True Bear Stories Part 4

Next in order comes the big, sleek, black bear; easily tamed, too lazy to fight, unless forced to it. But when "cornered" he fights well, and, like a lion, bites to the bone.

After this comes the small and quarrelsome black bear with big ears, and a white spot on his breast. I have heard hunters say, but I don't quite believe it, that he sometimes points to this white spot on his breast as a sort of Free Mason's sign, as if to say, "Don't shoot."

Next in order comes the smaller black bear with small ears. He is ubiquitous, as well as omniverous; gets into pig-pens, knocks over your beehives, breaks open your milk-house, eats more than two good-sized hogs ought to eat, and is off for the mountain top before you dream he is about. The first thing you see in the morning, however, will be some muddy tracks on the door steps. For he always comes and snuffles and shuffles and smells about the door in a good-natured sort of way, and leaves his card. The fifth member of the great bear family is not much bigger than an ordinary dog; but he is numerous, and he, too, is a nuisance.

Dog? Why not set the dog on him? Let me tell you. The California dog is a lazy, degenerate cur. He ought to be put with the extinct animals. He devotes his time and his talent to the flea. Not six months ago I saw a c.o.o.n, on his way to my fish-pond in the pleasant moonlight, walk within two feet of my dog's nose and not disturb his slumbers.

We hope that it is impossible ever to have such a thing as hydrophobia in California. But as our dogs are too lazy to bite anything, we have thus far been unable to find out exactly as to that.

This last-named bear has a big head and small body; has a long, sharp nose and longer and sharper teeth than any of the others; he is a natural thief, has low instincts, carries his nose close to the ground, and, wherever possible, makes his road along on the mossy surface of fallen trees in humid forests. He eats fish--dead and decaying salmon--in such abundance that his flesh is not good in the salmon season.

It was with this last described specimen of the bear family that a precocious old boy who had hired out to some horse drovers, went in swimming years and years ago. The two drovers had camped to recruit and feed their horses on the wild gra.s.s and clover that grew at the headwaters of the Sacramento River, close up under the foot of Mount Shasta. A pleasant spot it was, in the pleasant summer weather.

This warm afternoon the two men sauntered leisurely away up Soda Creek to where their horses were grazing belly deep in gra.s.s and clover.

They were slow to return, and the boy, as all boys will, began to grow restless. He had fished, he had hunted, had diverted himself in a dozen ways, but now he wanted something new. He got it.

A little distance below camp could be seen, through the thick foliage that hung and swung and bobbed above the swift waters, a long, mossy log that lay far out and far above the cool, swift river.

Why not go down through the trees and go out on that log, take off his clothes, dangle his feet, dance on the moss, do anything, everything that a boy wants to do?

In two minutes the boy was out on the big, long, mossy log, kicking his boots off, and in two minutes more he was dancing up and down on the humid, cool moss, and as naked as the first man, when he was first made.

And it was very pleasant. The great, strong river splashed and dashed and boomed below; above him the long green branches hung dense and luxuriant and almost within reach. Far off and away through their shifting shingle he caught glimpses of the bluest of all blue skies.

And a little to the left he saw gleaming in the sun and almost overhead the everlasting snows of Mount Shasta.

Putting his boots and his clothes all carefully in a heap, that nothing might roll off into the water, he walked, or rather danced on out to where the further end of the great fallen tree lay lodged on a huge boulder in the middle of the swift and surging river. His legs dangled down and he patted his plump thighs with great satisfaction.

Then he leaned over and saw some gold and silver trout, then he flopped over and lay down on his breast to get a better look at them.

Then he thought he heard something behind him on the other end of the log! He pulled himself together quickly and stood erect, face about.

There was a bear! It was one of those mean, sneaking, long-nosed, ant-eating little fellows, it is true, but it was a bear! And a bear is a bear to a boy, no matter about his size, age or character. The boy stood high up. The boy's bear stood up. And the boy's hair stood up!

