THE PARTING OF THE WAYS.
Now indeed I was truly lonely. During the three or four weeks that had
passed since I had seen my father or mother, I had in a measure learned
to rely upon myself; nor had I so far felt the separation keenly,
because I knew that every evening I should see Kahwa. Now she was gone
for ever. There was no longer any object in going into the town, and the
terror of that last scene was still so vivid in my mind that I wished
never to see man again.
It was true that I had feared man instinctively from the first, but
familiarity with him had for a while overcome that fear. Now it
returned, and with the fear was mingled another feeling--a feeling of
definite hatred. Originally, though afraid of him, I had borne man no
ill-will whatever, and would have been entirely content to go on living
beside him in peace and friendliness, just as we lived with the deer and
the beaver. Man himself made that impossible; and now I no longer wished
it. I hated him--hated him thoroughly. Had it not been for dread of the
thunder-sticks, I should have gone down into the town and attacked the
first man that I met. I would have persuaded other bears to go with me
to range through the buildings, destroying every man that we could find;
and though this was impossible, I made up my mind that it would be a bad
day for any man whom I might meet alone, when unprotected by the weapon
that gave him so great an advantage.
Meanwhile my present business was, somehow and somewhere, to go on
living. On that first evening, amid my conflict of emotions, it was some
time before I could bring myself to turn my back definitely upon the
town; for it was difficult to realize at once that there was in truth no
longer any Kahwa there, nor any reason for my going again among the
buildings, and it was late in the night before I finally started to look
for my father and mother. I went, of course, to the place where I had
left them, and where the fight with the stranger had taken place.
They were not there when I arrived, but I saw that they had spent the
preceding day at home, and would, in all probability, be back soon after
it was light. So I stayed in the immediate neighborhood, and before
sunrise they returned. My mother was glad to see me, but I do not think
I can say as much for my father. I told them where I had been, and of my
visits to the town, and of poor Kahwa's death; and though at the time
father did not seem to pay much attention to what I said, next day he
suggested that we should move farther away from the neighborhood of men.
The following afternoon we started, making our way back along the stream
by which we had descended, and soon finding ourselves once more in the
region that had been swept by fire. It was still desolate, but the two
months that had passed had made a wonderful difference. It was covered
by the bright red flowers of a tall plant standing nearly as high as a
bear's head, which shoots up all over the charred soil whenever a tract
of forest is burned. Other undergrowth may come up in the following
spring, but for the first year nothing appears except the red
"fireweed," and that grows so thickly that the burnt wood is a blaze of
color, out of which the blackened trunks of the old trees stand up naked
and gaunt.
We passed several houses of men by the waterside, and gave them a wide
berth. We learned from the beavers and the ospreys that a number of men
had gone up the stream during the summer, and few had come back, so that
now there must be many more of them in the district swept by the fire
than there had been before. We did not wish to live in the burnt
country, however, because there was little food to be found there, and
under the fireweed the ground was still covered with a layer of the
bitter black stuff, which, on being disturbed, got into one's throat and
eyes and nostrils. So we turned southwards along the edge of the track
of the fire, and soon found ourselves in a country that was entirely new
to us, though differing little in general appearance from the other
places with which we were familiar--the same unbroken succession of
hills and gulches covered with the dense growth of good forest trees. It
was, in fact, bears' country; and in it we felt at home.
For the most part we travelled in the morning and evening; but the
summer was gone now, and on the higher mountains it was sometimes
bitterly cold, so we often kept on moving all day. We were not going
anywhere in particular: only endeavoring to get away from man, and, if
possible, to find a region where he had never been. But it seemed as if
man now was pushing in everywhere. We did not see him, but continually
we came across the traces of him along the banks of the streams. The
beavers, and the kingfishers, of course, know everything that goes on
along the rivers. Nothing can pass upstream or down without going by the
beaver-dams, and the beavers are always on the watch. You might linger
about a beaver-dam all day, and except for the smell, which a man would
not notice, you would not believe there was a beaver near. But they are
watching you from the cracks and holes in their homes, and in the
evening, if they are not afraid of you, you will be astonished to see
twenty or thirty beavers come out to play about what you thought was an
empty house. We never passed a dam without asking about man, and always
it was the same tale. Men had been there a week ago, or the day before,
or when the moon last was full. And the kingfishers and the ospreys told
us the same things. So we kept on our way southward.
As the days went on I grew to think less of Kahwa; the memory of those
nights spent in the town, with the lights, and the strange noises, and
the warm man-smell all about me, began to fade until they all seemed
more like incidents of a dream than scenes which I had actually lived
through only a few weeks before. I began to feel more as I used to feel
in the good old days before the fire, and came again to be a part of the
wild, wholesome life of the woods. Moreover, I was growing; my mother
said that I was growing fast. No puma would have dared to touch me now,
and my unusual experiences about the town had bred in me a spirit of
independence and self-reliance, so that other cubs of my own age whom we
met, and who, of course, had lived always with their parents, always
seemed to me younger than I; and certainly I was bigger and stronger
than any first-year bear that I saw. On the whole, I would have been
fairly contented with life had it not been for the estrangement which
was somehow growing up between my father and myself. I could not help
feeling that, though I knew not why, he would have been glad to have me
go away again. So I kept out of his way as much as possible, seldom
speaking to him, and, of course, not venturing to share any food that he
found. On the first evening after my return he had rolled over an old
log, and mother and I went up as a matter of course to see what was
there; but he growled at me in a way that made me stand off while he and
mother finished the fungi and the beetles. After that I kept my
distance. It did not matter much, for I was well able to forage for
myself. But I would have preferred to have him kinder. His unkindness,
however, did not prevent him from taking for himself anything which he
wanted that I had found. One day I came across some honey, from which he
promptly drove me away, and I had to look on while he and mother shared
the feast between them.
