Bears I Have Met--and Others Part 4

Searles was unable to tell the surgeons what he thought of their schemes for wiring him together, but he indicated his dissent by kicking one of them in the stomach. Then they called in a dentist as an expert on broken jaws, after they had attended to the other damages, and the dentist showed them how to remove the debris and where to patch and sew, and they managed to get the shattered piece of human machinery tinkered up in fairly good shape. The vitality and obstinacy of Searles did the rest, and in a few weeks he was on his feet again and planning prospecting trips to Death Valley, not The Valley of the Shadow through which he had pa.s.sed, but the grewsome desert of Southern California where he found his fortune in borax.

CHAPTER VI.

WHEN GRIZZLIES RAN IN DROVES.

William Thurman, who owned a lumber mill on the Chowchilla mountain, not far from the Mariposa grove of Big Trees, told this plain, unadorned tale of an old-fashioned Grizzly bear hunt.

He was moved thereto by inspection of a Winchester express rifle, carrying a half-inch ball, backed by 110 grains of powder, that was shown to him by a hunter.

"If we had been armed with such rifles in early days," said Mr.

Thurman, "the Grizzly wouldn't have achieved his reputation for vitality and staying powers in a fight. There is no doubt that he is a very tough animal and a game fighter, but in the days when he made a terrible name for himself he had to face no such weapons as that.

"I a.s.sisted in killing, in 1850, the first Grizzlies that were brought into the town of Sonora. I had heard a great deal about the Grizzly, and coming across the plains I talked to my comrade, Green, about what I should do if I should get a chance at a bear. I was a pretty good shot, and thought it would be no trick at all to kill a bear with the Mississippi rifle that I brought home from the Mexican war.

"One day I went out with a man named Willis, who was a good hunter, and in the hills back of Sonora we found plenty of bear sign. In fact we could get through the thick brush and chaparral only on the trails made by bears, and we had to go carefully for fear of running upon a Grizzly at close quarters. Although it was evident that we were in a bear country, we hadn't seen anything to shoot at when we emerged from the brush into an open s.p.a.ce about fifty yards in diameter.

"Willis said that he was sure bears were close around us, if we could only see them, and I proposed to climb a tree on the other side of the clearing and get a good view of the surrounding thickets. If I should see bears I was to make a noise and try to scare them out of their hiding places.

"I started across the opening, but before I reached the tree I saw a huge Grizzly coming toward me through the brush. He looked much larger and uglier than I had expected, and it struck me that the proper thing for me was to get into that tree before shooting. I got to the tree all right enough, but found that I couldn't climb it and take my rifle up with me. Willis saw my difficulty and shouted to me that I couldn't make it, and so I abandoned the attempt and ran back toward him.

"The bear was following me, and Willis started back into the brush. I called to him not to do that, but to stand in the open and wait for me.

He halted, and when I got alongside we both turned and raised our rifles. When the bear saw that we were standing our ground, he stopped, looked at us a moment and then turned and shuffled back into the brush. He was so big and looked so formidable that we concluded to let him go unmolested, rather relieved, in fact, that we were let out of the sc.r.a.pe so easily.

"We made our way back to camp with some caution and decided that we would get up a crowd and go bear hunting the next day. When we told our adventure, Green was very hilarious at my expense and kept reminding me of the brave things I had said coming across the plains.

He was so everlastingly tickled with his joke that he sat up all that night to guy me about my running away from a bear. I told him I would show him all the bears he wanted to see the next day, and give him a chance to try his own nerves.

"The next day five of us went out to look for bears, and we struck them thick before we got to the place where we had found so much sign.

Willis and I took the upper side of a patch of brush, and Green and the other two skirted the lower edge. An old Grizzly and two cubs, startled by some noise made by the other fellows, jumped out of the brush on our side, and we fired at them. My bullet struck one near the shoulder, and Willis. .h.i.t the dam in the belly. They all turned and ran down through the brush toward the rest of the crowd, and got out of our range.

"The noise made by them in running through the brush stirred up another squad, and when the shooting began down below five bears came tearing out on our side to get out of the way. Willis raised his rifle and pulled the trigger, but luckily the cap failed to explode. The five turned as soon as they saw us and ran in another direction. I was going to shoot one in the rump, but Willis stopped me, saying that we had our hands full without inviting any more bears to join the scrimmage. Before those five bears, got out of sight three more broke cover and joined them, and for a moment there were eleven Grizzly bears, young and old, in sight from where I stood. Eight of them ran away and the original three kept us all busy for the best part of the afternoon.

