True Bear Stories Part 9

Before the dumfounded gardener could protest, the boys had broken into shouts of enthusiasm, and were running away in squads and in couples to borrow, buy or beg firearms for their work.

The smart boy from Boston, however, with an eye to big profits and a long job, went straight to the express office, and sent all the way to the East for a costly and first-cla.s.s shotgun.

The little brown Aztec Indian did nothing of that sort; he kept by himself, kept his own counsel, and so far as any of the boys could find out, paid no attention to the proffered reward for scalps.

Bill Peterson borrowed his older brother's gun and brought in two rabbits the next day. The Boston boy, with an eye wide open to future profits to himself, went with Peterson to the head gardener, and holding up first one dead jack-rabbit by the ear, and then the other, coolly and deliberately counted off four ears.

The gardener grudgingly counted out two dimes, and then, with a grunt of satisfaction, carried away the two big rabbits by their long hind legs.

As the weeks wore by, several other dead rabbits were reported, and despite the grumbling of the head gardener, the tumultuous and merry students had quite a revenue, and their hopes for the future were high, especially when that artillery should arrive from Boston!

Meantime, the little brown Aztec boy had done nothing at all. However, when Friday afternoon came, he earnestly begged, and finally obtained, leave to go down to his home at Tia Juana. He wanted very much to see his Mexican mother and his six little Mexican brothers, and his sixty, more or less, little Mexican cousins.

But lo! on Sat.u.r.day morning, bright and early, back came the little Bear-Slayer, as he was called by the boys, and at his heels came toddling and tumbling not only his six half-naked little brown brothers, but dozens of his cousins.

Each carried a bundle on his back. These bundles were long, finely woven bird-nets, and these nets were made of the fiber of the misnamed century plant, the agave.

This queer looking line of barefooted, bareheaded, diminutive beings, headed by the silent little Aztec, hastily dispersed itself along the outer edge of the grounds next to the chaparral abode of the jack-rabbits, and then, while grave professors leaned from their windows, and a hundred curious white boys looked on, these little brown fellows fastened all their long bird-nets together, and stretched two wide wings out and up the hill.

Very quiet but very quick they were, and when all the nets had been unwound and stretched out in a great letter V far up the hill, it was seen that each brown boy had a long, heavy manzanita wood club in his hand.

Suddenly and silently as they had come they all disappeared up and over the hills beyond, and in the dense black chaparral.

Where had they gone and what did all this silent mystery mean? One, two, three hours! What had become of this strange little army of silent brown boys?

Another hour pa.s.sed. Not a boy, not a sign, not a sound. What did it all mean?

Suddenly, down came a rabbit, jumping high in the air, his huge ears flapping forward and back, as if they had wilted in the hot sun.

Then another rabbit, then another! Then ten, twenty, forty, fifty, five hundred, a thousand, all jumping over each other and upon each other, and against the nets, with their long legs thrust through the meshes, and wriggling and struggling till the nets shook as in a gale.

Then came the long lines of half-naked brown boys tumbling down after them out of the brush, and striking right and left, up and down, with their clubs.

In less than ten minutes from the time they came out of the brush, the little fellows had laid down their clubs and were dragging the game together.

The grave professors shook their hats and handkerchiefs, and shouted with delight from their windows overhead, and all the white boys danced about, wild with excitement.

That is, all but one or two. The boy from Boston said savagely to the little Aztec, as he stood directing the counting of the ears, "You're a brigand! You're the black brigand of San Diego City, and I can whip you!"

The brigand said nothing, but kept on with his work.

In a little time the president and head gardener came forward, and roughly estimated that about one thousand of the pests had been destroyed. Then the kindly president went to the bank and brought out one hundred silver dollars, which he handed to the little Bear-Slayer of San Diego in a cotton handkerchief.

The poor, timid little fellow's lips quivered. He had never seen so much money in all his life. He held his head down in silence for a long time and seemed to be thinking hard. His half-naked little brothers and cousins grouped about and seemed to be waiting for a share of the money.

The boy's schoolmates also crowded around, just as boys will, but they did not want any of the silver, and I am sure that all, save only one or two, were very glad because of his good luck.

Finally, lifting up his head and looking about the crowd of his school-fellows, he said, "Now, look here; I want every one of you to take a dollar apiece, and I will take what is left." He laid the handkerchief that held the silver dollars down on the gra.s.s and spread it wide open.

Hastily but orderly, his schoolmates began to take up the silver, his own little brown fellows timidly holding back. Then one of the white boys who had hastily helped himself saw, after a time, that the bottom was almost reached, and, with the remark that he was half ashamed of himself for taking it, he quietly put his dollar back. Then all the others, fine, impulsive fellows who had hardly thought what they were about at first, did the same; and then the little brown boys came forward.

They kept coming and kept taking, till there was not very much but his handkerchief left. One of the professors then took a piece of gold from his pocket and gave it to the little Bear-Slayer. The boy was so glad that tears came into his eyes and he turned to go.

"See here! I'm sorry for what I said. Yes, I am. I ought to be ashamed, and I am ashamed."

It was the smart boy from Boston who had been looking on all this time, and who now came forward with his hand held out.

"See here!" he said. "I've got a forty-dollar shotgun to give away, and I want you to have it. Yes, I do. There's my hand on it. Take my hand, and you shall have the gun just as soon as it gets here."

The two shook hands, and the boys all shouted with delight; and on the very next Sat.u.r.day one of these two boys went out hunting quail with a fine shotgun on his shoulder.

It was the silent little hero, The Bear-Slayer of San Diego.

XV.

ALASKAN AND POLAR BEAR.

