<h2> <SPAN name="chap_7" id="chap_7"></SPAN> <a>CHAPTER VII</SPAN><br/><span>THE PARTING OF THE WAYS</span></h2>
<p><span class="smcap">Now</span> indeed I was truly lonely. During the
three or four weeks that had passed since I had
seen my father or mother, I had in a measure
learned to rely upon myself; nor had I so far felt
the separation keenly, because I knew that every
evening I should see Kahwa. Now she was gone
for ever. There was no longer any object in going
into the town, and the terror of that last scene was
still so vivid in my mind that I wished never to
see man again.</p>
<p>It was true that I had feared man instinctively
from the first, but familiarity with him had for a
while overcome that fear. Now it returned, and
with the fear was mingled another feeling—a feeling
of definite hatred. Originally, though afraid of
him, I had borne man no ill-will whatever, and
would have been entirely content to go on living
beside him in peace and friendliness, just as we
lived with the deer and the beaver. Man himself
made that impossible, and now I no longer wished
it. I hated him—hated him thoroughly. Had it
not been for dread of the thunder-sticks, I should
have gone down into the town and attacked the
first man that I met. I would have persuaded
other bears to go with me to rage through the
buildings, destroying every man that we could find;
and though this was impossible, I made up my
mind that it would be a bad day for any man
whom I might meet alone, when unprotected by
the weapon that gave him so great an advantage.</p>
<p>Meanwhile my present business was, somehow
and somewhere, to go on living. On that first
evening, amid my conflict of emotions, it was some
time before I could bring myself to turn my back
definitely upon the town; for it was difficult to
realize at once that there was in truth no longer
any Kahwa there, nor any reason for my going
again among the buildings, and it was late in the
night before I finally started to look for my father
and mother. I went, of course, to the place where
I had left them, and where the fight with the
stranger had taken place.</p>
<p>They were not there when I arrived, but I saw
that they had spent the preceding day at home,
and would, in all probability, be back soon after it
was light. So I stayed in the immediate neighbourhood,
and before sunrise they returned. My mother
was glad to see me, but I do not think I can say
as much for my father. I told them where I had
been, and of my visits to the town, and of poor
Kahwa’s death; and though at the time father did
not seem to pay much attention to what I said,
next day he suggested that we should move further
away from the neighbourhood of men.</p>
<p>The following afternoon we started, making our
way back along the stream by which we had descended,
and soon finding ourselves once more in
the region that had been swept by the fire. It was
still desolate, but the two months that had passed
had made a wonderful difference. It was covered
by the bright red flowers of a tall plant, standing
nearly as high as a bear’s head, which shoots up all
over the charred soil whenever a tract of forest is
burned. Other undergrowth may come up in the
following spring, but for the first year nothing
appears except the red ‘fireweed,’ and that grows
so thickly that the burnt wood is a blaze of colour,
out of which the blackened trunks of the old trees
stand up naked and gaunt.</p>
<p>We passed several houses of men by the waterside,
and gave them a wide berth. We learned
from the beavers and the ospreys that a number
of men had gone up the stream during the summer,
and few had come back, so that now there must
be many more of them in the district swept by
the fire than there had been before. We did not
wish to live in the burnt country, however, because
there was little food to be found there, and under
the fireweed the ground was still covered with a
layer of the bitter black stuff, which, on being disturbed,
got into one’s throat and eyes and nostrils.
So we turned southwards along the edge of the
track of the fire, and soon found ourselves in a
country that was entirely new to us, though differing
little in general appearance from the other
places with which we were familiar—the same
unbroken succession of hills and gulches covered
with the dense growth of good forest trees. It
was, in fact, bears’ country; and in it we felt at
home.</p>
<p>For the most part we travelled in the morning
and evening; but the summer was gone now, and
on the higher mountains it was sometimes bitterly
cold, so we often kept on moving all day. We
were not going anywhere in particular: only endeavouring
to get away from man, and, if possible,
to find a region where he had never been. But it
seemed as if man now was pushing in everywhere.
We did not see him, but continually we came across
the traces of him along the banks of the streams.
The beavers, and the kingfishers, and the ospreys,
of course, know everything that goes on along the
rivers. Nothing can pass upstream or down without
going by the beaver-dams, and the beavers are
always on the watch. You might linger about a
beaver-dam all day, and except for the smell, which
a man would not notice, you would not believe
there was a beaver near. But they are watching
you from the cracks and holes in their homes, and
in the evening, if they are not afraid of you, you
will be astonished to see twenty or thirty beavers
come out to play about what you thought was
an empty house. We never passed a dam without
asking about man, and always it was the same tale.
Men had been there a week ago, or the day before,
or when the moon last was full. And the kingfishers
and the ospreys told us the same things.
So we kept on our way southward.</p>
<p>As the days went on I grew to think less of
Kahwa; the memory of those nights spent in the
town, with the lights, and the strange noises, and
the warm man-smell all about me, began to fade
until they all seemed more like incidents of a dream
than scenes which I had actually lived through only
a few weeks before. I began to feel more as I used
to feel in the good old days before the fire, and
came again to be a part of the wild, wholesome
life of the woods. Moreover, I was growing; my
mother said that I was growing fast. No puma
would have dared to touch me now, and my unusual
experiences about the town had bred in me
a spirit of independence and self-reliance, so that
other cubs of my own age whom we met, and who,
of course, had lived always with their parents, always
seemed to me younger than I; and certainly I was
bigger and stronger than any first-year bear that I
saw. On the whole, I would have been fairly contented
with life had it not been for the estrangement
which was somehow growing up between my
father and myself. I could not help feeling that,
though I knew not why, he would have been glad
to have me go away again. So I kept out of his
way as much as possible, seldom speaking to him,
and, of course, not venturing to share any food that
he found. On the first evening after my return he
had rolled over an old log, and mother and I went
up as a matter of course to see what was there;
but he growled at me in a way that made me
stand off while he and mother finished the fungi
and the beetles. After that I kept my distance.
