<h2> <SPAN name="chap_2" id="chap_2"></SPAN> <a>CHAPTER II</SPAN><br/><span>CUBHOOD DAYS</span></h2>
<p><span class="smcap">When</span> they are small, bear-cubs rarely go about
alone. The whole family usually keeps together,
or, if it separates, it is generally into couples—one
cub with each of the parents; or the father goes off
alone, leaving both cubs with the mother. A cub
toddling off alone in its own woolly, comfortable
ignorance would be sure to make all manner of
mistakes in what it ate, and it might find itself in
very serious trouble in other ways.</p>
<p>Bears, when they live far enough away from man,
have absolutely nothing to be afraid of. There are,
of course, bigger bears—perhaps bigger ones of our
own kind, either black or brown (‘cinnamon,’ as
the brown members of our family are called), or,
especially, grizzly. But I never heard of a grizzly
bear hurting one of us. When I smell a grizzly in
the neighbourhood, I confess that it seems wiser to
go round the other side of the hill; but that is
probably inherited superstition more than anything
else. My father and mother did it, and so do I.
But I have known several of our cinnamon cousins
in my life, and have been friendly enough with
them—with the she-bears especially. Apart from
these, there lives nothing in the forest that a full-grown
black bear has any cause to fear. He goes
where he pleases and does what he likes, and
nobody ventures to dispute his rights. With a
cub, however, it is different.</p>
<p>I had heard my father and mother speak of
pumas, or mountain lions, and I knew their smell
well enough—and did not like it. But I shall
never forget the first one that I saw.</p>
<p>We were out together—father, mother, Kahwa,
and I—and it was getting well on in the morning.
The sun was up, and the day growing warm, and
I, wandering drowsily along with my nose to the
ground, had somehow strayed away from the rest,
when suddenly I smelled puma very strong. As I
threw myself up on my haunches, he came out from
behind a tree, and stood facing me only a few yards
away. I was simply paralyzed with fear—one of
the two or three times in my life when I have been
honestly and thoroughly frightened. As I looked
at him, wondering what would happen next, he
crouched down till he was almost flat along the
ground, and I can see him now, his whole yellow
body almost hidden behind his head, his eyes
blazing, and his tail going slap, slap! from side to
side. How I wished that I had a tail!</p>
<p>Then inch by inch he crept towards me, very
slowly, putting one foot forward and then the other.
I did not know what to do, and so did what proved
to be the best thing possible: I sat quite still, and
screamed for mother as loud as I could. She must
have known from my voice that something serious
was the matter, because in a second, just as the
puma’s muscles were growing tense for the final
spring, there was a sudden crash of broken boughs
behind me, a feeling as if a whirlwind was going
by, and my mother shot past me straight at the
puma. I had no idea that she could go so fast.
The puma was up on his hind-legs to meet her, but
her impetus was so terrific that it bore him backwards,
without seeming to check her speed in the
least, and away they went rolling over and over
down the hill.</p>
<p>But it was not much of a fight. The puma,
willing enough to attack a little cub like me, knew
that he was no match for my mother, and while
they were still rolling he wrenched himself loose,
and was off among the trees like a shadow.</p>
<p></p>
<p>When mother came back to me blood was running
over her face, where, at the moment of meeting,
the puma had managed to give her one wicked,
tearing claw down the side of her nose. So, as
soon as my father and Kahwa joined us, we all
went down to the stream, where mother bathed
her face, and kept it in the cold water for nearly
the whole day.</p>
<p>It was probably in some measure to pay me out
for this scrape, and to give me another lesson in
the unwisdom of too much independence and
inquisitiveness in a youngster, that my parents,
soon after this, allowed me to get into trouble with
that porcupine.</p>
<p>One evening my father had taken us to a place
where the ground was full of mountain lilies. It
was early in the year, when the green shoots were
just beginning to appear above the earth; and
wherever there was a shoot there was a bulb down
below. And a mountain lily bulb is one of the very
nicest things to eat that there is—so sweet, and
juicy, and crisp! The place was some distance
from our home, and after that first visit Kahwa and
I kept begging to be taken there again. At last
my father yielded, and we set out early one morning
just before day was breaking.</p>
<p></p>
<p>We were not loitering on the way, but trotting
steadily along all together, and Kahwa and I, at
least, were full of expectation of the lily bulbs in
store, when, in a little open space among the trees,
we came upon an object unlike anything I had ever
seen before. As we came upon it, I could have
declared that it was moving—that it was an animal
which, at sight of us, had stopped stock still, and
tucked its head and toes in underneath it. But it
certainly was not moving now, and did not look as
if it ever could move again, so finally I concluded
that it must be a large fungus or a strange new
kind of hillock, with black and white grass growing
all over it. My father and mother had stopped
short when they saw it, and just sat up on their
haunches and looked at it; and Kahwa did the
same, snuggling up close to my mother’s side.
