<h2> <SPAN name="chap_10" id="chap_10"></SPAN> <a>CHAPTER X</SPAN><br/><span>A VISIT TO THE OLD HOME</span></h2>
<p><span class="smcap">When</span> I awoke I found that it was indeed all true,
but I was so frightfully stiff that it was not easy to
be very happy all at once. I slept straight on all
through the morning until late in the afternoon.
My new companion had been awake, and had
wandered round a little in the early morning, but
without awaking me. When I awoke in the
afternoon she was asleep by my side. I tried to
stand up, but every bone in my body hurt, every
muscle ached, and every joint was so stiff that
I could almost hear it creak. The fuss that I made
in trying to get on to my feet disturbed her, and
she helped me up. Somehow I managed to stagger
along, and we went off for a short ramble in search
of food. I could hardly dig at all, but she shared
with me the roots she found, and with a few
berries we made a sort of a meal; and then I was
so tired that we lay down again, and I slept right
on till daybreak the following morning.</p>
<p></p>
<p>After that I felt myself again. It was days
before all the stiffness wore off, and weeks before
my wounds were entirely healed; while, as you
can see, I carry some of the scars to this day.</p>
<p>For some days the bear that I had beaten hung
about, in the hope of tempting Wooffa (that was
what I called my wife, it being my mother’s name)
to go back to him. But he was a pitiable object,
limping about with his broken leg, and I never
even offered to fight him again. There was no
need for it. Wooffa did not wish to have anything
to say to him, and she ignored him for the most
part unless he came too near, when she growled at
him in a way that was not to be misunderstood.
I really felt sorry for him, remembering my own
loneliness, and realizing that it was probably worse
to lose her and have to go off alone, while she
belonged to somebody else, than never to have
known her at all. After a while he recognised
that it was hopeless, and we saw him no more.
We ourselves, indeed, did not stay in the same
place, but as long as the summer lasted we wandered
where we pleased.</p>
<p>We suited each other admirably, Wooffa and I.
We had much the same tastes, with equal cause to
hate man and to wish to keep away from his neighbourhood,
and we were very nearly of the same size
and strength. I never knew a bear that had a
keener scent, and she was a marvel at finding
honey. In many ways it is a great advantage for
two bears to be together, for they have two noses
and two sets of eyes and ears, and two can turn
over a log or a stone that is too heavy for one.
Altogether, I now lived better and was much
more free from care than I had been; while above
all was the great fact of companionship—the mere
not being alone. In small ways she used to tyrannize
over me, just as mother did over father; but I
liked it, and neither of us ever found any tit-bit
which was large enough to share without being
willing to go halves with the other.</p>
<p>The rest of that summer we spent together, and
all the next, and I think she was as contented as I.
What I had hoped came true, for I increased in
weight so much that I do not think there was
a bear that we saw that could have held his own
against me in fair fight. Certainly there was no
pair that could have stood up against Wooffa and
me together; for though not quite so high at the
shoulder as I, she was splendidly built and magnificently
strong. On her chest she had a white
spot or streak, of which she was very proud, and
which she kept always beautifully white and well
combed.</p>
<p>Early in the summer of the year after I had met
her, I took her to visit my childhood home. It
needed a week’s steady travelling to get there, and
when we arrived in the neighbourhood we found
the whole place so changed that I could hardly find
my way. It was more than three years since I
had seen it, and man had now taken possession
of the whole country. For the last day or two
of our journey we had to go very carefully, for
men’s houses were scattered along the banks of
every stream, and wherever two streams of any
size came together there had grown up a small
town. In the burnt district many of the blackened
trees were still standing, but the ground was
carpeted with brush again, and young trees were
shooting up in every direction. The beaver-dams
were most of them broken, and those which
remained were deserted. On all sides were the
marks of man’s handiwork.</p>
<p>At last we came to the beaver-dam, the pool
of which had saved my life in the fire. There
were houses close beside the pool, and a large
clearing which had been made in the forest was
now a grass-field, and in that field for the first time
I saw cows. We had already passed several strings
of mules and ponies on the mountain-paths which
the men had made, each animal carrying a huge
bundle lashed on its back; and now we met horses
dragging carts along the wide road which had been
made along the border of the stream. Of course,
we did not venture near the road during the day,
but stayed hidden well up on the mountain-side,
where we could hear the noise of people passing,
and in the evening we made our way down.</p>
<p>Just as we arrived at the road, going very
cautiously, a pair of horses dragging a waggon
came along. Curious to see it, we stayed close by,
and peered out from behind the trees; but as they
came abreast of us a gust of wind blew the scent
of us to the horses, and they took fright and
seemed to go mad in one instant. Plunging and
rearing, they tried to turn round, backing the
waggon off the road into a tree. Then, putting
their heads down, they started blindly thundering
up the road, with the waggon swaying and rocking
behind them. The man shouted and pulled and
thrashed them with his whip, but the horses were
too mad with terror to listen to him. On they
dashed until there came a turn in the road, when
with a crash the waggon collided with a tree.