"For some time the other three men had all the fun, while Willis and I stood guard on our side of the thicket and watched the performance.

The old bear would stand up and look over a patch of brush to locate her enemy, and somebody would give her a shot. She would drop to all fours and gallop around to where she saw the man last, and he would run around the other side and reload. The cubs were half grown--big enough to be dangerous--and the boys had to watch for them while dodging about.

"I got even on Green that afternoon. He had forgotten to bring any caps, and after his first shot he could do nothing but dodge around the brush and keep out of the way. One of the bears was after him, and he had to step lively. While he was waiting to see which way the bear was coming next, he made motions with his hand, pointing to the nipple of his rifle, to indicate that he wanted caps. I saw what he meant, but instead of going to him to supply him with caps I stood still and laughed at him and applauded his running when the bear chased him.

That made him furious and he yelled that if he had a cap he'd take a shot at me.

"After two or three hours of dodging about, every man taking a shot whenever he got a chance, one of the cubs keeled over and the dam and the other cub retreated into the thickest part of the brush patch.

"We consulted and decided that if we killed the other cub next the dam might quit and get away, whereas if we killed the dam the cub probably wouldn't leave her and we'd bag the whole outfit. One of the party crawled cautiously into the thicket and presently he fired. Then he called to me to come in, and when I crawled up to him he said: 'I've killed the cub by mistake, but the old one is lying badly wounded on the other side of a little open spot, and you can get a splendid shot at the b.u.t.t of her ear while I back out and reload."

"He backed out, and I crawled up and took his place. There was the old bear about ten yards away, lying down and bleeding from a great many wounds. She seemed to be nearly exhausted and out of breath. I was in the act of raising my rifle to take aim at her head, when she caught sight of me and suddenly sprang up and rushed at me. She was almost upon me in two jumps, and I thought I was in for a bad time of it. I had no time to aim, but pushed out my rifle instinctively and fired in her face. The bullet struck her in the mouth, and the pain caused her to stop, wheel around and make a rush through the chaparral in the opposite direction. Such a shot as that from a Winchester express would have blown off the whole roof of her head, but my bullet, as I found later, tore through her tongue, splitting the root, and stopped when it struck bone.

"When she broke out of the brush on the other side three of the boys fired into her and she fell dead. We looked her over and found more than thirty bullets in her. We had been shooting at her and dodging her in the brush from 11 o'clock in the forenoon; until after 3 o'clock, and she had caved in from sheer exhaustion and loss of blood, not from the effects of any single bullet.

"We packed the three carcases into Sonora that night and a butcher named Dodge offered to cut them up and sell the meat without charge to us if we would let him have the bears at his shop. That was the first bear meat ever taken into Sonora, and everybody in the camp wanted a piece. In the morning there was a line of men at Dodge's shop like the crowd waiting at a theatre for Patti tickets. Men far down the line shouted to Dodge not to sell the meat in big pieces, but to save slices for them. The meat sold for $1 a pound. Everybody got a slice, and we got $500 for our three bears.

"One of our crowd was so elated over the profits of bear-hunting that he started out alone the next day to get more Grizzly meat. He didn't come back, and the boys who went out to look for him found his body, covered up with leaves and dirt, in the edge of a clump of brush. His skull had been smashed by a blow from a Grizzly's paw."

CHAPTER VII.

THE ADVENTURES OF PIKE.

Pike was one of the oldest of Yosemite guides and altogether the quaintest of the many queer old fellows who drifted into the valley in early days and there were stranded for life. He had another name, no doubt, but n.o.body knew or cared what it might be, and he seemed to have forgotten it himself. "Pike" fitted him, served all the purposes for which names were invented, was easy to p.r.o.nounce, and therefore was all the name he needed. Pike was tall, round-shouldered, lop-sided, slouchy, good-natured, illiterate, garrulous, frankly vain of the little sc.r.a.ps of botanical nomenclature he had picked up and as lazy and unacquainted with soap as an Indian.

Pike dearly loved bears and bear stories. When there were no tourists about to whom he could tell bear stories, he would go into the woods and have adventures with bears and stock up with stories for the next season. Pike never had to kill a bear to get a story out of him. He brought in no bear skins, pointed out no bullet holes, exhibited no scars and told no blood-curdling tales of furious combat and hair-breadth escapes. Pike and the bears appeared to have an understanding that there was room enough in the woods for both and that his hunting was all in the way of innocent amus.e.m.e.nt and recreation, to be spiced now and then with a practical joke.