The bear had evidently not seen the boy yet. But it had smelled his boots and clothes, and had got upon his dignity. But now, dropping down on all fours, with nose close to the mossy b.u.t.t of the log, it slowly shuffled forward.

That boy was the stillest boy, all this time, that has ever been.

Pretty soon the bear reached the clothes. He stopped, sat down, nosed them about as a hog might, and then slowly and lazily got up; but with a singular sort of economy of old clothes, for a bear, he did not push anything off into the river.

What next? Would he come any farther? Would he? Could he? Will he? The long, sharp little nose was once more to the moss and sliding slowly and surely toward the poor boy's naked shins. Then the boy shivered and settled down, down, down on his haunches, with his little hands clasped till he was all of a heap.

He tried to pray, but somehow or another, all he could think of as he sat there crouched down with all his clothes off was:

"Now I lay me down to sleep."

But all this could not last. The bear was almost on him in half a minute, although he did not lift his nose six inches till almost within reach of the boy's toes. Then the surprised bear suddenly stood up and began to look the boy in the face. As the terrified youth sprang up, he thrust out his left hand as a guard and struck the brute with all his might between the eyes with the other. But the left hand lodged in the two rows of sharp teeth and the boy and bear rolled into the river together.

But they were together only an instant. The bear, of course, could not breathe with his mouth open in the water, and so had to let go.

Instinctively, or perhaps because his course lay in that direction, the bear struck out, swimming "dog fashion," for the farther sh.o.r.e.

And as the boy certainly had no urgent business on that side of the river he did not follow, but kept very still, clinging to the moss on the big boulder till the bear had shaken the water from his coat and disappeared in the thicket.

Then the boy, pale and trembling from fright and the loss of blood, climbed up the broken end of the log, got his clothes, struggled into them as he ran, and so reached camp.

And he had not yelled! He tied up his hand in a piece of old flour sack, all by himself, for the men had not yet got back; and he didn't whimper! And what became of the boy? you ask.

The boy grew up as all energetic boys do; for there seems to be a sort of special providence for such boys.

And where is he now?

Out in California, trapping bear in the winter and planting olive trees in their season.

And do I know him?

Yes, pretty well, almost as well as any old fellow can know himself.

VI.

A FAT LITTLE EDITOR AND THREE LITTLE "BROWNS."

Mount Sinai, Heart of the Sierras--this place is one mile east and a little less than one mile perpendicular from the hot, dusty and dismal little railroad town down on the rocky banks of the foaming and tumbling Sacramento River. Some of the old miners are down there still--still working on the desolate old rocky bars with rockers. They have been there, some of them, for more than thirty years. A few of them have little orchards, or vineyards, on the steep, overhanging hills, but there is no home life, no white women to speak of, as yet.

The battered and gray old miners are poor, lonely and discouraged, but they are honest, stout-hearted still, and of a much higher type than those that hang about the towns. It is hot down on the river--too hot, almost, to tell the truth. Even here under Mount Shasta, in her sheets of eternal snow, the mercury is at par.

This Mount Sinai is not a town; it is a great spring of cold water that leaps from the high, rocky front of a mountain which we have located as a summer home in the Sierras--myself and a few other scribes of California.

This is the great bear land. One of our party, a simple-hearted and honest city editor, who was admitted into our little mountain colony because of his boundless good nature and native goodness, had never seen a bear before he came here. City editors do not, as a rule, ever know much about bears. This little city editor is baldheaded, bow-legged, plain to a degree. And maybe that is why he is so good.

"Give me fat men," said Caesar.

But give me plain men for good men, any time. Pretty women are to be preferred; but pretty men? Bah! I must get on with the bear, however, and make a long story a short story. We found our fat, bent-legged editor from the city fairly broiling in the little railroad town, away down at the bottom of the hill in the yellow golden fields of the Sacramento; and he was so limp and so lazy that we had to lay hold of him and get him out of the heat and up into the heart of the Sierras by main force.

