A BEAR'S "PIPE" IN WINTER
After ice-cutting came wood-cutting. It was now the latter part of
January with weather still unusually cold. There were about three feet
of snow on the ground, crusted over from a thaw which had occurred
during the first of the month. In those days we burned from forty to
fifty cords of wood in a year.
There was a wood-lot of a hundred acres along the brook on the east side
of the farm, and other forest lots to the north of it. Only the best
old-growth maple, birch and beech were cut for fuel--great trees two and
three feet in diameter.
The trunks were cut into eight-foot lengths, rolled on the ox-sleds with
levers, and then hauled home to the yard in front of the wood-house,
where they lay in four huge piles till March, when all hands turned to,
with axes and saws, and worked it up.
It was zero weather that week, but bright and clear, with spicules of
frost glistening on every twig; and I recollect how sharply the tree
trunks snapped--those frost snaps which make "shaky" lumber in Maine.
Addison, Halstead and I, with one of the old Squire's hired men, Asa
Doane, went to the wood-lot at eight o'clock that morning and chopped
smartly till near eleven. Indeed, we were obliged to work fast to keep
warm.
Addison and I then stuck our axes in a log and went on the snow crust up
to the foot of a mountain, about half a mile distant, where the hardwood
growth gave place to spruce. We wanted to dig a pocketful of spruce gum.
For several days Ellen and Theodora had been asking us to get them some
nice "purple" gum.
As we were going from one spruce to another, Addison stopped suddenly
and pointed to a little round hole with hard ice about it, near a large,
overhanging rock across which a tree had fallen. "Sh!" he exclaimed. "I
believe that's a bear's breath-hole!"
We reconnoitered the place at a safe distance. "That may be Old Three
Paws himself," Addison said. "If it is, we must put an end to him." For
"Old Three Paws" was a bear that had given trouble in the sheep pastures
for years.
After a good look all round, we went home to dinner, and at table talked
it over. The old Squire was a little incredulous, but admitted that
there might be a bear there. "I will tell you how you can find out," he
said. "Take a small looking-glass with you and hold it to the hole. If
there is a bear down there, you will see just a little film of moisture
on the glass from his breath."
We loaded two guns with buckshot. Our plan was to wake the bear up, and
shoot him when he broke out through the snow. Bears killed a good many
sheep at that time; the farmers did not regard them as desirable
neighbors.
The ruse which Addison hit on for waking the bear was to blow black
pepper down the hole through a hollow sunflower stalk. He had an idea
that this would set the bear sneezing. In view of what happened, I laugh
now when I remember our plans for waking that bear.
Directly after dinner we set off for the wood-lot with our guns and
pepper. Cold as it was, Ellen and Theodora went with us, intending to
stand at a very safe distance. Even grandmother Ruth would have gone, if
it had not been quite so cold and snowy. Although minus one foot, Old
Three Paws was known to be a savage bear, that had had more than one
encounter with mankind.
While the rest stood back, Addison approached on tiptoe with the
looking-glass, and held it to the hole for some moments. Then he
examined it and looked back at us, nodding. There was moisture on it.
The girls climbed upon a large rock among the spruces. The old Squire,
with one of the guns, took up a position beside a tree about fifty feet
from the "hole." He posted Asa, who was a pretty good shot, beside
another tree not far away. Halstead and I had to content ourselves with
axes for weapons, and kept pretty well to the rear.
Addison was now getting his pepper ready. Expectancy ran high when at
last he blew it down the hole and rushed back. We had little doubt that
an angry bear would break out, sneezing and growling.
But nothing of the sort occurred. Some minutes passed. Addison could not
even hear the faintest sneeze from below. He tiptoed up and blew in more
pepper.
No response.
Cutting a pole, Addison then belabored the snow crust about the hole
with resounding whacks--still with no result.
After this we approached less cautiously. Asa broke up the snow about
the hole and cleared it away, uncovering a considerable cavity which
extended back under the partially raised root of the fallen tree.
Halstead brought a shovel from the wood-piles; and Addison and Asa cut
away the roots of the old tree, and cleared out the frozen turf and
leaves to a depth of four or five feet, gradually working down where
they could look back beneath the root. We had begun to doubt whether we
would find anything there larger than a woodchuck.
At last Addison got down on hands and knees, crept in under the root,
and lighted several matches.
"There's something back in there," he said. "Looks black, but I cannot
see that it moves."
Asa crawled in and struck a match or two, then backed out. "I believe
it's a bear!" he exclaimed, and he wanted to creep in with a gun and
fire; but the old Squire advised against that on account of the heavy
charge in so confined a space.
Addison had been peeling dry bark from a birch, and crawling in again,
lighted a roll of it. The smoke drove him out, but he emerged in
excitement. "Bears!" he cried. "Two bears in there! I saw them!"
Asa took a pole and poked the bears cautiously. "Dead, I guess," said
he, at last. "They don't move."