Was it an animal, or a fungus, or only a mound of
earth? The way to find out was to smell it. So,
without any idea of hurting it, I trotted up and
reached out my nose. As I did so it shrank a little
more into itself, and became rounder and more like
a fungus than ever; but the act of shrinking also
made the black and white grass stick out a little
further, so that my nose met it sooner than I
expected, and I found that, if it was grass, it was
very sharp grass, and pricked horribly. I tried
again, and again it shrank up and pricked me worse
than ever. Then I heard my father chuckling to
himself.</p>
<p>That made me angry, for I always have detested
being laughed at, and, without stopping to think,
I smacked the thing just as hard as I could. A
moment later I was hopping round on three legs
howling with pain, for a bunch of the quills had
gone right into my paw, where they were still
sticking, one coming out on the other side.</p>
<p>My father laughed, but my mother drew out the
quills with her teeth, and that hurt worse than
anything; and all day, whenever she found a particularly
fat lily bulb, she gave it to me. For my
part, I could only dig for the bulbs with my left
paw, and it was ever so many days before I could
run on all four feet again.</p>
<p>All these things must have happened when I
was very young—less than three months old—because
we were still living in the same place,
whereas when summer came we moved away, as
bears always do, and had no fixed home during the
hot months.</p>
<p>Bear-cubs are born when the mother is still in
her winter den, and they are usually five or six
weeks old before they come out into the world at
all. Even then at first, when the cubs are very
young, the family stays close at home, and for
some time I imagine that the longest journey I
made was when I tumbled those fifty feet downhill.
Father or mother might wander away alone
in the early morning or evening for a while, but
for the most part we were all four at home by the
rock and the cedar-trees, with the bare brown tree-trunks
growing up all round out of the bare brown
mountain-sides, and Kahwa and I spending our
time lying sleepily cuddled up to mother, or
romping together and wishing we could catch
squirrels.</p>
<p>There were a great many squirrels about—large
gray ones mostly; but living in a fir-tree close by
us was a black one with a deplorable temper.</p>
<p>Every day he used to come and quarrel with us.
Whenever he had nothing particular to do, he
would say to himself, ‘I’ll go and tease those old
bears.’ And he did. His plan was to get on our
trees from behind, where we could not see him,
then to come round on our side about five or six
feet from the ground, just safely out of reach, and
there, hanging head downwards, call us every
name he could think of. Squirrels have an awful
vocabulary, but I never knew one that could talk
like Blacky. And every time he thought of something
new to say he waved his tail at us in a way
that was particularly aggravating. You have no
idea how other animals poke fun at us because we
have no tails, and how sensitive we really are on
the subject. They say that it was to hide our lack
of tail that we originally got into the habit of
sitting up on our haunches whenever we meet a
stranger.</p>
<p>Kahwa and I used to make all sorts of plans to
catch Blacky, but we might as well have tried to
catch a moonbeam. He knew exactly how far we
could reach from the ground, and if we made a
rush for him he was always three inches too high.
