The Project Gutenberg EBook of True Bear Stories, by Joaquin Miller
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
Title: True Bear Stories
Author: Joaquin Miller
Release Date: September 26, 2012 [EBook #40869]
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TRUE BEAR STORIES ***
Produced by David Edwards, Matthew Wheaton and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive)
TRUE BEAR STORIES
BY JOAQUIN MILLER,
WITH
INTRODUCTORY NOTES
BY
DR. DAVID STARR JORDAN,
President of Leland Stanford, Jr., University.
TOGETHER WITH A THRILLING ACCOUNT OF THE
CAPTURE OF THE CELEBRATED GRIZZLY "MONARCH."
_FULLY ILLUSTRATED._
CHICAGO AND NEW YORK:
RAND, McNALLY & COMPANY,
PUBLISHERS.
Copyright, 1900, by Rand, McNally & Co.
DEDICATED TO
MY DEAR LITTLE DAUGHTER,
JUANITA MILLER,
FOR WHOSE PLEASURE AND INSTRUCTION I HAVE MANY TIMES
DUG UP THE MOST OF THESE STORIES FROM
OUT THE DAYS OF MY BOYHOOD.
PREFACE.
_My Bright Young Reader_: I was once exactly your own age. Like all
boys, I was, from the first, fond of bear stories, and above all, I
did not like stories that seemed the least bit untrue. I always
preferred a natural and reasonable story and one that would instruct
as well as interest. This I think best for us all, and I have acted on
this line in compiling these comparatively few bear stories from a
long life of action in our mountains and up and down the continent.
As a rule, the modern bear is not a bloody, bad fellow, whatever he
may have been in Bible days. You read, almost any circus season, about
the killing of his keeper by a lion, a tiger, a panther, or even the
dreary old elephant, but you never hear of a tame bear's hurting
anybody.
I suppose you have been told, and believe, that bears will eat boys,
good or bad, if they meet them in the woods. This is not true. On the
contrary, there are several well-authenticated cases, in Germany
mostly, where bears have taken lost children under their protection,
one boy having been reared from the age of four to sixteen by a she
bear without ever seeing the face of man.
I have known several persons to be maimed or killed in battles with
bears, but in every case it was not the bear that began the fight, and
in all my experience of about half a century I never knew a bear to
eat human flesh, as does the tiger and like beasts.
Each branch of the bear family is represented here and each has its
characteristics. By noting these as you go along you may learn
something not set down in the schoolbooks. For the bear is a shy old
hermit and is rarely encountered in his wild state by anyone save the
hardy hunter, whose only interest in the event is to secure the skin
and carcass.
Of course, now and then, a man of science meets a bear in the woods,
but the meeting is of short duration. If the bear does not leave, the
man of books does, and so we seldom get his photograph as he really
appears in his wild state. The first and only bear I ever saw that
seemed to be sitting for his photograph was the swamp, or "sloth,"
bear--Ursus Labiatus--found in the marshes at the mouth of the
Mississippi River. You will read of an encounter with him further on.
I know very well that there exists a good deal of bad feeling between
boys and bears, particularly on the part of boys. The trouble began, I
suppose, about the time when that old she bear destroyed more than
forty boys at a single meeting, for poking fun at a good old prophet.
And we read that David, when a boy, got very angry at a she bear and
slew her single-handed and alone for interfering with his flock. So
you see the feud between the boy and bear family is an old one indeed.
But I am bound to say that I have found much that is pathetic, and
something that is almost half-human, in this poor, shaggy, shuffling
hermit. He doesn't want much, only the wildest and most worthless
parts of the mountains or marshes, where, if you will let him alone,
he will let you alone, as a rule. Sometimes, out here in California,
he loots a pig-pen, and now and then he gets among the bees. Only last
week, a little black bear got his head fast in a bee-hive that had
been improvised from a nail-keg, and the bee-farmer killed him with a
pitchfork; but it is only when hungry and far from home that he
seriously molests us.
The bear is a wise beast. This is, perhaps, because he never says
anything. Next to the giraffe, which you may know never makes any
noise or note whatever, notwithstanding the wonderful length of his
throat, the bear is the most noiseless of beasts. With his nose to the
ground all the time, standing up only now and then to pull a wild plum
or pick a bunch of grapes, or knock a man down if he must, he seems to
me like some weary old traveler that has missed the right road of life
and doesn't quite know what to do with himself. Ah! if he would only
lift up his nose and look about over this beautiful world, as the
Indians say the grizzly bear was permitted to do before he disobeyed
and got into trouble, an account of which you will find further on,
why, the bear might be less a bear.
Stop here and reflect on how much there is in keeping your face well
lifted. The pig with his snout to the ground will be forever a pig;
the bear will be a bear to the end of his race, because he will not
hold up his head in the world; but the horse--look at the horse!
However, our business is with the bear now.
CONTENTS.
INTRODUCTORY NOTES,
I. A BEAR ON FIRE,
II. MUSIC-LOVING BEARS,
III. MY FIRST GRIZZLY,
IV. TWIN BABIES,
V. IN SWIMMING WITH A BEAR,
VI. A FAT LITTLE EDITOR AND THREE LITTLE BROWNS,
VII. TREEING A BEAR,
VIII. BILL CROSS AND HIS PET BEAR,
IX. THE GREAT GRIZZLY BEAR,
X. AS A HUMORIST,
XI. A GRIZZLY'S SLY LITTLE JOKE,
XII. THE GRIZZLY AS FREMONT FOUND HIM,
XIII. THE BEAR WITH SPECTACLES,
XIV. THE BEAR-SLAYER OF SAN DIEGO,
XV. ALASKAN AND POLAR BEAR,
XVI. MONNEHAN, THE GREAT BEAR-HUNTER OF OREGON,
XVII. THE BEAR "MONARCH"--HOW HE WAS CAPTURED,
INTRODUCTORY NOTES.
The bear is the most human of all the beasts. He is not the most
man-like in anatomy, nor the nearest in the line of evolution. The
likeness is rather in his temper and way of doing things and in the
vicissitudes of his life. He is a savage, of course, but most men are
that--wild members of a wild fauna--and, like wild men, the bear is a
clumsy, good-natured blunderer, eating with his fingers in default of
a knife, and preferring any day a mouthful of berries to the
excitement of a fight.
In this book Joaquin Miller has tried to show us the bear as he is,
not the traditional bear of the story-books. In season and out of
season, the bear has been represented always the same bear, "as much
alike as so many English noblemen in evening dress," and always as a
bloody bear.
Mr. Miller insists that there are bears and bears, as unlike one
another in nature and action as so many horses, hogs or goats. This
much they have in common--_bears are never cruel_. They are
generally full of homely, careless kindness, and are very fond of
music as well as of honey, blackberries, nuts, fish and other
delicacies of the savage feast.
The matter of season affects a bear's temper and looks as the time of
the day affects those of a man.
He goes to bed in the fall, when the fish and berry season is over,
fat and happy, with no fight in him. He comes out in spring, just as
good-natured, if not so fat. But the hot sun melts him down. His
hungry hunt for roots, bugs, ants and small game makes him lean and
cross. His claws grow long, his hair is unkempt and he is soon a
shaggy ghost of himself, looking "like a second-hand sofa with the
stuffing coming out," and in this out-at-elbows condition he loses his
own self-respect.
Mr. Miller has strenuously insisted that bears of the United States
are of more than one or two species. In this he has the unqualified
support of the latest scientific investigations. Not long ago
naturalists were disposed to recognize but three kinds of bear in
North America. These are the polar bear, the black bear, and the
grizzly bear, and even the grizzly was thought doubtful, a slight
variation of the bear of Europe.
But the careful study of bears' skulls has changed all that, and our
highest authority on bears, Dr. C. Hart Merriam of the Department of
Agriculture, now recognizes not less than ten species of bear in the
limits of the United States and Alaska.
In his latest paper (1896), a "Preliminary Synopsis of the American
Bears," Dr. Merriam groups these animals as follows:
I. POLAR BEARS.
1. POLAR BEAR: _Thalarctos maritimus_ Linnaeus. Found on all Arctic
shores.
II. BLACK BEARS.
2. COMMON BLACK BEAR (sometimes brown or cinnamon): _Ursus americanus_
Pallas. Found throughout the United States.
3. YELLOW BEAR (sometimes black or brown): _Ursus luteolus_ Griffith.
Swamps of Louisiana and Texas.
4. EVERGLADE BEAR: _Ursus floridanus_ Merriam. Everglades of Florida.
5. GLACIER BEAR: _Ursus emmonsi_ Dall. About Mount St. Elias.
III. GRIZZLY BEARS.
6. THE GRIZZLY BEAR: _Ursus horribilis_ Ord. Found in the western
parts of North America.
Under this species are four varieties: the original _horribilis_, or
Rocky Mountain grizzly, from Montana to the Great Basin of Utah; the
variety _californicus_ Merriam, the California grizzly, from the
Sierra Nevada; variety _horriaeus_ Baird, the Sonora grizzly, from
Arizona and the South; and variety _alascensis_ Merriam, the Alaska
grizzly, from Alaska.
7. THE BARREN GROUND BEAR: _Ursus richardsoni_ Mayne Reid. A kind of
grizzly found about Hudson Bay.
IV. GREAT BROWN BEARS.
8. THE YAKUTAT BEAR: _Ursus dalli_ Merriam. From about Mount St.
Elias.
9. THE SITKA BEAR: _Ursus sitkensis_ Merriam. From about Sitka.
10. THE KADIAK BEAR: _Ursus middendorfi_ Merriam. From Kadiak and the
Peninsula of Alaska.
These three bears are even larger than the grizzly, and the Kadiak
Bear is the largest of all the land bears of the world. It prowls
about over the moss of the mountains, feeding on berries and fish.
The sea-bear, _Callorhinus ursinus_, which we call the fur seal, is
also a cousin of the bear, having much in common with its bear
ancestors of long ago, but neither that nor its relations, the
sea-lion and the walrus, are exactly bears to-day.
Of all the real bears, Mr. Miller treats of five in the pages of this
little book. All the straight "bear stories" relate to _Ursus
americanus_, as most bear stories in our country do. The grizzly
stories treat of _Ursus horribilis californicus_. The lean bear of the
Louisiana swamps is _Ursus luteolus_, and the Polar Bear is
_Thalarctos maritimus_. The author of the book has tried without
intrusion of technicalities to bring the distinctive features of the
different bears before the reader and to instruct as well as to
interest children and children's parents in the simple realities of
bear life.
DAVID STARR JORDAN.
Leland Stanford, Jr., University.
TRUE BEAR STORIES.
I.
A BEAR ON FIRE.
It is now more than a quarter of a century since I saw the woods of
Mount Shasta in flames, and beasts of all sorts, even serpents,
crowded together; but I can never forget, never!
It looked as if we would have a cloudburst that fearful morning. We
three were making our way by slow marches from Soda Springs across the
south base of Mount Shasta to the Modoc lava beds--two English artists
and myself. We had saddle horses, or, rather, two saddle horses and a
mule, for our own use. Six Indians, with broad leather or elkskin
straps across their foreheads, had been chartered to carry the kits
and traps. They were men of means and leisure, these artists, and
were making the trip for the fish, game, scenery and excitement and
everything, in fact, that was in the adventure. I was merely their
hired guide.
This second morning out, the Indians--poor slaves, perhaps, from the
first, certainly not warriors with any spirit in them--began to sulk.
They had risen early and kept hovering together and talking, or,
rather, making signs in the gloomiest sort of fashion. We had hard
work to get them to do anything at all, and even after breakfast was
ready they packed up without tasting food.
The air was ugly, for that region--hot, heavy, and without light or
life. It was what in some parts of South America they call "earthquake
weather." Even the horses sulked as we mounted; but the mule shot
ahead through the brush at once, and this induced the ponies to
follow.
The Englishmen thought the Indians and horses were only tired from the
day before, but we soon found the whole force plowing ahead through
the dense brush and over fallen timber on a double quick.
Then we heard low, heavy thunder in the heavens. Were they running
away from a thunder-storm? The English artists, who had been doing
India and had come to love the indolent patience and obedience of the
black people, tried to call a halt. No use. I shouted to the Indians
in their own tongue. "Tokau! Ki-sa! Kiu!" (Hasten! Quick! Quick!) was
all the answer I could get from the red, hot face that was thrown for
a moment back over the load and shoulder. So we shot forward. In fact,
the horses now refused all regard for the bit, and made their own way
through the brush with wondrous skill and speed.
We were flying from fire, not flood! Pitiful what a few years of
neglect will do toward destroying a forest! When a lad I had galloped
my horse in security and comfort all through this region. It was like
a park then. Now it was a dense tangle of undergrowth and a mass of
fallen timber. What a feast for flames! In one of the very old books
on America in the British Museum--possibly the very oldest on the
subject--the author tells of the park-like appearance of the American
forests. He tells his English friends back at home that it is most
comfortable to ride to the hounds, "since the Indian squats (squaws)
do set fire to the brush and leaves every spring," etc.
But the "squats" had long since disappeared from the forests of Mount
Shasta; and here we were tumbling over and tearing through ten years'
or more of accumulation of logs, brush, leaves, weeds and grass that
lay waiting for a sea of fire to roll over all like a mass of lava.
And now the wind blew past and over us. Bits of white ashes sifted
down like snow. Surely the sea of fire was coming, coming right on
after us! Still there was no sign, save this little sift of ashes, no
sound; nothing at all except the trained sense of the Indians and the
terror of the "cattle" (this is what the Englishmen called our horses)
to give us warning.
In a short time we struck an arroyo, or canyon, that was nearly free
from brush and led steeply down to the cool, deep waters of the
McCloud River. Here we found the Indians had thrown their loads and
themselves on the ground.
They got up in sulky silence, and, stripping our horses, turned them
loose; and then, taking our saddles, they led us hastily up out of the
narrow mouth of the arroyo under a little steep stone bluff.
They did not say a word or make any sign, and we were all too
breathless and bewildered to either question or protest. The sky was
black, and thunder made the woods tremble. We were hardly done wiping
the blood and perspiration from our torn hands and faces where we sat
when the mule jerked up his head, sniffed, snorted and then plunged
headlong into the river and struck out for the deep forest on the
farther bank, followed by the ponies.
The mule is the most traduced of all animals. A single mule has more
sense than a whole stableful of horses. You can handle a mule easily
if the barn is burning; he keeps his head; but a horse becomes insane.
He will rush right into the fire, if allowed to, and you can only
handle him, and that with difficulty if he sniffs the fire, by
blindfolding him. Trust a mule in case of peril or a panic long before
a horse. The brother of Solomon and willful son of David surely had
some of the great temple-builder's wisdom and discernment, for we read
that he rode a mule. True, he lost his head and got hung up by the
hair, but that is nothing against the mule.
As we turned our eyes from seeing the animals safely over, right there
by us and a little behind us, through the willows of the canyon and
over the edge of the water, we saw peering and pointing toward the
other side dozens of long black and brown outreaching noses. Elk!
They had come noiselessly, they stood motionless. They did not look
back or aside, only straight ahead. We could almost have touched the
nearest one. They were large and fat, almost as fat as cows; certainly
larger than the ordinary Jersey. The peculiar thing about them was the
way, the level way, in which they held their small, long
heads--straight out; the huge horns of the males lying far back on
their shoulders. And then for the first time I could make out what
these horns are for--to part the brush with as they lead through the
thicket, and thus save their coarse coats of hair, which is very
rotten, and could be torn off in a little time if not thus protected.
They are never used to fight with, never; the elk uses only his feet.
If on the defense, however, the male elk will throw his nose close to
the ground and receive the enemy on his horns.
Suddenly and all together, and perhaps they had only paused a second,
they moved on into the water, led by a bull with a head of horns like
a rocking-chair. And his rocking-chair rocked his head under water
much of the time. The cold, swift water soon broke the line, only the
leader making the bank directly before us, while the others drifted
far down and out of sight.
Our artists, meantime, had dug up pencil and pad and begun work. But
an Indian jerked the saddles, on which the Englishmen sat, aside, and
the work was stopped. Everything was now packed up close under the
steep little ledge of rocks. An avalanche of smaller wild animals,
mostly deer, was upon us. Many of these had their tongues hanging from
their half-opened mouths. They did not attempt to drink, as you would
suppose, but slid into the water silently almost as soon as they came.
Surely they must have seen us, but certainly they took no notice of
us. And such order! No crushing or crowding, as you see cattle in
corrals, aye, as you see people sometimes in the cars.
And now came a torrent of little creeping things: rabbits, rats,
squirrels! None of these smaller creatures attempted to cross, but
crept along in the willows and brush close to the water.
They loaded down the willows till they bent into the water, and the
terrified little creatures floated away without the least bit of noise
or confusion. And still the black skies were filled with the solemn
boom of thunder. In fact, we had not yet heard any noise of any sort
except thunder, not even our own voices. There was something more
eloquent in the air now, something more terrible than man or beast,
and all things were awed into silence--a profound silence.
And all this time countless creatures, little creatures and big, were
crowding the bank on our side or swimming across or floating down,
down, down the swift, woodhung waters. Suddenly the stolid leader of
the Indians threw his two naked arms in the air and let them fall,
limp and helpless at his side; then he pointed out into the stream,
for there embers and living and dead beasts began to drift and sweep
down the swift waters from above. The Indians now gathered up the
packs and saddles and made a barricade above, for it was clear that
many a living thing would now be borne down upon us.
The two Englishmen looked one another in the face long and
thoughtfully, pulling their feet under them to keep from being trodden
on. Then, after another avalanche of creatures of all sorts and sizes,
a sort of Noah's ark this time, one of them said to the other:
"Beastly, you know!"
"Awful beastly, don't you know!"
As they were talking entirely to themselves and in their own language,
I did not trouble myself to call their attention to an enormous yellow
rattlesnake which had suddenly and noiselessly slid down, over the
steep little bluff of rocks behind us, into our midst.
But now note this fact--every man there, red or white, saw or felt
that huge and noiseless monster the very second she slid among us. For
as I looked, even as I first looked, and then turned to see what the
others would say or do, they were all looking at the glittering eyes
set in that coffin-like head.
The Indians did not move back or seem nearly so much frightened as
when they saw the drift of embers and dead beasts in the river before
them; but the florid Englishmen turned white! They resolutely arose,
thrust their hands in their pockets and stood leaning their backs hard
against the steep bluff. Then another snake, long, black and
beautiful, swept his supple neck down between them and thrust his red
tongue forth--as if a bit of the flames had already reached us.
Fortunately, this particular "wisest of all the beasts of the field,"
was not disposed to tarry. In another second he had swung to the
ground and was making a thousand graceful curves in the swift water
for the further bank.
The world, even the world of books, seems to know nothing at all about
the wonderful snakes that live in the woods. The woods rattlesnake is
as large as at least twenty ordinary rattlesnakes; and Indians say it
is entirely harmless. The enormous black snake, I know, is entirely
without venom. In all my life, spent mostly in the camp, I have seen
only three of those monstrous yellow woods rattlesnakes; one in
Indiana, one in Oregon and the other on this occasion here on the
banks of the McCloud. Such bright eyes! It was hard to stop looking at
them.
Meantime a good many bears had come and gone. The bear is a good
swimmer, and takes to the water without fear. He is, in truth, quite a
fisherman; so much of a fisherman, in fact, that in salmon season here
his flesh is unfit for food. The pitiful part of it all was to see
such little creatures as could not swim clinging all up and down and
not daring to take to the water.
Unlike his domesticated brother, we saw several wild-cats take to the
water promptly. The wild-cat, you must know, has no tail to speak of.