Precisely what happened we could not see. Bits
of the waggon were strewn about the road, while
the horses plunged on with what was left of it
dangling behind them. But in what was left there
was no man.</p>
<p>We made our way along the edge of the road to
where the crash had taken place, and there among
the broken wheels and splinters of the waggon we
found the man lying, half on the road and half
in the forest, dead. It was some time before we
could make up our minds to approach him, but
at last I touched him with my nose, and then we
turned him over with our paws. We were still
inspecting him, when we heard the sound of other
men and horses approaching, and before they came
in sight we slipped off into the wood. We saw the
new horses shy just as the former ones had done,
but whether at the smell of ourselves or of the
dead man in the road we did not know. The men
managed to quiet them, however, and got out of the
waggon, and after standing over the dead man for a
while they lifted him and took him away with them.</p>
<p>We loitered about until it was dark, and then
tried to make our way on to where my old
home had been. It could not be half a mile
away, but that half-mile was beset with houses,
and as we drew nearer the houses became thicker,
until I saw that it would be useless to go on, for
where the cedar-trees used to grow, where the hill-slope
was that I had tumbled down, where Blacky
the squirrel and Rat-tat used to live, was now the
middle of a town. At the first sign of dawn we
made our way back to the beaver-pool, and, crossing
the dam again, turned our backs for ever on the
neighbourhood where I had spent my childhood.
It was no longer bears’ country.</p>
<p>Now for the first time I understood what the
coming of man meant to the people of the forest
and the mountains. I had, indeed, seen a man-town
before, and the men coming and going up
and down the streams, but, somehow, it had not
occurred to me that where they came they never
went away again. These men here, however, with
their houses, their roads and cows and horses—they
would never go away. They were wiping
out the forest: the animals that lived in it had
vanished: the very face of the mountains was
changed, so that I could not tell the spots that
I knew best; and I was sure that we could never
drive them out again. I was sorry that I had come
to see the old home, and we were a gloomy couple
as we started on our return journey southwards.</p>
<p></p>
<p>For a long time yet we would have to go
cautiously, for man was all around us. Along
the streams he had been digging, digging, digging,
endlessly digging, but what he gained by it we
could not comprehend; for we often watched him
at work, and he seemed to take nothing out of the
ground, nor to eat anything as he dug. When he
was not digging, he was chopping trees, either to
build more houses, to make dams across the streams,
or to break the wood up into pieces to burn. So
wherever he came the forest disappeared, and the
rivers were disfigured with holes and ditches and
piles of gravel on which no green thing grew, and
nothing lived that was good to eat.</p>
<p>In travelling we kept away from the streams as
much as possible, moving along the hillsides, and
only coming down to the water when we wished
to cross. We had been travelling in this way for
some two or three nights, when one morning very
early we came down to a stream at a point close by
a clump of buildings. The wind was blowing from
them to us, and suddenly Wooffa threw herself up
on her haunches and gasped one word—‘Pig!’</p>
<p>I had heard of pig before, and Wooffa had eaten
it to her cost; and in spite of the cost she agreed
with everyone in saying that young pig is the very
best thing there is to eat in all the world. I had
often wondered whether some of the best scraps
that I had picked up about the houses in the town
in the old days might not be pig, and now I know
that they were. But they were cooked and salted
pig, and not the fresh young pig newly killed,
which is the joy of joys to a bear. This it was that
Wooffa now smelled, and as the scent came to my
nostrils I knew that it was something new to me
and something very good.</p>
<p>The smell came from a sort of pen at one side
of the biggest building, not unlike that in which
Kahwa had been shut up, only the walls were not
so high. They were too high to look over, however,
and there was no way of climbing up until
Wooffa helped me, and by standing on her back I
was able to see over. It was a small square pen,
the floor deep in mud, and at one end was a covered
place something like the boxes that men keep dogs
in; and in the door of this covered place I could see,
asleep, a large black-and-white sow and five little
pigs.</p>
<p>If I got inside, I saw that I could climb on the
roof of the covered part and get out again; so I
did not hesitate, but with one scramble I was over
and down in the middle of the family. Wouff!