Then we would run round on opposite sides of the
tree in the hope of cutting him off when he came
down. But when we did that he never did come
down, but just went up instead, till he reached
a place where the branches of our trees nearly
touched those of his own fir, and then jumped
across. We always hoped he would miss that
jump, and Kahwa and I waited down below with
our mouths open for him to drop in, but he
never did.</p>
<p>We used to try and persuade mother to go up
his tree after him, but she knew very well that she
could neither catch him nor get out on the thin
branches where his nest was. There is only one
way in which a bear can catch squirrels, and that
is by pretending to be dead or asleep; for squirrels
are so idiotically inquisitive that sooner or later
they are certain to come right up to you if you do
this, and sit on your nose. Some bears, I believe,
are fond of squirrels, but I confess I never cared
for them. There is so much fluff and stringy stuff
in them, and so little to eat.</p>
<p>Chipmunks<SPAN name="Anchor-2" id="Anchor-2"></SPAN><SPAN href="#Footnote-2" class="fnanchor" title="Go to footnote 2.">[2]</SPAN> are different. Though smaller
than squirrels, they are much less fluffy in proportion,
and taste almost as nice as mice.</p>
<p>Next to Blacky, our most frequent visitor was
Rat-tat, the woodpecker. The air in the mountains
is very still, so that you can hear sounds a long
way, and all day long from every direction the
‘rat-tat-tat-tat!’ of the woodpeckers was ringing
through the woods. In the evening when the sun
was going down, they used to sit on the very tops
of the trees, and call to each other from hill to hill—just
two long whistles, ‘whee-whoo, whee-whoo.’
It was a sad noise, but I liked Rat-tat. He was so
jauntily gay in his suit of black and white, with his
bright red crest, and always so immensely busy.
Starting near the bottom of a tree, he worked
steadily up it—rat-tat-tat-tat! and up—rat-tat-tat-tat!
till he got to the top; then down like a flash to
another, to begin all over again. Grubs he was
after, and nothing else mattered. Grubs—rat-tat-tat-tat!
rat-tat-tat-tat! grubs! and up and up he
went.</p>
<p>One of our cedars was dead at the top, and Rat-tat
used to come there nearly every day. Little
chips and splinters of wood would come floating
down to us, and once a lovely fat beetle grub that
he had somehow overlooked came plump down
under my very nose. If that was the kind of thing
that he found up there, I was not surprised that he
was fond of our tree. I would have gone up too,
if I could; but the dead part would never have
been safe for me.</p>
<p>Very soon we began to be taken out on long
excursions, going all four together, as I have said,
and then we began to learn how much that is nice
to eat there is in the world.</p>
<p>You have probably no idea, for instance, how
many good things there may be under one rotting
log. Even if you do not get a mouse or a chipmunk,
you are sure of a fringe of greenstuff which,
from lack of sunlight, has grown white and juicy,
and almost as sure of some mushrooms or other
fungi, most of which are delicious. But before you
can touch them you have to look after the insects.
Mushrooms will wait, but the sooner you catch
beetles, and earwigs, and ants, and grubs, the
better. It is always worth while to roll a log
over, if you can, no matter how much trouble
it costs; and a big stone is sometimes nearly as
good.</p>
<p>Insects, of course, are small, and it would take a
lot of ants, or even beetles, to make a meal for a
bear; but they are good, and they help out. Some
wild animals, especially those which prey upon
others, eat a lot at one time, and then starve till
they can kill again. A bear, on the other hand, is
wandering about for more than half of the twenty-four
hours, except in the very heat of summer, and
he is eating most of the while that he wanders. The
greater part of his food, of course, is greenstuff—lily
bulbs, white camas roots, wild-onions, and
young shoots and leaves. As he walks he browses
a mouthful of young leaves here, scratches up a
root there, tears the bark off a decaying tree and
eats the insects underneath, lifts a stone and finds
a mouse or a lizard beneath, or loiters for twenty
minutes over an ant-hill. With plenty of time, he
is never in a hurry, and every little counts.</p>
<p>But most of all in summer I used to love to go
down to the stream. In warm weather, during the
heat of the day, bears stay in the shelter of thickets,
among the brush by the water or under the shade of a
fallen tree. As the sun sank we would move down
to the stream, and lie all through the long evening
in the shallows, where the cold water rippled
against one’s sides. And along the water there
was always something good to eat—not merely the
herbage and the roots of the water-plants, but frogs
and insects of all sorts among the grass. Our
favourite bathing-place was just above a wide pool
made by a beaver-dam. The pool itself was
deep in places, but before the river came to it, it
flowed for a hundred yards and more over a level
gravel bottom, so shallow that even as a cub I
