BA'TISTE, THE BEAR HUNTER
The city man, who goes bear-hunting with a body-guard of armed guides in
a field where the hunted have been on the run from the hunter for a
century, gets a very tame idea of the natural bear in its natural state.
Bears that have had the fear of man inculcated with longe-range
repeaters lose confidence in the prowess of an aggressive onset against
invisible foes. The city man comes back from the wilds with a legend of
how harmless bears have become. In fact, he doesn't believe a wild
animal ever attacks unless it is attacked. He doubts whether the bear
would go on its life-long career of rapine and death, if hunger did not
compel it, or if repeated assault and battery from other animals did not
teach the poor bear the art of self-defence.
Grisly old trappers coming down to the frontier towns of the Western
States once a year for provisions, or hanging round the forts of the
Hudson's Bay Company in Canada for the summer, tell a different tale.
Their hunting is done in a field where human presence is still so rare
that it is unknown and the bear treats mankind precisely as he treats
all other living beings from the moose and the musk-ox to mice and
ants--as fair game for his own insatiable maw.
Old hunters may be great spinners of yarns--"liars" the city man calls
them--but Montagnais, who squats on his heels round the fur company
forts on Peace River, carries ocular evidence in the artificial ridge of
a deformed nose that the bear which he slew was a real one with an
epicurean relish for that part of Indian anatomy which the Indian
considers to be the most choice bit of a moose.[36] And the Kootenay
hunter who was sent through the forests of Idaho to follow up the track
of a lost brave brought back proof of an actual bear; for he found a
dead man lying across a pile of logs with his skull crushed in like an
eggshell by something that had risen swift and silent from a lair on the
other side of the logs and dealt the climbing brave one quick terrible
blow. And little blind Ba'tiste, wizened and old, who spent the last
twenty years of his life weaving grass mats and carving curious little
wooden animals for the children of the chief factor, could convince you
that the bears he slew in his young days were very real bears,
altogether different from the clumsy bruins that gambol with boys and
girls through fairy books.
That is, he could convince you if he would; for he usually sat weaving
and weaving at the grasses--weaving bitter thoughts into the woof of his
mat--without a word. Round his white helmet, such as British soldiers
wear in hot lands, he always hung a heavy thick linen thing like the
frill of a sun-bonnet, coming over the face as well as the neck--"to
keep de sun off," he would mumble out if you asked him why. More than
that of the mysterious frill worn on dark days as well as sunny, he
would never vouch unless some town-bred man patronizingly pooh-poohed
the dangers of bear-hunting. Then the grass strands would tremble with
excitement and the little French hunter's body would quiver and he would
begin pouring forth a jumble, half habitant half Indian with a mixture
of all the oaths from both languages, pointing and pointing at his
hidden face and bidding you look what the bear had done to him, but
never lifting the thick frill.
* * * * *
It was somewhere between the tributary waters that flow north to the
Saskatchewan and the rivers that start near the Saskatchewan to flow
south to the Missouri. Ba'tiste and the three trappers who were with him
did not know which side of the boundary they were on. By slow travel,
stopping one day to trap beaver, pausing on the way to forage for meat,
building their canoes where they needed them and abandoning the boats
when they made a long overland _portage_, they were three weeks north of
the American fur post on the banks of the Missouri. The hunters were
travelling light-handed. That is, they were carrying only a little salt
and tea and tobacco. For the rest, they were depending on their muskets.
Game had not been plentiful.
Between the prairie and "the Mountains of the Setting Sun"--as the
Indians call the Rockies--a long line of tortuous, snaky red crawled
sinuously over the crests of the foothills; and all game--bird and
beast--will shun a prairie fire. There was no wind. It was the dead hazy
calm of Indian summer in the late autumn with the sun swimming in the
purplish smoke like a blood-red shield all day and the serpent line of
flame flickering and darting little tongues of vermilion against the
deep blue horizon all night, days filled with the crisp smell of
withered grasses, nights as clear and cold as the echo of a bell. On a
windless plain there is no danger from a prairie fire. One may travel
for weeks without nearing or distancing the waving tide of fire against
a far sky; and the four trappers, running short of rations, decided to
try to flank the fire coming around far enough ahead to intercept the
game that must be moving away from the fire line.
Nearly all hunters, through some dexterity of natural endowment,
unconsciously become specialists. One man sees beaver signs where
another sees only deer. For Ba'tiste, the page of nature spelled
_B-E-A-R_! Fifteen bear in a winter is a wonderfully good season's work
for any trapper. Ba'tiste's record for one lucky winter was fifty-four.
