True Bear Stories Part 2

And that was all my English friends said. The Indians made their moaning and whimpering friend who had been overcome by the snake pull himself together and they swam across and gathered up the "cattle."

Some men say a bear cannot leap; but I say there are times when a bear can leap like a tiger. This was one of the times.

II.

MUSIC-LOVING BEARS.

No, don't despise the bear, either in his life or his death. He is a kingly fellow, every inch a king; a curious, monkish, music-loving, roving Robin Hood of his somber woods--a silent monk, who knows a great deal more than he tells. And please don't go to look at him and sit in judgment on him behind the bars. Put yourself in his place and see how much of manhood or kinghood would be left in you with a muzzle on your mouth, and only enough liberty left to push your nose between two rusty bars and catch the peanut which the good little boy has found to be a bad one and so generously tosses it to the bear.

Of course, the little boy, remembering the experience of about forty other little boys in connection with the late baldheaded Elijah, has a prejudice against the bear family, but why the full-grown man should so continually persist in caging this s.h.a.ggy-coated, dignified, kingly and ancient brother of his, I cannot see, unless it is that he knows almost nothing at all of his better nature, his shy, innocent love of a joke, his partiality for music and his imperial disdain of death.

And so, with a desire that man may know a little more about this storied and cla.s.sic creature which, with noiseless and stately tread, has come down to us out of the past, and is as quietly pa.s.sing away from the face of the earth, these fragmentary facts are set down. But first as to his love of music. A bear loves music better than he loves honey, and that is saying that he loves music better than he loves his life.

We were going to mill, father and I, and Lyte Howard, in Oregon, about forty years ago, with ox-teams, a dozen or two bags of wheat, threshed with a flail and winnowed with a wagon cover, and were camped for the night by the Calipoola River; for it took two days to reach the mill.

Lyte got out his fiddle, keeping his gun, of course, close at hand.

Pretty soon the oxen came down, came very close, so close that they almost put their cold, moist noses against the backs of our necks as we sat there on the ox-yokes or reclined in our blankets, around the crackling pine-log fire and listened to the wild, sweet strains that swept up and down and up till the very tree tops seemed to dance and quiver with delight.

Then suddenly father seemed to feel the presence of something or somebody strange, and I felt it, too. But the fiddler felt, heard, saw nothing but the divine, wild melody that made the very pine trees dance and quiver to their tips. Oh, for the pure, wild, sweet, plaintive music once more! the music of "Money Musk," "Zip c.o.o.n," "Ol'

Dan Tucker" and all the other dear old airs that once made a thousand happy feet keep time on the puncheon floors from Hudson's bank to the Oregon. But they are no more, now. They have pa.s.sed away forever with the Indian, the pioneer, and the music-loving bear. It is strange how a man--I mean the natural man--will feel a presence long before he hears it or sees it. You can always feel the approach of a--but I forget. You are of another generation, a generation that only reads, takes thought at second hand only, if at all, and you would not understand; so let us get forward and not waste time in explaining the unexplainable to you.

Father got up, turned about, put me behind him like, as an animal will its young, and peered back and down through the dense tangle of the deep river bank between two of the huge oxen which had crossed the plains with us to the water's edge; then he reached around and drew me to him with his left hand, pointing between the oxen sharp down the bank with his right forefinger.

A bear! two bears! and another coming; one already more than half way across on the great, mossy log that lay above the deep, sweeping waters of the Calipoola; and Lyte kept on, and the wild, sweet music leaped up and swept through the delighted and dancing boughs above.

Then father reached back to the fire and thrust a long, burning bough deeper into the dying embers and the glittering sparks leaped and laughed and danced and swept out and up and up as if to companion with the stars. Then Lyte knew. He did not hear, he did not see, he only felt; but the fiddle forsook his fingers and his chin in a second, and his gun was to his face with the muzzle thrust down between the oxen.

And then my father's gentle hand reached out, lay on that long, black, Kentucky rifle barrel, and it dropped down, slept once more at the fiddler's side, and again the melodies; and the very stars came down, believe me, to listen, for they never seemed so big and so close by before. The bears sat down on their haunches at last, and one of them kept opening his mouth and putting out his red tongue, as if he really wanted to taste the music. Every now and then one of them would lift up a paw and gently tap the ground, as if to keep time with the music.

And both my papa and Lyte said next day that those bears really wanted to dance.

And that is all there is to say about that, except that my father was the gentlest gentleman I ever knew and his influence must have been boundless; for who ever before heard of any hunter laying down his rifle with a family of fat black bears holding the little snow-white cross on their b.r.e.a.s.t.s almost within reach of its muzzle?