But the panther and Californian lion are well equipped in this respect
and abhor the water.
I constantly kept an eye over my shoulder at the ledge or little bluff
of rocks, expecting to see a whole row of lions and panthers sitting
there, almost "cheek by jowl" with my English friends, at any moment.
But strangely enough, we saw neither panther nor lion; nor did we see
a single grizzly among all the bears that came that way.
We now noticed that one of the Indians had become fascinated or
charmed by looking too intently at the enormous serpent in our midst.
The snake's huge, coffin-shaped head, as big as your open palm, was
slowly swaying from side to side. The Indian's head was doing the
same, and their eyes were drawing closer and closer together. Whatever
there may be in the Bible story of Eve and the serpent, whether a
figure or a fact, who shall say?--but it is certainly, in some sense,
true.
An Indian will not kill a rattlesnake. But to break the charm, in this
case, they caught their companion by the shoulders and forced him back
flat on the ground. And there he lay, crying like a child, the first
and only Indian I ever saw cry. And then suddenly boom! boom! boom! as
if heaven burst. It began to rain in torrents.
And just then, as we began to breathe freely and feel safe, there came
a crash and bump and bang above our heads, and high over our heads
from off the ledge behind us! Over our heads like a rocket, in an
instant and clear into the water, leaped a huge black bear, a ball of
fire! his fat sides in flame. He sank out of sight but soon came up,
spun around like a top, dived again, then again spun around. But he
got across, I am glad to say. And this always pleases my little girl,
Juanita. He sat there on the bank looking back at us quite a time.
Finally he washed his face, like a cat, then quietly went away. The
rattlesnake was the last to cross.
[Illustration: Into the water leaped a black bear.--Page 26.]
The beautiful yellow beast was not at all disconcerted, but with the
serenest dignity lifted her yellow folds, coiled and uncoiled slowly,
curved high in the air, arched her glittering neck of gold, widened
her body till broad as your two hands, and so slid away over the water
to the other side through the wild white rain. The cloudburst put out
the fire instantly, showing that, though animals have superhuman
foresight, they don't know everything before the time.
"Beastly! I didn't get a blawsted sketch, you know."
"Awful beastly! Neither did I, don't you know."
And that was all my English friends said. The Indians made their
moaning and whimpering friend who had been overcome by the snake pull
himself together and they swam across and gathered up the "cattle."
Some men say a bear cannot leap; but I say there are times when a bear
can leap like a tiger. This was one of the times.
II.
MUSIC-LOVING BEARS.
No, don't despise the bear, either in his life or his death. He is a
kingly fellow, every inch a king; a curious, monkish, music-loving,
roving Robin Hood of his somber woods--a silent monk, who knows a
great deal more than he tells. And please don't go to look at him and
sit in judgment on him behind the bars. Put yourself in his place and
see how much of manhood or kinghood would be left in you with a muzzle
on your mouth, and only enough liberty left to push your nose between
two rusty bars and catch the peanut which the good little boy has
found to be a bad one and so generously tosses it to the bear.
Of course, the little boy, remembering the experience of about forty
other little boys in connection with the late baldheaded Elijah, has a
prejudice against the bear family, but why the full-grown man should
so continually persist in caging this shaggy-coated, dignified, kingly
and ancient brother of his, I cannot see, unless it is that he knows
almost nothing at all of his better nature, his shy, innocent love of
a joke, his partiality for music and his imperial disdain of death.
And so, with a desire that man may know a little more about this
storied and classic creature which, with noiseless and stately tread,
has come down to us out of the past, and is as quietly passing away
from the face of the earth, these fragmentary facts are set down. But
first as to his love of music. A bear loves music better than he loves
honey, and that is saying that he loves music better than he loves his
life.
We were going to mill, father and I, and Lyte Howard, in Oregon, about
forty years ago, with ox-teams, a dozen or two bags of wheat, threshed
with a flail and winnowed with a wagon cover, and were camped for the
night by the Calipoola River; for it took two days to reach the mill.
Lyte got out his fiddle, keeping his gun, of course, close at hand.
Pretty soon the oxen came down, came very close, so close that they
almost put their cold, moist noses against the backs of our necks as
we sat there on the ox-yokes or reclined in our blankets, around the
crackling pine-log fire and listened to the wild, sweet strains that
swept up and down and up till the very tree tops seemed to dance and
quiver with delight.
Then suddenly father seemed to feel the presence of something or
somebody strange, and I felt it, too. But the fiddler felt, heard, saw
nothing but the divine, wild melody that made the very pine trees
dance and quiver to their tips. Oh, for the pure, wild, sweet,
plaintive music once more! the music of "Money Musk," "Zip Coon," "Ol'
Dan Tucker" and all the other dear old airs that once made a thousand
happy feet keep time on the puncheon floors from Hudson's bank to the
Oregon. But they are no more, now. They have passed away forever with
the Indian, the pioneer, and the music-loving bear. It is strange how
a man--I mean the natural man--will feel a presence long before he
hears it or sees it. You can always feel the approach of a--but I
forget. You are of another generation, a generation that only reads,
takes thought at second hand only, if at all, and you would not
understand; so let us get forward and not waste time in explaining the
unexplainable to you.
Father got up, turned about, put me behind him like, as an animal will
its young, and peered back and down through the dense tangle of the
deep river bank between two of the huge oxen which had crossed the
plains with us to the water's edge; then he reached around and drew me
to him with his left hand, pointing between the oxen sharp down the
bank with his right forefinger.
A bear! two bears! and another coming; one already more than half way
across on the great, mossy log that lay above the deep, sweeping
waters of the Calipoola; and Lyte kept on, and the wild, sweet music
leaped up and swept through the delighted and dancing boughs above.
Then father reached back to the fire and thrust a long, burning bough
deeper into the dying embers and the glittering sparks leaped and
laughed and danced and swept out and up and up as if to companion with
the stars. Then Lyte knew. He did not hear, he did not see, he only
felt; but the fiddle forsook his fingers and his chin in a second, and
his gun was to his face with the muzzle thrust down between the oxen.
And then my father's gentle hand reached out, lay on that long, black,
Kentucky rifle barrel, and it dropped down, slept once more at the
fiddler's side, and again the melodies; and the very stars came down,
believe me, to listen, for they never seemed so big and so close by
before. The bears sat down on their haunches at last, and one of them
kept opening his mouth and putting out his red tongue, as if he really
wanted to taste the music. Every now and then one of them would lift
up a paw and gently tap the ground, as if to keep time with the music.
And both my papa and Lyte said next day that those bears really wanted
to dance.
And that is all there is to say about that, except that my father was
the gentlest gentleman I ever knew and his influence must have been
boundless; for who ever before heard of any hunter laying down his
rifle with a family of fat black bears holding the little snow-white
cross on their breasts almost within reach of its muzzle?
The moon came up by and by, and the chin of the weary fiddler sank
lower and lower, till all was still. The oxen lay down and ruminated,
with their noses nearly against us. Then the coal-black bears melted
away before the milk-white moon, and we slept there, with the sweet
breath of the cattle, like incense, upon us.
But how does a bear die? Ah, I had forgotten. I must tell you of
death, then. Well, we have different kinds of bears. I know little of
the Polar bear, and so say nothing positively of him. I am told,
however, that there is not, considering his size, much snap or grit
about him; but as for the others, I am free to say that they live and
die like gentlemen.
I shall find time, as we go forward, to set down many incidents out of
my own experience to prove that the bear is often a humorist, and
never by any means a bad fellow.
Judge Highton, odd as it may seem, has left the San Francisco bar for
the "bar" of Mount Shasta every season for more than a quarter of a
century, and he probably knows more about bears than any other
eminently learned man in the world, and Henry Highton will tell you
that the bear is a good fellow at home, good all through, a brave,
modest, sober old monk.
A monkish Robin Hood
In his good green wood.
III.
MY FIRST GRIZZLY.
One of Fremont's men, Mountain Joe, had taken a fancy to me down in
Oregon, and finally, to put three volumes in three lines, I turned up
as partner in his Soda Springs ranch on the Sacramento, where the
famous Shasta-water is now bottled, I believe. Then the Indians broke
out, burned us up and we followed and fought them in Castle rocks, and
I was shot down. Then my father came on to watch by my side, where I
lay, under protection of soldiers, at the mouth of Shot Creek canyon.
As the manzanita berries began to turn the mountain sides red and the
brown pine quills to sift down their perfumed carpets at our feet, I
began to feel some strength and wanted to fight, but I had had enough
of Indians. I wanted to fight grizzly bears this time. The fact is,
they used to leave tracks in the pack trail every night, and right
close about the camp, too, as big as the head of a barrel.
Now father was well up in woodcraft, no man better, but he never fired
a gun. Never, in his seventy years of life among savages, did that
gentle Quaker, school-master, magistrate and Christian ever fire a
gun. But he always allowed me to have my own way as a hunter, and now
that I was getting well of my wound he was so glad and grateful that
he willingly joined in with the soldiers to help me kill one of these
huge bears that had made the big tracks.
Do you know why a beast, a bear of all beasts, is so very much afraid
of fire? Well, in the first place, as said before, a bear is a
gentleman, in dress as well as address, and so likes a decent coat. If
a bear should get his coat singed he would hide away from sight of
both man and beast for half a year. But back of his pride is the fact
that a fat bear will burn like a candle; the fire will not stop with
the destruction of his coat. And so, mean as it was, in the olden
days, when bears were as common in California as cows are now, men
used to take advantage of this fear and kindle pine-quill fires in and
around his haunts in the head of canyons to drive him out and down and
into ambush.
Read two or three chapters here between the lines--lots of plans,
preparations, diagrams. I was to hide near camp and wait--to place the
crescent of pine-quill fires and all that. Then at twilight they all
went out and away on the mountain sides around the head of the canyon,
and I hid behind a big rock near by the extinguished camp-fire, with
my old muzzle-loading Kentucky rifle, lifting my eyes away up and
around to the head of the Manzanita canyon looking for the fires. A
light! One, two, three, ten! A sudden crescent of forked flames, and
all the fight and impetuosity of a boy of only a dozen years was
uppermost, and I wanted a bear!
All alone I waited; got hot, cold, thirsty, cross as a bear and so
sick of sitting there that I was about to go to my blankets, for the
flames had almost died out on the hills, leaving only a circle of
little dots and dying embers, like a fading diadem on the mighty
lifted brow of the glorious Manzanita mountain. And now the new moon
came, went softly and sweetly by, like a shy, sweet maiden, hiding
down, down out of sight.
Crash! His head was thrown back, not over his shoulder, as you may
read but never see, but down by his left foot, as he looked around and
back up the brown mountain side. He had stumbled, or rather, he had
stepped on himself, for a bear gets down hill sadly. If a bear ever
gets after you, you had better go hill and go down hill fast. It will
make him mad, but that is not your affair. I never saw a bear go down
hill in a good humor. What nature meant by making a bear so short in
the arms I don't know. Indians say he was first a man and walked
upright with a club on his shoulder, but sinned and fell. As evidence
of this, they show that he can still stand up and fight with his fists
when hard pressed, but more of this later on.
This huge brute before me looked almost white in the tawny twilight as
he stumbled down through the steep tangle of chaparral into the
opening on the stony bar of the river.
He had evidently been terribly tangled up and disgusted while in the
bush and jungle, and now, well out of it, with the foamy, rumbling,
roaring Sacramento River only a few rods beyond him, into which he
could plunge with his glossy coat, he seemed to want to turn about and
shake his huge fists at the crescent of fire in the pine-quills that
had driven him down the mountain. He threw his enormous bulk back on
his haunches and rose up, and rose up, and rose up! Oh, the majesty of
this king of our continent, as he seemed to still keep rising! Then
he turned slowly around on his great hinder feet to look back; he
pushed his nose away out, then drew it back, twisted his short, thick
neck, like that of a beer-drinking German, and then for a final
observation he tiptoed up, threw his high head still higher in the air
and wiggled it about and sniffed and sniffed and--bang!
I shot at him from ambush, with his back toward me, shot at his back!
For shame! Henry Highton would not have done that; nor, indeed, would
I or any other real sportsman do such a thing now; but I must plead
the "Baby Act," and all the facts, and also my sincere penitence, and
proceed.
The noble brute did not fall, but let himself down with dignity and
came slowly forward. Hugely, ponderously, solemnly, he was coming. And
right here, if I should set down what I thought about--where father
was, the soldiers, anybody, everybody else, whether I had best just
fall on my face and "play possum" and put in a little prayer or two
on the side, like--well, I was going on to say that if I should write
all that flashed and surged through my mind in the next three seconds,
you would be very tired. I was certain I had not hit the bear at all.
As a rule, you can always see the "fur fly," as hunters put it; only
it is not fur, but dust, that flies.
But this bear was very fat and hot, and so there could have been no
dust to fly. After shuffling a few steps forward and straight for the
river, he suddenly surged up again, looked all about, just as before,
then turned his face to the river and me, the tallest bear that ever
tiptoed up and up and up in the Sierras. One, two, three steps--on
came the bear! and my gun empty! Then he fell, all at once and all in
a heap. No noise, no moaning or groaning at all, no clutching at the
ground, as men have seen Indians and even white men do; as if they
would hold the earth from passing away--nothing of that sort. He lay
quite still, head down hill, on his left side, gave just one short,
quick breath, and then, pulling up his great right paw, he pushed his
nose and eyes under it, as if to shut out the light forever, or,
maybe, to muffle up his face as when "great Cæsar fell."
And that was all. I had killed a grizzly bear; nearly as big as the
biggest ox.
IV.
TWIN BABIES.
These twin babies were black. They were black as coal. Indeed, they
were blacker than coal, for they glistened in their oily blackness.
They were young baby bears; and so exactly alike that no one could, in
any way, tell the one from the other. And they were orphans. They had
been found at the foot of a small cedar tree on the banks of the
Sacramento River, near the now famous Soda Springs, found by a
tow-headed boy who was very fond of bears and hunting.
But at the time the twin babies were found Soda Springs was only a
wild camp, or way station, on the one and only trail that wound
through the woods and up and down mountains for hundreds of miles,
connecting the gold fields of California with the pastoral settlements
away to the north in Oregon. But a railroad has now taken the place
of that tortuous old packtrail, and you can whisk through these wild
and woody mountains, and away on down through Oregon and up through
Washington, Montana, Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin and on to Chicago
without even once getting out of your car, if you like. Yet such a
persistent ride is not probable, for fish, pheasants, deer, elk, and
bear still abound here in their ancient haunts, and the temptation to
get out and fish or hunt is too great to be resisted.
[Illustration: He threw his enormous bulk back on his haunches, and
rose up.--Page 40.]
This place where the baby bears were found was first owned by three
men or, rather, by two men and a boy. One of the men was known as
Mountain Joe. He had once been a guide in the service of General
Fremont, but he was now a drunken fellow and spent most of his time at
the trading post, twenty miles down the river. He is now an old man,
almost blind, and lives in Oregon City, on a pension received as a
soldier of the Mexican war. The other man's name was Sil Reese. He,
also, is living and famously rich--as rich as he is stingy, and that
is saying that he is very rich indeed.
The boy preferred the trees to the house, partly because it was more
pleasant and partly because Sil Reese, who had a large nose and used
it to talk with constantly, kept grumbling because the boy, who had
been wounded in defending the ranch, was not able to work--wash the
dishes, make fires and so on, and help in a general and particular way
about the so-called "Soda Spring Hotel." This Sil Reese was certainly
a mean man, as has, perhaps, been set down in this sketch before.
The baby bears were found asleep, and alone. How they came to be
there, and, above all, how they came to be left long enough alone by
their mother for a feeble boy to rush forward at sight of them, catch
them up in his arms and escape with them, will always be a wonder. But
this one thing is certain, you had about as well take up two
rattlesnakes in your arms as two baby bears, and hope to get off
unharmed, if the mother of the young bears is within a mile of you.
This boy, however, had not yet learned caution, and he probably was
not born with much fear in his make-up. And then he was so lonesome,
and this man Reese was so cruel and so cross, with his big nose like a
sounding fog-horn, that the boy was glad to get even a bear to love
and play with.
They, so far from being frightened or cross, began to root around
under his arms and against his breast, like little pigs, for something
to eat. Possibly their mother had been killed by hunters, for they
were nearly famished. When he got them home, how they did eat! This
also made Sil Reese mad. For, although the boy, wounded as he was,
managed to shoot down a deer not too far from the house almost every
day, and so kept the "hotel" in meat, still it made Reese miserable
and envious to see the boy so happy with his sable and woolly little
friends. Reese was simply mean!
Before a month the little black boys began to walk erect, carry stick
muskets, wear paper caps, and march up and down before the door of the
big log "hotel" like soldiers.
But the cutest trick they learned was that of waiting on the table.
With little round caps and short white aprons, the little black boys
would stand behind the long bench on which the guests sat at the pine
board table and pretend to take orders with all the precision and
solemnity of Southern negroes.
Of course, it is to be confessed that they often dropped things,
especially if the least bit hot; but remember we had only tin plates
and tin or iron dishes of all sorts, so that little damage was done if
a dish did happen to fall and rattle down on the earthen floor.
Men came from far and near and often lingered all day to see these
cunning and intelligent creatures perform.
About this time Mountain Joe fought a duel with another mountaineer
down at the trading post, and this duel, a bloodless and foolish
affair, was all the talk. Why not have the little black fellows fight
a duel also? They were surely civilized enough to fight now!
And so, with a very few days' training, they fought a duel exactly
like the one in which poor, drunken old Mountain Joe was engaged; even
to the detail of one of them suddenly dropping his stick gun and
running away and falling headlong in a prospect hole.
When Joe came home and saw this duel and saw what a fool he had made
of himself, he at first was furiously angry. But it made him sober,
and he kept sober for half a year. Meantime Reese was mad as ever,
more mad, in fact, than ever before. For he could not endure to see
the boy have any friends of any kind. Above all, he did not want
Mountain Joe to stay at home or keep sober. He wanted to handle all
the money and answer no questions. A drunken man and a boy that he
could bully suited him best. Ah, but this man Reese was a mean fellow,
as has been said a time or two before.
As winter came on the two blacks were fat as pigs and fully
half-grown. Their appetites increased daily, and so did the anger and
envy of Mr. Sil Reese.
"They'll eat us out o' house and hum," said the big, towering nose one
day, as the snow began to descend and close up the pack trails. And
then the stingy man proposed that the blacks should be made to
hibernate, as others of their kind. There was a big, hollow log that
had been sawed off in joints to make bee gums; and the stingy man
insisted that they should be put in there with a tight head, and a
pack of hay for a bed, and nailed up till spring to save provisions.
Soon there was an Indian outbreak. Some one from the ranch, or
"hotel," must go with the company of volunteers that was forming down
at the post for a winter campaign. Of course Reese would not go. He
wanted Mountain Joe to go and get killed. But Joe was sober now and he
wanted to stay and watch Reese.
And that is how it came about that the two black babies were tumbled
headlong into a big, black bee gum, or short, hollow log, on a heap of
hay, and nailed up for the winter. The boy had to go to the war.
It was late in the spring when the boy, having neglected to get
himself killed, to the great disgust of Mr. Sil Reese, rode down and
went straight up to the big black bee gum in the back yard. He put his
ear to a knothole. Not a sound. He tethered his mule, came back and
tried to shake the short, hollow log. Not a sound or sign or movement
of any kind. Then he kicked the big black gum with all his might.
Nothing. Rushing to the wood-pile, he caught up an ax and in a moment
had the whole end of the big gum caved in, and, to his infinite
delight, out rolled the twins!
But they were merely the ghosts of themselves. They had been kept in a
month or more too long, and were now so weak and so lean that they
could hardly stand on their feet.
