Monarch, The Big Bear Of Tallac Part 1

Monarch, The Big Bear of Tallac.

by Ernest Thompson Seton.

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED

To the memory of the days in Tallac's Pines, where by the fire I heard this epic tale.

Kind memory calls the picture up before me now, clear, living clear: I see them as they sat, the one small and slight, the other tall and brawny, leader and led, rough men of the hills. They told me this tale--in broken bits they gave it, a sentence at a time. They were ready to talk but knew not how. Few their words, and those they used would be empty on paper, meaningless without the puckered lip, the interhiss, the brutal semi-snarl restrained by human mastery, the snap and jerk of wrist and gleam of steel-gray eye, that really told the tale, of which the spoken word was mere headline. Another, a subtler theme was theirs that night; not in the line but in the interline it ran; and listening to the hunter's ruder tale, I heard as one may hear the night bird singing in the storm; amid the glitter of the mica I caught the glint of gold, for theirs was a parable of hill-born power that fades when it finds the plains. They told of the giant redwood's growth from a tiny seed; of the avalanche that, born a snowflake, heaves and grows on the peaks, to shrink and die on the level lands below. They told of the river at our feet: of its rise, a thread-like rill, afar on Tallac's side, and its growth--a brook, a stream, a little river, a river, a mighty flood that rolled and ran from hills to plain to meet a final doom so strange that only the wise believe.

Yes, I have seen it; it is there to-day--the river, the wonderful river, that unabated flows, but that never reaches the sea.

I give you the story then as it came to me, and yet I do not give it, for theirs is a tongue unknown to script: I give a dim translation; dim, but in all ways respectful, reverencing the indomitable spirit of the mountaineer, worshiping the mighty Beast that nature built a monument of power, and loving and worshiping the clash, the awful strife heroic, at the close, when these two met.

FOREWORD

The story of Monarch is founded on material gathered from many sources as well as from personal experience, and the Bear is of necessity a composite. The great Grizzly Monarch, still pacing his prison floor at the Golden Gate Park, is the central fact of the tale.

In telling it I have taken two liberties that I conceive to be proper in a story of this sort.

First, I have selected for my hero an unusual individual.

Second, I have ascribed to that one animal the adventures of several of his kind.

The aim of the story is to picture the life of a Grizzly with the added glamour of a remarkable Bear personality. The intention is to convey the known truth. But the fact that liberties have been taken excludes the story from the catalogue of pure science. It must be considered rather an historical novel of Bear life.

Many different Bears were concerned in the early adventures here related, but the last two chapters, the captivity and the despair of the Big Bear, are told as they were told to me by several witnesses, including my friends the two mountaineers.

I. THE TWO SPRINGS

High above Sierra's peaks stands grim Mount Tallac. Ten thousand feet above the sea it rears its head to gaze out north to that vast and wonderful turquoise that men call Lake Tahoe, and northwest, across a piney sea, to its great white sister, Shasta of the Snows; wonderful colors and things on every side, mast-like pine trees strung with jewelry, streams that a Buddhist would have made sacred, hills that an Arab would have held holy. But Lan Kellyan's keen gray eyes were turned to other things. The childish delight in life and light for their own sakes had faded, as they must in one whose training had been to make him hold them very cheap. Why value gra.s.s? All the world is gra.s.s. Why value air, when it is everywhere in measureless immensity?

Why value life, when, all alive, his living came from taking life? His senses were alert, not for the rainbow hills and the gem-bright lakes, but for the living things that he must meet in daily rivalry, each staking on the game, his life. Hunter was written on his leathern garb, on his tawny face, on his lithe and sinewy form, and shone in his clear gray eye.

The cloven granite peak might pa.s.s unmarked, but a faint dimple in the sod did not. Calipers could not have told that it was widened at one end, but the hunter's eye did, and following, he looked for and found another, then smaller signs, and he knew that a big Bear and two little ones had pa.s.sed and were still close at hand, for the gra.s.s in the marks was yet unbending. Lan rode his hunting pony on the trail.