The moon came up by and by, and the chin of the weary fiddler sank lower and lower, till all was still. The oxen lay down and ruminated, with their noses nearly against us. Then the coal-black bears melted away before the milk-white moon, and we slept there, with the sweet breath of the cattle, like incense, upon us.

But how does a bear die? Ah, I had forgotten. I must tell you of death, then. Well, we have different kinds of bears. I know little of the Polar bear, and so say nothing positively of him. I am told, however, that there is not, considering his size, much snap or grit about him; but as for the others, I am free to say that they live and die like gentlemen.

I shall find time, as we go forward, to set down many incidents out of my own experience to prove that the bear is often a humorist, and never by any means a bad fellow.

Judge Highton, odd as it may seem, has left the San Francis...o...b..r for the "bar" of Mount Shasta every season for more than a quarter of a century, and he probably knows more about bears than any other eminently learned man in the world, and Henry Highton will tell you that the bear is a good fellow at home, good all through, a brave, modest, sober old monk.

A monkish Robin Hood In his good green wood.

III.

MY FIRST GRIZZLY.

One of Fremont's men, Mountain Joe, had taken a fancy to me down in Oregon, and finally, to put three volumes in three lines, I turned up as partner in his Soda Springs ranch on the Sacramento, where the famous Shasta-water is now bottled, I believe. Then the Indians broke out, burned us up and we followed and fought them in Castle rocks, and I was shot down. Then my father came on to watch by my side, where I lay, under protection of soldiers, at the mouth of Shot Creek canyon.

As the manzanita berries began to turn the mountain sides red and the brown pine quills to sift down their perfumed carpets at our feet, I began to feel some strength and wanted to fight, but I had had enough of Indians. I wanted to fight grizzly bears this time. The fact is, they used to leave tracks in the pack trail every night, and right close about the camp, too, as big as the head of a barrel.

Now father was well up in woodcraft, no man better, but he never fired a gun. Never, in his seventy years of life among savages, did that gentle Quaker, school-master, magistrate and Christian ever fire a gun. But he always allowed me to have my own way as a hunter, and now that I was getting well of my wound he was so glad and grateful that he willingly joined in with the soldiers to help me kill one of these huge bears that had made the big tracks.

Do you know why a beast, a bear of all beasts, is so very much afraid of fire? Well, in the first place, as said before, a bear is a gentleman, in dress as well as address, and so likes a decent coat. If a bear should get his coat singed he would hide away from sight of both man and beast for half a year. But back of his pride is the fact that a fat bear will burn like a candle; the fire will not stop with the destruction of his coat. And so, mean as it was, in the olden days, when bears were as common in California as cows are now, men used to take advantage of this fear and kindle pine-quill fires in and around his haunts in the head of canyons to drive him out and down and into ambush.

Read two or three chapters here between the lines--lots of plans, preparations, diagrams. I was to hide near camp and wait--to place the crescent of pine-quill fires and all that. Then at twilight they all went out and away on the mountain sides around the head of the canyon, and I hid behind a big rock near by the extinguished camp-fire, with my old muzzle-loading Kentucky rifle, lifting my eyes away up and around to the head of the Manzanita canyon looking for the fires. A light! One, two, three, ten! A sudden crescent of forked flames, and all the fight and impetuosity of a boy of only a dozen years was uppermost, and I wanted a bear!

All alone I waited; got hot, cold, thirsty, cross as a bear and so sick of sitting there that I was about to go to my blankets, for the flames had almost died out on the hills, leaving only a circle of little dots and dying embers, like a fading diadem on the mighty lifted brow of the glorious Manzanita mountain. And now the new moon came, went softly and sweetly by, like a shy, sweet maiden, hiding down, down out of sight.

Crash! His head was thrown back, not over his shoulder, as you may read but never see, but down by his left foot, as he looked around and back up the brown mountain side. He had stumbled, or rather, he had stepped on himself, for a bear gets down hill sadly. If a bear ever gets after you, you had better go hill and go down hill fast. It will make him mad, but that is not your affair. I never saw a bear go down hill in a good humor. What nature meant by making a bear so short in the arms I don't know. Indians say he was first a man and walked upright with a club on his shoulder, but sinned and fell. As evidence of this, they show that he can still stand up and fight with his fists when hard pressed, but more of this later on.

This huge brute before me looked almost white in the tawny twilight as he stumbled down through the steep tangle of chaparral into the opening on the stony bar of the river.