"Kill 'em and put 'em out o' misery," said Reese, for run from him
they really could not, and he came forward and kicked one of them flat
down on its face as it was trying hard to stand on its four feet.
The boy had grown some; besides, he was just from the war and was now
strong and well. He rushed up in front of Reese, and he must have
looked unfriendly, for Sil Reese tried to smile, and then at the same
time he turned hastily to go into the house. And when he got fairly
turned around, the boy kicked him precisely where he had kicked the
bear. And he kicked him hard, so hard that he pitched forward on his
face just as the bear had done. He got up quickly, but he did not look
back. He seemed to have something to do in the house.
In a month the babies, big babies now, were sleek and fat. It is
amazing how these creatures will eat after a short nap of a few
months, like that. And their cunning tricks, now! And their kindness
to their master! Ah! their glossy black coats and their brilliant
black eyes!
And now three men came. Two of these men were Italians from San
Francisco. The third man was also from that city, but he had an
amazing big nose and refused to eat bear meat. He thought it was pork.
They took tremendous interest in the big black twins, and stayed all
night and till late next day, seeing them perform.
"Seventy-five dollars," said one big nose to the other big nose, back
in a corner where they thought the boy did not hear.
"One hundred and fifty. You see, I'll have to give my friends fifty
each. Yes, it's true I've took care of 'em all winter, but I ain't
mean, and I'll only keep fifty of it."
The boy, bursting with indignation, ran to Mountain Joe with what he
had heard. But poor Joe had been sober for a long time, and his eyes
fairly danced in delight at having $50 in his own hand and right to
spend it down at the post.
And so the two Italians muzzled the big, pretty pets and led them
kindly down the trail toward the city, where they were to perform in
the streets, the man with the big nose following after the twins on a
big white mule.
And what became of the big black twin babies? They are still
performing, seem content and happy, sometimes in a circus, sometimes
in a garden, sometimes in the street. They are great favorites and
have never done harm to anyone.
And what became of Sil Reese? Well, as said before, he still lives, is
very rich and very miserable. He met the boy--the boy that was--on the
street the other day and wanted to talk of old times. He told the boy
he ought to write something about the old times and put him, Sil
Reese, in it. He said, with that same old sounding nose and sickening
smile, that he wanted the boy to be sure and put his, Sil Reese's
name, in it so that he could show it to his friends. And the boy has
done so.
The boy? You want to know what the boy is doing? Well, in about a
second he will be signing his autograph to the bottom of this story
about his twin babies.
V.
IN SWIMMING WITH A BEAR.
What made these ugly rows of scars on my left hand?
Well, it might have been buckshot; only it wasn't. Besides, buckshot
would be scattered about, "sort of promiscuous like," as backwoodsmen
say. But these ugly little holes are all in a row, or rather in two
rows. Now a wolf might have made these holes with his fine white
teeth, or a bear might have done it with his dingy and ugly teeth,
long ago. I must here tell you that the teeth of a bear are not nearly
so fine as the teeth of a wolf. And the teeth of a lion are the
ugliest of them all. They are often broken and bent; and they are
always of a dim yellow color. It is from this yellow hue of the lion's
teeth that we have the name of one of the most famous early flowers of
May: dent de lion, tooth of the lion; dandelion. Get down your
botany, now, find the Anglo-Asian name of the flower, and fix this
fact on your mind before you read further.
I know of three men, all old men now, who have their left hands all
covered with scars. One is due to the wolf; the others owe their scars
to the red mouths of black bears.
You see, in the old days, out here in California, when the Sierras
were full of bold young fellows hunting for gold, quite a number of
them had hand-to-hand battles with bears. For when we came out here
"the woods were full of 'em."
Of course, the first thing a man does when he finds himself face to
face with a bear that won't run and he has no gun--and that is always
the time when he finds a bear--why, he runs, himself; that is, if the
bear will let him.
But it is generally a good deal like the old Crusader who "caught a
Tartar" long ago, when on his way to capture Jerusalem, with Peter
the Hermit.
"Come on!" cried Peter to the helmeted and knightly old Crusader, who
sat his horse with lance in rest on a hill a little in the rear. "Come
on!"
"I can't! I've caught a Tartar."
"Well, bring him along."
"He won't come."
"Well, then, come without him."
"He won't let me."
And so it often happened in the old days out here. When a man "caught"
his bear and didn't have his gun he had to fight it out hand-to-hand.
But fortunately, every man at all times had a knife in his belt. A
knife never gets out of order, never "snaps," and a man in those days
always had to have it with him to cut his food, cut brush, "crevice"
for gold, and so on.
Oh! it is a grim picture to see a young fellow in his red shirt wheel
about, when he can't run, thrust out his left hand, draw his knife
with his right, and so, breast to breast, with the bear erect, strike
and strike and strike to try to reach his heart before his left hand
is eaten off to the elbow!
We have five kinds of bears in the Sierras. The "boxer," the "biter,"
the "hugger," are the most conspicuous. The other two are a sort of
"all round" rough and tumble style of fighters.
The grizzly is the boxer. A game old beast he is, too, and would knock
down all the John L. Sullivans you could put in the Sierras faster
than you could set them up. He is a kingly old fellow and disdains
familiarity. Whatever may be said to the contrary, he never "hugs" if
he has room to box. In some desperate cases he has been known to bite,
but ordinarily he obeys "the rules of the ring."
The cinnamon bear is a lazy brown brute, about one-half the size of
the grizzly. He always insists on being very familiar, if not
affectionate. This is the "hugger."
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 coon, 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 grass 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 grass 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 butt 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 shore.
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 pass by him and come after me and my friend with both fish
and bacon, and so, with half a line, I assert this truth and pass 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?"
VII.
TREEING A BEAR.
Away back in the "fifties" bears were as numerous on the banks of the
Willamette River, in Oregon, as are hogs in the hickory woods of
Kentucky in nut time, and that is saying that bears were mighty plenty
in Oregon about forty years ago.
You see, after the missionaries established their great cattle ranches
in Oregon and gathered the Indians from the wilderness and set them to
work and fed them on beef and bread, the bears had it all their own
way, till they literally overran the land. And this gave a great
chance for sport to the sons of missionaries and the sons of new
settlers "where rolls the Oregon."
And it was not perilous sport, either, for the grizzly was rarely
encountered here. His home was further to the south. Neither was the
large and clumsy cinnamon bear abundant on the banks of the beautiful
Willamette in those dear old days, when you might ride from sun to
sun, belly deep in wild flowers, and never see a house. But the small
black bear, as indicated before, was on deck in great force, at all
times and in nearly all places.
It was the custom in those days for boys to take this bear with the
lasso, usually on horseback.
We would ride along close to the dense woods that grew by the river
bank, and, getting between him and his base of retreat, would, as soon
as we sighted a bear feeding out in the open plain, swing our lassos
and charge him with whoop and yell. His habit of rearing up and
standing erect and looking about to see what was the matter made him
an easy prey to the lasso. And then the fun of taking him home through
the long, strong grass!
As a rule, he did not show fight when once in the toils of the lasso;
but in a few hours, making the best of the situation like a little
philosopher, he would lead along like a dog.
There were, of course, exceptions to this exemplary conduct.
On one occasion particularly, Ed Parish, the son of a celebrated
missionary, came near losing his life by counting too confidently on
the docility of a bear which he had taken with a lasso and was leading
home.
His bear suddenly stopped, stood up and began to haul in the rope,
hand over hand, just like a sailor. And as the other end of the rope
was fastened tightly to the big Spanish pommel of the saddle, why of
course the distance between the bear and the horse soon grew
perilously short, and Ed Parish slid from his horse's back and took to
the brush, leaving horse and bear to fight it out as best they could.
When he came back, with some boys to help him, the horse was dead and
the bear was gone, having cut the rope with his teeth.
After having lost his horse in this way, poor little Ed Parish had to
do his hunting on foot, and, as my people were immigrants and very
poor, why we, that is my brother and I, were on foot also. This kept
us three boys together a great deal, and many a peculiar adventure we
had in those dear days "when all the world was young."
Ed Parish was nearly always the hero of our achievements, for he was a
bold, enterprising fellow, who feared nothing at all. In fact, he
finally lost his life from his very great love of adventure. But this
is too sad to tell now, and we must be content with the story about
how he treed a bear for the present.
We three boys had gone bear hunting up a wooded canyon near his
father's ranch late one warm summer afternoon. Ed had a gun, but, as I
said before, my people were very poor, so neither brother nor I as
yet had any other arms or implements than the inseparable lasso.
Ed, who was always the captain in such cases, chose the center of the
dense, deep canyon for himself, and, putting my brother on the
hillside to his right and myself on the hillside to his left, ordered
a simultaneous "Forward march."
After a time we heard him shoot. Then we heard him shout. Then there
was a long silence.
Then suddenly, high and wild, his voice rang out through the tree tops
down in the deep canyon.
"Come down! Come quick! I've treed a bear! Come and help me catch him;
come quick! Oh, Moses! come quick, and--and--and catch him!"
My brother came tearing down the steep hill on his side of the canyon
as I descended from my side. We got down about the same time, but the
trees in their dense foliage, together with the compact underbrush,
concealed everything. We could see neither bear nor boy.
This Oregon is a damp country, warm and wet; nearly always moist and
humid, and so the trees are covered with moss. Long, gray, sweeping
moss swings from the broad, drooping boughs of fir and pine and cedar
and nearly every bit of sunlight is shut out in these canyons from one
year's end to the other. And it rains here nearly half of the year;
and then these densely wooded canyons are as dark as caverns. I know
of nothing so grandly gloomy as these dense Oregon woods in this long
rainy season.
I laid my ear to the ground after I got a glimpse of my brother on the
other side of the canyon, but could hear nothing at all but the
beating of my heart.
Suddenly there was a wild yell away up in the dense boughs of a big
mossy maple tree that leaned over toward my side of the canyon. I
looked and looked with eagerness, but could see nothing whatever.
Then again came the yell from the top of the big leaning maple. Then
there was a moment of silence, and then the cry: "Oh, Moses! Why don't
you come, I say, and help me catch him?" By this time I could see the
leaves rustling. And I could see the boy rustling, too.
And just behind him was a bear. He had treed the bear, sure enough!
My eyes gradually grew accustomed to the gloom and density, and I now
saw the red mouth of the bear amid the green foliage high overhead.
The bear had already pulled off one of Ed's boots and was about making
a bootjack of his big red mouth for the other.
"Why don't you come on, I say, and help me catch him?"
He kicked at the bear, and at the same time hitched himself a little
further along up the leaning trunk, and in doing so kicked his
remaining boot into the bear's mouth.
"Oh, Moses, Moses! Why don't you come? I've got a bear, I tell you."
"Where is it, Ed?" shouted my brother on the other side.
But Ed did not tell him, for he had not yet got his foot from the
bear's mouth, and was now too busy to do anything else but yell and
cry "Oh, Moses!"
Then my brother and I shouted out to Ed at the same time. This gave
him great courage. He said something like "Confound you!" to the bear,
and getting his foot loose without losing the boot he kicked the bear
right on the nose. This brought things to a standstill. Ed hitched
along a little higher up, and as the leaning trunk of the tree was
already bending under his own and the bear's weight, the infuriated
brute did not seem disposed to go further. Besides, as he had been
mortally wounded, he was probably growing too weak to do much now.
My brother got to the bottom of the canyon and brought Ed's gun to
where I stood. But, as we had no powder or bullets, and as Ed could
not get them to us, even if he would have been willing to risk our
shooting at the bear, it was hard to decide what to do. It was already
dusk and we could not stay there all night.
"Boys," shouted Ed, at last, as he steadied himself in the forks of a
leaning and overhanging bough, "I'm going to come down on my laz rope.
There, take that end of it, tie your laz ropes to it and scramble up
the hill."
We obeyed him to the letter, and as we did so, he fastened his lasso
firmly to the leaning bough and descended like a spider to where we
had stood a moment before. We all scrambled up out of the canyon
together and as quickly as possible.
When we went back next day to get our ropes we found the bear dead
near the root of the old mossy maple. The skin was a splendid one, and
Ed insisted that my brother and I should have it, and we gladly
accepted it.
My brother, who was older and wiser than I, said that he made us take
the skin so that we would not be disposed to tell how he had "treed a
bear." But I trust not, for he was a very generous-hearted fellow.
Anyhow, we never told the story while he lived.
VIII.
BILL CROSS AND HIS PET BEAR.
When my father settled down at the foot of the Oregon Sierras with his
little family, long, long years ago, it was about forty miles from our
place to the nearest civilized settlement.
People were very scarce in those days, and bears, as said before, were
very plenty. We also had wolves, wild-cats, wild cattle, wild hogs,
and a good many long-tailed and big-headed yellow Californian lions.
The wild cattle, brought there from Spanish Mexico, next to the bear,
were most to be feared. They had long, sharp horns and keen, sharp
hoofs. Nature had gradually helped them out in these weapons of
defense. They had grown to be slim and trim in body, and were as
supple and swift as deer. They were the deadly enemies of all wild
beasts; because all wild beasts devoured their young.
When fat and saucy, in warm summer weather, these cattle would hover
along the foothills in bands, hiding in the hollows, and would begin
to bellow whenever they saw a bear or a wolf, or even a man or boy, if
on foot, crossing the wide valley of grass and blue camas blossoms.
Then there would be music! They would start up, with heads and tails
in the air, and, broadening out, left and right, they would draw a
long bent line, completely shutting off their victim from all approach
to the foothills. If the unfortunate victim were a man or boy on foot,
he generally made escape up one of the small ash trees that dotted the
valley in groves here and there, and the cattle would then soon give
up the chase. But if it were a wolf or any other wild beast that could
not get up a tree, the case was different. Far away, on the other side
of the valley, where dense woods lined the banks of the winding
Willamette river, the wild, bellowing herd would be answered. Out from
the edge of the woods would stream, right and left, two long,
corresponding, surging lines, bellowing and plunging forward now and
then, their heads to the ground, their tails always in the air and
their eyes aflame, as if they would set fire to the long gray grass.
With the precision and discipline of a well-ordered army, they would
close in upon the wild beast, too terrified now to either fight or
fly, and, leaping upon him, one after another, with their long, sharp
hoofs, he would, in a little time, be crushed into an unrecognizable
mass. Not a bone would be left unbroken. It is a mistake to suppose
that they ever used their long, sharp horns in attack. These were used
only in defense, the same as elk or deer, falling on the knees and
receiving the enemy on their horns, much as the Old Guard received the
French in the last terrible struggle at Waterloo.
Bill Cross was a "tender foot" at the time of which I write, and a
sailor, at that. Now, the old pilgrims who had dared the plains in
those days of '49, when cowards did not venture and the weak died on
the way, had not the greatest respect for the courage or endurance of
those who had reached Oregon by ship. But here was this man, a sailor
by trade, settling down in the interior of Oregon, and, strangely
enough, pretending to know more about everything in general and bears
in particular than either my father or any of his boys!
He had taken up a piece of land down in the pretty Camas Valley where
the grass grew long and strong and waved in the wind, mobile and
beautiful as the mobile sea.
The good-natured and self-complacent old sailor liked to watch the
waving grass. It reminded him of the sea, I reckon. He would sometimes
sit on our little porch as the sun went down and tell us boys strange,
wild sea stories. He had traveled far and seen much, as much as any
man can see on water, and maybe was not a very big liar, for a
sailor, after all. We liked his tales. He would not work, and so he
paid his way with stories of the sea. The only thing about him that we
did not like, outside of his chronic idleness, was his exalted opinion
of himself and his unconcealed contempt for everybody's opinion but
his own.
"Bill," said my father one day, "those black Spanish cattle will get
after that red sash and sailor jacket of yours some day when you go
down in the valley to your claim, and they won't leave a grease spot.
Better go horseback, or at least take a gun, when you go down next
time."
"Pshaw! Squire. I wish I had as many dollars as I ain't afeard of all
the black Spanish cattle in Oregon. Why, if they're so blasted
dangerous, how did your missionaries ever manage to drive them up here
from Mexico, anyhow?"
Still, for all that, the very next time that he saw the old sailor
setting out at his snail pace for his ranch below, slow and indolent
as if on the deck of a ship, my father insisted that he should go on
horseback, or at least take a gun.
"Pooh, pooh! I wouldn't be bothered with a horse or a gun. Say, I'm
goin' to bring your boys a pet bear some day."
And so, cocking his little hat down over his right eye and thrusting
his big hands into his deep pockets almost to the elbows, he slowly
and lazily whistled himself down the gradual slope of the foothills,
waist deep in the waving grass and delicious wild flowers, and soon
was lost to sight in the great waving sea.
Two things may be here written down. He wouldn't ride a horse because
he couldn't, and for the same reason he wouldn't use a gun. Again let
it be written down, also, that the reason he was going away that warm
autumn afternoon was that there was some work to do. These facts were
clear to my kind and indulgent father; but of course we boys never
thought of it, and laid our little shoulders to the hard work of
helping father lift up the long, heavy poles that were to complete the
corral around our pioneer log cabin, and we really hoped and half
believed that he might bring home a little pet bear.
This stout log corral had become an absolute necessity. It was high
and strong, and made of poles or small logs stood on end in a trench,
after the fashion of a primitive fort or stout stockade. There was but
one opening, and that was a very narrow one in front of the cabin
door. Here it was proposed to put up a gate. We also had talked about
port-holes in the corners of the corral, but neither gate nor
port-holes were yet made. In fact, as said before, the serene and
indolent man of the sea always slowly walked away down through the
grass toward his untracked claim whenever there was anything said
about port-holes, posts or gates.
Father and we three little boys had only got the last post set and
solidly "tamped" in the ground as the sun was going down.
Suddenly we heard a yell; then a yelling, then a bellowing. The
yelling was heard in the high grass in the Camas Valley below, and the
bellowing of cattle came from the woody river banks far beyond.
Then up on the brown hills of the Oregon Sierras above us came the
wild answer of the wild black cattle of the hills, and a moment later,
right and left, the long black lines began to widen out; then down
they came, like a whirlwind, toward the black and surging line in the
grass below. We were now almost in the center of what would, in a
little time, be a complete circle and cyclone of furious Spanish
cattle.
And now, here is something curious to relate. Our own cows, poor,
weary, immigrant cows of only a year before, tossed their tails in the
air, pawed the ground, bellowed and fairly went wild in the splendid
excitement and tumult. One touch of nature made the whole cow world
kin!
Father clambered up on a "buck-horse" and looked out over the
stockade; and then he shouted and shook his hat and laughed as I had
never heard him laugh before. For there, breathless, coatless,
hatless, came William Cross, Esq., two small wolves and a very small
black bear! They were all making good time, anywhere, anyway, to
escape the frantic cattle. Father used to say afterwards, when telling
about this little incident, that "it was nip and tuck between the
four, and hard to say which was ahead." The cattle had made quite a
"round-up."
They all four straggled in at the narrow little gate at about the same
time, the great big, lazy sailor in a hurry, for the first time in his
life.
But think of the coolness of the man, as he turned to us children with
his first gasp of breath, and said, "Bo--bo--boys, I've
bro--bro--brought you a little bear!"
The wolves were the little chicken thieves known as coyotes, quite
harmless, as a rule, so far as man is concerned, but the cattle hated
them and they were terrified nearly to death.
The cattle stopped a few rods from the stockade. We let the coyotes
go, but we kept the little bear and named him Bill Cross. Yet he was
never a bit cross, despite his name.
IX.
THE GREAT GRIZZLY BEAR.
(Ursus Ferox.)