"Black bears and brown bears are peaceable folks," Pike used to say in his Californianized-Missourian vernacular. "There's nothing mean about 'em and they don't go around with chips on their shoulders. I generally get along with them slick as grease and they never try to jump me when I haven't got a gun. Why, sir, I can just talk a brown bear out of the trail, even when he thinks he owns it. I did one night in the valley. I was going from Barnard's up to the Stoneman when I ran right up against a big brown bear in the dark. He was coming down the road and was in pretty considerable of a hurry, too--going down to the butcher's corral for supper I reckon--and we stopped about three feet apart. 'What you adoin' of here,' says I. 'Seems to me you're prowling around mighty permiscuous, buntin' inter people on the State stage road. You git inter the bresh,' says I, 'where you belong or I'll kick a few dents into you. Now don't stand here argifying the pint,' says I, just as important as if I was the Gardeen of the Valley, which I wasn't. 'Scoot, skedaddle, vamoos the ranch, git off the earth,' I says, 'if you ain't aimin' to git your head punched.'

"Well, sir, he stood there a minute with his head c.o.c.ked sidewise, kinder grunted once as if he was saying 'good-night,' and turned off the road into the brush and went about his business, and I poked along up to the Stoneman. 'Course I can't swear that he knew just what I said, but he ketched the general drift of the argyment all right, what you might call the prepoort of my remarks, and he knowed he hadn't no case worth fighting about.

"I remember once when Jim Duncan and me was ketched out in a snowstorm up near the head of Alder Creek, and lost each other in the dark. I knew Jim would take care of himself and it was no use tramping around, so I hunted a hole to sleep in. I found a place under a rock just big enough for me, where the snow didn't blow in, and I curled up on some dry leaves and snoozed off in no time. By and by something touched my face and I woke up, and there was a bear poking his head in and wondering if there was room for two. There wasn't no room and I don't like to sleep with bears nohow. Bears are all right in their place and I don't hold to no prejudices, but I'm notional about some things and I never could stand bears in my bed; they smell worse than Indians. So I says to that bear, which was looking mighty wishful into my snug quarters, 'Git along out of this; I was here first,' and I reached up and fetched him a back-handed slap on the nose. You'd orter heard him sneeze as he moseyed off. Last thing I remembered when I turned over and went to sleep was him a sneezing as he wandered around looking for another hole.

"If that had been a she-bear, of course I'd have crawled out and gave her my place like a gentleman. You never know what a she--bear, or any other kind of she, is going to do next, and the best way to get along with 'em is to let 'em have their own way and be polite. I'm always polite to ladies--or most always any way. Of course when they get too cantankerous a man has to forget his manners and call 'em down.

"I was impolite to a she-bear once, but she got back at me. I was over on the far side of Signal Peak hunting gray squirrels with a shot-gun.

I heard a funny sort of squealing a little way off, and set out to find out what was going on in the woods. Poking quietly through the brush, I came to the top of a ledge that dropped off straight and smooth to a flat covered with bear clover, just an opening in the forest. A she-bear was busy cracking open sugar pine cones and showing two cubs how to get the nuts out of them. The little fellows were having a gay old time, wrestling, boxing, stealing nuts from mamma and rolling about in the clover like a couple of kids, and I laid down in some bushes on top of the ledge and watched them. Sometimes they would grab a cone from the old one or bite her ear, and she would scold them and cuff them until they yelped that they'd be good. They couldn't be good half a minute, and they had the old lady's patience most worn out before I took a hand in the frolic.

"The old bear's coat was pretty thin and rusty, and she'd been sitting down or coasting down a bear slide so much that all the hair was worn off her hams slick and smooth. She looked mighty ridiculous when her back was turned, and it came into my fool head that a charge of small shot in the smooth place would be mighty surprising to her and help out the fun a whole lot. She couldn't get at me on the ledge, so I was perfectly safe to play jokes on her, and I wanted to see her jump. So I shoved the gun out through a bush and turned it loose. She was sixty yards away and the shot stung her good without doing any great harm.

"'Woof!' said the old bear as she jumped four feet high, and when she lit she was as mad as a wet hen. She looked up at the ledge, but couldn't see me, and she looked all around for somebody or something to blame for her trouble. Not a thing was in sight to account for it.

