CUBHOOD DAYS.
When they are small, bear-cubs rarely go about alone. The whole family
usually keeps together, or, if it separates, it is generally into
couples--one cub with each of the parents; or the father goes off alone,
leaving both cubs with the mother. A cub toddling off alone in its own
woolly, comfortable ignorance would be sure to make all manner of
mistakes in what it ate, and it might find itself in very serious
trouble in other ways.
Bears, when they live far enough away from man, have absolutely nothing
to be afraid of. There are, of course, bigger bears--perhaps bigger ones
of our own kind, either black or brown ("cinnamon," the brown members of
our family are called), or, especially, grizzly. But I never heard of a
grizzly bear hurting one of us. When I smell a grizzly in the
neighborhood, I confess that it seems wiser to go round the other side
of the hill; but that is probably inherited superstition more than
anything else. My father and mother did it, and so do I. Apart from
these, there lives nothing in the forest that a full-grown bear has any
cause to fear. He goes where he pleases and does what he likes, and
nobody ventures to dispute his rights. With a cub, however, it is
different.
I had heard my father and mother speak of pumas, or mountain lions, and
I knew their smell well enough--and did not like it. But I shall never
forget the first one that I saw.
We were out together--father, mother, Kahwa and I--and it was getting
well on in the morning. The sun was up, and the day growing warm, and I,
wandering drowsily along with my nose to the ground, had somehow strayed
away from the rest, when suddenly I smelled puma very strong. As I
threw myself up on my haunches, he came out from behind a tree, and
stood facing me only a few yards away. I was simply paralyzed with
fear--one of the two or three times in my life when I have been honestly
and thoroughly frightened. As I looked at him, wondering what would
happen next, he crouched down till he was almost flat along the ground,
and I can see him now, his whole yellow body almost hidden behind his
head, his eyes blazing, and his tail going slap, slap from side to side.
How I wished that I had a tail!
Then inch by inch he crept towards me, very slowly, putting one foot
forward and then the other. I did not know what to do, and so did what
proved to be the best thing possible: I sat quite still, and screamed
for mother as loud as I could. She must have known from my voice that
something serious was the matter, because in a second, just as the
puma's muscles were growing tense for the final spring, there was a
sudden crash of broken boughs behind me, a feeling as if a whirlwind was
going by, and my mother shot past me straight at the puma. I had no idea
that she could go so fast. The puma was up on his hind-legs to meet
her, but her impetus was so terrific that it bore him backwards, without
seeming to check her speed in the least, and away they went rolling over
and over down the hill.
But it was not much of a fight. The puma, willing enough to attack a
little cub like me, knew that he was no match for my mother, and while
they were still rolling he wrenched himself loose, and was off among the
trees like a shadow.
When mother came back to me blood was running over her face, where at
the moment of meeting, the puma had managed to give her one wicked,
tearing claw down the side of her nose. So, as soon as my father and
Kahwa joined us, we all went down to the stream, where mother bathed her
face, and kept it in the cold water for nearly the whole day.
It was probably in some measure to pay me out for this scrape, and to
give me another lesson in the unwisdom of too much independence and
inquisitiveness in a youngster, that my parents, soon after this sad
event, allowed me to get into trouble with that porcupine.
One evening my father had taken us to a place where the ground was full
of mountain lilies. It was early in the year, when the green shoots
were just beginning to appear above the earth; and wherever there was a
shoot there was a bulb down below. And a mountain lily bulb is one of
the very nicest things to eat that there is--so sweet, and juicy, and
crisp! The place was some distance from our home, and after that first
visit Kahwa and I kept begging to be taken there again. At last my
father yielded, and we set out early one morning just before day was
breaking.
We were not loitering on the way, but trotting steadily along all
together, and Kahwa and I, at least, were full of expectation of the
lily bulbs in store, when in a little open space among the trees, we
came upon an object unlike anything I had ever seen before. As we came
upon it, I could have declared that it was moving--then that it was an
animal which, at sight of us, had stopped stock still, and tucked its
head and toes in underneath it. But it certainly was not moving now, and
did not look as if it ever could move again, so finally I concluded that
it must be a large fungus or a strange new kind of hillock, with black
and white grass growing all over it. My father and mother had stopped
short when they saw it, and just sat up on their haunches and looked at
it; and Kahwa did the same, snuggling up close to my mother's side. Was
it an animal, or a fungus, or only a mound of earth? The way to find out
was to smell it. So, without any idea of hurting it, I trotted up and
reached out my nose. As I did so it shrank a little more into itself,
and became rounder and more like a fungus than ever; but the act of
shrinking also made the black and white grass stick out a little
farther, so that my nose met it sooner than I expected, and I found
that, if it was grass, it was very sharp grass, and pricked horribly. I
tried again, and again it shrank up and pricked me worse than ever. Then
I heard my father chuckling to himself.