"The Indians have unbounded reverence for this bear. When they kill
one, they make exculpating speeches to it, smoke tobacco to it, call
it grandfather, ancestor, etc."
P. MARTIN DUNCAN, M. B., F. R. S., F. G. S.
Kings College, London.
The Indians with whom I once lived in the Californian Sierras held the
grizzly bear in great respect and veneration. Some writers have said
that this was because they were afraid of this terrible king of
beasts. But this is not true. The Indian, notwithstanding his almost
useless bow and arrow in battles with this monster, was not controlled
by fear. He venerated the grizzly bear as his paternal ancestor. And
here I briefly set down the Modoc and Mount Shasta Indians' account of
their own creation.
They, as in the Biblical account of the creation of all things, claim
to have found the woods, wild beasts, birds and all things waiting for
them, as did Adam and Eve.
The Indians say the Great Spirit made this mountain first of all. Can
you not see how it is? they say. He first pushed down snow and ice
from the skies through a hole which he made in the blue heavens by
turning a stone round and round, till he made this great mountain;
then he stepped out of the clouds onto the mountain-top, and descended
and planted the trees all around by putting his finger on the ground.
The sun melted the snow, and the water ran down and nurtured the trees
and made the rivers. After that he made the fish for the rivers out of
the small end of his staff. He made the birds by blowing some leaves,
which he took up from the ground, among the trees. After that he made
the beasts out of the remainder of his stick, but made the grizzly
bear out of the big end, and made him master over all the others. He
made the grizzly so strong that he feared him himself, and would have
to go up on top of the mountain out of sight of the forest to sleep at
night, lest the grizzly, who, as will be seen, was much more strong
and cunning then than now, should assail him in his sleep. Afterwards,
the Great Spirit, wishing to remain on earth and make the sea and some
more land, converted Mount Shasta, by a great deal of labor, into a
wigwam, and built a fire in the center of it and made it a pleasant
home. After that, his family came down, and they all have lived in the
mountain ever since. They say that before the white man came they
could see the fire ascending from the mountain by night and the smoke
by day, every time they chose to look in that direction. They say that
one late and severe springtime, many thousand snows ago, there was a
great storm about the summit of Mount Shasta, and that the Great
Spirit sent his youngest and fairest daughter, of whom he was very
fond, up to the hole in the top, bidding her to speak to the storm
that came up from the sea, and tell it to be more gentle or it would
blow the mountain over. He bade her do this hastily, and not put her
head out, lest the wind should catch her in the hair and blow her
away. He told her she should only thrust out her long red arm and make
a sign, and then speak to the storm without.
The child hastened to the top and did as she was bid, and was about to
return, but having never yet seen the ocean, where the wind was born
and made his home, when it was white with the storm, she stopped,
turned and put her head out to look that way, when lo! the storm
caught in her long red hair, and blew her out and away down and down
the mountain side. Here she could not fix her feet in the hard, smooth
ice and snow, and so slid on and on down to the dark belt of firs
below the snow rim.
Now, the grizzly bears possessed all the wood and all the land down to
the sea at that time, and were very numerous and very powerful. They
were not exactly beasts then, although they were covered with hair,
lived in caves and had sharp claws; but they walked on two feet, and
talked, and used clubs to fight with, instead of their teeth and
claws, as they do now.
At this time, there was a family of grizzlies living close up to the
snows. The mother had lately brought forth, and the father was out in
quest of food for the young, when, as he returned with his club on his
shoulder and a young elk in his left hand, under his arm, he saw this
little child, red like fire, hid under a fir-bush, with her long hair
trailing in the snows, and shivering with fright and cold. Not knowing
what to make of her, he took her to the old mother, who was very
learned in all things, and asked her what this fair and frail thing
was that he had found shivering under a fir-bush in the snow. The old
mother grizzly, who had things pretty much her own way, bade him
leave the child with her, but never mention it to anyone, and she
would share her breast with her, and bring her up with the other
children, and maybe some great good would come of it.
The old mother reared her as she promised to do, and the old hairy
father went out every day, with his club on his shoulder, to get food
for his family, till they were all grown up and able to do for
themselves.
"Now," said the old mother Grizzly to the old father Grizzly, as he
stood his club by the door and sat down one day, "our oldest son is
quite grown up and must have a wife. Now, who shall it be but the
little red creature you found in the snow under the black fir-bush."
So the old father Grizzly kissed her, said she was very wise, then
took up his club on his shoulder and went out and killed some meat for
the marriage feast.
They married and were very happy, and many children were born to
them. But, being part of the Great Spirit and part of the grizzly
bear, these children did not exactly resemble either of their parents,
but partook somewhat of the nature and likeness of both. Thus was the
red man created; for these children were the first Indians.
All the other grizzlies throughout the black forests, even down to the
sea, were very proud and very kind, and met together, and, with their
united strength, built for the lovely little red princess a wigwam
close to that of her father, the Great Spirit. This is what is now
called "Little Mount Shasta."
After many years, the old mother Grizzly felt that she soon must die,
and, fearing that she had done wrong in detaining the child of the
Great Spirit, she could not rest till she had seen him and restored to
him his long-lost treasure and asked his forgiveness.
With this object in view, she gathered together all the grizzlies at
the new and magnificent lodge built for the princess and her children,
and then sent her eldest grandson to the summit of Mount Shasta in a
cloud, to speak to the Great Spirit and tell him where he could find
his long-lost daughter.
When the Great Spirit heard this, he was so glad that he ran down the
mountain side on the south so fast and strong that the snow was melted
off in places, and the tokens of his steps remain to this day. The
grizzlies went out to meet him by thousands; and as he approached they
stood apart in two great lines, with their clubs under their arms, and
so opened a lane through which he passed in great state to the lodge
where his daughter sat with her children.
But when he saw the children, and learned how the grizzlies that he
had created had betrayed him into the creation of a new race, he was
very wroth, and frowned on the old mother Grizzly till she died on
the spot. At this, the grizzlies all set up a dreadful howl; but he
took his daughter on his shoulder and, turning to all the grizzlies,
bade them hold their tongues, get down on their hands and knees and so
remain till he returned. They did as they were bid, and he closed the
door of the lodge after him, drove all the children out into the
world, passed out and up the mountain and never returned to the timber
any more.
So the grizzlies could not rise up any more, or make a noise, or use
their clubs, but ever since have had to go on all-fours, much like
other beasts, except when they have to fight for their lives; then the
Great Spirit permits them to stand up and fight with their fists like
men.
That is why the Indians about Mount Shasta will never kill or
interfere in any way with a grizzly. Whenever one of their number is
killed by one of these kings of the forest, he is burned on the spot,
and all who pass that way for years cast a stone on the place till a
great pile is thrown up. Fortunately, however, grizzlies are not now
plentiful about the mountain.
In proof of the story that the grizzly once stood and walked erect and
was much like a man, they show that he has scarcely any tail, and that
his arms are a great deal shorter than his legs, and that they are
more like a man than any other animal.
X.
AS A HUMORIST.
Not long ago, about the time a party of Americans were setting out for
India to hunt the tiger, a young banker from New York came to
California to hunt what he rightly considered the nobler beast.
He chartered a small steamer in San Francisco Bay and taking with him
a party of friends, as well as a great-grandson of Daniel Boone, a
famous hunter, for a guide, he sailed up the coast to the redwood
wilderness of Humboldt. Here he camped on the bank of a small stream
in a madrona thicket and began to hunt for his bear. He found his
bear, an old female with young cubs. As Boone was naturally in advance
when the beast was suddenly stumbled upon, he had to do the fighting,
and this gave the banker from the States a chance to scramble up a
small madrona. Of course he dropped his gun. They always do drop
their guns, by some singularly sad combination of accidents, when they
start up a tree with two rows of big teeth in the rear, and it is
hardly fair to expect the young bear-hunter from New York to prove an
exception. Poor Boone was severely maltreated by the savage old mother
grizzly in defense of her young. There was a crashing of brush and a
crushing of bones, and then all was still.
[Illustration: Of course he dropped his gun.--Page 107.]
Suddenly the bear seemed to remember that there was a second party who
had been in earnest search for a bear, and looking back down the trail
and up in the boughs of a small tree, she saw a pair of boots. She
left poor Boone senseless on the ground and went for those boots.
Coming forward, she reared up under the tree and began to claw for the
capitalist. He told me that she seemed to him, as she stood there, to
be about fifty feet high. Then she laid hold of the tree.
Fortunately this madrona tree is of a hard and unyielding nature, and
with all her strength she could neither break nor bend it. But she
kept thrusting up her long nose and longer claws, laying hold first of
his boots, which she pulled off, one after the other, with her teeth,
then with her claws she took hold of one garment and then another till
the man of money had hardly a shred, and his legs were streaming with
blood. Fearing that he should faint from loss of blood, he lashed
himself to the small trunk of the tree by his belt and then began to
scream with all his might for his friends.
When the bear became weary of clawing up at the dangling legs she went
back and began to turn poor Boone over to see if he showed any signs
of life. Then she came back and again clawed a while at the screaming
man up the madrona tree. It was great fun for the bear!
To cut a thrilling story short, the party in camp on the other side of
the creek finally came in hail, when the old bear gathered up her
babies and made safe exit up a gulch. Boone, now in Arizona, was so
badly crushed and bitten that his life was long despaired of, but he
finally got well. The bear, he informed me, showed no disposition to
eat him while turning him over and tapping him with her foot and
thrusting her nose into his bleeding face to see if he still breathed.
Story after story of this character could be told to prove that the
grizzly at home is not entirely brutal and savage; but rather a
good-natured lover of his family and fond of his sly joke.
XI.
A GRIZZLY'S SLY LITTLE JOKE.
I know an old Indian who was terribly frightened by an old monster
grizzly and her half-grown cub, one autumn, while out gathering
manzanita berries. But badly as he was frightened, he was not even
scratched.
It seems that while he had his head raised, and was busy gathering and
eating berries, he almost stumbled over an old bear and her cub. They
had eaten their fill and fallen asleep in the trail on the wooded
hillside. The old Indian had only time to turn on his heel and throw
himself headlong in the large end of a hollow log, which luckily lay
at hand. This, however, was only a temporary refuge. He saw, to his
delight, that the log was open at the other end, and corkscrewing his
way along toward the further end, he was about to emerge, when, to his
dismay, he saw the old mother sitting down quietly waiting for him!
After recovering his breath as best he could in his hot and contracted
quarters, he elbowed and corkscrewed himself back to the place by
which he first entered. But lo! the bear was there, sitting down, half
smiling, and waiting to receive him warmly. This, the old Indian said,
was repeated time after time, till he had no longer strength left to
struggle further, and turned on his face to die, when she put her head
in, touched the top of his head gently with her nose and then drew
back, took her cub with her and shuffled on.
I went to the spot with the Indian a day or two afterward, and am
convinced that his story was exactly as narrated. And when you
understand that the bear could easily have entered the hollow log and
killed him at any time, you will see that she had at least a faint
sense of fun in that "cat and mouse" amusement with the frightened
Indian.
XII.
THE GRIZZLY AS FREMONT FOUND HIM.
General Fremont found this powerful brute to be a gregarious
and confiding creature, fond of his family and not given to
disturbing those who did not disturb him. In his report to the
government--1847--he tells of finding a large family of grizzly bears
gathering acorns very much as the native Indians gathered them, and
this not far from a small Mexican town. He says that riding at the
head of his troops he saw, on reaching the brow of a little grassy
hill set with oaks, a great commotion in the boughs of one of the
largest trees, and, halting to cautiously reconnoiter, he noticed that
there were grouped about the base of the tree and under its wide
boughs, several huge grizzlies, employed in gathering and eating the
acorns which the baby grizzlies threw down from the thick branches
overhead. More than this, he reports that the baby bears, on seeing
him, became frightened, and attempted to descend to the ground and run
away, but the older bears, which had not yet discovered the explorers,
beat the young ones and drove them back up the tree, and compelled
them to go on with their work, as if they had been children.
In the early '50s, I, myself, saw the grizzlies feeding together in
numbers under the trees, far up the Sacramento Valley, as tranquilly
as a flock of sheep. A serene, dignified and very decent old beast was
the full-grown grizzly as Fremont and others found him here at home.
This king of the continent, who is quietly abdicating his throne, has
never been understood. The grizzly was not only every inch a king, but
he had, in his undisputed dominion, a pretty fair sense of justice. He
was never a roaring lion. He was never a man-eater. He is indebted for
his character for ferocity almost entirely to tradition, but, in some
degree, to the female bear when seeking to protect her young. Of
course, the grizzlies are good fighters, when forced to it; but as for
lying in wait for anyone, like the lion, or creeping, cat-like, as the
tiger does, into camp to carry off someone for supper, such a thing
was never heard of in connection with the grizzly.
The grizzly went out as the American rifle came in. I do not think he
retreated. He was a lover of home and family, and so fell where he was
born. For he is still found here and there, all up and down the land,
as the Indian is still found, but he is no longer the majestic and
serene king of the world. His whole life has been disturbed, broken
up; and his temper ruined. He is a cattle thief now, and even a sheep
thief. In old age, he keeps close to his canyon by day, deep in the
impenetrable chaparral, and at night shuffles down hill to some
hog-pen, perfectly careless of dogs or shots, and, tearing out a
whole side of the pen, feeds his fill on the inmates.
One of the interior counties kept a standing reward for the capture of
an old grizzly of this character for several years. But he defied
everything and he escaped everything but old age. Some hunters finally
crept in to where the old king lay, nearly blind and dying of old age,
and dispatched him with a volley from several Winchester rifles. It
was found that he was almost toothless, his paws had been terribly
mutilated by numerous steel traps, and it is said that his kingly old
carcass had received nearly lead enough to sink a small ship. There
were no means of ascertaining his exact weight, but it was claimed
that skin, bone and bullets, as he was found, he would have weighed
well nigh a ton.
XIII.
THE BEAR WITH SPECTACLES.
And now let us go down to near the mouth of the Father of Waters, to
"Barra Tarra Land" or Barren Land, as it was called of old by
Cervantes, in the kingdom of Sancho Panza. Strange how little the
great men of the old world knew of this new world! In one of his plays
Shakespeare speaks of ships from Mexico; in another he means to
mention the Bermudas. Burns speaks of a Newfoundland dog as
"Whelped in a country far abroad
Where boatmen gang to fish for cod,"
and Byron gets in a whole lot about Daniel Boone; but as a rule we
were ignored.
Barra Tarra, so called, is the very richest part of this globe. It
must have been rich always, rich as the delta of the Nile; but now,
with the fertility of more than a dozen States dumped along there
annually, it is rich as cream is rich.
The fish, fowl, oysters of Barra Tarra--ah, the oysters! No oysters in
the world like these for flavor, size and sweetness. They are so
enormous in size that--but let me illustrate their size by an anecdote
of the war.
A Yankee captain, hungry and worn out hewing his way with his sword
from Chicago to the sea, as General Logan had put it, sat down in a
French restaurant in New Orleans, and while waiting for a plate of the
famous Barra Tarra raw oysters, saw that a French creole sitting at
the same little side table was turning over and over with his fork a
solitary and most tempting oyster of enormous size, eyeing it
ruefully.
"Why don't you eat him?"
"By gar! I find him too big for me. You like?"
"Certainly. Not too big for me. See this!" and snatching the fork from
the Frenchman the oyster was gone at a gulp.
The little Frenchman shrugged his shoulders, looked at the gallant
officer a moment and then said in a fit of enthusiastic admiration:
"By gar, Monsieur Capitaine, you are one mighty brave man! I did try
him t'ree times zat way, but he no stay."
The captain threw up his arms and--his oyster!--so runs the story.
The soil along the river bank is so rich that weeds, woods, vines,
trench close and hard on the heels of the plowman. A plantation will
almost perish from the earth, as it were, by a few years of
abandonment. And so it is that you see miles and miles on either
side--parishes on top of parishes, in fact--fast returning to
barbarism, dragging the blacks by thousands down to below the level of
brutes with them, as you descend from New Orleans toward the mouth of
the mighty river, nearly one hundred miles from the beautiful
"Crescent City." And, ah, the superstition of these poor blacks!
You see hundreds of little white houses, old "quarters," and all
tenantless now, save one or two on each plantation. Cheap sugar and
high wages, as compared with old times of slavery--but then the
enormous cost of keeping up the levees, and above all, the continued
peril to life and property, with a mile of swift, muddy water sweeping
seaward high above your head--these things are making a desert of the
richest lands on earth. We are gaining ground in the West, but we are
losing ground in the South, the great, silent South.
Of course, the world, we, civilization, will turn back to this
wondrous region some day, when we have settled the West; for the mouth
of the mightiest river on the globe is a fact; it is the mouth by
which this young nation was trained in its younger days, and we cannot
ignore it in the end, however willing we may be to do so now.
Strange how wild beasts and all sorts of queer creatures are
overrunning the region down there, too, growing like weeds, increasing
as man decreases. I found a sort of marsh bear here. He looks like the
sloth bear (Ursus Labiatus) of the Ganges, India, as you see him in
the Zoo of London, only he is not a sloth, by any means. The negroes
are superstitiously afraid of him, and their dogs, very numerous, and
good coon dogs, too, will not touch him. His feet are large and flat,
to accommodate him in getting over the soft ground, while his shaggy
and misshapen body is very thin and light. His color is as unlovely as
his shape--a sort of faded, dirty brown or pale blue, with a rim of
dirty white about the eyes that makes him look as if he wore
spectacles when he stops and looks at you.
As he is not fit to eat because he lives on fish and oysters,
sportsmen will not fire at him; and as the poor, superstitious,
voodoo-worshiping negroes, and their dogs, too, run away as soon as he
is seen, he has quite a habit of stopping and looking at you through
his queer spectacles as long as you are in sight. He looks to be a
sort of second-hand bear, his shaggy, faded, dirty coat of hair
looking as if he had been stuffed, like an old sofa, with the stuffing
coming out--a very second-hand appearance, to be sure.
Now, as I have always had a fondness for skins--having slept on them
and under them all my life, making both bed and carpet of them--I very
much wanted a skin of this queer marsh bear which the poor negroes
both adore and dread as a sort of devil. But, as no one liked him well
enough to kill him, I must do it myself; and with this object, along
with my duty to describe the drowning plantations, I left New Orleans
with Colonel Bloom, two good guns, and something to eat and to drink,
and swept down the great river to the landing in the outer edge of the
timber belt.
And how strange this landing! As a rule you have to climb up to the
shore from a ship. Here, after setting foot on the levee, we walked
down, down, down to reach the level land--a vast field of fevers.
I had a letter of introduction to the "preacher." He was a marvel of
rags, preached every day and night, up and down the river, and
received 25 cents a day from the few impoverished white planters, too
poor to get away, for his influence for good among the voodoo blacks.
Not that they could afford to care for the negroes, those few
discouraged and fever-stricken planters on their plantations of weeds
and water, but they must, now and then, have these indolent and
retrograding blacks to plant or cut down their cane, or sow and gather
their drowning patches of rice, and the preacher could preach them
into working a little, when right hungry.
The ragged black took my letter and pretended to read it. Poor fellow,
he could not read, but pride, or rather vanity, made him act a lie.
Seeing the fact, I contrived to tell him that it was from a colored
clergyman, and that I had come to get him and his dogs to help me
kill a bear. The blacks now turned white; or at least white around the
lips. The preacher shuddered and shrugged his shoulders and finally
groaned in his grief.
[Illustration: The bear was waiting there.--Page 111.]