She sat down sort of sideways, reached around with one paw to scratch where it hurt and thought the matter over. I had to stuff gra.s.s in my mouth to keep from howling with laughter at the way she c.o.c.ked her head and seemed to be sizing up the situation while she scratched the stinging place.

"The cubs had stopped playing at the sound of the gun and run up close to her, and they were watching her for further orders. The old girl finally got her eye on them, and she looked at them solemnly for half a minute, and it was plain as print she was beginning to have suspicions.

Then she was sure she had the thing figured out, and she fetched first one and then the other a cuff that sent them rolling ten feet away.

When they got up bawling she was right there and gave them the darndest spanking two innocent cubs ever got. Every time she hit one he would go heels over head and yell blue murder, and by the time he got up she gave him another belt, scolding like an old woman all the time. It seemed to me I could almost hear her say, 'Play tricks on your mammy, will ye? I'll teach ye. Get along home without your supper, ye little scamps, and take that.' And so she went through the woods; spanking her babies, and they a'yelling for keeps and not knowing what they were being licked for, and I rolled around on top of the ledge, kicking my heels in the air and just bellowing with laughter.

"I thought that was the end of the funniest time I ever had with a bear, but it wasn't. Along about the first of March there was a warm spell in the mountains, and I went down the South Fork to Devil's Gulch, which heads up toward Signal Peak, to look over a timber claim and see if it was worth taking up. It was one of those warm days that take the snap out of a man, and I got tired and went to sleep under a tree. When I waked a bear had me half covered up with leaves and was piling on more. I wasn't cold, and didn't need any covering, but she seemed to think I did, and I reckoned the best thing to do was to keep still and let her finish the job. She seemed so serious about it that I didn't dare take it as a joke and try any tricks on her, but I couldn't figure out what her game was. She covered me with oak leaves, pine-needles and dirt from head to foot, and then all was still. I couldn't see, and I didn't dare to lift my head and shake off the leaves.

"After a while I made up my mind to take some chances to find out if the bear was on watch, and I wiggled my foot. Nothing happened, so I wiggled it a little harder. Then I felt around slowly until I got hold of my gun, and when I had that where I could handle it, I jumped up and shook the leaves and dirt from my face. The bear was gone. I had a sort of notion of what she was driving at, and so I fixed up the pile of leaves just as she had left them, went up the hill a little way and shinned a tree.

"About half an hour later the bear came back, leading two half-grown cubs so thin you could count their slats, and I recognized the interesting family I had met and had fun with in the fall. She was saying things to them in bear-talk, sort of whining and grunting, and they wobbled along behind her up to that pile of leaves. The cubs laid down with their tongues hanging out as if they were pretty tired, and the old girl tackled the pile confidently. It was plain enough that she had cached me for dinner, gone home into the gulch after the cubs and brought them back to have a square meal after being holed up for two or three months.

"The old bear made only two or three dabs at the pile when she began to suspect something was wrong, and then she sailed into it like a steam shovel. She made leaves and dirt fly so fast out between her hind legs that the cubs had to get out of the way or be buried, and the more she dug, the more excited she got. She worked over that pile and all the ground for ten feet around it until she was down to the frost, and when she finally got it through her head that the cupboard was bare, she was the most foolish-looking critter a man ever saw. She stood there blinking at the cubs, who were sniffing at the rubbish she had scattered about, and couldn't explain to them what had become of that square meal, and I reckon the cubs had it put up that mamma was getting light-headed and having dreams. They quit prospecting and sat down and looked at her and whined, and that set her off again raking over all the leaves in the neighborhood as if she hoped to find me hiding under them. Pretty soon she struck some kind of a root that was good to eat, and she braced up and called the cubs and showed it to 'em as if that was what she had been hunting for all the time. She made more fuss over that root than there was any call for and pretended it was the greatest thing a bear ever struck in the woods, and the cubs were so glad to get anything that they allowed roots were good enough and forgot all about what she had promised them.

"If her pelt had been good and the cubs had been big enough, I reckon I'd have got even with her for caching me, but she wasn't worth skinning and the cubs were no good for grub. It was getting late and I was tired of my tree, so I ploughed up the dirt under her nose with a load of shot and let out a yell, and she herded those cubs off into the brush and lit out for Devil's Gulch, and I went home. That was the nearest I ever came to being eaten up by bears."

CHAPTER VIII.

IN THE BIG SNOW.