He had evidently been terribly tangled up and disgusted while in the bush and jungle, and now, well out of it, with the foamy, rumbling, roaring Sacramento River only a few rods beyond him, into which he could plunge with his glossy coat, he seemed to want to turn about and shake his huge fists at the crescent of fire in the pine-quills that had driven him down the mountain. He threw his enormous bulk back on his haunches and rose up, and rose up, and rose up! Oh, the majesty of this king of our continent, as he seemed to still keep rising! Then he turned slowly around on his great hinder feet to look back; he pushed his nose away out, then drew it back, twisted his short, thick neck, like that of a beer-drinking German, and then for a final observation he tiptoed up, threw his high head still higher in the air and wiggled it about and sniffed and sniffed and--bang!

I shot at him from ambush, with his back toward me, shot at his back!

For shame! Henry Highton would not have done that; nor, indeed, would I or any other real sportsman do such a thing now; but I must plead the "Baby Act," and all the facts, and also my sincere penitence, and proceed.

The n.o.ble brute did not fall, but let himself down with dignity and came slowly forward. Hugely, ponderously, solemnly, he was coming. And right here, if I should set down what I thought about--where father was, the soldiers, anybody, everybody else, whether I had best just fall on my face and "play possum" and put in a little prayer or two on the side, like--well, I was going on to say that if I should write all that flashed and surged through my mind in the next three seconds, you would be very tired. I was certain I had not hit the bear at all.

As a rule, you can always see the "fur fly," as hunters put it; only it is not fur, but dust, that flies.

But this bear was very fat and hot, and so there could have been no dust to fly. After shuffling a few steps forward and straight for the river, he suddenly surged up again, looked all about, just as before, then turned his face to the river and me, the tallest bear that ever tiptoed up and up and up in the Sierras. One, two, three steps--on came the bear! and my gun empty! Then he fell, all at once and all in a heap. No noise, no moaning or groaning at all, no clutching at the ground, as men have seen Indians and even white men do; as if they would hold the earth from pa.s.sing away--nothing of that sort. He lay quite still, head down hill, on his left side, gave just one short, quick breath, and then, pulling up his great right paw, he pushed his nose and eyes under it, as if to shut out the light forever, or, maybe, to m.u.f.fle up his face as when "great Caesar fell."

And that was all. I had killed a grizzly bear; nearly as big as the biggest ox.

IV.

TWIN BABIES.

These twin babies were black. They were black as coal. Indeed, they were blacker than coal, for they glistened in their oily blackness.

They were young baby bears; and so exactly alike that no one could, in any way, tell the one from the other. And they were orphans. They had been found at the foot of a small cedar tree on the banks of the Sacramento River, near the now famous Soda Springs, found by a tow-headed boy who was very fond of bears and hunting.

But at the time the twin babies were found Soda Springs was only a wild camp, or way station, on the one and only trail that wound through the woods and up and down mountains for hundreds of miles, connecting the gold fields of California with the pastoral settlements away to the north in Oregon. But a railroad has now taken the place of that tortuous old packtrail, and you can whisk through these wild and woody mountains, and away on down through Oregon and up through Washington, Montana, Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin and on to Chicago without even once getting out of your car, if you like. Yet such a persistent ride is not probable, for fish, pheasants, deer, elk, and bear still abound here in their ancient haunts, and the temptation to get out and fish or hunt is too great to be resisted.

[Ill.u.s.tration: He threw his enormous bulk back on his haunches, and rose up.--Page 40.]

This place where the baby bears were found was first owned by three men or, rather, by two men and a boy. One of the men was known as Mountain Joe. He had once been a guide in the service of General Fremont, but he was now a drunken fellow and spent most of his time at the trading post, twenty miles down the river. He is now an old man, almost blind, and lives in Oregon City, on a pension received as a soldier of the Mexican war. The other man's name was Sil Reese. He, also, is living and famously rich--as rich as he is stingy, and that is saying that he is very rich indeed.

The boy preferred the trees to the house, partly because it was more pleasant and partly because Sil Reese, who had a large nose and used it to talk with constantly, kept grumbling because the boy, who had been wounded in defending the ranch, was not able to work--wash the dishes, make fires and so on, and help in a general and particular way about the so-called "Soda Spring Hotel." This Sil Reese was certainly a mean man, as has, perhaps, been set down in this sketch before.

The baby bears were found asleep, and alone. How they came to be there, and, above all, how they came to be left long enough alone by their mother for a feeble boy to rush forward at sight of them, catch them up in his arms and escape with them, will always be a wonder. But this one thing is certain, you had about as well take up two rattlesnakes in your arms as two baby bears, and hope to get off unharmed, if the mother of the young bears is within a mile of you.

This boy, however, had not yet learned caution, and he probably was not born with much fear in his make-up. And then he was so lonesome, and this man Reese was so cruel and so cross, with his big nose like a sounding fog-horn, that the boy was glad to get even a bear to love and play with.