THE WRECK
For weary hours the ox-cart plodded along the country road, and at last
the long shadows deepened into twilight and the stars came out and it was
night, but still they journeyed on.
The soft night-winds quickened into being the fragrance of many a flower
that had not been noticed in the full heat of day. But wind and
fragrance, night and daylight were all the same to Black Bruin, for that
which made the world beautiful, and his strong free life worth living,
was gone. Freedom was no longer his, and he cowered upon the floor of
his prison, laid his head between his paws, and acted more like a whipped
puppy than the great strong brute that he was.
Finally the ox-team drew up at a long, low building, and the men unloaded
the crate upon a narrow platform.
Here they were soon joined by another man who came from the building.
"How long before the night freight ter H---- comes along, Bill?" drawled
one of the men in charge of Black Bruin. "Alec, here, has got a bar as
big as a cow that he is a-takin' to the circus which'll be at H----
to-morrow. He don't want to miss it."
"It's due now," replied the station-agent, and even as he spoke, the
shrill whistle of the freight sounded in the distance.
A little later Black Bruin heard a distant rumbling and clanging which
was like nothing that he had ever heard before. Then there was a
vibration of the solid floor under him, and the long, heavily loaded
freight thundered down upon the little station.
As the hideous, clanging, shrieking, hissing monster rushed down upon
them, coming seemingly straight for the wooden crate, Black Bruin sprang
against the bars with such violence that he nearly tipped it over, and
gave his captors a great scare.
In a very few minutes, however, the crate, together with the other
freight, was hustled into an empty car, and the train pulled out and went
thundering away into the darkness.
At first the motion made Black Bruin very uneasy, and he walked to and
fro continually; but finally this was succeeded by his being car-sick,
and he was soon glad to lie down and keep very still for the rest of the
journey.
This was his first night upon a freight train, but it was not his last,
for ahead of him was a strange and turbulent existence. He was going to
the great city to join the circus, to be a part of that astonishing
procession which annually parades the streets of our large cities, and
which draws crowds, such as does no other entertainment.
Toward morning, after having made several stops, the car in which Black
Bruin was a passenger was side-tracked, and a large, gilded wagon, known
to the small boy as a circus-van, was backed up to it. Then the crate
was placed against the cage on the van, and both doors were opened.
The new prison looked much more fragile than that in which Black Bruin
was. The bars were very small and might be easily broken. It was
lighter, too, than his present abode, so after a little poking and
punching, the captive went into the other prison, and a moment later,
when he turned about to look for the doorway by which he had entered, it
was closed and the wooden crate was being taken away. Man had again
outwitted him, but the manner in which he was now confined seemed very
insecure to Black Bruin. He would soon either find a way out, or else
make one. With this in view, he went about the cage several times,
sniffing and poking his nose between the bars. He put his powerful arms
between two of the bars and strained upon them with all his enormous
strength, but they did not seem to give at all. Then he sought to grind
one to splinters between his teeth, but instead he broke a tooth, and the
effort made him see stars.
What new and amazing substance was this, which could not be bent or
broken, or even bitten into? The more Black Bruin pushed at the iron
bars of his cage, the fainter grew that spark of hope which is the
mainspring of all life, until at last he ceased to hope altogether, and
bowing to the inevitable, no longer sought to be free. Sullenly he
glared at the gaping crowds that passed his cage daily, and the only
thing to which he looked forward was his food. This he received each day
at about noon.
What it all meant, he could not imagine. The great crowds, the blare of
bands, the gala dress and the babel of voices all reminded him of the
country fairs that he had often attended with Pedro, in the old
dancing-bear days.
The long journeys by rail he soon got used to, so that he was no longer
sick, but it was a weary existence. The snap and rattle of car-wheels
was continually in his ears, and if it was not that, it was the rattle
and the rumble of heavy wheels over paving-stones, the noise of the
brazen-throated circus-band, or the high and insistent calliope. Noise,
noise, noise everywhere.
