THE BABY AND THE BEAR
A stiffish breeze was blowing over Silverwater. Close inshore, where
the Babe was fishing, the water was fairly calm--just sufficiently
ruffled to keep the trout from distinguishing too clearly that small,
intent figure at the edge of the raft. But out in the middle of the
lake the little whitecaps were chasing each other boisterously.
The raft was a tiny one, of four logs pinned together with two lengths
of spruce pole. It was made for just the use which the Babe was now
putting it to. A raft was so much more convenient than a boat or a
canoe when the water was still and one had to make long, delicate casts
in order to drop one's fly along the edges of the lily pods. But the
Babe was not making long, delicate casts. On such a day as this the
somewhat unsophisticated trout of Silverwater demanded no subtleties.
They were hungry, and they were feeding close inshore, and the Babe was
having great sport. The fish were not large, but they were clean,
trim-jawed, bright fellows, some of them not far short of the
half-pound; and the only blue-bottle in the ointment of the Babe's
exultation was that Uncle Andy was not on hand to see his triumph. To
be sure, the proof would be in the pan that night, browned in savory
cornmeal after the fashion of the New Brunswick backwoods. But the
Babe had in him the makings of a true sportsman, and for him a trout
had just one brief moment of unmatchable perfection--the moment when it
was taken off the hook and held up to be gloated over or coveted.
The raft had been anchored, carelessly enough, by running an inner
corner lightly aground. The Babe's weight, slight as it was, on the
outer end, together with his occasional ecstatic, though silent,
hoppings up and down, had little by little sufficed to slip the
haphazard mooring. This the Babe was far too absorbed to notice.
All at once, having just slipped a nice half-pounder onto the forked
stick which served him instead of a fishing basket, he noticed that the
wooded point which had been shutting off his view on the right seemed
to have politely drawn back. His heart jumped into his throat. He
turned--and there were twenty yards or so of clear water between the
raft and the shore. The raft was gently but none too slowly gliding
out toward the tumbling whitecaps.
Always methodical, the Babe laid his rod and his string of fish
carefully down on the logs, and then stood for a second or two quite
rigid. This was one of those dreadful things which, as he knew, _did_
happen, sometimes, to other people, so that he might read about it.
But that it should actually happen to _him_! Why, it was as if he had
been reading some terrible adventure and suddenly found himself thrust
trembling into the midst of it. All at once those whitecaps out in the
lake seemed to be turning dreadful eyes his way and clamoring for
_him_! He opened his mouth and gave two piercing shrieks which cut the
air like saws.
"What's the matter?" shouted a very anxious voice from among the trees.
It was the voice of Uncle Andy. He had returned sooner than he was
expected. And instantly the Babe's terror vanished. He knew that
everything would be all right in just no time.
"I'm afloat. Bill's raft's carrying me away!" he replied in an injured
voice.
"Oh!" said Uncle Andy, emerging from the trees and taking in the
situation. "You _are_ afloat, are you! I was afraid from the noise
you made that you were sinking. Keep your hair on, and I'll be with
you in five seconds. And we'll see what Bill's raft has to say for
itself after such extraordinary behavior."
Putting the canoe into the water, he thrust out, overtook the raft in a
dozen strokes of his paddle, and proceeded to tow it back to the shore
in disgrace.
"What on earth did you make those dreadful noises for?" demanded Uncle
Andy, "instead of simply calling for me, or Bill, to come and get you?"
"You see, Uncle Andy," answered the Babe, after some consideration, "I
was in a hurry, rather, and I thought you or Bill might be in a hurry,
too, if I made a noise like that, instead of just calling."
"Well, I believe," said Uncle Andy, seating himself on the bank and
getting out his pipe, "that at last the unexpected has happened. I
believe, in other words, that you are right. I once knew of a couple
of youngsters who might have saved themselves and their parents a lot
of trouble if they could have made some such sound as you did, at the
right time. But they couldn't, or, at least, they didn't; and,
therefore, things happened, which I'll tell you about if you like."
The Babe carefully laid his string of fish in a cool place under some
leaves, and then came and sat on the grass at his uncle's feet to
listen.
"They were an odd pair of youngsters," began Uncle Andy--and paused to
get his pipe going.
"They were a curious pair, and they eyed each other curiously. One was
about five years old and the other about five months. One was all pink
and white, and ruddy tan, and fluffy gold, and the other all glossy
black. One, in fact, was a baby, and the other was a bear.
"Neither had come voluntarily into this strange fellowship; and it
would have been hard to say which of the pair regarded the other with
most suspicion. The bear, to be sure, at five months old, was more
grown up, more self-sufficing and efficient than the baby at five
years; but he had the disadvantage of feeling himself an interloper.