At last we came to a stream where the beavers told us that no man had
been seen in the time of any member of their colony then living. The
stream, which was here wide enough to be a river, came from the west,
and for two or three days we followed it down eastwards, and found no
trace or news of man; so we turned back up it again--back past the place
where we had first struck it--and on along its course for another day's
journey into the mountains. It was, perhaps, too much to hope that we
had lighted on a place where man would never come; but at least we knew
that for a distance of a week's travelling in all directions he never
yet had been, and it might be many years before he came. Meanwhile we
should have a chance to live our lives in peace.
Here we stayed, moving about very little, and feeding as much as we
could; for winter was coming on, and a bear likes to be fat and well fed
before his long sleep. It rained a good deal now, as it always does in
the mountains in the late autumn, and as a general rule the woods were
full of mist all day, in which we went about tearing the roots out of
the soft earth, eating the late blueberries where we could find them,
and the cranberries and the elderberries, which were ripe on the bushes,
now and then coming across a clump of nut-trees, and once in a while,
the greatest of all treats, revelling in a feast of honey.
One morning, after a cold and stormy night, we saw that the tops of the
highest mountains were covered with snow. It might be a week or two yet
before the snow fell over the country as a whole, or it might be only a
day or two; for the wind was blowing from the north, biting cold, and
making us feel numb and drowsy. So my father decided that it was time to
make our homes for the winter. He had already fixed upon a spot where a
tree had fallen and torn out its roots, making a cave well shut in on
two sides, and blocked on a third by another fallen log; and here,
without thinking, I had taken it as a matter of course that we should
somehow all make our winter homes together. But when that morning he
started out, with mother after him, and I attempted to follow, he drove
me away. I followed yet for a while, but he kept turning back and
growling at me, and at last told me bluntly that I must go and shift for
myself. I took it philosophically, I think, but it was with a heavy
heart that I turned away to seek a winter home for myself.
It did not take me long to decide on the spot. At the head of a narrow
gully, where at some time or other a stream must have run, there was a
tree half fallen, and leaning against the hillside. A little digging
behind the tree would make as snug and sheltered a den as I could want.
So I set to work, and in the course of a few hours I had made a
sufficiently large hollow, and into it I scraped all the leaves and
pine-needles in the neighborhood, and, by working about inside and
turning round and round, I piled them up on all sides until I had a nest
where I was perfectly sheltered, with only an opening in front large
enough to go in and out of. This opening I would almost close when the
time came, but for the present I left it open and lived inside, sleeping
much of the time, but still continuing for a week or ten days to go out
in the mornings and evenings for food. But it was getting colder and
colder, and the woods had become strangely silent. The deer had gone
down to the lower ground at the first sign of coming winter, and the
coyotes and the wolves had followed to spend the cold months in the
foot-hills and on the plains about the haunts of man. The woodchucks
were already asleep below-ground, and of the birds only the woodpeckers
and the crossbills, and some smaller birds fluttering among the
pine-branches, remained. There was a fringe of ice along the edges of
the streams, and the kingfishers and the ospreys had both flown to where
the waters would remain open throughout the year. The beavers had been
very busy for some time, but now, if one went to the nearest dam in the
evening, there was not a sign of life.
At last the winter came. It had been very cold and gray for a day or
two, and I felt dull and torpid. And then, one morning towards mid-day,
the white flakes began to fall. There had been a few little flurries of
snow before, lasting only for a minute or two; but this was different.
The great flakes fell slowly and softly, and soon the whole landscape
began to grow white. Through the opening in my den I watched the snow
falling for some time, but did not venture out; and as the afternoon
wore on, and it only fell faster and faster, I saw that it would soon
pile up and close the door upon me.
There was no danger of its coming in, for I had taken care that the roof
overhung far enough to prevent anything falling in from above, and the
den was too well sheltered for the wind to drift the snow inside. So I
burrowed down into my leaves and pine-needles, and worked them up on
both sides till only a narrow slit of an opening remained, and through
this slit, sitting back on my haunches against the rear of the little
cave I watched the white wall rising outside. All that night and all
next day it snowed, and by the second evening there was hardly a ray of
light coming in. I remember feeling a certain pride in being all alone,
in the warm nest made by myself, for the first time in my life; and I
sat back and mumbled at my paw, and grew gradually drowsier and
drowsier, till I hardly knew when the morning came, for I was very
sleepy and the daylight scarcely pierced the wall of snow outside. And
before another night fell I was asleep, while outside the white covering
which was to shut me in for the next four months at least, was growing
thicker. Under it I was as safe and snug up there in the heart of the
mountains as ever a man could be in any house that he might build.