That made me angry, for I always have detested being laughed at, and,
without stopping to think, I smacked the thing just as hard as I could.
A moment later I was hopping round on three legs howling with pain, for
a hunch of the quills had gone right into my paw, where they were still
sticking, one coming out on the other side.
My father laughed, but my mother drew out the quills with her teeth, and
that hurt worse than anything; and all day, whenever she found a
particularly fat lily bulb, she gave it to me. For my part, I could
only dig for the bulbs with my left paw, and it was ever so many days
before I could run on all four feet again.
All these things must have happened when I was very young--less than
three months old--because we were still living in the same place,
whereas when summer came we moved away, as bears always do, and had no
fixed home during the hot months.
Bear-cubs are born when the mother is still in her winter den, and they
are usually five or six weeks old before they come out into the world at
all. Even then at first, when the cubs are very young, the family stays
close at home, and for some time I imagine that the longest journey I
made was when I tumbled those fifty feet downhill. Father or mother
might wander away alone in the early morning or evening for a while, but
for the most part we were all four at home by the rock and the
cedar-trees, with the bare brown tree-trunks growing up all round out of
the bare brown mountain-sides, and Kahwa and I spending our time lying
sleepily cuddled up to mother, or romping together and wishing we could
catch squirrels.
There were a great many squirrels about--large gray ones mostly; but
living in a fir-tree close by us was a black one with a deplorable
temper.
Every day he used to come and quarrel with us. Whenever he had nothing
particular to do, he would say to himself, "I'll go and tease those old
bears." And he did. His plan was to get on our trees from behind, where
we could not see him, then to come round on our side about five or six
feet from the ground, just safely out of reach, and there, hanging head
downwards, call us every name he could think of. Squirrels have an awful
vocabulary, but I never knew one that could talk like Blacky. And every
time he thought of something new to say he waved his tail at us in a way
that was particularly aggravating. You have no idea how other animals
poke fun at us because we have no tails, and how sensitive we really are
on the subject. They say that it was to hide our lack of tail that we
originally got into the habit of sitting up on our haunches whenever we
meet a stranger.
Very soon we began to be taken out on long excursions, going all four
together, as I have said, and then we began to learn how much that is
nice to eat there is in the world.
You have probably no idea, for instance, how many good things there may
be under one rotting log. Even if you do not get a mouse or a chipmunk,
you are sure of a fringe of greenstuff which, from lack of sunlight, has
grown white and juicy, and almost as sure of some mushrooms or other
fungi, most of which are delicious. But before you can touch them you
have to look after the insects. Mushrooms will wait, but the sooner you
catch beetles, and earwigs, and ants, and grubs, the better. It is
always worth while to roll a log over, if you can, no matter how much
trouble it costs; and a big stone is sometimes nearly as good.
Insects, of course, are small, and it would take a lot of ants, or even
beetles, to make a meal for a bear; but they are good, and they help
out. Some wild animals, especially those which prey upon others, eat a
lot at one time, and then starve till they can kill again. A bear, on
the other hand, is wandering about for more than half of the twenty-four
hours, except in the very heat of summer, and he is eating most of the
while that he wanders. The greater part of his food, of course, is
greenstuff--lily bulbs, white camas roots, wild-onions, and young shoots
and leaves. As he walks he browses a mouthful of young leaves here,
scratches up a root there, tears the bark off a decaying tree and eats
the insects underneath, lifts a stone and finds a mouse or a lizard
beneath, or loiters for twenty minutes over an ant-hill. With plenty of
time, he is never in a hurry, and every little counts.
