THE GHOST-BEAR
The cold increased. Pŭl-Yūn, debarred his usual exercise, suffered in
his circulation and felt nipped within the robes which his nurse heaped
upon him.
"Mittens thou shalt have," said she, and made her promise good at the
charges of a brace of blue hare, whose longs-and-shorts she patiently
followed up until her throwing-stick decided the ownership of the
peltries which she claimed.
Pŭl-Yūn watched her stitching: a needle snapped. "My wife will be
wanting a touch of my skill," he said, and selected a shank-bone, slim
and straight, split it, and scraped the more promising piece to a point.
"That is all very well," said the Master-Girl, "but how about the
eye?--I have no bits small enough for drilling a needle-eye. We must
punch our holes in the skin, and poke the sinew through with a forked
bone, as when one nets."
[Illustration: THE GHOST-BEAR]
"That makes clumsy stitches," remarked the man. "No, I do not think we
shall come down to the punch. Thy needles are pit-eyed--"
"We always make them so; how else?--with the centre-bit, a bent stick,
a twist of hazel," said the girl.
"But we use the strung-drill. Hast never seen it?" She stared. "Then
there is something that even a Little Moon woman can learn from her
man!" He spoke in humorous mockery, but with a spice of malice, for
truly this astonishing squaw of his had forereached upon her master in
a manner beyond all precedent; would he ever get the whip-hand of her
again?
She understood; she crawled to him cooing gently; patted his hand; they
rubbed noses.
"Why are my needles clumsy?" she asked humbly, and he showed her that
her people's method of boring the eye, a funnel-shaped hole driven from
each side and meeting midway, necessitated a broader head than a small
true hole drilled straight through at one asking.
"Our holes are big and shallow, yes, like ant-lion pits," she laughed.
"That is because our centre-bit wobbles; but how can one help the
centre-bit wobbling?"
From the raffle of bones upon the floor (Cave-man was an untidy fellow,
or 'tis little we should know about him)--from the remains of his
yesterday's dinner Pŭl-Yūn chose a young roe's shin-bone, sawed off the
joint with care and sucked out the marrow. "I want," said he, "a small
sharp stone, to sit in that hollow: there are such in the bellies of
bigger stones,"--he meant quartz crystals, and the Master-Girl nodded;
so far his requirements presented no difficulty. "And I must have," he
went on, "a couple of smooth rods of rowan or hazel as long as my arm;
also an elder-stick as long as my hand."
There was meat in the larder for two days; the nurse was keen to
provide play-things for her convalescent, nor was she herself loth or
incurious; within the hour she was back with a handful of sparkling
gems from the hollow of a big pebble and a pair of rods, one of which
she watched her husband bend and string with a thong of deer-skin.
Presently he had found a shard of rock-crystal to his mind, and had
hafted it in the hollow bone with a morsel of pitch picked from
his axe-head and warmed in the embers. (It is singular, but beyond
controversy, that the Old Stone men, who used the drill so adroitly
for small work, and could pierce the enamel of a bear's tooth, or the
nacre of a sea-shell when a necklace was required, never applied their
invention to the hafting of their weapons. An axe was apparently too
serious a matter to be bored, nor did the presence of a natural hole
in a flint pebble suggest the insertion of a stick, any more than the
hole for the handle in a trade hatchet appeals to a South-Sea Islander
of one of the more backward races; no, he stops the hole with gum and
hafts as his fore-fathers did, and as Pŭl-Yūn and Dêh-Yān did, in a
cleft stick).
What next?--Dêh-Yān, still very much in the dark but longing for
light, watched her husband with absorbed attention. Now he had laid
aside the strung rowan-rod and the armed bone for a moment, and was at
work upon the elder-stick, working one end of it to a smooth rounded
head, driving into the tough, yielding, pithy hollow of its opposite
extremity the sharpened shank of the armed roedeer's bone as far as it
would go. He had now to his hand a short, solidly-made dagger, stoutly
cylindrical in form, and bearing as its head a glittering morsel of
crystal. He next fastened the slip of hare's bone which he proposed to
convert to a needle firmly to the handle of his axe, and bound the axe
in turn to the thigh of his sound leg, raised his knee, and said--
"Now, I begin!"
"Wah!--this is a wonder! But have a care of thy broken ankle!"
"I will have a care. Give me that strung rowan-rod." He took it from
her hand, bent it yet more and looped the slackened thong once around
the barrel of his drill, or bit, and then, using his own breast and
left hand as bearings for the smooth butt, applied the crystal point to
the blind head of the needle and drew the bent rod swiftly from left
to right. The drill revolved, its armature began to mark the bone, to
penetrate infinitesimally. He reversed the action and again the tool
spun and cut. He persisted, it began to excavate. Pŭl-Yūn was no novice
at the work, he had an instinctive appreciation of what his tool would
bear, he knew to a nicety just what the fragile bone might be trusted
to take without splitting.