It sniffed and stepped nervously, for it knew as well as the rider that a Grizzly family was near. They came to a terrace leading to an open upland. Twenty feet on this side of it Lan slipped to the ground, dropped the reins, the well-known sign to the pony that he must stand at that spot, then c.o.c.ked his rifle and climbed the bank. At the top he went with yet greater caution, and soon saw an old Grizzly with her two cubs. She was lying down some fifty yards away and afforded a poor shot; he fired at what seemed to be the shoulder. The aim was true, but the Bear got only a flesh-wound. She sprang to her feet and made for the place where the puff of smoke arose. The Bear had fifty yards to cover, the man had fifteen, but she came racing down the bank before he was fairly on the horse, and for a hundred yards the pony bounded in terror while the old Grizzly ran almost alongside, striking at him and missing by a scant hair's-breadth each time. But the Grizzly rarely keeps up its great speed for many yards. The horse got under full headway, and the s.h.a.ggy mother, falling behind, gave up the chase and returned to her cubs.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "THE PONY BOUNDED IN TERROR WHILE THE GRIZZLY RAN ALMOST ALONGSIDE"]

She was a singular old Bear. She had a large patch of white on her breast, white cheeks and shoulders, graded into the brown elsewhere, and Lan from this remembered her afterward as the "Pinto." She had almost caught him that time, and the hunter was ready to believe that he owed her a grudge.

A week later his chance came. As he pa.s.sed along the rim of Pocket Gulch, a small, deep valley with sides of sheer rock in most places, he saw afar the old Pinto Bear with her two little brown cubs. She was crossing from one side where the wall was low to another part easy to climb. As she stopped to drink at the clear stream Lan fired with his rifle. At the shot Pinto turned on her cubs, and slapping first one, then the other, she chased them up a tree. Now a second shot struck her and she charged fiercely up the sloping part of the wall, clearly recognizing the whole situation and determined to destroy that hunter.

She came snorting up the steep acclivity wounded and raging, only to receive a final shot in the brain that sent her rolling back to lie dead at the bottom of Pocket Gulch. The hunter, after waiting to make sure, moved to the edge and fired another shot into the old one's body; then reloading, he went cautiously down to the tree where still were the cubs. They gazed at him with wild seriousness as he approached them, and when he began to climb they scrambled up higher.

Here one set up a plaintive whining and the other an angry growling, their outcries increasing as he came nearer.

He took out a stout cord, and noosing them in turn, dragged them to the ground. One rushed at him and, though little bigger than a cat, would certainly have done him serious injury had he not held it off with a forked stick.

After tying them to a strong but swaying branch he went to his horse, got a grain-bag, dropped them into that, and rode with them to his shanty. He fastened each with a collar and chain to a post, up which they climbed, and sitting on the top they whined and growled, according to their humor. For the first few days there was danger of the cubs strangling themselves or of starving to death, but at length they were beguiled into drinking some milk most ungently procured from a range cow that was la.s.soed for the purpose. In another week they seemed somewhat reconciled to their lot, and thenceforth plainly notified their captor whenever they wanted food or water.

And thus the two small rills ran on, a little farther down the mountain now, deeper and wider, keeping near each other; leaping bars, rejoicing in the sunlight, held for a while by some trivial dam, but overleaping that and running on with pools and deeps that harbor bigger things.

II. THE SPRINGS AND THE MINER'S DAM

Jack and Jill, the hunter named the cubs; and Jill, the little fury, did nothing to change his early impression of her bad temper. When at food-time the man came she would get as far as possible up the post and growl, or else sit in sulky fear and silence; Jack would scramble down and strain at his chain to meet his captor, whining softly, and gobbling his food at once with the greatest of gusto and the worst of manners. He had many odd ways of his own, and he was a lasting rebuke to those who say an animal has no sense of humor. In a month he had grown so tame that he was allowed to run free. He followed his master like a dog, and his tricks and funny doings were a continual delight to Kellyan and the few friends he had in the mountains.