could walk from shore to shore without the water
being above my shoulders. At the edge of the
pool the same black and white kingfisher was
always sitting on the same branch when we came
down, and he disliked our coming, and <em>chirred</em> at us
to go away. I used to love to pretend not to
understand him, and to walk solemnly through the
water underneath and all round his branch. It
made him furious, and sent him <em>chirring</em> upstream
to find another place to fish, where there were no
idiotic bear-cubs who did not know any better than
to walk about among his fish.</p>
<p>Here, too, my father and mother taught us to
fish; but it was a long time before I managed to
catch a trout for myself. It takes such a dreadful
lot of sitting still. Having found where a fish is
lying, probably under an overhanging branch or
beneath the grass jutting out from the bank, you
lie down silently as close to the edge of the water
as you can get, and slip one paw in, ever so
gradually, behind the fish, and move it towards
him gently—gently. If he takes fright and darts
away, you leave your paw where it is, or move it
as close to the spot where he was lying as you
can reach, and wait. Sooner or later he will come
back, swimming downstream and then swinging
round to take his station almost exactly in the
same spot as before. If you leave your paw
absolutely still, he does not mind it, and may
even, on his return, come and lie right up against
it. If so, you strike at once. More probably he
will stop a few inches or a foot away. If you
have already reached as far as you can towards
him, then is the time that you need all your
patience. Again and again he darts out to take
a fly from the surface of the water or swallow
something that is floated down to him by the
current, and each time that he comes back he
may shift his position an inch or two. At last
he comes to where you can actually crook your
claws under his tail. Ever so cautiously you
move your paw gently halfway up towards his
head, and then, when your claws are almost
touching him, you strike—strike, once and hard,
with a hooking blow that sends him whirling like
a bar of silver far out on the bank behind you.
And trout is good—the plump, dark, pink-banded
trout of the mountain streams. But you must
not strike one fraction of a second too soon, for
if your paw has more than an inch to travel before
the claws touch him he is gone, and all you feel
is the flip of a tail upon the inner side of the paw,
and all your time is wasted.</p>
<p>It is hard to learn to wait long enough, and I
know that at first I used to strike at fish that were
a foot away, with no more chance of catching them
than of making supper off a waterfall. But father
and mother used to catch a fish apiece for us almost
every evening, and gradually Kahwa and I began
to take them for ourselves.</p>
<p></p>
<p>Then, as the daylight faded, the beavers came
out upon their dam and played about in the pool,
swimming and diving and slapping the surface
with their tails with a noise like that of an osprey
when he strikes the water in diving for a fish.
But though they had time for play, they were busy
folk, the beavers. Some of them were constantly
patching and tinkering at the dam, and some
always at work, except when the sun was up,
one relieving another, gnawing their way with
little tiny bites steadily through one of the great
trees that stood by the water’s edge, and always
gnawing it so that when, after weeks of labour,
it fell, it never failed to fall across the stream
precisely where they wanted it. If an enemy
appeared—at the least sign or smell of wolf or
puma—there would be a loud ringing slap from
one of the tails upon the water, and in an instant
every beaver had vanished under water and was
safe inside the house among the logs of the dam,
the door of which was down below the surface.</p>
<p>Us bears they were used to and did not mind;
but they never let us come too near. Sitting
safely on the top of their piled logs, or twenty
feet away in the water, they would talk to us
pleasantly enough; but—well, my father told me
that young, very young, beaver was good eating,
and I imagine that the beavers knew that we
thought so, and were afraid, perhaps, that we might
not be too particular about the age.</p>
<p>As the dusk changed to darkness we would
leave the water and roam over the hillsides,
sometimes sleeping through the middle hours of
the night, but in summer more often roaming
on, to come back to the stream for a while just
before the sun was up, and then turning in to sleep
till he went down again.</p>
<p>Those long rambles in the summer moonlight,
or in the early dawn when everything reeked
with dew, how good they were! And when the
afternoon of a broiling day brought a thunderstorm,
the delight of the smell of the moist earth
and the almost overpowering scent of the pines!
And when the berries were ripe—blueberries,
cranberries, wild-raspberries, and, later in the
year, elderberries—no fruit, nor anything else to
eat, has ever tasted as they did then in that first
summer when I was a cub.</p>
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