Addison crept in again, and actually passed his hand over the bears,
then backed out, laughing. "No, they are not dead!" he exclaimed. "They
are warm. But they are awfully sound asleep."
"Let's haul them out!" cried Asa; and they now sent me to the wood-sled
for two or three small trace-chains. Asa then crawled in and slipped a
chain about the body of one of the bears. The other two chains were
hooked on; and then they slowly hauled the bear out, the old Squire
standing by with gun cocked--for we expected every moment that the
animal would wake.
But even when out on the snow crust the creature lay as inert as a dead
bear. It was small. "Only a yearling," the old Squire said. None of us
were now much afraid of them, and the other one was drawn out in the
same way. Their hair was glossy and as black as jet. Possibly they would
have weighed seventy-five pounds each. Evidently they were young bears
that had never been separated, and that accounted for their denning up
together; old bears rarely do this.
We put them on the wood-sled and hauled them home. They lay in a pile of
hay on the stable floor all night, without a sign of waking up; and the
next morning we hauled them to the cellar of the west barn. Under this
barn, which was used mainly for sheep and young cattle, there were
several pigsties, now empty. The dormant young bears were rolled into
one of these sties and the sty filled with dry leaves, such as we used
for bedding in the barns.
About a fortnight afterward a young doctor named Truman, from the
village, desired very much to see the bears in their winter sleep. He
got into the sty, uncovered them, and repeatedly pricked one of them
with a needle, or penknife, without fairly waking it. But salts of
ammonia, held to the nostrils of the other one, produced an unexpected
result. The creature struck out spasmodically with one paw and rolled
suddenly over. Doctor Truman jumped out of the sty quite as suddenly.
"He's alive, all right," said the doctor.
The bears were not disturbed again, and remained there so quietly that
we nearly forgot them. It was now the second week of March, and up to
this time the weather had continued cold; but a thaw set in, with rain
for two or three days, the temperature rising to sixty degrees, and even
higher.
On the third night of the thaw, or rather, in the early morning, a great
commotion broke out at the west barn. It waked the girls first, their
room being on that side of the farmhouse. At about two o'clock in the
morning Ellen came to our door to rouse Addison and me.
"There's a fearful racket up at the west barn," she said, in low tones.
"You had better see what's wrong."
Addison and I threw on our clothes, went down quietly, so as not to
disturb the old Squire, and were getting our lanterns ready, when he
came from his room; for he, too, had heard the disturbance. We then
sallied forth and approached the end door of the barn. Inside, the young
cattle were bellowing and bawling. Below, in the barn cellar, sheep were
bleating, and a shoat was adding its raucous voice to the uproar. Above
it all, however, we could hear eight old turkeys and a peacock that were
wintering in the west barn, "quitting" and "quuttering" aloft, where
they roosted on the high beams.
The young cattle, seventeen head, were tied facing the barn floor. All
of them were on their feet, pulling back at their stanchions in a great
state of alarm. But the real trouble seemed now to be aloft in the dark
roof of the barn, among the turkeys. Addison held up the lantern.
Nothing could be seen so far up there in the dark, but feathers came
fluttering down, and the old peacock was squalling, "Tap-pee-yaw!" over
and over.
We fixed a lantern on the end of a long bean-pole and thrust it high up.
Its light revealed those two young bears on one of the high beams of the
barn!
One of them had the head of a turkey in his mouth, and was apparently
trying to bolt it; and we discovered later that they had had trouble
with the shoat down in the cellar. The shoat was somewhat scratched, but
had stood them off.
Several of the sheep had their fleeces torn, particularly one old
Cotswold ram, which also had a bleeding nose. Evidently the barn had
been the scene of a protracted fracas. The bears must have climbed for
the turkeys as a last resort. How they reached the beam we did not know,
unless by swarming up one of the bare posts of the barn.
To drive them down, Addison climbed on a scaffold and thrust the lantern
close up to the one with the turkey's head in its mouth. The bear struck
at the lantern with one paw, started back, but lost its claw-hold on the
beam and fell, turkey and all, eighteen or twenty feet to the barn
floor.
The old Squire and I sprang aside in great haste; but so far as we could
see, the bear never stirred after it struck the floor. Either the fall
broke its neck, or else the turkey's head choked it to death.
When menaced with the lantern, the other bear slid down one of the barn
posts, tail first, and was driven into a horse stall at the far end of
the barn. There we succeeded in shutting it up, and in the morning gave
it a breakfast of corn-meal dough and apples, which it devoured with
great avidity.
We had no particular use for a bear, and a week later sold this
youngster to Doctor Truman. He soon tired of his new pet, however, and
parted with it to a friend who kept a summer hotel in the White
Mountains.
The other bear--the one that fell from the high beam--had the handsomest
black, glossy pelt I have ever seen. Grandmother Ruth insisted on having
it tanned and made into a rug. She declared jocosely that it should be
given to the first one of our girls who married. Ellen finally fell heir
to it, and carried it with her to Dakota.