After that he was known as the bear hunter. Such a reputation affects
keen hunters differently. The Indian grows cautious almost to cowardice.
Ba'tiste grew rash. He would follow a wounded grisly to cover. He would
afterward laugh at the episode as a joke if the wounded brute had treed
him. "For sure, good t'ing dat was not de prairie dat tam," he would
say, flinging down the pelt of his foe. The other trappers with Indian
blood in their veins might laugh, but they shook their heads when his
back was turned.
Flanking the fire by some of the great gullies that cut the foothills
like trenches, the hunters began to find the signs they had been
seeking. For Ba'tiste, the many different signs had but one meaning.
Where some summer rain pool had dried almost to a soft mud hole, the
other trappers saw little cleft foot-marks that meant deer, and prints
like a baby's fingers that spelled out the visit of some member of the
weasel family, and broad splay-hoof impressions that had spread under
the weight as some giant moose had gone shambling over the quaking mud
bottom. But Ba'tiste looked only at a long shuffling foot-mark the
length of a man's fore-arm with padded ball-like pressures as of monster
toes. The French hunter would at once examine which way that great foot
had pointed. Were there other impressions dimmer on the dry mud? Did the
crushed spear-grass tell any tales of what had passed that mud hole? If
it did, Ba'tiste would be seen wandering apparently aimlessly out on the
prairie, carrying his uncased rifle carefully that the sunlight should
not glint from the barrel, zigzagging up a foothill where perhaps wild
plums or shrub berries hung rotting with frost ripeness. Ba'tiste did
not stand full height at the top of the hill. He dropped face down, took
off his hat, or scarlet "safety" handkerchief, and peered warily over
the crest of the hill. If he went on over into the next valley, the
other men would say they "guessed he smelt bear." If he came back, they
knew he had been on a cold scent that had faded indistinguishably as the
grasses thinned.
Southern slopes of prairie and foothill are often matted tangles of a
raspberry patch. Here Ba'tiste read many things--stories of many bears,
of families, of cubs, of old cross fellows wandering alone. Great slabs
of stone had been clawed up by mighty hands. Worms and snails and all
the damp clammy things that cling to the cold dark between stone and
earth had been gobbled up by some greedy forager. In the trenched
ravines crossed by the trappers lay many a hidden forest of cottonwood
or poplar or willow. Here was refuge, indeed, for the wandering
creatures of the treeless prairie that rolled away from the tops of the
cliffs.
Many secrets could be read from the clustered woods of the ravines. The
other hunters might look for the fresh nibbled alder bush where a busy
beaver had been laying up store for winter, or detect the blink of a
russet ear among the seared foliage betraying a deer, or wonder what
flesh-eater had caught the poor jack rabbit just outside his shelter of
thorny brush.
The hawk soaring and dropping--lilting and falling and lifting
again--might mean that a little mink was "playing dead" to induce the
bird to swoop down so that the vampire beast could suck the hawk's
blood, or that the hawk was watching for an unguarded moment to plunge
down with his talons in a poor "fool-hen's" feathers.
These things might interest the others. They did not interest Ba'tiste.
Ba'tiste's eyes were for lairs of grass crushed so recently that the
spear leaves were even now rising; for holes in the black mould where
great ripping claws had been tearing up roots; for hollow logs and
rotted stumps where a black bear might have crawled to take his
afternoon siesta; for punky trees which a grisly might have torn open to
gobble ants' eggs; for scratchings down the bole of poplar or cottonwood
where some languid bear had been sharpening his claws in midsummer as a
cat will scratch chair-legs; for great pits deep in the clay banks,
where some silly badger or gopher ran down to the depths of his burrow
in sheer terror only to have old bruin come ripping and tearing to the
innermost recesses, with scattered fur left that told what had happened.
Some soft oozy moss-padded lair, deep in the marsh with the reeds of the
brittle cat-tails lifting as if a sleeper had just risen, sets
Ba'tiste's pulse hopping--jumping--marking time in thrills like the
lithe bounds of a pouncing mountain-cat. With tread soft as the velvet
paw of a panther, he steals through the cane-brake parting the reeds
before each pace, brushing aside softly--silently what might
crush!--snap!--sound ever so slight an alarm to the little pricked ears
of a shaggy head tossing from side to side--jerk--jerk--from right to
left--from left to right--always on the listen!--on the listen!--for
prey!--for prey!