"And round about the bleak North Pole Glideth the lean, white bear."

Nearly forty years ago, when down from the Indian country to sell some skins in San Francisco, I saw a great commotion around a big ship in the bay, and was told that a Polar bear had been discovered floating on an iceberg in the Arctic, and had been taken alive by the ship's crew.

I went out in a boat, and on boarding the ship, just down from Alaska with a cargo of ice, I saw the most beautiful specimen of the bear family I ever beheld. A long body and neck, short legs, small head, cream-white and clean as snow, this enormous creature stood before us on the deck, as docile as a lamb. This is as near as ever I came to encountering the Polar bear, although I have lived in the Arctic and have more than one trophy of the bear family from the land of everlasting snows.

Bear are very plenty in Alaska and the Klondike country, and they are, perhaps, a bit more ferocious than in California, for I have seen more than one man hobbling about the Klondike mines on one leg, having lost the other in an argument with bear.

As a rule, the flesh is not good, here, in the salmon season, for the bear is in all lands a famous fisherman. He sits by the river and, while you may think he is asleep, he thrusts his paw deep down, and, quick as wink, he lands a huge salmon in his bunch of long, hooded claws.

A friend and I watched a bear fishing for hours on the Yukon, trying to learn his habits. I left my friend, finally, and went to camp to cook supper. Then, it seems, my friend shot him, for his skin, I think. Thinking the bear dead, he called to me and went up to the bear, knife in hand. But the bear rose up when he felt the knife, caught the man in his arms and they rolled in the river together. The poor man could not get away. When we recovered his body far down the river next day, the bear still held him in her arms. She was a long, slim cinnamon, said to be the most savage fighter in that region.

All the bear of the far north seem to me to have longer bodies and shorter legs than in other lands. The black bear (there are three kinds of them) are bow-legged, I think; at least they "toe in," walk as an Indian walks, and even step one foot over the other when taking their time on the trail. We cultivated the acquaintance of a black bear for some months, on the Klondike, in the winter of '97-'98, and had a good chance to learn his habits. He was a persistent robber and very cunning. He would eat anything he could get, which was not much, of course, and when he could not get anything thrown to him from a door he would go and tear down a stump and eat ants. I don't know why he did not hibernate, as other bears in that region do. He may have been a sort of crank. No one who knew about him, or who had been in camp long, would hurt him; but a crowd of strangers, pa.s.sing up the trail near our Klondike cabin, saw him, and as he did not try to get away he was soon dead. He weighed 400 pounds, and they sold him where he lay for one dollar a pound.

I fell in with a famous bear-hunter, a few miles up from the mouth of the Klondike early in September, before the snow fell, and with him made a short hunt. He has wonderful bear sense. He has but one eye and but one side of a face, the rest of him having been knocked off by the slash of a bear's paw. He is known as Bear Bill.

The moss is very deep and thick and elastic in that region, so that no tracks are made except in a worn trail. But Bill saw where a bit of moss had been disturbed away up on a mountain side, and he sat right down and turned his one eye and all his bear sense to the solution of the mystery.

At last he decided that a bear had been gathering moss for a bed. Then he went close up under a cliff of rocks and in a few minutes was peering and pointing down into a sunken place in the earth. And behold, we could see the moss move! A bear had covered himself up and was waiting to be snowed under. Bill walked all around the spot, then took position on a higher place and shouted to the bear to come out.

The bear did not move. Then he got me to throw some rocks. No response. Then Bill fired his Winchester down into the moss. In a second the big brown fellow was on his hind feet looking us full in the face and blinking his little black eyes as if trying to make us out. Bill dropped him at once, with a bullet in his brain.

I greatly regret that I never had the good fortune to encounter a Polar bear, so that I might be able to tell you more about him and his habits; for men of science and writers of books are not bear-hunters, as a rule, and so real information about this white robber-monk of the cold, blue north is meager indeed. But here is what the most eminent English authority says about the nature and habits of this one bear that I have not shaken hands with, or encountered in some sort of way on his native heath:

"The great white bear of the Arctic regions--the 'Nennok' of the Eskimo--is the largest as well as one of the best known of the whole family. It is a gigantic animal, often attaining a length of nearly nine feet and is proportionally strong and fierce. It is found over the whole of Greenland; but its numbers seem to be on the decrease. It is distinguished from other bears by its narrow head, its flat forehead in a line with its prolonged muzzle, its short ears and long neck. It is of a light, creamy color, rarely pure white, except when young, hence the Scottish whalers call it the 'brounie' and sometimes the 'farmer,' from its very agricultural appearance as it stalks leisurely over the furrowed fields of ice. Its princ.i.p.al food consists of seals, which it persecutes most indefatigably; but it is somewhat omniverous in its diet, and will often clear an islet of eider duck eggs in the course of a few hours. I once saw it watch a seal for half a day, the seal continually escaping, just as the bear was about putting his foot on it, at the atluk (or escape hole) in the ice.

Finally, it tried to circ.u.mvent its prey in another maneuver. It swam off to a distance, and when the seal was again half asleep at its atluk, the bear swam under the ice, with a view to cut off its retreat. It failed, however, and the seal finally escaped. The rage of the animal was boundless; it moaned hideously, tossing the snow in the air, and at last trotted off in a most indignant state of mind.

"Being so fond of seal-flesh, the Polar bear often proves a great nuisance to sealhunters, whose occupation he naturally regards as a catering to his wants. He is also glad of the whale carca.s.ses often found floating in the Arctic seas, and travelers have seen as many as twenty bears busily discussing the huge body of a dead whalebone whale.