Let us omit the mosquitoes, the miserable babies, nude as nature, and
surely very hungry in this beauteous place of fertility. They hung
about my door, a "quarters" cabin with grass knee high through the
cracks in the floor, like flies, till they got all my little store of
supplies, save a big flask of "provisions" which General Beauregard
had given me for Colonel Bloom, as a preventive against the deadly
fever. No, it was not whiskey, not all whiskey, at least, for it was
bitter as gall with quinine. I had to help the Colonel sample it at
first, but I only helped him sample it once. It tasted so vilely that
it seemed to me I should, as between the two, prefer fever.
And such a moon! The ragged minister stood whooping up his numerous
dogs and gathering his sullen clan of blacks to get that bear and that
promised $5.
Away from up toward New Orleans, winding, sweeping, surging, flashing
like a mighty sword of silver, the Father of Waters came through the
air, high above our heads and level with the topmost limit of his
artificial banks. The blacks were silent, ugly, sullen, and so the
preacher asked for and received the five silver dollars in advance.
This made me suspicious, and, out of humor, I went into my cabin and
took Colonel Bloom into a corner and told him what had been done. He
did not say one word but took a long drink of preventive against the
fever, as General Beauregard had advised and provided.
Then we set out for the woods, through weeds that reached to our
shoulders, the negroes in a string, slow, silent, sullen and ugly, the
brave bear dogs only a little behind the negroes. The preacher kept
muttering a monotonous prayer.
But that moon and that mighty sword of silver in the air, the silence,
the large solemnity, the queer line of black heads barely visible
above the sea of weeds! I was not right certain that I had lost any
bear as we came to the edge of the moss-swept cypress woods, for here
the negroes all suddenly huddled up and muttered and prayed with one
voice. Aye, how they prayed in their piteous monotone! How sad it all
was!
The dogs had sat down a few rods back, a line of black dots along the
path through the tall weeds, and did not seem to care for anything at
all. I had to lay my hand on the preacher's shoulder and ask him to
please get on; then they all started on together, and oh, the moon,
through the swaying cypress moss, the mighty river above!
It was with great effort that I got them to cross a foot-log that lay
across a lagoon only a little way in the moss-hung woods, the brave
dogs all the time only a short distance behind us still. It was a hot
night and the mosquitoes were terrible in the woods, but I doubt if
they bite the blacks as they did me. Surely not, else they would not
be even as nearly alive as they are.
Having got them across the lagoon, I gave them each 25 cents more, and
this made them want to go home. The dogs had all sat down in a queer
row on the foot-log. Such languor, such laziness, such idiotic
helplessness I never saw before, even on the Nile. The blacks, as well
as the dogs, seemed to be afraid to move now. The preacher again began
to mumble a prayer, and the whole pack with him; and then they prayed
again, this time not so loudly. And although there was melody of a
sort in their united voices, I am certain they used no words, at least
no words of any real language.
Suddenly the dogs got up and came across and hid among the men, and
the men huddled up close; for right there on the other end of the log,
with his broad right foot resting on it, was the shaggy little beast
we were hunting for. We had found our bear, or rather, he had found
us, and it was clear that he meant to come over and interview us at
once.
The preacher crouched behind me as I cocked and raised my gun, the
blacks hid behind the preacher, and I think, though I had not time to
see certainly, that the dogs hid behind the blacks.
I fired at the dim white spot on the bear's breast and sent shot after
shot into his tattered coat, for he was not ten lengths of an old
Kentucky ramrod distant, and he fell dead where he stood, and I went
over and dragged him safely up on the higher bank.
Then the wild blacks danced and sang and sang and danced, till one of
them slipped and fell into the lagoon. They fished him out and all
returned to where I was, with the dead bear, dogs and all in great
good spirits. Tying the bear's feet together with a withe they strung
him on a pole and we all went back home, the blacks singing all the
way some barbaric half French song at the top of their melodious
voices.
But Colonel Bloom was afraid that the one who had fallen in the river
might take the fever, and so as soon as we got safe back he drank what
was left in the bottle General Beauregard had sent him and he went to
sleep; while the superstitious blacks huddled together under the great
levee and skinned the bear in the silver moonlight, below the mighty
river. I gave them each a silver dollar--very bright was the brand new
silver from the mint of New Orleans, but not nearly so bright as the
moon away down there by the glowing rim of the Mexican seas where the
spectacled bear abides in the classic land, Barra Tarra, Kingdom of
Sancho Panza.
XIV.
THE BEAR-SLAYER OF SAN DIEGO.
Let us now leave the great grizzly and the little marsh bear in
spectacles behind us and tell about a boy, a bear-slayer; not about a
bear, mind you. For the little fish-eating black bear which he killed
and by which he got his name is hardly worth telling about. This bear
lives in the brush along the sea-bank on the Mexican and Southern
California coast and has huge feet but almost no hair. I don't know
any name for him, but think he resembles the "sun bear" (Ursus
Titanus) more than any other. His habit of rolling himself up in a
ball and rolling down hill after you is like that of the porcus or pig
bear.
You may not know that a bear, any kind of a bear, finds it hard work
running down hill, because of his short arms, so when a man who knows
anything about bears is pursued, or thinks he is pursued, he always
tries, if he knows himself, to run down hill. A man can escape almost
any bear by running down hill, except this little fellow along the
foothills by the Mexican seas. You see, he has good bear sense, like
the rest of the bear family, and gets along without regard to legs of
any sort, sometimes.
This boy that I am going to tell about was going to school on the
Mexican side of the line between the two republics, near San Diego,
California, when a she bear which had lost her cub caught sight of the
boys at play down at the bottom of a high, steep hill, and she rolled
for them, rolled right among the little, half-naked fellows, and
knocked numbers of them down. But before she could get the dust out of
her eyes and get up, this boy jumped on her and killed her with his
knife.
The governor remembered the boy for his pluck and presence of mind and
he was quite a hero and was always called "The Bear-Slayer" after
that.
Some rich ladies from Boston, hearing about his brave act, put their
heads together and then put their hands in their pockets and sent him
to a higher school, where the following incident took place.
I ought to mention that this little Mexican bear, though he has but
little hair on his body, has a great deal on his feet, making him look
as if he wore pantalets, little short pantalets badly frayed out at
the bottoms.
San Diego is one of the great new cities of Southern California. It
lies within only a few minutes' ride of Mexico. There is a pretty
little Mexican town on the line between Mexico and California--Tia
Juana--pronounced Te Wanna. Translated, the name means "Aunt Jane." In
the center of one of the streets stands a great gray stone monument,
set there by the government to mark the line between the United States
and Mexico.
To the south, several hundred miles distant, stretches the long Sea of
Cortez, as the conquerors of ancient Mexico once called the Gulf of
California. Beyond the Sea of Cortez is the long and rock-bound reach
of the west coast of Mexico. Then a group of little Central American
republics; then Colombia, Peru and so on, till at last Patagonia
points away like a huge giant's finger straight toward the South Pole.
But I must bear in mind that I set out in this story to tell you about
"The Bear-Slayer of San Diego," and the South Pole is a long way from
the subject in hand.
I have spoken of San Diego as one of the great new cities, and great
it is, but altogether new it certainly is not, for it was founded by a
Spanish missionary, known as Father Junipero, more than one hundred
years ago.
These old Spanish missionaries were great men in their day; brave,
patient and very self-sacrificing in their attempts to settle the
wild countries and civilize the Indians.
This Father Junipero walked all the way from the City of Mexico to San
Diego, although he was more than fifty years old; and finally, after
he had spent nearly a quarter of a century in founding missions up and
down the coast of California, he walked all the way back to Mexico,
where he died.
When it is added that he was a lame man, that he was more than
threescore and ten years of age, and that he traveled all the distance
on this last journey on foot and alone, with neither arms nor
provisions, trusting himself entirely to Providence, one can hardly
fail to remember his name and speak it with respect.
This new city, San Diego, with its most salubrious clime, is set all
over and about with waving green palms, with golden oranges, red
pomegranates, great heavy bunches of green and golden bananas, and
silver-laden olive orchards. The leaf of the olive is of the same
soft gray as the breast of the dove. As if the dove and the olive
branch had in some sort kept companionship ever since the days of the
deluge.
San Diego is nearly ten miles broad, with its base resting against the
warm, still waters of the Pacific Ocean. The most populous part of the
city is to the south, toward Mexico. Then comes the middle part of San
Diego City. This is called "the old town," and here it was that Father
Junipero planted some palm trees that stand to this day--so tall that
they almost seem to be dusting the stars with their splendid plumes.
Here also you see a great many old adobe houses in ruins, old forts,
churches, fortresses, barracks, built by the Mexicans nearly a century
ago, when Spain possessed California, and her gaudy banner floated
from Oregon to the Isthmus of Darien.
The first old mission is a little farther on up the coast, and the new
college, known as the San Diego College of Letters, is still farther
on up the warm sea bank. San Francisco lies several hundred miles on
up the coast beyond Los Angeles. Then comes Oregon, then Washington,
one of the newest States, and then Canada, then Alaska, and at last
the North Pole, which, by the way, is almost as far as the South Pole
from my subject: The Bear-Slayer of San Diego.
He was a little Aztec Indian, brown as a berry, slim and slender, very
silent, very polite and not at all strong.
It was said that he had Spanish blood in his veins, but it did not
show through his tawny skin. It is to be conceded, however, that he
had all the politeness and serene dignity of the proudest Spanish don
in the land.
He was now, by the kind favor of those good ladies who had heard of
his daring address in killing the bear with his knife, a student of
the San Diego College of Letters, where there were several hundred
other boys of all grades and ages, from almost all parts of the earth.
A good many boys came here from Boston and other eastern cities to
escape the rigors of winter. I remember one boy in particular from
Philadelphia. He was a small boy with a big nose, very bright and very
brave. He was not a friend of the little Aztec Indian, the Bear-Slayer
of San Diego. The name of this boy from Philadelphia was Peterson; the
Boston boys called him Bill Peterson. His name, perhaps, was William
P. Peterson; William Penn Peterson, most likely. But this is merely
detail, and can make but little difference in the main facts of the
case.
As I said before, these college grounds are on the outer edge of the
city. The ocean shuts out the world on the west, but the huge
chaparral hills roll in on the east, and out of these hills the
jack-rabbits come down in perfect avalanches at night, and devour
almost everything that grows.
Wolves howl from these hills of chaparral at night by hundreds, but
they are only little bits of shaggy, gray coyotes and do little or no
harm in comparison with the innumerable rabbits. For these big
fellows, on their long, bent legs, and with ears like those of a
donkey, can cut down with their teeth a young orchard almost in a
single night.
The new college, of course, had new grounds, new bananas, oranges,
olives, all things, indeed, that wealth and good taste could
contribute in this warm, sweet soil. But the rabbits! You could not
build a fence so high that they would not leap over it.
"They are a sort of Jumbo grasshopper," said the smart boy from
Boston.
The head gardener of the college campus and environment grew
desperate.
"Look here, sir," he said to the president, "these big-eared fellows
are lazy and audacious things. Why can't they live up in the
chaparral, as they did before we came here to plant trees and try to
make the world beautiful? Now, either these jack-rabbits must go or
we must go."
"Very well," answered the president. "Offer a reward for their ears
and let the boys destroy them."
"How much reward can I offer?"
"Five cents apiece, I think, would do," answered the head of the
college, as he passed on up the great stone steps to his study.
The gardener got the boys together that evening and said, "I will give
you five cents apiece for the ears of these dreadful rabbits."
"That makes ten cents for each rabbit, for each rabbit has two ears!"
shouted the smart boy from Boston.
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-class 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 Saturday 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 passed. 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 grass 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 Saturday 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, passing 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 principal 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 circumvent 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 carcasses 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.
"As the Polar bear is able to obtain food all through the Arctic
winter, there is not the same necessity, as in the case of the
vegetable-eating bears, for hibernating. In fact, the males and young
females roam about through the whole winter, and only the older
females retire for the season. These--according to the Eskimo account,
quoted by Captain Lyon--are very fat at the commencement of winter,
and on the first fall of snow lie down and allow themselves to be
covered, or else dig a cave in a drift, and then go to sleep until the
spring, when the cubs are born. By this time the animal's heat has
melted the snow for a considerable distance, so that there is plenty
of room for the young ones, who tumble about at their ease and get
fat at the expense of their parent, who, after her long abstinence,
becomes gradually very thin and weak. The whole family leave their
abode of snow when the sun is strong enough to partially melt its
roof.
"The Polar bear is regularly hunted with dogs by the Eskimo. The
following extract gives an account of their mode of procedure:
"Let us suppose a bear scented out at the base of an iceberg. The
Eskimo examines the track with sagacious care, to determine its age
and direction, and the speed with which the animal was moving when he
passed along. The dogs are set upon the trail, and the hunter courses
over the ice in silence. As he turns the angle of the berg his game is
in view before him, stalking along, probably, with quiet march,
sometimes snuffing the air suspiciously, but making, nevertheless, for
a nest of broken hummocks. The dogs spring forward, opening a wild,
wolfish yell, the driver shrieking 'Nannook! Nannook!' and all
straining every nerve in pursuit.
[Illustration: Pressed more severely, the bear stands at bay.--Page
155.]
"The bear rises on his haunches, then starts off at full speed. The
hunter, as he runs, leaning over his sledge, seizes the traces of a
couple of his dogs and liberates them from their burthen. It is the
work of a minute, for the motion is not checked, and the remaining
dogs rush on with apparent ease.
"Now, pressed more severely, the bear makes for an iceberg, and stands
at bay, while his two foremost pursuers halt at a short distance and
await the arrival of the hunter. At this moment the whole pack are
liberated; the hunter grasps his lance, and, tumbling through the snow
and ice, prepares for the encounter.
"If there be two hunters, the bear is killed easily; for one makes a
feint of thrusting the spear at the right side, and, as the animal
turns with his arms toward the threatened attack, the left is
unprotected and receives the death wound."
XVI.
MONNEHAN, THE GREAT BEAR-HUNTER OF OREGON.
He wore a tall silk hat, the first one I had ever seen, not at all the
equipment of "a mighty hunter before the Lord;" but Phineas Monnehan,
Esq., late of some castle (I forget the name now), County of Cork,
Ireland, would have been quite another personage with another sort of
hat. And mighty pretension made he to great estates and titles at
home, but greatest of all his claims was that of "a mighty hunter."
Clearly he had been simply a schoolmaster at home, and had picked up
all his knowledge of wild beasts from books. He had very impressive
manners and had come to Oregon with an eye to political promotion, for
he more than once hinted to my quiet Quaker father, on whose
hospitality he had fastened himself, that he would not at all dislike
going to Congress, and would even consent to act as Governor of this
far-off and half-savage land known as Oregon. But, as observed a time
or two before, Monnehan most of all things desired the name and the
renown, like Nimrod, the builder of Babylon, of a "mighty hunter."
He had brought no firearms with him, nor was my father at all fond of
guns, but finally we three little boys, my brother John, two years
older than I, my brother James, two years younger, and myself, had a
gun between us. So with this gun, Monnehan, under his tall hat, a pipe
in his teeth and a tremendously heavy stick in his left hand would
wander about under the oaks, not too far away from the house, all the
working hours of the day. Not that he ever killed anything. In truth,
I do not now recall that he ever once fired off the gun. But he got
away from work, all the same, and a mighty hunter was Monnehan.
He carried this club and kept it swinging and sweeping in a
semi-circle along before him all the time because of the incredible
number of rattlesnakes that infested our portion of Oregon in those
early days. I shall never forget the terror in this brave stranger's
face when he first found out that all the grass on all our grounds was
literally alive with snakes. But he had found a good place to stay,
and he was not going to be driven out by snakes.
You see, we lived next to a mountain or steep stony hill known as
Rattlesnake Butte, and in the ledges of limestone rock here the
rattlesnakes hibernated by thousands. In the spring they would crawl
out of the cracks in the cliffs, and that was the beginning of the end
of rattlesnakes in Oregon. It was awful!
But he had a neighbor by the name of Wilkins, an old man now, and a
recent candidate for Governor of Oregon, who was equal to the
occasion. He sent back to the States and had some black, bristly,
razor-backed hogs brought out to Oregon. These hogs ate the
rattlesnakes. But we must get on with the bear story; for this man
Monnehan, who came to us the year the black, razor-backed hogs came,
was, as I may have said before, "a mighty hunter."
The great high hills back of our house, black and wild and woody, were
full of bear. There were several kinds of bear there in those days.
"How big is this ere brown bear, Squire?" asked Monnehan.
"Well," answered my father, "almost as big as a small sawmill when in
active operation."
"Oi think Oi'll confine me operations, for this hunting sayson, to the
smaller spacies o' bear," said Mr. Monnehan, as he arose with a
thoughtful face and laid his pipe on the mantel-piece.
A few mornings later you would have thought, on looking at our porch,
that a very large negro from a very muddy place had been walking
bare-footed up and down the length of it. This was not a big bear by
the sign, only a small black cub; but we got the gun out, cleaned and
loaded it, and by high noon we three little boys, my father and
Monnehan, the mighty hunter, were on the track of that little black
bear. We had gone back up the narrow canyon with its one little clump
of dense woods that lay back of our house and reached up toward the
big black hills.
Monnehan took the gun and his big club and went along up and around
above the edge of the brush. My father took the pitchfork and my
younger brother James kept on the ridge above the brush on the other
side of the canyon, while my older brother John and myself were
directed to come on a little later, after Mr. Monnehan had got himself
in position to do his deadly work, and, if possible, drive the
terrible beast within range of his fatal rifle.
Slowly and cautiously my brother and I came on, beating the brush and
the tall rye grass. As we advanced up the canyon, Mr. Monnehan was
dimly visible on the high ridge to the right, and father now and then
was to be seen with little brother and his pitchfork to the left.
Suddenly there was such a shout as almost shook the walls of the
canyon about our ears. It was the voice of Monnehan calling from the
high ridge close above the clump of dense wood; and it was a wild and
a desperate and a continuous howl, too. At last we could make out
these words:
"Oi've thrade the bear! Oi've thrade the bear! Oi've thrade the bear!"
Down the steep walls came father like an avalanche, trailing his
pitchfork in one hand and half dragging little brother James with the
other.
"Run, boys, run! right up the hill! He's got him treed, he's got him
treed! Keep around the bush and go right up the hill, fast as you can.
He's got him treed, he's got him treed! Hurrah for Monnehan, at last!
He's got him treed, he's got him treed!"
Out of breath from running, my father sat down at the foot of the
steep wall of the canyon below Monnehan and we boys clambered on up
the grassy slope like goats.
Meantime, Monnehan kept shouting wildly and fearfully as before. Such
lungs as Monnehan had! A mighty hunter was Monnehan. At last we got on
the ridge up among the scattering and storm-bent and low-boughed oaks;
breathless and nearly dead from exhaustion.
"Here, byes, here!"
We looked up the hill a little ahead of us from where the voice came,
and there, straddled across the leaning bough of a broad oak tree hung
Monnehan, the mighty hunter. His hat was on the ground underneath him,
his club was still in his daring hand, but his gun was in the grass a
hundred yards away.
"Here, boys, right up here. Come up here an' get a look at 'im!
Thot's vaght Oi got up 'ere fur, to get a good look at 'im! Right up
now, byes, an' get a good look at 'im! Look out fur me hat there!"
My brother hastily ran and got and handed me the gun and instantly was
up the tree along with Monnehan, peering forward and back, left and
right, everywhere. But no sign, no sound or scent of any bear
anywhere.
By this time my father had arrived with his pitchfork and a very tired
little boy. He sat down on the grass, and, wearily wiping his
forehead, he said to Monnehan,
"Mr. Monnehan, how big was the bear that you saw?"