When the animals were fed, there was the roaring of the lions, the
snapping and snarling of wolves, jaguars, pumas, and the hideous laugh of
the hyena; the chattering of the monkeys, and the piping and croaking of
strange, tropical birds. And, more insistent than any of these, the
bellowing of the sacred cattle from India, and the belling and bleating
of strange deer, not to mention the cavernous trumpeting of elephants
when their keepers prodded them into obedience.
There is but one law in the circus, and that is the law of fear. All the
wild beasts are ruled by it alone. The tricks that the great cats do are
clubbed into them, and the elephants' ears are often so torn by the
trainer's iron that they hang in ribbons.
It is only with the domestic animals, like the horses and the trick-dogs,
that the trainer can exercise gentle persuasion. So in this great arena,
this bedlam of wild beasts, were often heard the blows of club and lash,
and the sharp report of pistols fired in the faces of unruly big cats.
How the two mammoth tents, covering many acres, and a dozen smaller ones
came and went was a mystery to the general circus-goer. In the forenoon
they went up like white mountains, and in the evening, almost before the
last spectator had left his seat, they began to come down. Sometimes in
half an hour after the last whistle had sounded, the tents and all the
circus paraphernalia were packed in wagons and rumbling off to the depot.
It was a life of hustle and bustle, jostle and push, here to-day, and a
hundred miles away tomorrow.
The small boy, who was up before the first pale streak of light appeared
in the east, and off to the freight-yards to see the four or five long
circus trains come in, could have told you something about the marvelous
way in which circus-men handle their strange caravan. There was always a
crowd of these enterprising urchins standing wide-eyed and with gaping
mouths, while the circus wonders were being unloaded.
They could have told you that the great gaudy vans were loaded on a train
of flat cars, and that a single horse working a rope and pulley-block
trundled the vans from the train nearly as fast as their respective
teamsters could hitch horses to them and drive away. These boys knew
that the stake and chain wagon was always the first to leave the train.
Some of them usually fell in behind it and followed to the circus
grounds, for it was good sport to see men with heavy sledge-hammers drive
the many stakes and stretch the long chain which formed the perimeter of
the mammoth tent, and behind which all the vans would ultimately take
their places.
After the stake and chain wagon, came wagons bearing the cooking and
dining tents, for breakfast is a most important matter when you have five
hundred hungry people to feed. By nine o'clock the vast concourse were
all on the circus ground, breakfast was over and preparations for the
great parade were on foot. Nearly everything in the circus, with the
exception of the side-shows, had to take part in the parade.
Only the small boy, who stands upon the pavement, holding to lamp-post or
iron hitching-post to steady himself in the wild excitement, can tell you
how his heart races and his blood leaps as the first gilded chariot
swings around the corner into the main street. Thoughts of this moment
have been in the boy's mind for weeks, and the realization is always
greater than his anticipation. No matter if it is a small one-horse
show, the hallucination of paint and tinsel, and gleam and glitter are
there, and what a concourse it is! To get together this strange medley
of men and women, beasts, birds and reptiles, the ends of the earth have
been scoured. All Asia, from Siberia to India is there. Africa is
represented from the Nile to Cape Town. The steppes of Russia and every
out-of-the-way corner of Europe have been visited by the agents of the
showman, and the result is legion. South America, with the wonders of
the Amazon and the pampas and the high fauna of the Andes, is there. Our
own continent also contributes largely, for the Rockies and the Selkirks
still hold wonders for the eyes of youth. Even if we could contribute no
wild beasts, there would still be ample reward for the boy in viewing our
Indians, cow-punchers and real live scouts, such as our border-life alone
can furnish.
It was as a feature of such a motley procession as this that Black
Bruin's van was daily rattled over the paving-stones and finally took its
place each day in the mammoth tent behind the chain, in readiness for the
noon feeding. His van always followed that of a den of gray timber
wolves and was in turn followed by the great white polar bear.