what a noise they made! But with one smack
of my paw I had killed the nearest little one, and
grabbed it in my mouth, and in a minute I was up
on the covered roof and out with Wooffa on the
grass outside.</p>
<p>We did not stop to eat the pig there, for the
others were still squealing as if they were all being
killed, and we were afraid that they would wake
the men; so we made off as fast as we could into
the wood, taking the pig with us. It was as well
that we did, for we had not gone far before we
heard a door bang and a dog barking, and then
the voices of men shouting to each other. We
kept on for a mile or so before we stopped, down
by the side of a little stream. Then we divided
the pig fairly, and nothing that I had heard about
his goodness had been exaggerated. No; there
are many good things in the world—honey and
berries and sugar and cooked things; but pig is
above all others.</p>
<p>So good was he that, if I had been by myself, I
think I should have stayed there, and gone down
again next night for another, and probably been
shot for my pains. But, as Wooffa had told me
long ago, it was in doing just that very thing that
her husband and two children had lost their lives.
They had found some pigs kept by men just as we
had, and had taken three the first night. The next
night they went and got two more; the third
night the men were waiting for them, and only
Wooffa escaped. The smell of the pig when it came
to her again after two years had for the moment
overcome all her fears; but she told me that she
had been terrified all the time that I was in the
sty, and nothing on earth would tempt her to risk
a second visit.</p>
<p>I have said before that greediness is the undoing
of nearly all wild animals, and, however much I
longed for another taste of pig, I knew that she
was right. It was better to go without pig and
keep alive. So we set our faces resolutely in the
other direction, and kept on our course, vowing
that nothing should tempt us to linger in the
proximity of man. And very glad we both were
when we found ourselves at last once more in a
region where as yet man had not been seen, where
we could wander abroad as we pleased by night
or day, where the good forest smells were still
untainted, and where we could lie in the water of
the streams at sunset or fish as long as we pleased
without thought of an enemy.</p>
<p>It was a beautiful autumn that year, and I think,
as I look back to it, I was as happy then as ever
in my life. There had been a splendid crop of
berries, in contrast to the year before, and now,
with the long clear autumn, all signs pointed to a
hard winter. So we made our preparations for the
cold season early, hollowing out our dens carefully
side by side under the roots of two huge trees,
where they were well sheltered from the wind, and
lining them with sticks and leaves. Wooffa in
particular spent a long time over hers; and afterwards
I understood why.</p>
<p>It was still bright autumn weather, when the
birds flying southwards told us that already snow
had fallen to the north, and it was bitterly cold.
Everyone was talking of the severe winter that
was ahead of us, and the wolves and the coyotes
had gone to the plains. We were glad we had
made our preparations in good time, for, when the
winter came, it came, in spite of all that had been
said about it, unexpectedly. There was no warning
of snow upon the higher peaks, but one night the
north wind blew steadily the long night through,
and in the morning the winter was on us, settling
down on all the country, peak and valley, together.</p>
<p>That day we retired into our dens for good.
When I came out in the spring, Wooffa had not
appeared, so I began to scratch away the stuff
from the opening of her den, and as I did so I
heard new noises inside; and all at once it dawned
upon me that I was a father. Wooffa had brought
me a little Kahwa and a little Wahka for my
own.</p>
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