"Well, now, Squire, upon the sowl o' me, he was fully the size of a
very extraordinary black dog," answered Mr. Monnehan, as he descended
and came and stood close to my father, as if to defend him with his
club. Father rose soon after and, with just the least tinge of
impatience and vexation in his voice, said to brother John and me,
"Boys, go up and around the thicket with your gun and beat the bush
down the canyon as you come down. Mr. Monnehan and I will drop down to
the bottom of the canyon here between the woods and the house and
catch him as he comes out."
Brother and I were greatly cheered at this; for it was evident that
father had faith that we would find the bear yet. And believing that
the fun was not over, we, tired as we were, bounded forward and on and
up and around the head of the canyon with swift feet and beating
hearts. Here we separated, and each taking a half of the dense copse
of wood and keeping within hailing distance, we hastily descended
through the steep tangle of grapevine, wild hops, wild gourdvines and
all sorts of things, shouting and yelling as we went. But no bear or
sign of bear as yet.
We were near the edge of the brush. I could see, from a little naked
hillock in the copse where I paused to take breath, my father with
his pitchfork standing close to the cow path below the brush, while a
little further away and a little closer to the house stood Mr.
Monnehan, club in hand and ready for the raging bear.
Suddenly I heard the brush break and crackle over in the direction of
my brother. I dropped on my knee and cocked my gun. I got a glimpse of
something black tearing through the brush like a streak, but did not
fire.
Then I heard my brother shout, and I thought I heard him laugh, too.
Just then there burst out of the thicket and on past my father and his
pitchfork a little black, razor-backed sow, followed by five black,
squealing pigs! Monnehan's bear!
XVII.
THE BEAR "MONARCH."
HOW HE WAS CAPTURED.
Much having been said about bears of late, a young Californian of
great fortune and enterprise resolved to set some questions at rest,
and, quite regardless of cost or consequences, sent into the mountains
for a live grizzly. The details of his capture, the plain story of the
long, wild quest, the courage, the cunning, the final submission of
the monster, and then the last bulletin about his health, habits and
all that, make so instructive and pleasing a narrative that I have
asked for permission to add it to my own stories. The bear described
is at present in our San Francisco Zoo, a fine and greatly admired
monarch.
* * * * *
"Are there any true grizzly bears in California?"
"Undoubtedly there are."
"I don't know about it. I have a great deal of doubt. Where are they?"
"In the Sierra Madre, in Touloumne Canyon, in Siskiyou County and
probably in many other mountain districts."
"That may be so, but nobody can find them. Now, do you think you could
find them?"
"I think I could if I should try."
"Would you undertake to get a genuine grizzly in this State?"
"Yes, if you want one. How will you have him--dead or alive?"
"Alive."
This conversation was held last May between the proprietor of the
Examiner and special reporter Allen Kelly.
A week ago Kelly brought home an enormous grizzly bear, lodged the
animal temporarily in one of the cages in Woodward's Gardens and
reported to the editor that he had finished that assignment.
The following is his account of the hunt and capture.
The Examiner expedition began the search for a grizzly early in June,
starting from Santa Paula and striking into the mountains at Tar
Creek, where the Sespe oil wells are bored. The Examiner correspondent
detailed to catch a bear was accompanied by De Moss Bowers of Ventura,
who was moved by love of adventure to offer his assistance.
During the first part of the trip the party numbered five persons,
including Dad Coffman, a spry old gentleman of seventy-two years, who
was out for the benefit of his health, a packer and guide, and a
person from Santa Paula called "Doc," who was loaded to the muzzle
with misinformation and inspired with the notion that it was
legitimate to plunder the expedition because the Examiner had plenty
of money. The packer was "Doc's" son, a good man to work, but
unfortunately afflicted with similar hallucinations. The expedition
was plundered because these persons were trusted on the
recommendation of a gentleman who ought to have known better.
At Tar Creek the correspondent was told that the Stone Corral bear, a
somewhat noted grizzly that had killed his man, had been recently on
Squaw Flat, and had prowled about an old cabin at night, sorting over
the garbage heap and pile of tin cans at the door, but when the
expedition passed the cabin no fresh sign was found, and the tracks on
Squaw Flat were at least a week old.
The first camp was in a clump of chincapin brush at Stone Corral.
There were bear tracks in the soft ground at the edge of the creek,
which induced the hunters to spend two days in prospecting that part
of the country. One of the proposed plans for capturing the bear was
to run him out of the rocks and brush to some reasonably open bit of
country like Squaw Flat or one of the small level patches near camp
and lasso him, but the impracticable nature of that scheme was soon
demonstrated. On the next day after making camp the Examiner's own
bear catcher went out on a nervous black horse called "Nig" to find
out where the Stone Corral bear was spending the summer and
incidentally to get some venison. The Stone Corral bear was there or
thereabouts beyond any doubt. He ran the correspondent out of the
brush and showed a perverse disposition to do all the hunting himself.
"Nig" would not stand to let his rider take a shot, but when the bear
gave notice of his presence by growling and smashing down the brush
twenty yards away, he wheeled and bolted towards camp. Near the camp
Dad was found rounding up the other horses, who had just been scared
from their pasturage by another wandering bear. It was clear that not
a horse in the outfit could be ridden to within roping distance of a
bear, and it is doubtful if three horses fit for such a job could be
found in the country. Some years ago the ranchmen and vaqueros
frequently caught bears with a rope, but even then it was difficult to
train horses to the work, and only one horse out of a hundred could be
cured of his instinctive dread of a grizzly.
It was clear also that there were some defects in the plan of driving
the Stone Corral bear out of the brush, chief of which was the bear's
inconsiderate desire to do the driving himself. As the hunting would
have to be done afoot, the prospects incident to an attempt to round
up a big grizzly among the rocks and chaparral were not peculiarly
alluring. Trapping was the only other method that could be suggested,
but the absence of any heavy timber would make that difficult.
The Stone Corral is a singular arrangement of huge sandstone ledges on
the slope of a mountain, forming a rough inclosure about a quarter of
a mile wide and three or four times as long. The country is very
rugged and broken for miles around, and except along the creek and on
the trail a horse cannot be ridden through it. The problem of how to
catch a bear in such a place was not solved, because the bear cut
short its consideration by marching past the camp and lumbering down
the creek bed toward the Alder Creek Canyon and the Sespe country. The
correspondent stood upon the sandstone ledge as he went by, and yelled
at him, but he did not quicken his pace.
When it became evident that the bear was bound for the Sespe, the
horses were saddled. Balaam the Burro was concealed under a
mountainous pack, and the march was resumed over the Alder Creek trail
to the deep gorge through which the Sespe River runs. The man who made
the Alder Creek trail was not born to build roads. He laid it out
right over the top of a high and steep mountain, when by making a
slight detour, he could have avoided a difficult and unnecessary
climb. In the broiling hot sun of a breezeless day in June, the march
over the mountains was hard on men and horses, and the pace was
necessarily slow.
The heat coaxed the rattlesnakes out of their holes, and the angry hum
of their rattles was an almost incessant accompaniment to the hoof
beats of the horses. Where the trail wound along a steep slope,
affording but slight foothold for an animal, a more than unusually
strenuous and insistent singing of a snake, disturbed from his sunny
siesta, caused Balaam to jump aside. Balaam avoided the snake, but he
lost his balance and rolled down the slope, heels in the air and pack
underneath. The acrobatic feats achieved by Balaam in his struggles to
regain his footing were watched by an admiring and solicitous
audience, and when he cleverly took advantage of the slight
obstruction offered by a manzanita bush, and got safely upon his feet,
he was loudly applauded. The deep solicitude of the party for the
safety of Balaam and his pack was accounted for when he scrambled
back to the trail and gravely walked up to the packer to have his pack
straightened. Every man anxiously felt of the pack, and heaved a sigh
of relief. The bottles containing O. P. S., antidote for snake bite,
were not broken, but it was a narrow escape.
"Great Beeswax!" said the Doctor, "suppose those bottles had been
smashed and then some one of us should go to work and bite himself
with a snake! Wouldn't that be a fix?"
"Dogdurn if it don't make my blood run cold to think of it," said Dad.
Everybody's blood seemed to be congealing, and as the pack was loose
and the antidote accessible, an ounce of prevention was administered
to each man, and Balaam was rewarded for his timely agility with a
handful of sugar.
No more accidents occurred, and late in the afternoon the cavalcade
slid, coasted and scrambled down the last steep hill into the Sespe
Canyon, where a camp was made under an immense oak beside a deep,
rocky pool. That evening, around the camp-fire, some strange bear
stories were evolved from either the memories or imagination of the
hunters.
In the morning the search for bear signs was resumed and prosecuted
until noon without success. Dad was lured by the swarms of trout in
the stream, and went fishing. Dad is not a scientific fly fisherman.
His favorite method is to select a shady nook on the bank, sit down
with his back against a rock, tie a sinker to a large and gaudy fly,
and angle on the bottom for the biggest trout he can see. He generally
carries a book in his pocket, and when the trout remains unresponsive
to the allurements of the gaudy fly, he fastens his rod to a bush and
reads until he falls asleep.
In the afternoon one of the party went out over a long, brushy ridge,
and the correspondent pushed on down the gorge in search of bear
signs. All the bear tracks led up toward the Hot Springs Canyon,
indicating that the grizzlies had begun their annual migration to the
Alamo, Frazier and Pine mountains, where large bands of sheep are
herded through the summer. Some of the tracks were large and fresh,
and a person might come upon a bear at any time in the bottom of the
canyon. Preparations were made for following the bears and directions
given for an early start in the morning. The Doctor recollected that
he had important business in Santa Paula that required his immediate
attention, and he wouldn't have time to follow the grizzlies through
the rugged passes of the mountains. Accordingly, he and Dad decided to
remain in the Sespe camp a day or two, enjoy the fishing, and then
return to Santa Paula, and the bear hunting party that saddled up and
struck out on the trail of the grizzly in the morning was reduced to
three.
The trail led through the Hot Springs Canyon, where boiling hot
sulphur water flows out of the ground in a stream large enough to
sensibly affect the temperature of the Sespe River, into which it
runs. This canyon was formerly a beautiful camping spot, and was
resorted to by many persons who believed that bathing in sulphur water
would restore their health, but about three years ago a cloudburst
uprooted all the trees and converted the green cienaga into a rocky
desolate flat, as barren and unattractive as the sharp, treeless peaks
surrounding the canyon. A few mountain sheep inhabit the mountains
about the Hot Springs, and occasionally one is seen standing upon some
high and inaccessible cliff, but it is very seldom that a hunter
succeeds in getting a pair of big horns.
The next camp was on the Piru Creek, where it runs through the Mutaw
ranch. One of the most promising mining districts in this part of the
State takes its name from the Piru, and in years gone by a great deal
of gold was taken from the diggings along the stream. One of the most
successful miners was Mike Brannan, whose cabins and mining appliances
lie unused and decaying about six miles from the place where the
expedition camped.
From the camp on the Mutaw the expedition followed Piru Creek down to
Lockwood, and the latter up to the divide between Lockwood Valley and
the Cuddy ranch at the foot of Mount Pinos, called Sawmill Mountain by
the settlers. The mountain is about 10,000 feet high, and is covered
with heavy pine timber. Ever since Haggin & Carr's sheep have been on
the mountain, the bears from forty miles around have made annual
marauding expeditions, and kept the herders on the jump all the
summer. The first band of sheep and the Examiner expedition arrived at
the old Sawmill simultaneously this year, and the Basque who was
herding the band, having a very lively sense of the danger of his
situation, pitched his tent close to the camp, where he would be under
the protection of three rifles. The Basque had never been on the
mountain before, but he had heard about the bears and their audacious
raids, and he was not at all enamored of his job. When the campfires
were started, and the forest became an enclosing wall of gloom, behind
which lurked all the mysteries and menaces of the mountains, the
Basque came shyly into camp, bringing a shoulder of mutton with which
to establish friendly relations, and under the mellowing influence of
a glass of something hot he became confidential and as communicative
as his broken jargon of French and California Spanish would permit.
He had come to the mountain reluctantly, and having been told about
the herder whose hand was torn off by a grizzly last year, he was
still more unwilling to remain. He would stay as long as the Examiner
party remained near him, but when the hunters went away he proposed to
quit and hasten back to the plains, where he would have nothing worse
than the coyotes to encounter. Every night after that, so long as the
hunters were in that camp, the Basque came and sat at the fire until
bedtime, talking about _los osos_, and when the grass and water gave
out and the expedition was obliged to move camp about two miles, the
gentle shepherd packed his blankets over the trail to Bakersfield,
leaving his flock in the care of a leathery skinned bear-hardened
Mexican.
The bears were later this year than usual in coming to the mountain,
probably because the warm weather was longer delayed, and for many
days the hunters scanned the trails in the canyons in vain for the
footprints of grizzlies. The first indication of their arrival was
given in a somewhat startling way to the correspondent one evening as
he was slowly toiling through a deep, rocky ravine back to camp, after
a weary tramp over the foothills of the big mountain.
The sun had set and the bottom of the ravine was dark as night. The
belated searcher for bear signs skirted a dense willow thicket, and
brushed against the bushes with his elbow. "Woof! Woof!" snorted a
bear within ten feet of him, invisible in the thicket. His heart
thumped and his rifle lock clicked, together, and which sound was the
louder he could not tell. For a few seconds he stood at the edge of
the thicket with his rifle ready, expecting the rush of the bear, but
the animal was not in a warlike mood and did not rush, and the hunter
cautiously backed away about twenty yards up the steep side of the
ravine. The cracking of brush indicated that bruin was moving in the
thicket, but nothing could be seen in the gathering gloom. Two or
three large rocks rolled down into the willows started the bear out on
a run and he could be heard crashing his way down the ravine and
splashing into the pools as he went. The remainder of the journey back
to camp was made through the open pine forest on the top of the
mountain.
Superintendent McCullough, who has charge of Haggin & Carr's sheep
camps on Pinos Mountain, stopped at the Examiner camp when he made his
inspecting tours, and consultations were held with him about the
bears. From the reports given him by the herders he judged that only
the bears that lived on the mountain were prowling about, and that the
invading army had not arrived from the Alamo and the Sespe region. A
large cinnamon bear had walked into one camp about ten miles distant
and killed two sheep in daylight, but the grizzlies had not begun to
eat mutton. In July or August there would be bears enough to keep a
man busy shinning up trees. Last year, he said, there were at least
forty bears on the mountain, and they visited some of the sheep camps
every night. Sometimes two or three bears would raid a camp, tree the
herder and kill several sheep. The herders were not expected to fight
bears or attempt to drive them away, and the owners reckoned upon the
loss of several hundred sheep every summer.
Shortly before the first of July the camp was moved to Seymore Spring,
about two miles from the mill, where good water and feed were plenty,
and search for bear sign was continued. Every day some deep gorge or
rocky ravine was visited and thoroughly hunted, and a deer was killed
occasionally, but no sign of bears was found until the 3d of July,
when the tracks of a very large grizzly were discovered crossing a
ridge between the Lockwood Valley and the Seymour. The tracks were
followed across the Seymour Valley to a spur of the mountain between
the mill ravine and a deep canyon to the westward.
Camp was moved to a green cienaga at the head of the latter, which was
christened Bear Canyon, and the building of a trap was begun near the
mouth--about half a mile from camp. Three large pine trees served as
corner posts for a pen built of twenty-inch logs, "gained" at the
corners and fastened together with stout oak pins. The pen was about
twelve feet long, four feet high and five feet wide inside, and the
door was made of pine logs sunk into the ground and wedged and pinned
securely. A door of four-inch planks, so heavy that it required three
men to raise it, was set in front, between oak guides pinned
vertically to the trees and suspended by a rope running over a pulley
and back to a trigger that engaged with a pivoted stick of oak, to
which the bait was to be fastened. Five days were consumed in the
construction of the trap, and while the work was going on a bear
visited the camp at night and stampeded all the saddle and pack
animals out of the canyon.
A German prospector named Sparkuhle, who was staying temporarily in
the camp, was cured of a severe case of skepticism that night.
Sparkuhle believed nothing that he could not see, and he declared,
with exasperating iteration, "I believe there don't vas any bears in
der gountry. I look for 'em every day, thinking perhaps might I could
see one, but I don't could see any." And every night before he turned
in, Sparkuhle said: "Vell, might did a bear come tonight. I wish I
could see one, but I think there don't vas any bears at all."
Sparkuhle scorned the shelter of the bough shed, under which the
Examiner outfit slept, and spread his blankets on top of a bank about
six feet above a rocky shelf that was used as a pantry and kitchen.
His only weapon was his pick, and he was not afraid of being disturbed
by any prowling animal.
It was about midnight when the camp was alarmed by the snorting of the
horses and the clatter of hoofs galloping down the canyon, but before
the cause of the disturbance could be learned a yell of surprise came
from Sparkuhle, followed by a crash and a terrible clatter among the
pots and pans below the bank. In another moment Sparkuhle ran into
the camp and began to tell excitedly what had happened to him. He was
so intensely interested in his story that he paid no attention to a
three-tined fork that was sticking in him just below the end of his
back. He said he was awakened by the noise in camp, and looking up
thought he saw the burro standing over him. Seizing his pillow he made
a swipe at the animal, and said, "Get away, Balaam!" and then the
supposed burro hit him a clip and knocked him spinning over the edge
of the bank, but the blow did no further damage because Sparkuhle was
rolled up in half a dozen blankets. The noise of his arrival among the
tinware alarmed the bear and when the party got out with lights and
guns he was out of sight. Sparkuhle slept in the cabin after that.
Two days later the big bear went into a sheep camp near the mill,
while the herder was cooking supper, stampeded the sheep right over
the fire, caught one and killed it, and sat down within thirty yards
of the herder and leisurely gorged himself with mutton. The Mexican
herder described him as "grande" and "muy blanco" and said he was as
tall as a mule. On the following day at noon the same bear went into
another sheep camp about three miles from the mill, and stole a
freshly killed sheep, which the herder had hung up for his own use.
Then he suddenly ceased his raids and disappeared and for the next
three weeks the mountain seemed to be deserted by the bears.
The herders had put strychnine into the carcasses of several sheep
that had died of eating poisonous weeds, and McCullough thought the
bears must have eaten the poisoned mutton and become sick. It requires
a strong dose of strychnine to kill a grizzly, and frequently the
bears get only enough to make them ill and send them into temporary
retirement in some dark gorge.
But while the bears were away the mountain lions and panthers managed
to keep things from becoming dull. They came into camp several times
and made the canyon ring with their yowling, but they always kept
brush between themselves and the fire-light, and it was impossible to
get a shot at them. Their raids became so annoying that two hounds
were procured and brought into camp; after that the nightprowling
beasts kept at a respectful distance. Being unable to steal any more
provisions from the Examiner outfit, the lions turned their attention
to the sheep camps. One night a lion sneaked up through a willow
thicket to the nearest sheep camp and killed three sheep. He was a
dainty lion, evidently, as he only cut the throats of the sheep and
drank their blood and did not eat any mutton. The same lion followed
the scent of a carcass that had been dragged to the bear trap for
bait, but he stopped twenty yards from the trap, and went away, not
caring to risk his neck by going into any such contrivance.
Wherever bait was dragged over the mountain, and it was dragged many
miles for the purpose of enticing bear to the trap, the lions followed
the trail, but they would not go into the trap. Still it is not safe
to generalize from this fact and assume that the cougar or mountain
lion never will go into a trap, for he is a most erratic and uncertain
beast. Sometimes he is an arrant coward, and again he is as bold as a
genuine lion. Generally a dog will keep cougars away from a camp or
house, but once in a while the cougar hunts the dog and kills him.