"Oh, for sure, that Ba'tiste, he was but a fool-hunter," as his comrades
afterward said (it is always so very plain afterward); "that Ba'tiste,
he was a fool! What man else go step--step--into the marsh after a
bear!"
But the truth was that Ba'tiste, the cunning rascal, always succeeded in
coming out of the marsh, out of the bush, out of the windfall, sound as
a top, safe and unscratched, with a bear-skin over his shoulder, the
head swinging pendant to show what sort of fellow he had mastered.
"Dat wan!--ah!--diable!--he has long sharp nose--he was thin--thin as a
barrel all gone but de hoops--ah!--voila!--he was wan ugly garcon, was
dat bear!"
Where the hunters found tufts of fur on the sage brush, bits of skin on
the spined cactus, the others might vow coyotes had worried a badger.
Ba'tiste would have it that the badger had been slain by a bear. The
cached carcass of fawn or doe, of course, meant bear; for the bear is an
epicure that would have meat gamey. To that the others would agree.
And so the shortening autumn days with the shimmering heat of a crisp
noon and the noiseless chill of starry twilights found the trappers
canoeing leisurely up-stream from the northern tributaries of the
Missouri nearing the long overland trail that led to the hunting-fields
in Canada.
One evening they came to a place bounded by high cliff banks with the
flats heavily wooded by poplar and willow. Ba'tiste had found signs that
were hot--oh! so hot! The mould of an uprooted gopher hole was so fresh
that it had not yet dried. This was not a region of timber-wolves. What
had dug that hole? Not the small, skulking coyote--the vagrant of
prairie life! Oh!--no!--the coyote like other vagrants earns his living
without work, by skulking in the wake of the business-like badger; and
when the badger goes down in the gopher hole, Master Coyote stands
nearby and gobbles up all the stray gophers that bolt to escape the
invading badger.[37] What had dug the hole? Ba'tiste thinks that he
knows.
That was on open prairie. Just below the cliff is another kind of
hole--a roundish pit dug between moss-covered logs and earth wall, a
pit with grass clawed down into it, snug and hidden and sheltered as a
bird's nest. If the pit is what Ba'tiste thinks, somewhere on the banks
of the stream should be a watering-place. He proposes that they beach
the canoes and camp here. Twilight is not a good time to still hunt an
unseen bear. Twilight is the time when the bear himself goes still
hunting. Ba'tiste will go out in the early morning. Meantime if he
stumbles on what looks like a trail to the watering-place, he will set a
trap.
Camp is not for the regular trapper what it is for the amateur hunter--a
time of rest and waiting while others skin the game and prepare supper.
One hunter whittles the willow sticks that are to make the camp fire.
Another gathers moss or boughs for a bed. If fish can be got, some one
has out a line. The kettle hisses from the cross-bar between notched
sticks above the fire, and the meat sizzling at the end of a forked twig
sends up a flavour that whets every appetite. Over the upturned canoes
bend a couple of men gumming afresh all the splits and seams against
to-morrow's voyage. Then with a flip-flop that tells of the other side
of the flap-jacks being browned, the cook yodels in crescendo that
"Sup--per!--'s--read--ee!"
Supper over, a trap or two may be set in likely places. The men may take
a plunge; for in spite of their tawny skins, these earth-coloured
fellows have closer acquaintance with water than their appearance would
indicate. The man-smell is as acute to the beast's nose as the rank
fur-animal-smell is to the man's nose; and the first thing that an
Indian who has had a long run of ill-luck does is to get a native
"sweating-bath" and make himself clean.
On the ripple of the flowing river are the red bars of the camp fire.
Among the willows, perhaps, the bole of some birch stands out white and
spectral. Though there is no wind, the poplars shiver with a fall of
wan, faded leaves like snow-flakes on the grave of summer. Red bills and
whisky-jacks and lonely phoebe-birds came fluttering and pecking at the
crumbs. Out from the gray thicket bounds a cottontail to jerk up on his
hind legs with surprise at the camp fire. A blink of his long ear, and
he has bounded back to tell the news to his rabbit family. Overhead,
with shrill clangour, single file and in long wavering <big>V</big> lines, wing
geese migrating southward for the season. The children's hour, has a
great poet called a certain time of day? Then this is the hour of the
wilderness hunter, the hour when "the Mountains of the Setting Sun" are
flooded in fiery lights from zone to zenith with the snowy heights
overtopping the far rolling prairie like clouds of opal at poise in
mid-heaven, the hour when the camp fire lies on the russet
autumn-tinged earth like a red jewel, and the far line of the prairie
fire billows against the darkening east in a tide of vermilion flame.