It did not matter much, for I was well able to
forage for myself. But I would have preferred to
have him kinder. His unkindness, however, did
not prevent him from taking for himself anything
which he wanted that I had found. One day I
came across some honey, from which he promptly
drove me away, and I had to look on while he and
mother shared the feast between them.</p>
<p>At last we came to a stream where the beavers
told us that no man had been seen in the time of
any member of their colony then living. The
stream, which was here wide enough to be a river,
came from the west, and for two or three days
we followed it down eastwards, and found no trace
or news of man; so we turned back up it again—back
past the place where we had first struck it—and
on along its course for another day’s journey
into the mountains. It was, perhaps, too much
to hope that we had lighted on a place where man
would never come; but at least we knew that for
a distance of a week’s travelling in all directions
he never yet had been, and it might be many years
before he came. Meanwhile we should have a
chance to live our lives in peace.</p>
<p>Here we stayed, moving about very little, and
feeding as much as we could; for winter was
coming on, and a bear likes to be fat and well fed
before his long sleep. It rained a good deal now,
as it always does in the mountains in the late
autumn, and as a general rule the woods were
full of mist all day, in which we went about
tearing the roots out of the soft earth, eating
the late blueberries where we could find them,
and the cranberries and the elderberries, which
were ripe on the bushes, now and then coming
across a clump of nut-trees, and once in a while,
the greatest of all treats, revelling in a feast of
honey.</p>
<p>One morning, after a cold and stormy night, we
saw that the tops of the highest mountains were
covered with snow. It might be a week or two
yet before the snow fell over the country as a
whole, or it might be only a day or two; for the
wind was blowing from the north, biting cold, and
making us feel numb and drowsy. So my father
decided that it was time to make our homes for
the winter. He had already fixed upon a spot
where a tree had fallen and torn out its roots,
making a cave well shut in on two sides, and
blocked on a third by another fallen log; and here,
without thinking, I had taken it as a matter of
course that we should somehow all make our
winter homes together. But when that morning
he started out, with mother after him, and I
attempted to follow, he drove me away. I
followed yet for a while, but he kept turning
back and growling at me, and at last told me
bluntly that I must go and shift for myself. I
took it philosophically, I think, but it was with
a heavy heart that I turned away to seek a winter
home for myself.</p>
<p>It did not take me long to decide on the spot.
At the head of a narrow gully, where at some
time or other a stream must have run, there was
a tree half fallen, and leaning against the hillside.
A little digging behind the tree would make as
snug and sheltered a den as I could want. So I
set to work, and in the course of a few hours I
had made a sufficiently large hollow, and into it
I scraped all the leaves and pine-needles in the
neighbourhood, and, by working about inside and
turning round and round, I piled them up on all
sides until I had a nest where I was perfectly
sheltered, with only an opening in front large
enough to go in and out of. This opening I
would almost close when the time came, but for
the present I left it open and lived inside, sleeping
much of the time, but still continuing for a week
or ten days to go out in the mornings and evenings
for food. But it was getting colder and colder,
and the woods had become strangely silent. The
deer had gone down to the lower ground at the
first sign of coming winter, and the coyotes and the
wolves had followed to spend the cold months in
the foot-hills and on the plains about the haunts
of man. The woodchucks were already asleep
below-ground, and of the birds only the woodpeckers
and the crossbills, and some smaller birds
fluttering among the pine-branches, remained.
There was a fringe of ice along the edges of the
streams, and the kingfishers and the ospreys had
both flown to where the waters would remain open
throughout the year. The beavers had been very
busy for some time, but now, if one went to the
nearest dam in the evening, there was not a sign
of life.</p>
<p>At last the winter came. It had been very cold
and gray for a day or two, and I felt dull and
torpid. And then, one morning towards mid-day,
the white flakes began to fall. There had been a
few little flurries of snow before, lasting only for
a minute or two; but this was different. The
great flakes fell slowly and softly, and soon the
whole landscape began to grow white. Through
the opening in my den I watched the snow falling
for some time, but did not venture out; and as
the afternoon wore on, and it only fell faster and
faster, I saw that it would soon pile up and close
the door upon me.</p>
<p>There was no danger of its coming in, for I had
taken care that the roof overhung far enough to
prevent anything falling in from above, and the den
was too well sheltered for the wind to drift the
snow inside. So I burrowed down into my leaves
and pine-needles, and worked them up on both
sides till only a narrow slit of an opening remained,
and through this slit, sitting back on my haunches
against the rear of the little cave, I watched the
white wall rising outside. All that night and all
next day it snowed, and by the second evening
there was hardly a ray of light coming in. I
remember feeling a certain pride in being all alone,
in the warm nest made by myself, for the first time
in my life; and I sat back and mumbled at my
paw, and grew gradually drowsier and drowsier,
till I hardly knew when the morning came, for
I was very sleepy and the daylight scarcely pierced
the wall of snow outside. And before another
night fell I was asleep, while outside the white
covering which was to shut me in for the next
four months at least, was growing thicker until it
was many feet deep all around, and under it I was
as safe and snug up there in the heart of the
mountains as ever a man could be in any house
that he might build.</p>
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