foraging, then silence was the thing. This he learned,
partly from Kroof’s admonitions, partly from a deep-seated instinct; and
whenever he was left alone, he held his tongue. There was always the
possibility slight but unpleasant, of a fox or a brown cat noting
Kroof’s absence, and seizing the chance to savour a delicate morsel of
sucking bear.
Wandering the silent woods with Kroof, the cub would sniff carefully at
the moist earth and budding shoots wheresoever his mother stopped to
dig. He thus learned where to find the starchy roots which form so large
a part of the bear’s food in spring. He found out the important
difference between the sweet groundnuts and the fiery bitter bulb of the
arum, or Indian turnip; and he learned to go over the grassy meadows by
the lake and dig unerringly for the wild bean’s nourishing tubers. He
discovered, also, what old stumps to tear apart when he wanted a
pleasantly acid tonic dose of the larvæ of the wood-ant. Among these
serious occupations he would gambol between his mother’s feet, or caper
hilariously on his hind legs. Soon he would have been taught to detect a
bee tree, and to rob it of its delectable stores without getting his
eyes stung out; but just then the mysterious forest fates dropped the
curtain on his merry little play, as a reminder that not even for the
great black bear could the rule of doom be relaxed.
Kroof’s first wanderings with the cub were in the neighbourhood of the
clearing, where both were sometimes seen by Miranda. The sight of the
cub so overjoyed her that she departed from her usual reticence as to
the forest-folk, and told her mother about the lovely, glossy little dog
that the nice, great big dog took about with her. The only result was
that Kirstie gave her a sharp warning.
“Dog!” she exclaimed severely; “didn’t I tell you, Miranda, it was a
bear? Bears are mostly harmless, if you leave them alone; but an old
bear with a cub is mighty ugly. Mind what I say now, you keep by me and
don’t go too nigh the edge of the woods.”
And so, for the next few weeks, Miranda was watched very strictly, lest
her childish daring should involve her with the bears.
Along in the summer Kroof began to lead the cub wider afield. The longer
journeys vexed the little animal at first, and tired him; so that
sometimes he would throw himself down on his back, with pinky-white
soles of protest in the air, and refuse to go a step farther. But in
spite of the appeal of his quizzical little black snout, big ears, and
twinkling eyes, old Kroof would box him sternly till he was glad enough
to jump up and renew the march. With the exercise he got a little
leaner, but much harder, and soon came to delight in the widest
wandering. Nothing could tire him, and at the end of the journey he
would chase rabbits, or weasels, or other elusive creatures, till
convicted of futility by his mother’s sarcastic comments.
These wide wanderings were, indeed, the making of him, so that he
promised to rival Kroof herself in prowess and stature; but alas! poor
cub, they were also his undoing. Had he stayed at home—but even that
might have little availed, for among the folk of the wood it is right at
home that fate most surely strikes.
One day they two were exploring far over in the next valley—the valley
of the Quah-Davic, a tract little familiar to Kroof herself. At the noon
hour Kroof lay down in a little hollow of coolness beside a spring that
_drip-drop, drip-drop, drip-dropped_ from the face of a green rock. The
cub, however, went untiringly exploring the thickets for fifty yards
about, out of sight, indeed, but scrupulously never out of ear-shot.
Near one of these thickets his nostrils caught a new and enthralling
savour. He had never, in his brief life, smelled anything at all like
it, but an unerring instinct told him it was the smell of something very
good to eat. Pushing through the leafage he came upon the source of the
fragrance. Under a slanting structure of logs he found a piece of flesh,
yellowish-white, streaked thickly with dark reddish-brown,—and, oh, so
sweet smelling! It was stuck temptingly on a forked point of wood. His
ears stood up very wide and high in his eagerness. His sensitive
nostrils wrinkled as he sniffed at the tempting find. He decided that he
would just taste it, and then go fetch his mother. But it was a little
high up for him. He rose, set his small white teeth into it, clutched it
with his soft forepaws, and flung his whole weight upon it to pull it
down.
Kroof, dozing in her hollow of coolness, heard a small agonized screech,
cut short horribly. On the instant her great body went tearing in a
panic through the underbrush. She found poor cub crushed flat under the
huge timbers of “a dead-fall,” his glossy head and one paw sticking out
piteously, his little red tongue protruding from his distorted mouth.
Kroof needed no second look to know in her heart he was dead, stone
dead; but in the rage of her grief she would not acknowledge it. She
tore madly at the great timber,—so huge a thing to set to crush so small
a life,—and so astonishing was the strength of her claws and her vast
forearms that in the course of half an hour she had the trap fairly
demolished. Softly she removed the crushed and shapeless body, licking
the mouth, the nostrils, the pitifully staring eyes; snuggling it
lightly as a breath, and moaning over it. She would lift the head a
little with her paw, and redouble her caresses as it fell limply aside.
Then it grew cold. This was testimony she could not pretend to ignore.
She ceased the caresses which proved so vain to keep warmth in the
little body she loved. With her snout held high in air she turned around
slowly twice, as if in an appeal to some power not clearly apprehended;
then, without another glance at her dead, she rushed off madly through
the forest.
All night she wandered aimlessly, hither and thither through the low
Quah-Davic valley, over the lower slopes of the mountain, through tracts
where she had never been, but of which she took no note; and toward noon
of the following day she found herself once more in the ancient wood,
not far from the clearing. She avoided widely the old den under the pine
root, and at last threw herself down, worn out and with unsuckled teats
fiercely aching, behind the trunk of a fallen hemlock.
She slept heavily for an hour or two. Then she was awakened by the
crying of a child. She knew it at once for Miranda’s voice; and being in
some way stirred by it, in spite of the preoccupation of her pain, she
got up and moved noiselessly toward the sound.