Black Bruin often wondered why his large cousin from the Arctic Circle
spent so much of his time swaying to and fro. It was a queer trick that
he had, whenever he was not in his tank of water, of forever swaying back
and forth, back and forth. Black Bruin often felt fairly frantic
himself, and would pace to and fro for hours, but he could see no relief
in this continual swaying.
Although he had been sold to the circus-agent as a trick-bear, who could
take stoppers out of bottles and do other marvelous tricks, yet he was so
morose during the first summer of his circus life that the keeper could
do nothing with him as a trick-bear; so he merely paraded as one of the
wild beasts.
Men, women and little children came and went in front of his cage by the
thousands and ten thousands. Often the keeper would reach in with a
stick and poke Black Bruin to make him growl, for this amused the
children. He soon learned what was expected of him, and would growl
almost before the stick touched him.
In the hot, stifling summer days, when his cage seemed so cramped and
unendurable, how Black Bruin thirsted for the woods, he alone knew.
Sometimes he would fall asleep and dream of the old free life, only to
wake to the torment of his prison-bars.
There was but one incident during the first year of Black Bruin's circus
life that is worth mentioning. The circus was showing in a fair-sized
city in Northern New York, in St. Lawrence River County. The day was
exceptionally warm, the crowd was unusually large and the torment of
captivity was unusually galling to the wild beasts.
Black Bruin was restless and paced to and fro in his cage, and sniffed
its bars more often than usual.
Suddenly from out the babel about him a voice spoke that fell pleasantly
on his ear and in the sound was something that he remembered. When the
voice ceased speaking, some psychological reaction slipped a slide in the
brute mind, the impression of which had been gained many years before,
and the great bear saw, as plainly as he had seen it then, the farmhouse
with the chicken-coops in the front yard, and ducks, geese, turkeys and
hens all moving about over the green turf. There was the barn and the
outbuildings and the long low hen-house where he had so often robbed the
hens' nests. Then the scene shifted slightly and the dreamer saw the
orchard at the back of the farmhouse with its gnarled and twisted trees
and the row of little white houses in the shade near by. "Hum, hum,
zip--hum," went the bees flying in from their long quest afield in search
of the heart secret of the floral world. But whether it was the droning
of bees or the hum of many voices that he heard Black Bruin could not
tell.
At this point in his reverie he looked through his bars at three of the
circus-goers who were evincing peculiar interest in him. These were a
man, a woman, and a boy of about nine years.
"What a fine bear," the man was saying; "much larger than the old female
that I shot on that----" But the man did not finish the sentence, for
noticing the pallor that crept into his wife's face at his words and the
shiver that ran through her frame, he desisted.
"Look here, sonny," he continued to the boy, "if we had been able to have
kept Black Bruin until now he would probably have looked just about like
this old chap. What do you think of that?"
"Whew," whistled the boy. "Ain't he a monster? Our bear wasn't more
than a quarter as big."
"No," replied the man. "That was because he was not grown, but he was a
fine cub when we let the peddler have him. I have often wondered what
became of him."
"Wasn't Bar-bar cunning," exclaimed the boy, "when he was a little fuzzy
fellow and I used to roll about with him on the floor and pull his ears,
just like the photograph you had taken of us."
"Come, John, let's look at some of the other animals," said the boy's
mother. "Bar-bar was all right, but it gives me the shivers to look at a
full-grown black bear like this." So the three moved on to the wolf-den.
Black Bruin sniffed the bars of his cage where the man's hand had rested
upon it for a moment, as the three moved away. The man-scent too awoke
strange memories which he could not understand. It was like coming upon
a well-remembered spot in a stream where he had once captured a large
salmon, or some burrow under a stump where he had dug out a luckless
rabbit. But soon even the remembrance of the pleasant voices, that in
some strange way suggested something dim and distant, was forgotten, the
man-scent on the bars of his cage was obliterated, and Black Bruin was
back in the old rut, bumping and thumping over paving-stones and seeing
his van continually being rolled on or off the flat car which carried it.