One afternoon a cougar jumped into Joe Dye's dooryard at his ranch on
the Sespe, picked up Joe's baby and sprang over the fence with it. Joe
seized his rifle and shot the animal as it ran, and when the cougar
felt the sting of the bullet he dropped the baby and ran up the
mountain. He had seized the baby's clothes only, and the little one
was not hurt. The next night the cougar returned, captured Joe's
hound, carried it into the mountains and killed it.
On the 1st of August, the report reached camp that the bears were
having a picnic on the Mutaw ranch and were killing hogs by the score.
John F. Cuddy's sons, the best vaqueros and bronco-riders in this part
of the country, offered to go over to the Mutaw with the correspondent
and lasso a bear if one could be found on open ground; accordingly,
the party saddled up and took the trail up the Piru, arriving at the
Mutaw meadows late in the night, after a rough ride of twenty miles.
In the morning Mr. Taylor, one of the owners of the ranch, was found
skinning a grizzly that had eaten strychnine in pork during the night.
Mr. Taylor had put poison out all over the ranch and the prospect of
catching a live bear seemed dubious, but all the poisoned meat that
could be found was buried at once, and Bowers and the correspondent
began building a trap to catch a bear that had been making twelve-inch
tracks around the cabins. The Cuddy boys rode about looking for bear,
and one of them lassoed an eagle that had waterlogged himself and was
sitting stupidly on a rock by the creek. The bird measured nine feet
across the wings. Messrs. Louis and Taylor, owners of the Mutaw,
received the party hospitably and assisted in the work of preparing
the trap. But Mr. Taylor forgot where he had put some of his poison,
and in forty-eight hours all the dogs in the place, including the
Examiner's two hounds, were stiffened out and turned up their toes.
Chopping off their tails and pouring sweet oil down their throats did
not restore them.
No chance to lasso a bear presented itself, and as soon as the trap
was completed and baited with two live pigs the party returned to Pine
Mountain.
At last it became evident that the bears on Mount Pinos could not be
enticed into a trap while they had their pick and choice of the
thousands of sheep that grazed on the mountain. They preferred to do
their own butchering and would not touch mutton that was killed for
them by anybody else. A cougar raided a camp one night, sprang upon
the sheep from a willow thicket and killed three within twenty yards
of the sleeping herder. The fastidious cougar cut their throats,
sucked their blood and left their carcasses at the edge of the thicket
without eating the meat. But the bears would not touch what the cougar
left.
Shortly after this the herders reported that the bears were avoiding
the sheep and passing around the bands without making an attack.
Apparently bruin had made a miscalculation in his calendar and was
keeping Lent in the wrong season, but his erratic conduct was
explained when some of the herders admitted that they had put
strychnine into several carcasses. Some of the bears had got doses of
poison large enough to make them mortally unwell, but had survived and
sworn off eating mutton. They disappeared from the vicinity of the
camps and grazing ground, and went into solitary confinement in remote
and deep gorges, where nobody but a lunatic would follow them.
The result of many weeks' hard work on Mount Pinos was the acquirement
of some knowledge of the nature and eccentricities of Ursus ferox,
which was glibly imparted by Tom, Dick and Harry, who assumed that the
mere fact of their having lived near the mountains qualified them to
speak as authorities on the habits of bears.
One inspired idiot declared that the best way to catch a grizzly was
to give him atropia, which would make him blind for a day or two, and
lead him along like a tame calf. This genius was so enamored of his
great discovery that he went about the country telling everybody that
the Examiner man was going to catch a grizzly with atropia, and that
he (the aforesaid lunatic) was the inventor of the scheme and general
boss of the outfit.
"A bear will do this," said one. "He will do so and so," said another,
and "you just do that and he'll go right into the trap," said a dozen
more. Everybody seemed to be loaded to the guards with an assorted
cargo of general ignorance about bears, which they were anxious to
discharge upon the Examiner expedition, but not one man in the whole
lot ever caught a grizzly, and very few ever saw one.
As a matter of fact, determined by experience and observation, a
grizzly will do none of the things laid down as rules of conduct for
him by the wise men of the mountains, but will do pretty much as he
pleases, and act as his individual whim or desire moves him. It is a
mistake to generalize about bears from the actions of one of the
species. One bear will be bold and inquisitive, and will walk right
into a camp to gratify his curiosity, while another will carefully
avoid man and all his works.
The predictions of an ursine invasion of Mount Pinos were not
fulfilled and when it became clear that the few grizzlies in the
neighborhood were too timid and wary to be caught, the expedition
struck camp and moved on, leaving the traps set for luck.
Considerable annoyance was caused by a discharged mule-packer, who
carried away tools required in trap building, and embezzled quite a
sum of money. The fellow had attempted to impose upon the
correspondent by whittling out pine-bark models of bear's feet, with
which to make tracks around the trap; and had proposed various
swindling jobs to others of the party, explaining that the "Examiner
was rich and they might as well get a hack at the money." He had
opened and read letters intrusted to him for mailing, and had proved
himself generally a faithless scamp and an unconscionable liar. A
written demand upon him, for restitution of his plunder, elicited
only a coarse and abusive letter, but there was no time to waste in
prosecuting the fellow and he was left in the enjoyment of his booty
and in such satisfaction as the rascal mind of him could derive from
the fact that he had succeeded in robbing his employer.
The big bear on the Mutaw never came near the trap built for his
special accommodation, notwithstanding the confident assurances of the
bear experts on the ranch that he was sure to show up within
forty-eight hours. For two months after the poisoning of his campanero
no signs of the large grizzly were seen anywhere near the Mutaw, and
the hogs roamed about the hills unmolested.
After leaving Mount Pinos the expedition built several traps in the
mountains near trails frequented by bears. An old grizzly that lived
among the unsurveyed and unnamed peaks between Castac Lake and the
Liebra Mountain absorbed the attention of the hunters for some time.
He was an audacious marauder and killed his beef almost within sight
of the camp-fire. Often at night a cow or steer could be heard
bellowing in terror, and in the morning a freshly killed animal would
be found in some hollow not far away, bearing marks of bear's claws.
Whitened bones scattered all over the hills showed that the bear had
been the boss butcher of General Beal's ranch for a long time. His
average allowance of beef appeared to be about two steers a week, but
he usually ate only half a carcass, leaving the rest to the coyotes
and vultures.
One morning Bowers returned from a hunt for the horses, two of which
had been struck and slightly wounded by the bear a few nights before,
and had run away, and reported the discovery of a dead steer within
150 yards of an unfinished trap, about a quarter of a mile from camp.
The animal appeared to have been killed two nights before, and the
bear had made but one meal off the carcass. As he might be expected
to return that night, all haste was made to finish the trap. Bowers
rode out to Gorman's Station to get some nails and honey, while the
correspondent paid a visit to one of General Beal's old corrals and
stole some planks to make a door. He packed the planks up the
mountain, and was using the hammer and saw with great diligence and a
tremendous amount of noise, when bruin sauntered down the ridge,
looked curiously at him and calmly began eating an early supper,
wholly indifferent to the noise of the hammer and the presence of the
man.
It was nearly dark when Bowers rode up to the trap, his horse in a
lather composed of equal parts of perspiration and honey, the latter
having leaked profusely from the cans tied to the saddle. Tossing the
nails to the correspondent, Bowers hastily dismounted and went afoot
up the ridge toward the dead steer, intending to place a can of honey
near it. In about a minute Bowers was seen running from the ridge in
fifteen-foot jumps, and as he approached the trap he shouted: "The
bear is there now!"
"Is that so?" said the correspondent. "I thought he had finished his
supper and had gone away by this time."
Bowers had approached to within forty yards of the bear before seeing
him, and the bear had merely raised his head, taken a look at the
intruder and resumed his eating. As it had become too dark to drive
nails, and there was no longer any reason for finishing the door that
night, Bowers fetched the rifles from camp and the two men went up the
ridge to take a better look at the bear. Had there been light enough
to make the rifle sights visible, it would have been hard to resist
the temptation of turning loose at the old fellow from behind a
convenient log; but it was impossible to draw a bead on him, and it
would have been sheer foolhardiness to shoot and take the chances of a
fight in the dark with a wounded grizzly. Besides, if shot at and
missed, the bear would probably not return, and all the chances of
getting him into the trap would be lost. So the two sat on a log and
watched the grizzly till the night came on thick and dark, when they
returned to camp.
The trap was finished the next day, but a somewhat ludicrous accident
destroyed its possibilities of usefulness, and made it quite certain
that bruin would never be caught in it. Not expecting a visit from the
bear, for at least two days, the correspondent went up to the ridge
just before dark, made a rope fast to the remains of a steer, and
dragged him down to the trap. Bowers had gone back to Ventura on
business, and the correspondent was alone on the mountain; when he
went into the trap to fix a can of honey upon the trigger, he placed a
stick under the door, in such a way that if the door should fall he
could use the stick as a lever to pry it up, and so avoid an
experience like Dad Coffman's.
The precaution was well taken. While he was arranging the bait he
heard snuffling and the movement of some animal outside. Supposing
that some cow or perhaps the burro was wandering about, he paid no
particular attention to the noise, but when the bait was arranged and
he turned to go out he saw the muzzle of old bruin poked into the door
and his eyes blinking curiously at the dark interior of the trap.
Bruin had come down for a feast and had followed the trail of the
steer's remains with unexpected promptness. He had scented the honey,
which was more alluring than stale beef, and evidently was considering
the propriety of entering the trap to get his supper, which might
consist of honeycomb _au naturel_, with Examiner man on the side.
The man in the trap deemed it highly improper for the bear to intrude
at that time, and quickly decided the etiquette of the case by
kicking the trigger and letting the door fall with a dull thud plump
upon the old grizzly's nose. A hundred and sixty pounds falling four
feet is no laughing affair when it hits one on the nose, and bruin did
not make light of it. He was pained and surprised, and he went away
more in sorrow than in anger, judging from the tone of his
expostulating grunts and snorts.
When the snorts of the bear died away in the distance, the
correspondent pried up the door, crawled out and cautiously made his
way through the dark woods to his lonely camp.
At this time there were six traps scattered through the mountains
within a radius of sixty miles, all of them set and baited, and the
more distant ones watched by men employed for that purpose. One of the
traps was on a mountain that was not pastured by cattle, or sheep, and
as there were no acorns in that part of the country, the bears had to
rustle for a living and were unable to withstand the temptation
offered by quarters of beef judiciously exposed to their raids.
The bait scattered around this trap was discovered by four bears, but
for some time they regarded it with suspicion, and were afraid to
touch it, possibly because they detected the scent of man near it.
Gradually they became accustomed to it and the signs of man's
presence, and then they began to quarrel over the meat, as was plainly
indicated by the disturbance of the ground where their tracks met. Two
of the tracks were of medium size, one was quite large and evidently
made by a grizzly, and the fourth was enormous, being fourteen inches
long and nine inches wide.
The last-named track was not made by a grizzly however. There were six
toes on the forefoot, and this peculiar deformity was the
distinguishing mark of a gigantic cinnamon bear known to hunters as
"Six-Toed Pete."
It was almost invariably found, during the long campaign in the
wilderness, that tracks over eleven inches in length were made by
cinnamon bears, and not by genuine grizzlies, although some hunters
declare that the cinnamon is only a variety of grizzly, and that the
color is not the mark of a different species. However that may be, the
difference between the two varieties is very distinct, and as the
object of the expedition was the capture of an indubitable California
grizzly, no special effort was made to trap any of the big cinnamons.
The smaller bears soon gave up the contest for the beef and left the
field to Pete and the grizzly, who quarreled and fought around it for
several nights. At last the grizzly gave Pete a thorough licking and
established his own right to the title of monarch of the mountain. The
decisive battle occurred one moonlight night and was witnessed from a
safe perch in a fork of a tree near the trap.
It was nearly 9 o'clock when the snapping of dry sticks indicated the
approach of a heavy animal through the brush, and in a few moments the
big grizzly came into sight, walking slowly and sniffing suspiciously.
A smart breeze was drawing down the canyon, and the bear, being to the
windward, could not smell the man up the tree, but he approached the
meat cautiously and seemed in no hurry for his supper. While he was
reconnoitering another animal was heard smashing through the thicket,
and presently the huge bulk of Six-Toed Pete loomed up in the
moonlight at the edge of the opening.
At the approach of the cinnamon the grizzly rose upon his haunches and
uttered low, hoarse growls, and when the big fellow appeared within
twenty feet of him, he launched himself forward with surprising
swiftness and struck Pete a blow on the neck that staggered him. It
was like one of Sullivan's rushes in the ring, and the blow of that
ponderous paw would have knocked out an ox; but Pete was no slouch of
a slugger himself, and he quickly recovered and returned the blow with
such good will that had the grizzly's head been in the way it would
have ached for a week afterward.
Then the fur began to fly.
It was impossible to follow the movements of the combatants in detail,
as they sparred, clinched and rolled about, but in a general way
Six-Toed Pete seemed to be trying to make his superior weight tell by
rushing at the grizzly and knocking him over, while the latter avoided
the direct impact of the cinnamon's great bulk by quick turns and a
display of agility that was scarcely credible in so unwieldy looking
an animal. Once the cinnamon seized the grizzly by the throat and for
a moment hushed the latter's fierce growls by choking off his wind,
but the grizzly sat down, threw his arm over Pete's neck, placed his
other forepaw upon Pete's nose, sunk his claws in deep, and instantly
broke the hold. As they parted, the grizzly made a vicious sweep with
his right paw and caught Pete on the side of the head. The blow either
destroyed the cinnamon's left eye or tore the flesh around it, so that
the blood blinded him on that side, for during the rest of the fight
he tried to keep his right side toward the grizzly and seemed unable
to avoid blows delivered on his left.
For at least a quarter of an hour the combat raged, without an
instant's cessation, both belligerents keeping up a terrific growling,
punctuated with occasional howls of pain. Neither could get a fair
blow at the other's head. Had the grizzly struck the cinnamon with the
full force of his tremendous arm, Pete's skull would have surely been
smashed. Pete finally got enough, broke away from the Monarch and fled
into the brush, a badly used up bear; and he never came back.
Having won his supper by force of arms, the grizzly was no longer
suspicious of the bait, and he ate up the best part of a quarter of
beef before he left the battle ground. He soon became accustomed to
the trap, and regularly came there for his meals, which were gradually
placed nearer the door and finally inside the structure. A piece of
meat was tied to the trigger, and one morning the door was found
closed, and a great ripping and tearing was heard going on inside. The
Monarch was caught at last.
Upon the approach of the men, the grizzly became furious and made the
heavy logs tremble and shake in his efforts to get out and resent the
indignity that had been placed upon him. Had he concentrated his
attack on any one spot and been left to wreak his rage without
interruption he would have been out in a few hours, but he was not
permitted to work long at any place. Wherever he began work he
encountered the end of a heavy stake which was jabbed against his nose
and head with all the power of a man's arms.
Day and night from the moment he was found in the trap, the Monarch
was watched and guarded, and he kept two men busy all the time.
Although his attention was distracted from the trap as much as
possible, he found time to gnaw and rip a ten-inch log almost in two,
and sometimes he made the bark and splinters fly in a way that was
calculated to make a nervous man loathe the job of standing guard over
him. For six days the Monarch was so busy trying to break jail that he
had no time to fool away in eating. Solitary confinement developed in
him a most malicious temper and he flew into a rage whenever food was
thrown to him.
But his applications for a writ of habeas corpus were persistently
denied by a man with a club, and the Monarch at last cooled down a
little and condescended to take a light lunch of raw venison. He was
given two days for reflection and meditation, and when he seemed to be
in a more reasonable mood, the work of preparing him for a visit to
the city was begun.
A running noose was made in a stout chain and put into the trap
between two of the logs, and when the bear stepped his forepaw into
the noose it was drawn taut and held by four men outside. Despite the
strain upon the chain the bear easily threw the noose off with his
other paw, letting the men fall backwards in a heap on the ground.
Again and again the trick was tried but the noose would not hold.
Then the method of working the chain was changed and the noose let
down through the top of the trap, and after many failures it was drawn
sharply up round his arm near the shoulder, where it held. Ten hours
were consumed in the effort to secure one leg and the Monarch fought
furiously every minute of the time, biting the chain, seizing it with
his paws and charging about in his prison as though he were crazy. He
was utterly reckless of consequences to himself, and he bit the iron
so savagely that he splintered his teeth and wholly destroyed his
longer tushes.
Having secured one leg, it was comparatively easy to get another
chain around his other paw and two ropes around his hind legs, and
then he was stretched out, spread-eagle fashion, on the floor of the
trap.
[Illustration: Large Black Bear.--Page 250.]
The next move was to fasten a heavy chain around his neck in such a
way that it could not choke him, and to accomplish this it was
necessary to muzzle the Monarch. A stick about eighteen inches long
and two inches thick was held under his nose, and he promptly seized
it in his jaws. Before he dropped it a stout cord was made fast to one
end of the stick, passed over his nose, around the other end of the
stick, under his jaw, and then wound around his muzzle and the stick
in such a way as to bind his jaws together, a turn back of his head
holding the gag firmly in place.
The Monarch was now bound, gagged and utterly helpless, but he never
ceased roaring with rage at his captors and struggling to get just one
blow at them with his paw. It was an easy matter for a man to get
upon his back, put a chain collar around his neck, and fasten the
heavy chain with a swivel to the collar. The collar was kept in place
by a chain rigged like a martingale and passed under his arms and over
his back. A stout rope made fast about his body completed the
Monarch's fetters and the gag was then removed from the royal mouth.
The King of the mountains was a hopeless prisoner--Gulliver, tied hand
and foot by the Lilliputians.
The next morning Monarch was lashed upon a rough sled--a contrivance
known to lumbermen as a "go-devil"--to make the journey down the
mountain. The first team of horses procured to haul him could not be
driven anywhere near the bear. They plunged and snorted and became
utterly unmanageable, and finally they broke away and ran home. The
next team was but little better, and small progress was made the first
day.
At night the Monarch was released from the "go-devil" and secured
only by his chains to a large tree. The ropes were removed from his
legs, and he was allowed considerable freedom to move about, but a
close watch was kept upon him. After several futile efforts to break
away, he accepted the situation, stretched himself at the foot of the
tree and watched the camp-fire all night.
In the morning the ropes were replaced, after a lively combat, and the
bear was again lashed to the sled. Four horses were harnessed to it
and the journey was resumed. Men with axes and bars went ahead to make
a road, and it was with no small amount of labor that they made it
passable. The poor old bear was slammed along over the rocks and
through the brush, but he never whimpered at the hardest jolts. With
all the care that could be observed, it was impossible to make his
ride anything but a series of bumps, slides and capsizes, and the
progress was slow. At the steep places men held the sled back with
ropes and tried to keep it right side up.
Four days on a "go-devil" is no pleasure excursion, even for a tough
grizzly, and when the Monarch was released from his uncomfortable
vehicle, at the foot of the mountain, he seemed glad to get a chance
to stretch himself and rest. For nearly a week he was left free of all
fetters except the chain on his neck and the rope around his body, and
he spent his days in slumber and his nights eating and digging a great
hole in the ground. Having convinced himself that he could neither
break his chain nor bite it in two, he accepted the situation with
surly resignation and asked only to be let alone and fed decently.
While the bear was recuperating and becoming reconciled to what
couldn't be helped, a cage was being built of Oregon pine lumber with
an iron-barred door, and when it was finished he was dragged into it
by the heels. As soon as he saw the ropes, Monarch knew that mischief
was afoot, and when a man began throwing back into the hole the dirt
that he had dug out, he mounted the heap and silently but strenuously
began to dig for himself a new hole. He worked twice as fast as two
men with shovels, and in his efforts to escape he only assisted in
filling up the old hole.