"I am through, or nearly," said he, the sweat running into his eyes,
for he was wholly out of condition, and the attitude was trying. "Let
us turn the needle, I will work a little from the other side and then
we can give it a point and a polish."
The Master-Girl, meanwhile, overlooked this new magic of the Sun-Men,
with a breathless frowning intentness which (and this marks the
woman we have to deal with) had no contempt in it. Your savage has a
fathomless irrational scorn for the arts and usages of any other tribe
than his own. A traveller who had photographed a group of Fingo women
at their field work showed them a picture of a similar group of Pondos
taken a fortnight before; there was a shout of derisive laughter. "They
are using the long-handled hoe--_Baboons!_" Upon his return journey
he showed the Fingo photograph to his Pondo friends; again the yell of
scorn. "They are using the short-handled hoe--the _Baboons_!"
The girl's cast of mind, or her relation to this man, saved her from
this fatal attitude of sterile complacency. She waited and watched,
reserving judgment. Full approval was conceded, with an undercurrent
of doubt as to the possibility of improvement. To her husband the size
and curvature of his implement were fixed by custom and unimprovable.
To Dêh-Yān these dimensions were open questions. She experimented;
would not a longer bow give longer strokes? He stared, but, being
sensible beyond the run of men, and grateful somewhat, and what was
possibly more to the point than all else, having no one to laugh at
him[1]--consented to give the larger drill a trial and presently found
his tool biting faster.
Within the week the girl, having such a head upon her brown shoulders
as is conceded to a savage but once in a thousand generations or so,
after much watching and brooding, made for herself a bigger drill from
a bough of her own height, and seating herself opposite to her man,
drove the bow rapidly, whilst he steadied the bit and watched the holes
deepen at a pace quite new to his experience. It was no longer needles
but hunting-whistles.
It was whilst thus at work, he, seated with his face to the mouth of
the cave, beheld the broad, five-clawed fore-paw of a bear thrust up
from below, feeling for foothold upon the smooth sill of the dwelling.
The woman saw the living fear in his eyes, sprang for an axe, and was
hacking hard at the protruding toes before they found their purchase.
Thrice she beat them down, and when the great wrinkled, snarling
muzzle and fanged cavern of a mouth came up within reach, she was too
urgent and too sudden to be faced. The enemy withdrew deliberately
beneath a pelting storm of stones not ill-directed.
It was all over, a brief struggle of wills between a girl and an ogre,
but how intolerably long had it seemed to the foot-fast convalescent.
It was over, and Pŭl-Yūn listening to the final slide and scratching
upon the rock and crash among the bushes beneath, drew deep breaths and
looked upon this woman of his with a new and huge admiration, for not
once had she cried for help, but thrice and four times had she bidden
him keep still and respect his injured limb.
There are people who give vent to the surplus excitement generated by
an adventure in chatter and exclamation; there are others who take it
quietly. Pŭl-Yūn was one of the latter, he felt the imperative need of
silence in which to review the thing, and see whether he had played
the game. Had Dêh-Yān fallen into tears or gigglings, he would have
been hard put to it to have borne with her; but, it appeared that she
was of his own way of taking things, and when for some while neither
had spoken one word, their mutual respects had deepened.
"Woman, that was well done!" said the man at length, and the girl
nodded with a proud humility. She had played a great innings and knew
it, but, having an intuitive understanding of Man, she wisely forbore
to celebrate her achievement with vaunts, as a brave of her tribe would
certainly have done under like circumstances.
"We were near the end of our stones," remarked Pŭl-Yūn, looking about
him.
"We had only one left--this--" replied the girl. "I kept it to the
last."
"That was lucky," admitted her husband, meaning more than he said,
but it was a maxim in old days that a woman was little the better for
praise.
"He will come again," he added doubtfully.
"Next time I--we will kill him," said Dêh-Yān a little above herself;
"I will get more stones, and bigger, for his entertainment."
"Yes, he will be back again; not to-morrow, perhaps, but within a
while, when he has turned it over in his mind and thinks we have
forgotten him," resumed the man, ignoring the woman's brag.
Dêh-Yān was sensible of her master's silent censure, and of a
sex-superiority too secure of itself to need assertion, and shrunk back
half-meekly, half-resentfully, but within a little found herself rising
quietly and resolutely against its injustice. It must be so at present,
no doubt, but it should not always be so. Meanwhile, her husband,
satisfied with the effects of the snubbing, was speaking again.