But most of all in summer I used to love to go down to the stream. In
warm weather, during the heat of the day, bears stay in the shelter of
thickets, among the brush by the water or under the shade of a fallen
tree. As the sun sank we would move down to the stream, and lie all
through the long evening in the shallows, where the cold water rippled
against one's sides. And along the water there was always something good
to eat--not merely the herbage and the roots of the water-plants, but
frogs and insects of all sorts among the grass. Our favorite
bathing-place was just above a wide pool made by a beaver-dam. The pool
itself was deep in places, but before the river came to it, it flowed
for a hundred yards and more over a level gravel bottom, so shallow that
even as a cub I could walk from shore to shore without the water being
above my shoulders. At the edge of the pool the same black and white
kingfisher was always sitting on the same branch when we came down, and
he disliked our coming, and _chirred_ at us to go away. I used to love
to pretend not to understand him, and to walk solemnly through the water
underneath and all round his branch. It made him furious, and sent him
_chirring_ upstream to find another place to fish, where there were no
idiotic bear-cubs who did not know any better than to walk about among
his fish.
Here, too, my father and mother taught us to fish; but it was a long
time before I managed to catch a trout for myself. It takes such a
dreadful lot of sitting still. Having found where a fish is lying,
probably under an overhanging branch or beneath the grass jutting out
from the bank, you lie down silently as close to the edge of the water
as you can get, and slip one paw in, ever so gradually, behind the fish,
and move it towards him gently--gently. If he takes fright and darts
away, you leave your paw where it is, or move it as close to the spot
where he was lying as you can reach, and wait. Sooner or later he will
come back, swimming downstream and then swinging round to take his
station almost exactly in the same spot as before. If you leave your
paw absolutely still, he does not mind it, and may even, on his return,
come and lie right up against it. If so, you strike at once. More
probably he will stop a few inches or a foot away. If you have already
reached as far as you can towards him, then is the time that you need
all your patience. Again and again he darts out to take a fly from the
surface of the water or swallow something that is floated down to him by
the current, and each time that he comes back he may shift his position
an inch or two. At last he comes to where you can actually crook your
claws under his tail. Ever so cautiously you move your paw gently half
way up towards his head, and then, when your claws are almost touching
him, you strike--strike, once and hard, with a hooking blow that sends
him whirling like a bar of silver far out on the bank behind you. And
trout is good--the plump, dark, pink-banded trout of the mountain
streams. But you must not strike one fraction of a second too soon, for
if your paw has more than an inch to travel before the claws touch him
he is gone, and all you feel is the flip of a tail upon the inner side
of the paw, and all your time is wasted.
It is hard to learn to wait long enough, and I know that at first I
used to strike at fish that were a foot away, with no more chance of
catching them than of making supper off a waterfall. But father and
mother used to catch a fish apiece for us almost every evening, and
gradually Kahwa and I began to take them for ourselves.
Then, as the daylight faded, the beavers came out upon their dam and
played about in the pool, swimming and diving and slapping the surface
with their tails with a noise like that of an osprey when he strikes the
water in diving for a fish. But though they had time for play, they were
busy folk, the beavers. Some of them were constantly patching and
tinkering at the dam, and some always at work, except when the sun was
up, one relieving another, gnawing their way with little tiny bites
steadily through one of the great trees that stood by the water's edge,
and always gnawing it so that when, after weeks of labor, it fell, it
never failed to fall across the stream precisely where they wanted it.
If an enemy appeared--at the least sign or smell of wolf or puma--there
would be a loud ringing slap from one of the tails upon the water, and
in an instant every beaver had vanished under water and was safe inside
the house among the logs of the dam, the door of which was down below
the surface.
Us bears they were used to and did not mind; but they never let us come
too near. Sitting safely on the top of their piled logs, or twenty feet
away in the water, they would talk to us pleasantly enough; but--well,
my father told me that young, very young, beaver was good eating and I
imagine that the beavers knew that we thought so, and were afraid,
perhaps, that we might not be too particular about the age.
As the dusk changed to darkness we would leave the water and roam over
the hillsides, sometimes sleeping through the middle hours of the night,
but in summer more often roaming on, to come back to the stream for a
while just before the sun was up, and then turning in to sleep till he
went down again.
Those long rambles in the summer moonlight, or in the early dawn when
everything reeked with dew, how good they were! And when the afternoon
of a broiling day brought a thunderstorm, the delight of the smell of
the moist earth and the almost overpowering scent of the pines! And when
the berries were ripe--blueberries, cranberries, wild-raspberries, and,
later in the year, elderberries--no fruit, nor anything else to eat,
has ever tasted as they did then in that first summer when I was a cub.