Finally the long hard trips were over for that season and the circus went
into winter quarters.
This winter Black Bruin did not hibernate as he usually did, but spent
the time in a series of short naps. Each day he came forth from his
improvised den to stretch and to eat. Toward spring, by dint of much
coaxing and liberal rewards of sugar and honey, the keeper got upon good
terms with him and finally discovered most of his tricks.
When the next season opened, the prisoner found that he was to have a
little more freedom and a rather more varied existence than that of the
year before.
Upon the circus bills he appeared as Napoleon Bonaparte, the wonderful
trick-bear; and there was a striking and astonishing picture of him in
the act of opening a bottle and drinking from it.
Small boys stood spellbound before this picture, and they were still more
astonished when the real live bear was led into the ring and marched up
and down with a wooden gun upon his shoulder, while the performance of
his bottle-trick always created a rustle all over the tent. This was the
surest sign of a great hit.
So now each day, in addition to appearing in the grand cavalcade and the
street-parade, Black Bruin had to come into the ring each afternoon and
evening and go through his senseless tricks.
The only thing that kept him good-natured and up to the mark, was the
fact that his bottle was always filled with some pleasing drink, so he
had that to look forward to after each performance of the trick. There
were also sweets in waiting for him when he came out of the ring.
Thus went the endless round. Here to-day and there to-morrow. In the
evening a magic city of white tents would be seen upon the grounds, but
by midnight all had been stowed away in four or five long trains, which
soon were thundering over the rails to a distant city, where for the past
three weeks posters had announced the coming of the circus.
Thus the days and weeks of Black Bruin's second year in the circus passed
and they concluded the season at Nashville, Tennessee. Then all the
paraphernalia was loaded with even more care than usual, for they were
off for the long trip northward, to their winter quarters.
That night when they loaded the elephants and the trick-ponies, some of
them hung back and refused to board the train, a tendency most unusual on
their part; but they finally obeyed the goad and lash and all were stowed
away in their customary places.
It was about midnight when the train bearing Black Bruin's van pulled
out. One by one the cars bumped over the switch and the long train got
under way. At first the locomotive puffed and panted as though the load
were too great for it, but finally the train got up momentum and the
car-wheels sang their old song of rat-a-clat-rat-a-clat-rat-a-tat-tat,
while the engine assumed its familiar song of
"Rushing, pulling, snatch the train along,
Tugging, pulling, locomotive strong."
This is the song that a locomotive always sings when it is off for a
long, hard pull.
On, on through the darkness the train sped, the engine sending forth
showers of sparks that twinkled in the gloom like fireflies, and then
went out.
But the most conspicuous thing about the train was the headlight, which
threw its long cylindrical shaft of light far ahead, like a mighty auger
of fire boring into the darkness. No matter how hard the engine puffed
and panted or how fast the drivers thundered over the rails, this bright
cylinder of light was always just so far ahead, illuminating the gleaming
rails, flashing into deep cuts, lighting up cliffs and forest, and long
stretches of open fields.
Black Bruin was not asleep in his cage, as he usually was on long
journeys like this. Somehow, he felt restless and ill at ease. He
sniffed his bars often, but the heavy shutters were down and no sign of
freedom was at hand. Yet in some unaccountable manner, the wind sucking
through the cracks between the shutters blew fresher and sweeter than
usual. It tasted of pine-woods and deep tangles of swamp-land, where all
the roots that a bear likes grow.