He had come to the raft quite uninvited, and found the baby in
possession! On that account, of course, he rather expected the baby to
show her white little teeth, and snarl at him, and try to drive him off
into the water. In that case he would have resisted desperately,
because he was in mortal fear of the boiling, seething flood. But he
was very uneasy, and kept up a whimpering that was intended to be
conciliatory; for though the baby was small, and by no means ferocious,
he regarded her as the possessor of the raft, and it was an axiom of
the wilds that very small and harmless-looking creatures might become
dangerous when resisting an invasion of their rights.
"The baby, on the other hand, was momentarily expecting that the bear
would come over and bite her. Why else, if not from some such sinister
motive, had he come aboard her raft, when he had been traveling on a
perfectly good tree? The tree looked so much more interesting than her
bare raft, on which she had been voyaging for over an hour, and of
which she was now heartily tired. To be sure, the bear was not much
bigger than her own Teddy Bear at home, which she was wont to carry
around by one leg, or to spank without ceremony whenever she thought it
needed discipline. But the glossy black of the stranger was quite
unlike the wild and grubby whiteness of her Teddy, and his shrewd
little twinkling eyes were quite unlike the bland shoe buttons which
adorned the face of her uncomplaining pet. She wondered when her
mother would come and relieve the strain of the situation.
"All at once the raft, which had hitherto voyaged with a discreet
deliberation, seemed to become agitated. Boiling upthrusts of the
current, caused by some hidden unevenness on the bottom, shouldered it
horridly from beneath, threatening to tear it apart, and unbridled
eddies twisted it this way and that with sickening lurches. The tree
was torn from it and snatched off reluctant all by itself, rolling over
and over in a fashion that must have made the cub rejoice to think that
he had quitted a refuge so eccentric in its behavior. As a matter of
fact, the flood was now sweeping the raft over what was, at ordinary
times, a series of low falls, a succession of saw-toothed ledges which
would have ripped the raft to bits. Now the ledges were buried deep
under the immense volume of the freshet. But they were not to be
ignored, for all that. And they made their submerged presence felt in
a turmoil that became more and more terrifying to the two little
passengers on the raft.
"There was just one point in the raft, one only, that was farther away
than any other part from those dreadful, seething-crested black
surges--and that was the very center. The little bear backed toward
it, whimpering and shivering, from his corner.
"From her corner, directly opposite, the baby too backed toward it,
hitching herself along and eyeing the waves in the silence of the
terror. She arrived at the same instant. Each was conscious of
something alive, and warm, and soft, and comfortable--with motherly
suggestion in the contact. The baby turned with a sob and flung her
arms about the bear. The bear, snuggling his narrow black snout under
her arm as if to shut out the fearful sight of the waves, made futile
efforts to crawl into a lap that was many sizes too small to
accommodate him.
"In some ten minutes more the wild ledges were past. The surges sank
to foaming swirls, and the raft once more journeyed smoothly. The two
little voyagers, recovering from their ecstasy of fear, looked at each
other in surprise--and the bear, slipping off the baby's lap, squatted
on his furry haunches and eyed her with a sort of guilty apprehension.
"Here it was that the baby showed herself of the dominant breed. The
bear was still uneasy and afraid of her. But she, for her part, had no
more dread of him whatever. Through all her panic she had been dimly
conscious that he had been in the attitude of seeking her protection.
Now she was quite ready to give it--quite ready to take possession of
him, in fact, as really a sort of glorified Teddy Bear come to life;
and she felt her authority complete. Half-coaxingly, but quite firmly,
and with a note of command in her little voice which the animal
instinctively understood, she said: 'Turn here, Teddy!' and pulled him
back unceremoniously to her lap. The bear, with the influence of her
comforting warmth still strong upon him, yielded. It was nice, when
one was frightened and had lost one's mother, to be cuddled so softly
by a creature that was evidently friendly, in spite of the dreaded man
smell that hung about her. His mother had tried to teach him that that
smell was the most dangerous of all the warning smells his nostrils
could encounter. But the lesson had been most imperfectly learned, and
now was easily forgotten. He was tired, moreover, and wanted to go to
sleep. So he snuggled his glossy, roguish face down into the baby's
lap and shut his eyes. And the baby, filled with delight over such a
novel and interesting plaything, shook her yellow hair down over his
black fur and crooned to him a soft, half-articulate babble of
endearment.
"The swollen flood was comparatively quiet now, rolling full and turbid
over the drowned lands, and gleaming sullenly under a blaze of sun.
The bear having gone to sleep, the baby presently followed his example,
her rosy face falling forward into his woodsy-smelling black fur. At
last the raft, catching in the trees of a submerged islet, came softly
to a stop, so softly as not to awaken the little pair of sleepers.
"In the meantime two distraught mothers, quite beside themselves with
fear and grief, were hurrying downstream in search of the runaway raft
and its burden.