On the creek-bottom below the shack was a meadow where Lan cut enough hay each year to feed his two ponies through the winter. This year when hay-time came Jack was his daily companion, either following him about in dangerous nearness to the snorting scythe, or curling up an hour at a time on his coat to guard it a.s.siduously from such aggressive monsters as Ground Squirrels and Chipmunks. An interesting variation of the day came about whenever the mower found a b.u.mblebees'

nest. Jack loved honey, of course, and knew quite well what a bees'

nest was, so the call, "Honey--Jacky--honey!" never failed to bring him in waddling haste to the spot. Jerking his nose up in token of pleasure, he would approach cautiously, for he knew that bees have stings. Watching his chance, he would dexterously slap at them with his paws till, one by one, they were knocked down and crushed; then sniffing hard for the latest information, he would stir up the nest gingerly till the very last was tempted forth to be killed. When the dozen or more that formed the swarm were thus got rid of, Jack would carefully dig out the nest and eat first the honey, next the grubs and wax, and last of all the bees he had killed, champing his jaws like a little Pig at a trough, while his long red, snaky tongue was ever busy lashing the stragglers into his greedy maw.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "JACK ATE TILL HIS PAUNCH LOOKED LIKE A RUBBER BALLOON"]

Lan's nearest neighbor was Lou Bonamy, an ex-cowboy and sheep-herder, now a prospecting miner. He lived, with his dog, in a shanty about a mile below Kellyan's shack. Bonamy had seen Jack "perform on a bee-crew." And one day, as he came to Kellyan's, he called out: "Lan, bring Jack here and we'll have some fun." He led the way down the stream into the woods. Kellyan followed him, and Jacky waddled at Kellyan's heels, sniffing once in a while to make sure he was not following the wrong pair of legs.

"There, Jacky, honey--honey!" and Bonamy pointed up a tree to an immense wasps' nest.

Jack c.o.c.ked his head on one side and swung his nose on the other.

Certainly those things buzzing about looked like bees, though he never before saw a bees' nest of that shape, or in such a place.

But he scrambled up the trunk. The men waited--Lan in doubt as to whether he should let his pet cub go into such danger, Bonamy insisting it would be a capital joke "to spring a surprise" on the little Bear. Jack reached the branch that held the big nest high over the deep water, but went with increasing caution. He had never seen a bees' nest like this; it did not have the right smell. Then he took another step forward on the branch--what an awful lot of bees; another step--still they were undoubtedly bees; he cautiously advanced a foot--and bees mean honey; a little farther--he was now within four feet of the great paper globe. The bees hummed angrily and Jack stepped back, in doubt. The men giggled; then Bonamy called softly and untruthfully: "Honey--Jacky--honey!"

[Ill.u.s.tration: "'HONEY--JACKY--HONEY'"]

The little Bear, fortunately for himself, went slowly, since in doubt; he made no sudden move, and he waited a long time, though urged to go on, till the whole swarm of bees had reentered their nest. Now Jacky jerked his nose up, hitched softly out a little farther till right over the fateful paper globe. He reached out, and by lucky chance put one h.o.r.n.y little paw-pad over the hole; his other arm grasped the nest, and leaping from the branch he plunged headlong into the pool below, taking the whole thing with him. As soon as he reached the water his hind feet were seen tearing into the nest, kicking it to pieces; then he let it go and struck out for the sh.o.r.e, the nest floating in rags down-stream. He ran alongside till the comb lodged against a shallow place, then he plunged in again; the wasps were drowned or too wet to be dangerous, and he carried his prize to the bank in triumph. No honey; of course, that was a disappointment, but there were lots of fat white grubs--almost as good--and Jack ate till his paunch looked like a little rubber balloon.

"How is that?" chuckled Lan.

"The laugh is on us," answered Bonamy, with a grimace.

III. THE TROUT POOL

Jack was now growing into a st.u.r.dy cub, and he would follow Kellyan even as far as Bonamy's shack. One day, as they watched him rolling head over heels in riotous glee, Kellyan remarked to his friend: "I'm afraid some one will happen on him an' shoot him in the woods for a wild B'ar."

"Then why don't you ear-mark him with them thar new sheep-rings?" was the sheep-man's suggestion.

Thus it was that, much against his will, Jack's ears were punched and he was decorated with earrings like a prize ram. The intention was good, but they were neither ornamental nor comfortable. Jack fought them for days, and when at length he came home trailing a branch that was caught in the jewel of his left ear, Kellyan impatiently removed them.

At Bonamy's he formed two new acquaintances, a bl.u.s.tering, bullying old ram that was "in storage" for a sheep-herder acquaintance, and which inspired him with a lasting enmity for everything that smelt of sheep--and Bonamy's dog.