The train had left the low-lying lands far behind and was coming into the
foothills--those friendly steps by which tired feet climb to the
mountains above. It was rushing down a steep grade, traveling by its own
momentum, upon a rather precipitous pathway cut in a side hill, when
something happened. Perhaps it was a broken rail, or maybe a great
boulder had toppled down the mountainside and lay upon the track; but the
important thing was that suddenly, without a second's warning, the engine
bucked like a balky broncho, and after one or two mad plunges along the
roadbed, toppled over the bank and rolled into the gulley below. At the
first impact of the locomotive with the long train behind it, the freight
arched its back and writhed and twisted like a mighty serpent. Three of
the cars went over the bank still attached to the engine and the rest
piled up on one another or rolled down into the gulley, as fate willed.
There was crash upon crash and thunder upon thunder as the heavy cars
piled in a frightful heap. There was the groan of iron and steel being
bent and broken, and the crash and creak and crackle of breaking,
grinding car-floors.
When we add to this the roar of lions, the shrieking of horses, the
trumpeting of elephants, the snarling and snapping of wolves, jaguars,
hyenas and a chorus of other cries from the circus bedlam, the roar of
steam as it escaped through an open valve in the locomotive, and the
shriek of the whistle which blew continually, we can get some idea of the
wreck, as the gorgeous splendor of the barbaric show was piled in ruins.
It was such sights and sounds as these that greeted Black Bruin as he
squeezed through the battered, broken door of his cage into freedom. He
had felt himself rolling over and over. First he was upon the bottom of
his cage and then standing upon the inverted roof. Three times he bumped
from the top to the bottom and back again in rapid succession. What did
it mean? His van had never acted like this.
It was all so quick that he merely emitted a frightened bawl or two and
lay still, cowering in the corner of his cage. Then in some
unaccountable way he became aware that his cage-door was open. His back
was to it, but the wind that blew in upon him, was the wind of the woods
and the waters, and not the stifling, filtered wind of his prison.
As this sense was borne in upon him, Black Bruin lost no time in
scrambling out through the opening.
His first act on coming forth into the open air with the moon and the
stars and the free sky above him, was to stretch. He then looked about
him as though uncertain what was coming next.
As he stood irresolute, looking first at the wreck and then away to the
outline of a great mountain that stretched above him, seeming to reach up
into the very heavens, the long, lithe form of a panther slipped by him
and melted into the darkness. A moment later a jaguar followed it; they
were going back to freedom.
Then Black Bruin stretched his nose high in air and sniffed the fresh
untamed winds. They were sweet with the scent of the southern pine.
Suggestions of the persimmon fruit were also there and the tantalizing
odor of witch-hazel and other sweet scents that the bear knew not. There
was a clump of underbrush just ahead and into it Black Bruin crashed.
Weeds swished as he passed and the brush whipped his face. With bushes
parting and grasses and weeds bending at his coming, the old sense of
freedom came surging back to the escaped prisoner and he stretched out
his strong muscles, which had been so long cramped in the cage, and
shuffled up the side of the mountain at his best pace. Through thickets
and brambles he crashed with a wild exultation; up precipitate crags he
labored with feverish excitement and frenzy that grew with each moment.
He sniffed at the rustling fronds and mosses as he passed, with wild
delight. How fresh, how new, how satisfying the wilderness was!
Now racing through deep gulches, and now scrambling up steep bluffs with
sheer delight of motion, he fled.
At last the moon set and the stars faded and from the heart of the
Cumberland Mountains, near the top of one of its most jagged and
unfrequented spurs, Black Bruin beheld his first sunrise in southern
skies.
Slowly the east warmed and glowed until at last the golden disk mounted
over the top of a twin peak and gilded the mountain upon which Black
Bruin stood with a flood of golden sunlight. Birds began to twitter
strange songs in the tree-tops and thickets and the high peak sang for
joy at the sun's coming.
At this auspicious moment, Black Bruin reared upon his hind legs and
placing his forepaws high upon the trunk of a sentinel pine, raked a deep
scar in the bark. This was his hall-mark;--the sign by which he took
possession of the mountain and the surrounding lowlands, just as the
discoverers did of old.
This land was to be his, where he would dwell and seek his meat and mate,
and live the life of a wild beast to the end of his days.