"The mother of the baby, when she saw the flood sweeping the raft away,
was for some moments perilously near to flinging herself in after it.
Then her backwoods common sense came to the rescue. She reflected, in
time, that she could not swim--while the raft, on the other hand, could
and did, and would carry her treasure safely enough for a while.
Wading waist deep through the drowned fields behind the house, she
gained the uplands, and rushed dripping along the ridge to the next
farm, where, as she knew, a boat was kept. This farmhouse, perched on
a bluff, was safe from all floods; and the farmer was at home,
congratulating himself. Before he quite knew what was happening, he
found himself being dragged to the boat--for his neighbor was a
strenuous woman, whom few in the settlement presumed to argue with, and
it was plain to him now that she was laboring under an unwonted
excitement. It was not until he was in the boat, with the oars in his
hands, that he gathered clearly what had happened. Then, however, he
bent to the oars with a will which convinced even that frantic and
vehement mother that nothing better could be demanded of him. Dodging
logs and wrecks and uprooted trees, the boat went surging down the
flood, while the woman sat stiffly erect in the stern, her face white
as death, her eyes staring far ahead, while from time to time she
muttered angry phrases which sounded as if the baby had gone off on a
pleasure trip without leave and was going to be called to sharp account
for it.
"The other mother had the deeper and more immediate cause for anguish.
Coming to the bank where she had left her cub in the tree, she found
the bank caved in and the tree and cub together vanished. Unlike the
baby's mother, she _could_ swim; but she knew that she could run faster
and farther. In stoic silence, but with a look of piteous anxiety in
her eyes, she started on a gallop down the half-drowned shores,
clambering the heaps of debris, and swimming the deep, still estuaries
where the flood had backed up into the valleys of the tributary brooks.
"At last, with laboring lungs and pounding heart, she came out upon a
low, bare bluff overlooking the flood, and saw, not a hundred yards
out, the raft with its two little passengers asleep. She saw her cub
lying curled up with his head in the baby's arms, his black fur mixed
with the baby's yellow locks. Her first thought was that he was
dead--that the baby had killed him and was carrying him off. With a
roar of pain and vengeful fury, she rushed down the bluff and hurled
herself into the water.
"Not till then did she notice that a boat was approaching the raft--a
boat with two human beings in it. It was very much nearer the raft
than she was--and traveling very much faster than she could swim. Her
savage heart went near to bursting with rage and fear. She knew those
beings in the boat could have but one object--the slaughter, or at
least the theft, of her little one. She swam frantically, her great
muscles heaving as she shouldered the waves apart. But in that race
she was hopelessly beaten from the first.
"The boat reached the raft, bumped hard upon it--and the baby's mother
leaped out while the man, with his boathook, held the two craft close
together. The woman, thrusting the cub angrily aside, clutched the
baby hysterically to her breast, sobbing over her and muttering strange
threats of what she would do to her when she got her home to punish her
for giving so much trouble. The baby did not seem in the least
disturbed by these threats--to which the man in the boat was listening
with a grin--but when her mother started to carry her to the boat she
reached out her arms rebelliously for the cub.
"'Won't go wivout my Teddy Bear,' she announced with tearful decision.
"'Ye'd better git a move on, Mrs. Murdoch,' admonished the man in the
boat, 'Here's the old b'ar comin' after her young un, an' I've a notion
she ain't exactly ca'm.'
"The woman hesitated. She was willing enough to indulge the baby's
whim, the more so as she felt in her heart that it was in some respects
her fault that the raft had got away. She measured the distance to
that formidable black head cleaving the waters some thirty yards away.
"'Well,' said she, 'we may's well take the little varmint along, if
baby wants him.' And she stepped over to pick up the now shrinking and
anxious cub.
"'You quit that an' get into the boat quick!" ordered the man in a
voice of curt authority. The woman whipped round and stared at him in
amazement. She was accustomed to having people defer to her; and Jim
Simmons, in particular, she had always considered such a mild-mannered
man,
"'Get in!' reiterated the man in a voice that she found herself obeying
in spite of herself.
"'D'ye want to see baby et up afore yer eyes?" he continued sternly,
hiding a grin beneath the sandy droop of his big mustache. And with
the baby kicking and wailing and stretching out her arms to the
all-unheeding cub, he rowed rapidly away just as the old bear dragged
herself up upon the raft.
"Then Mrs. Murdoch's wrath found words, and she let it flow forth while
the man listened as indifferently as if it had been the whistling of
the wind. At last she stopped.
"'Anything more to say, ma'am?' he asked politely.
"Mrs. Murdoch snorted a negative.
"'Then all _I_ hev to say,' he went on, 'is that to _my_ mind _mothers_
has _rights_. That there b'ar's a mother, an' she's got feelin's, like
you, an' she's come after her young un, like you--an' I wasn't a-goin'
to see her robbed of him.'"