Only one hour of climbing and we got up to where the little mountain streams come tumbling out of snow-banks on every side. The Sacramento, away down below and almost under us, from here looks dwindled to a brawling brook; a foamy white thread twisting about the boulders as big as meeting houses, plunging forward, white with fear, as if glad to get away--as if there was a bear back there where it came from. We did not register. No, indeed. This place here on Square Creek, among the clouds, where the water bursts in a torrent from the living rock, we have named Mount Sinai. We own the whole place for one mile square--the tall pine trees, the lovely pine-wood houses; all, all.

We proposed to hunt and fish, for food. But we had some bread, some bacon, lots of coffee and sugar. And so, whipping out our hooks and lines, we set off with the editor up a little mountain brook, and in less than an hour were far up among the fields of eternal snow, and finely loaded with trout.

What a bed of pine quills! What long and delicious cones for a camp fire! Some of those sugar-pine cones are as long as your arm. One of them alone will make a lofty pyramid of flame and illuminate the scene for half a mile about. I threw myself on my back and kicked up my heels. I kicked care square in the face. Oh, what freedom! How we would rest after dinner here! Of course we could not all rest or sleep at the same time. One of us would have to keep a pine cone burning all the time. Bears are not very numerous out here; but the California lion is both numerous and large here. The wild-cat, too, is no friend to the tourist. But we were not tourists. The land was and is ours. We would and all could defend our own.

The sun was going down. Glorious! The shades of night were coming up out of the gorges below and audaciously pursuing the dying sun. Not a sound. Not a sign of man or of beast. We were scattered all up and down the hill.

Crash! Something came tearing down the creek through the brush! The fat and simple-hearted editor, who had been dressing the homeopathic dose of trout, which inexperience had marked as his own, sprang up from the bank of the tumbling little stream above us and stood at his full height. His stout little knees for the first time smote together.

I was a good way below him on the steep hillside. A brother editor was slicing bacon on a piece of reversed pine bark close by.

"Fall down," I cried, "fall flat down on your face."

It was a small she bear, and she was very thin and very hungry, with cubs at her heels, and she wanted that fat little city editor's fish.

I know it would take volumes to convince you that I really meant for the bear to pa.s.s by him and come after me and my friend with both fish and bacon, and so, with half a line, I a.s.sert this truth and pa.s.s on.

Nor was I in any peril in appropriating the little brown bear to myself. Any man who knows what he is about is as safe with a bear on a steep hillside as is the best bull-fighter in any arena. No bear can keep his footing on a steep hillside, much less fight. And whenever an Indian is in peril he always takes down hill till he comes to a steep plane, and then lets the bear almost overtake him, when he suddenly steps aside and either knifes the bear to the heart or lets the open-mouthed beast go on down the hill, heels over head.

The fat editor turned his face toward me, and it was pale. "What! Lie down and be eaten up while you lie there and kick up your heels and enjoy yourself? Never. We will die together!" he shouted.

He started for me as fast as his short legs would allow. The bear struck at him with her long, rattling claws. He landed far below me, and when he got up he hardly knew where he was or what he was. His clothes were in shreds, the back and bottom parts of them. The bear caught at his trout and was gone in an instant back with her two little cubs, and a moment later the little family had dined and was away, over the hill. She was a cinnamon bear, not much bigger than a big, yellow dog, and almost as lean and mean and hungry as any wolf could possibly be. We helped our inexperienced little friend slowly down to camp, forgetting all about the bacon and the fish till we came to the little board house, where we had coffee. Of course the editor could not go to the table now. He leaned, or rather sat, against a pine, drank copious cups of coffee and watched the stars, while I heaped up great piles of leaves and built a big fire, and so night rolled by in all her starry splendor as the men slept soundly all about beneath the lordly pines. But alas for the fat little editor; he did not like the scenery, and he would not stay. We saw him to the station on his way back to his little sanctum. He said he was satisfied. He had seen the "bar." His last words were, as he pulled himself close together in a modest corner in the car and smiled feebly: "Say, boys, you won't let it get in the papers, will you?"