Unless it is raining, the _voyageurs_ do not erect their tent; for they
will sleep in the open, feet to the fire, or under the canoes, close to
the great earth, into whose very fibre their beings seem to be rooted.
And now is the time when the hunters spin their yarns and exchange notes
of all they have seen in the long silent day. There was the prairie
chicken with a late brood of half-grown clumsy clucking chicks amply
able to take care of themselves, but still clinging to the old mother's
care. When the hunter came suddenly on them, over the old hen went,
flopping broken-winged to decoy the trapper till her children could run
for shelter--when--lo!--of a sudden, the broken wing is mended and away
she darts on both wings before he has uncased his gun! There are the
stories of bear hunters like Ba'tiste sitting on the other side of the
fire there, who have been caught in their own bear traps and held till
they died of starvation and their bones bleached in the rusted steel.
That story has such small relish for Ba'tiste that he hitches farther
away from the others and lies back flat on the ground close to the
willow under-tangle with his head on his hand.
"For sure," says Ba'tiste contemptuously, "nobody doesn't need no tree
to climb here! Sacre!--cry wolf!--wolf!--and for sure!--diable!--de beeg
loup-garou will eat you yet!"
Down somewhere from those stars overhead drops a call silvery as a
flute, clear as a piccolo--some night bird lilting like a mote on the
far oceans of air. The trappers look up with a movement that in other
men would be a nervous start; for any shrill cry pierces the silence of
the prairie in almost a stab. Then the men go on with their yarn telling
of how the Blackfeet murdered some traders on this very ground not long
ago till the gloom gathering over willow thicket and encircling cliffs
seems peopled with those marauding warriors. One man rises, saying that
he is "goin' to turn in" and is taking a step through the dark to his
canoe when there is a dull pouncing thud. For an instant the trappers
thought that their comrade had stumbled over his boat. But a heavy
groan--a low guttural cry--a shout of "Help--help--help Ba'tiste!" and
the man who had risen plunged into the crashing cane-brake, calling out
incoherently for them to "help--help Ba'tiste!"
In the confusion of cries and darkness, it was impossible for the other
two trappers to know what had happened. Their first thought was of the
Indians whose crimes they had been telling. Their second was for their
rifles--and they had both sprung over the fire where they saw the third
man striking--striking--striking wildly at something in the dark. A low
worrying growl--and they descried the Frenchman rolling over and over,
clutched by or clutching a huge furry form--hitting--plunging with his
knife--struggling--screaming with agony.
"It's Ba'tiste! It's a bear!" shouted the third man, who was attempting
to drive the brute off by raining blows on its head.
Man and bear were an indistinguishable struggling mass. Should they
shoot in the half-dark? Then the Frenchman uttered the scream of one in
death-throes: "Shoot!--shoot!--shoot quick! She's striking my
face!--she's striking my face----"
And before the words had died, sharp flashes of light cleft the
dark--the great beast rolled over with a coughing growl, and the
trappers raised their comrade from the ground.
The bear had had him on his back between her teeth by the thick chest
piece of his double-breasted buckskin. Except for his face, he seemed
uninjured; but down that face the great brute had drawn the claws of her
fore paw.
Ba'tiste raised his hands to his face.
"Mon dieu!" he asked thickly, fumbling with both hands, "what is done
to my eyes? Is the fire out? I cannot see!"
Then the man who had fought like a demon armed with only a hunting-knife
fainted because of what his hands felt.
* * * * *
Traitors there are among trappers as among all other classes, men like
those who deserted Glass on the Missouri, and Scott on the Platte, and
how many others whose treachery will never be known.
But Ba'tiste's comrades stayed with him on the banks of the river that
flows into the Missouri. One cared for the blind man. The other two
foraged for game. When the wounded hunter could be moved, they put him
in a canoe and hurried down-stream to the fur post before the freezing
of the rivers. At the fur post, the doctor did what he could; but a
doctor cannot restore what has been torn away. The next spring, Ba'tiste
was put on a pack horse and sent to his relatives at the Canadian fur
post. Here his sisters made him the curtain to hang round his helmet and
set him to weaving grass mats that the days might not drag so wearily.