"We shall certainly be looked up before long. But, there is something
I do not understand about that bear, Dêh-Yān. In my country, south of
the ranges, a brown bear ambushes and waylays, but rarely attacks by
day and in the open. Is it more usual here? Are thy people's weapons so
weak that a bear has no fear of them? or is this a Ghost-Bear, thinkest
thou?--This beast should either have followed your tribe down, or have
laid up for the winter. What is he doing abroad in snow?--_Is he a bear
at all?_ Did any warrior of your tribe die during the past summer?"
"This was no Brown Bear--but a Grizzly of the Big Kind[2]--but--I
think--" she paused, her hand over her mouth. "Saw-Kimo, the old
chief's son, died--was found dead," she muttered reluctantly, for death
is a very mysterious thing to your savage, and to speak of the recently
deceased is unlucky; they may be about, anywhere, at your elbow, and
may take offence; who can say?
"Was _found_ dead?" questioned the man.
"Yes ... no one saw how it happened.... A stone was thought to have
fallen; so said Gow-Loo, who found him."
"Oho, Gow-Loo? Was not that one of the three who came a-hunting thee?
Now tell me, Dêh-Yān, and speak the thing that is--"
"I always do!" exclaimed the girl.
"I believe thee, I shall always believe thee. So, tell me, was not this
Saw-Kimo one of the young braves who had asked for thee? Yes?--And had
not this Gow-Loo asked for thee too?"
The girl nodded. "I was to have been given to Saw-Kimo, but--he died."
"It is very unlucky when stones fall in that manner. Gow-Loo painted
his face for his friend, no doubt, and made great lamentation, as I
should expect. Was it not so?--But, is there no witch-doctor in your
tribe? Was there no smelling-out for blood?"
The girl shook her head. "There was talk of it in the old chief's
tee-pee, but--Gow-Loo's people are strong, and he and his two
friends, Low-Mah and Pongu, who always hunt with him (it was they who
came upon the winter-hunting)--they were thought to have made gifts
to the medicine-man and put him off the line, if indeed there was a
line. I do not know--how should I?--I am only a woman. I did not like
Saw-Kimo--much; but--" with sudden heat, "I hate Gow-Loo--and the
others."
"Humph," grunted Pŭl-Yūn, "it is curious that three braves who are
tied up in a knot of this sort, and who are keen enough to go upon a
winter-hunting together, should have run from a bear as they ran from
this; right away down-stream and out of the valley too. It is strange.
But, if they had reason to think he was their old friend, Saw-Kimo,
that would explain a good deal."
"Perhaps he was very fierce--they had touched him, I think," argued
the girl, willing to believe anything rather than that she and her
crippled husband were beleaguered by her dead lover in the form of a
ghost-bear.
"Touched?--What makes thee think so?"
"He seemed to climb clumsily. He had but one fore-paw to which he could
fully trust, as it seemed to me. I watched him go, and he went lame in
the shoulder, and it was not my stones that did that--no, there was a
something there, a stump of a spear, as I think, and that is why he has
lost some of his fat and cannot lay up for the winter."
"And, being too slow to catch bison calf, he comes for us. My dream was
a true sending. He is certainly thy Saw-Kimo and will assuredly come
back for thee, Dêh-Yān."
"And so will _they_," muttered the girl, "for they must know they have
left a spear-head in him and that he must be getting weaker. They will
give the wound time to ripen, and then--"
"It is time I was about again," growled the crippled hunter, and set
to work upon his drilling with a grim face. Dêh-Yān was kneeling upon
his right hand, her left resting loosely upon the cave-floor within his
reach. Upon the impulse of the moment and without word or look, Pŭl-Yūn
struck swift and hard at the brown wrist with the elder bit that he was
holding: the stick encountered the rock and split, for the slim brown
wrist had been withdrawn with nimble rapidity. The eyes of the young
people met and smiled, it was their first attempt at play.
"My husband sees that I can take care of myself," remarked the girl
sedately.
"That is well, Dêh-Yān, for with a Ghost-Bear and a hunting party of
three in this glen, a woman has need of eyes in the back of her head,"
was the comment of her lover.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: Children, countrymen and savages are keenly sensitive to
ridicule. It is the fear of failure and of becoming the butt of his
fellows which keeps many a young labourer from attempting anything new.
To have tried and failed is to incur some opprobrious by-name that may
stick to a villager through life. Rustic wit is cruel and drearily
long-lived.]
[Footnote 2: She meant Cave Bear (_Ursus spelæus_), now extinct.]