Ask Ba'tiste whether he agrees with the amateur hunter that bears never
attack unless they are attacked, that they would never become ravening
creatures of prey unless the assaults of other creatures taught them
ferocity, ask Ba'tiste this and something resembling the snarl of a
baited beast breaks from the lipless face under the veil:
"S--s--sz!--" with a quiver of inexpressible rage. "The bear--it is an
animal!--the bear!--it is a beast!--toujours!--the bear!--it is a
beast!--always--always!" And his hands clinch.
Then he falls to carving of the little wooden animals and weaving of
sad, sad, bitter thoughts into the warp of the Indian mat.
Are such onslaughts common among bears, or are they the mad freaks of
the bear's nature? President Roosevelt tells of two soldiers bitten to
death in the South-West; and M. L'Abbe Dugast, of St. Boniface,
Manitoba, incidentally relates an experience almost similar to that of
Ba'tiste which occurred in the North-West. Lest Ba'tiste's case seem
overdrawn, I quote the Abbe's words:
"At a little distance Madame Lajimoniere and the other women were
preparing the tents for the night, when all at once Bouvier gave a cry
of distress and called to his companions to help him. At the first
shout, each hunter seized his gun and prepared to defend himself against
the attack of an enemy; they hurried to the other side of the ditch to
see what was the matter with Bouvier, and what he was struggling with.
They had no idea that a wild animal would come near the fire to attack a
man even under cover of night; for fire usually has the effect of
frightening wild beasts. However, almost before the four hunters knew
what had happened, they saw their unfortunate companion dragged into the
woods by a bear followed by her two cubs. She held Bouvier in her claws
and struck him savagely in the face to stun him. As soon as she saw the
four men in pursuit, she redoubled her fury against her prey, tearing
his face with her claws. M. Lajimoniere, who was an intrepid hunter,
baited her with the butt end of his gun to make her let go her hold, as
he dared not shoot for fear of killing the man while trying to save
him, but Bouvier, who felt himself being choked, cried with all his
strength: 'Shoot; I would rather be shot than eaten alive!' M.
Lajimoniere pulled the trigger as close to the bear as possible,
wounding her mortally. She let go Bouvier and before her strength was
exhausted made a wild attack upon M. Lajimoniere, who expected this and
as his gun had only one barrel loaded, he ran towards the canoe, where
he had a second gun fully charged. He had hardly seized it before the
bear reached the shore and tried to climb into the canoe, but fearing no
longer to wound his friend, M. Lajimoniere aimed full at her breast and
this time she was killed instantly. As soon as the bear was no longer to
be feared, Madame Lajimoniere, who had been trembling with fear during
the tumult, went to raise the unfortunate Bouvier, who was covered with
wounds and nearly dead. The bear had torn the skin from his face with
her nails from the roots of his hair to the lower part of his chin. His
eyes and nose were gone--in fact his features were indiscernible--but he
was not mortally injured. His wounds were dressed as well as the
circumstances would permit, and thus crippled he was carried to the Fort
of the Prairies, Madame Lajimoniere taking care of him all through the
journey. In time his wounds were successfully healed, but he was blind
and infirm to the end of his life. He dwelt at the Fort of the Prairies
for many years, but when the first missionaries reached Red River in
1818, he persuaded his friends to send him to St. Boniface to meet the
priests and ended his days in M. Provencher's house. He employed his
time during the last years of his life in making crosses and crucifixes
blind as he was, but he never made any _chefs d'oeuvre_."
Such is bear-hunting and such is the nature of the bear. And these
things are not of the past. Wherever long-range repeaters have not put
the fear of man in the animal heart, the bear is the aggressor. Even as
I write comes word from a little frontier fur post which I visited in
1901, of a seven-year-old boy being waylaid and devoured by a grisly
only four miles back from a transcontinental railway. This is the second
death from the unprovoked attacks of bears within a month in that
country--and that month, the month of August, 1902, when sentimental
ladies and gentlemen many miles away from danger are sagely discussing
whether the bear is naturally ferocious or not--whether, in a word, it
is altogether _humane to hunt bears_.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 36: In further confirmation of Montagnais's bear, the chief
factor's daughter, who told me the story, was standing in the fort gate
when the Indian came running back with a grisly pelt over his shoulder.
When he saw her his hands went up to conceal the price he had paid for
the pelt.]
[Footnote 37: This phase of prairie life must not be set down to
writer's license. It is something that every rider of the plains can see
any time he has patience to rein up and sit like a statue within
field-glass distance of the gopher burrows about nightfall when the
badgers are running.]