For some time he baffled all attempts to get ropes on his forepaws,
having learned the trick of throwing them off and seizing the loops
with his teeth, but he was soon secured and stretched out on his back.
The Monarch roared his remonstrances and did his best to get even for
the outrages that had been done to his rights and his feelings, but
the ropes were tough and he could not get a chance to use his enormous
strength. He was dragged on his back into the cage, the door was
dropped and the ropes were removed, but the chain remained around his
neck and that was made fast to the bars. As soon as he found himself
shut up in a box the angry and insulted bear ceased roaring and in a
short time he philosophically stretched himself on the floor and
wondered what would happen next.
The next thing that happened to him was the standing of his cage on
end, but that did not appear to disturb him. A wagon was backed up,
and the cage was tilted down again and placed upon the wagon, which
was then hauled down the canyon and along the river bed to a little
water station on the Southern Pacific Railroad, where the cage was put
upon a stock car. The car was provisioned with a quarter of beef, and
a lot of watermelons, and attached to a freight train, then men who
had helped to bring the bear out of the mountains waved their hats,
and the Monarch caught a last glimpse of his native hills as the train
whirled him and the correspondent northward.
It must have been a very strange, perhaps terrifying, thing to the
wild grizzly to be jolted along for two days on a rattling, bumping,
lurching freight train, with the shrieking of steam whistles and the
ringing of bells, but he endured it all heroically and gave no sign of
fear. He ate well when food was given him, taking meat from his
captor's hands through the bars, and slept soundly when he was tired.
He seemed to know and yield a sort of obedience to the correspondent,
but resented with menacing growls the impertinent curiosity of
strangers who came to look at him through the bars.
In every crowd that, came to see him there was at least one fool
afflicted with a desire to poke the bear with a stick, and constant
vigilance was necessary to prevent such witless persons from enraging
him. At Mojave, when the correspondent went to the car, he found a
dozen idlers inside, and one inspired lunatic was stirring up the
Monarch, who was rapidly losing his temper. The cage would not have
held him five minutes had he once tackled the bars in a rage, and it
was only the moral influence of the chain around his neck that kept
him quiet. When the correspondent sprang into the car, the grizzly's
eyes were green with anger, and in a moment more there would have been
the liveliest kind of a circus on that freight train. Hustling the
crowd out with unceremonious haste--incidentally throwing a few
maledictions at the man with the stick--the correspondent drove the
Monarch back from the bars, and ordered him to lie down, and for the
next half hour rode in the car with him and talked him into a
peaceable frame of mind.
From the freight depot on Townsend Street the cage was hauled on a
truck to Woodward's Gardens, and under the directions of Louis
Ohnimus, superintendent of the gardens, the Monarch was transferred to
more comfortable quarters. His cage was backed up to one of the
permanent cages, both doors were opened, and he was invited to move,
but he refused to budge until his chain was passed around the bars
and hauled by four stout men. The grizzly resisted for a few minutes,
but suddenly decided to change his quarters and went with a rush and a
roar, wheeling about and striking savagely through the bars at the
men. But Mr. Ohnimus had expected just such a performance and taken
such precautions that nobody was hurt and no damage done.
The Monarch had shown himself a brave fighter and an animal of unusual
courage in every way. He had endured the roughest kind of a journey
without weakening, and compelled respect and admiration from the
moment of his capture. But when the strain and excitement were over,
and he was left to himself, the effects became apparent, and for two
or three days he was a sick bear. He had a fever and would not eat for
a time, but Mr. Ohnimus took charge of him, doctored him with
medicines good for the ills of bear flesh, and soon tempted back his
appetite with rabbits and pigeons.
Soon the Monarch was sufficiently convalescent to rip the sheet iron
from the side of his cage and break a hole through into the hyena's
quarters. By night he was on his muscle in great shape, and
Superintendent Ohnimus sent for the correspondent to sit up with him
all night and help keep the half-ton grizzly from tearing things to
pieces. By watching the old fellow and talking to him now and then
they managed to distract his attention from mischief most of the time,
but he got in considerable work and rolled up several sheets of iron
as though they were paper.
It was evident that no ordinary cage would hold him, and men were at
once employed to line one of the compartments with heavy iron of the
toughest quality and to strengthen it with bars and angle iron. This
made a perfectly secure place of confinement. A watch was kept on the
Monarch by the garden keepers during the day, and by the
superintendent and the correspondent every night, until the work was
finished and the Monarch transferred.
The grizzly is now safely housed in the first apartment of the line of
cages, and under the watchful care of Mr. Ohnimus will soon recover
his lost flesh and energy and again be the magnificent animal that he
was when he was the undisputed monarch of the Sierra Madre.
LATEST BULLETIN.
Monarch a True Grizzly.
"Monarch," the Examiner's big grizzly, received many visitors
yesterday, but, having been up all night trying the strength of his
new house, he declined to stand up, and paid but little attention to
the crowd. His chain had been fastened to the bars of his cage with
three half hitches and a knot, and the knot was held in place by a
piece of wire. During the night he removed the wire, untied all the
knots and half hitches and hauled the chain inside, where nobody
could meddle with it. Having the chain all to himself, Monarch was
indifferent to his visitors and lazily stretched himself on his back,
with one arm thrown back over his head.
He had a good appetite yesterday and got away with a leg of lamb and a
lot of bread and apples. He ate a little too heartily and had the
symptoms of fever. Today he will not get so much food. The best time
to see him is when he eats, because he lies down all other times of
the day. He has breakfast at 10 a. m., lunch at 1 p. m. and dinner at
3 p. m.
Monarch still looks travelworn and thin, but he is brightening up, and
when the abrasions of the skin, made by ropes and chains, are healed
up and his hair grown again on the bare spots he will be more
presentable. His broken teeth trouble him some and it will be some
time before he will feel as well as he did before he was caught.
Several artists went to Woodward's Gardens today to sketch and
photograph the bear, but he refused to pose, so they did not get the
best results. It would be unwise to stir him up and excite him at
present, and unless the artists can catch him at his meals they will
have to wait a little while for a chance to study the grizzly under
favorable conditions.
Sculptor Rupert Schmidt has made an excellent model in clay of
Monarch, which will be a valuable assistance in designs requiring the
introduction of the California emblem.
Mr. Schmidt said:
"I am very glad to have the opportunity to study the real grizzly, and
I find him very different from the models generally accepted. I have
modeled many bears, but never one like this. You see in this design
some figures of bears (showing a wax model of decorative capitals).
These were intended to be grizzlies, but you see they have the Roman
nose, which is characteristic of the black bear. No other bear that I
ever saw had the broad forehead and strong, straight nose of the
grizzly. He has a magnificent head, and I think all artists will be
glad of a chance to study him. I have inquired for grizzlies in
zoölogical gardens all over the world, but never found one before."
Monarch has a big, intelligent-looking head and a kindly eye, and is
not disposed to quarrel with visitors, but he objects to any meddling
with his chain, and will not submit to any insults. It was necessary
yesterday to keep a watchman between the cage and the crowd to prevent
people from throwing things at the bear and stirring him up. Monarch
is getting along very well and taking his troubles quite
philosophically; but he has had a rough experience, is worn out with
fighting and worry, is sore in body and spirit and needs rest. It is a
difficult thing to keep alive in captivity a wild bear of his age, and
undue excitement might throw him into a fatal fever. If
Superintendent Ohnimus succeeds in his efforts to cure the Monarch of
his bruises and put him into good condition, he will deserve great
credit, and the visitors are requested not to make the task more
difficult by worrying the captive. No other zoölogical garden in the
world has a California grizzly, and it would be a great loss to the
menagerie to be established in the Park if the Monarch should die.
It is not surprising that many people cannot tell a grizzly bear, even
when they see one, as many zoölogists even differ widely in regard to
the characteristics of the king of bears. It is astonishing how little
is really known in regard to the grizzly bear. Many text-books contain
only a general notice of the great animal, while those naturalists who
have written descriptions of him do by no means agree. This is due to
their lack of specimens. The grizzly is so powerful and unyielding a
beast that but few have been captured alive. There have not been
individuals enough of the species studied to admit of their being
fully generalized. Different naturalists described the grizzly from
the single specimen that came within their notice, and hence their
various descriptions are far apart. It is a fact that hardly two of
the animals taken are exactly alike in color or habits.
In order to definitely settle the question, Prof. Walter E. Bryant, of
the Academy of Sciences, was yesterday induced to visit the bear. He
has made the mammals of the Pacific Coast his study for years, and
probably knows more than anyone else about California bears.
He examined Monarch very carefully, noted his every point, and then
examined just as carefully the other bears at the gardens.
When he had completed his investigation and stood once more before
Monarch's cage, he was asked:
"Well, what is he?"
"He is a true grizzly bear," answered Professor Bryant, and he added,
"a mighty big one, too.
"I never before saw one of the animals with as dark a coat as his," he
continued; "but that is nothing. The bear is a true grizzly, and has
all the characteristics of one. As far as his color is concerned,
grizzlies are of all colors; there is almost as much variety in that
regard among bears as among dogs."
"How do you know it is a grizzly?" was asked.
"Well, in the first place, the claws on his forefeet are longer and
stronger than those of any other species. Then his head is larger than
that of other bears, and his muzzle is longer and heavier. Another and
more distinguishing feature is the height of his shoulders. Just back
of his neck is the tallest point. From there his back slopes down
towards his haunches. The black bear, on the other hand, has low
shoulders, and is tallest at a point rather back of the middle of the
body. There are numerous other means of distinguishing this bear. His
teeth are very much larger and stronger than those of the others, and
the entire structure of the skull is peculiar to the grizzly. He has
neither the short muzzle of the European bear such as you see in the
pit, nor the rounded muzzle of the black bear. There are, of course,
many minor points that only a naturalist would observe, but it is
sufficient to say that he lacks none of the essential qualities of the
grizzly bear, and has none of those of the other varieties.
"His coat is almost black, to be sure, but it is very different from
the glossy black of his neighbor. If you observe the grizzly's hair,
you will see that a great deal of it is a rusty brown and in certain
lights seems to be very far from black. This variation in the color of
the hair is a peculiar characteristic of the grizzly. That lanky mane
is another. His legs, you observe, are darker than his body. This is
another characteristic of the California grizzly.
"This animal is thin now, doubtless from the hard time he had while he
was being brought here. When he gets fat his hair will have a very
different appearance. It will be interesting to watch him when he
sheds his hair. The coat that comes after may be altogether of another
color. That grizzly, I should say, is comparatively a young bear, and
when he gets older the gray that originally gave him his name will
very likely be pronounced."
THE END.
SCIENTIFIC CLASSIFICATION OF BEARS.
EDITED BY PIERRE N. BERINGER.
I.
THE LOUISIANA SPECTACLED BEAR.
_Tremarctos Ornatus._
Some of our scientists have very carefully divided the _Genus Ursus_
into _twelve_ species. While I will admit that these gentlemen are
conscientious and that they are thorough in their researches, I wish
to point to the fact that they have entirely overlooked three or four
species found on the Pacific Coast.
Many writers have completely ignored the spectacled bear of Louisiana.
Is he the representative of another genus? Does he belong to the
_Genus Helarctos_ (_helios_, the "sun," and _arctos_, "bear") credited
by the majority of writers with basking in the sun, or because of the
peculiar markings of his chest, representing a sunburst? He resembles
the _Helarctos Malayanus_ of the Malayan archipelago or the _Bruang_
of Java. Or is he the Sloth Bear, _Prochilous_ (or _Melursus_)
_labiatus_? This bear has been carefully classified as a separate
genus found from the Ganges to Ceylon. His description fits rather
loosely the so-called sloth of Louisiana. Possibly the Louisiana
specimen is of the _Genus Tremarctos_, of which the learned people
tell us there is but a solitary species carefully isolated in the
Andes of Chile and Peru. I shall call the Louisiana specimen by the
name given him by our poet, the Spectacled Bear, _Tremarctos Ornatus_,
and the professors who have entirely overlooked his existence may
classify him later when they find time. At one time the Honey Bear was
classified as a "Bradipus," or sloth, because of its liability to lose
its incisors. It was therefore set down as one of the _Edentata_. It
has also been styled the Jungle Bear, the Lipped Bear, and names as
various as the investigators' fancy. The _Tremarctos Ornatus_ of
Louisiana, or spectacled bear, is not a sloth. He does not belong to
the _Edentata_, neither is he lazy. He is essentially the clown of
all bears, a very intelligent animal, and in many cases the
intellectual superior of his keeper. He is active to a degree, and
will perform the queerest antics for the amusement of the onlooker. He
is quaintly conscious of his mirth-provoking powers, much as a child
playing "smarty." He will quickly climb an inclined log or tree, and
then slide down either in an upright position, clasping the log with
the knees, or he will slide "down the banister" as a child might. I
have seen the merry fellow grab his tail in his mouth and roll over
and over until dizzy.
His snout is almost hairless, narrow and proboscis like, and the
nostrils and lips are mobile. He shapes these almost into a pipe,
through which his long tongue is shot out, drawing things in or
sucking them up. It has claws of a bluish gray that are longer than
those of any other of the Ursidae. The hair is very long, of a deep
brown black. There is a sunburst upon the chest of a white or fulvous
hue. The ears are small and scarcely distinguishable, owing to the
shaggy mane. The fur is rather coarse and very long.
It lives mainly upon honey and vegetables and sugar cane. In captivity
it will very gratefully subsist upon oatmeal and occasional sweets.
The animal is easily tamed, and will become attached to its keeper,
giving an exhibition of exuberant joy at his approach. It is a jolly
good fellow, and shows a marked preference for liquors, refusing all
others when it may have champagne.
It will sit on its hind legs and make faces at the onlooker, waving
its arms in the most grotesque fashion, while it rolls its body from
side to side. This is one of the characteristics that has impressed
the negro with the sacredness of this "Voodoo Bear."
II.
THE GRIZZLY.
_Ursus Horribilis or Ferox._
This is the great grizzly of California, whose habits have been
described by many writers. It is a shy animal, not nearly as ferocious
as has been claimed. "It will always run away if it can," says General
Dodge, "and never attacks unless it is cornered or wounded." Johnson
says "the grizzly is the king of all our animals, and can destroy by
blows from his paws the powerful bison of the plains; wolves will not
even touch the carcass of the dreaded monster, and, it is said, stand
in such awe that they refrain from molesting deer that he has slain.
Horses also require careful training before they can be taught to
allow its hide to be placed upon their backs."
In the beautiful legend of the Good Poet the grizzly is the forefather
of the Indian, and the Indian gives many proofs to show his descent
from the grizzly and the Spirit of the Mountain. I want to add a
curious fact: The grizzly is the only one of the Ursidae that moves
his toes and fingers independently of one another just like a _man_.
Also the bear walks with his foot full upon the ground. In further
proof the grizzly, when young, and all other bears, except one,
descend a tree backward and head up, as a man would. The clown bear,
or spectacled bear, will sometimes descend head down and enjoy a good
laugh over it. At least he seems to laugh. After the grizzly has
attained bulk and weight with age, he cannot climb trees, as his claws
are not strong enough to sustain his weight.
A short time after "Monarch," the large grizzly, arrived in San
Francisco, my model, a very considerate young person, who loved all
animals, came to the studio one day with the story that she had made
friends with the great beast. It was about the time when "Monarch" was
being starved. He had been removed from the pit to the cage. With
very little forethought the cage was built without a cover, and
"Monarch" was found one night making an attempt to escape. He was
prodded back with red-hot irons. It was not possible to work about the
cage, and "Monarch" must be confined in smaller quarters. A very small
cage was dropped into the enclosure; this had a slide door and was to
serve as a trap. I believe the grizzly is the quickest of all animals.
Six times a live chicken was fastened in the small cage, and six times
"Monarch's" long arm had literally "swiped" that fowl. So quick was he
that the slide fell only as he was already safely crunching its bones.
At the seventh attempt he was a little slow and was caught. After that
the iron workers placed the roof in position. The trapping of the
monster took six days, and "Monarch" received only the food he managed
to get from the trap, and that which my tender-hearted model was
feeding him (apples and candy) surreptitiously. As this was against
the orders of the keeper, the young woman could feed the bear only at
irregular intervals. She continued her kindnesses to him after he had
been again given the freedom of the larger cage. Then she went away
from the city. She was gone for two years. She married and assumed the
rotund proportions of a staid matron, and when next I saw her I joked
her about this, saying that she was nearly as fat as her old friend
"Monarch."
At this she was indignant. "Indeed," she said, "animals are less
forgetful than man, and 'Monarch' undoubtedly will remember me, even
if I am not the slim artist's model I once was." I told her "Monarch"
was far too much like a man, and that he was now satisfied to look
upon the world as well lost, and that short of his dinner there was
little that could move him from a comfortable position upon his back,
his toes in the air, apparently content, and like a philosopher,
wondering why the human displays so much curiosity. "I'll bet he won't
stir," I said. The upshot of this conversation was that we found
ourselves just outside the railing gazing at his lazy majesty. He
rolled his head slowly from side to side, eyeing each newcomer with
his bead-like eyes. Suddenly the lady in the case said, "Oh, you dear
old darling!" "Monarch" seemed electrified; he rose as quickly as
possible--certainly he had grown fat--and then he rushed to the side
of the cage. He was not satisfied with looking at her from his
ordinary standpoint, but rose upon his feet, extending himself his
entire height, that he might better look upon the friend of times of
trouble. She held up an apple. "Monarch" dropped to his feet, placed
his snout as far out as the bars allowed, and opened his immense jaws.
She threw the apple, and the bear sat himself down contentedly to chew
it. I firmly believe that young woman could have walked into the cage
with an apron full of apples and escaped without injury. "Monarch"
remembered his friend.
III.
THE POLAR BEAR.
_Thalassarctos Maritimus._
Much uncertainty prevails respecting the generic classification of the
bears. Wallace has divided them into five genera or subgenera, and
fifteen species. Wood gives eighteen, and Gray says twelve. The
appearance of the bear at different seasons has led to much error in
classification. The practical mountaineer will tell you of some three
or four species in California that have been given notice of as the
young of another species, or that have never been mentioned by the
learned gentlemen who usually study bear life in the seclusion of a
library or with the help of a strong field telescope. A glance at the
teeth of the bear will tell you that they incline rather to the
vegetable diet. Their ferocity is almost always exaggerated. Their
courage is desperate in self-defense, but it is seldom that they
become the aggressor. The brain of the bear is very highly developed,
and they soon learn all kinds of accomplishments. The lion is an
uncouth boor in comparison.
The Polar Bear, _Thalassarctos Maritimus_, is the only representative
of the genus. He is an almost wholly carnivorous animal, his food
consisting of fishes and seals, which he skillfully captures. He can
swim better than any other bear, and has been known to swim a strait
forty miles wide. The fur is silver white tinged with yellow. This
color is variable in specimens, and according to the seasons. The head
is much smaller than that of the grizzly or black bear, and is
ferret-like, with a decided downward curve to the nose. The nose does
not possess the flexibility of that of the rest of the bear family,
although the polar bear has the higher development of the sense of
smell. Johnson says that the flesh is good to eat, but other writers
do not agree with him. Kane was poisoned by eating of the liver. In
speaking of a capture De Vere wrote as follows: "We dressed her
liver and ate it, which in taste liked us well, but it made us all
sick * * * for all their skins came off, from the foot to the head,
but they recovered again, for which we gave God hearty thanks." Hall
says that the Eskimos of Cumberland Sound likewise believe the liver
to be poisonous, even for the dogs. Ross says all who partook of the
meat suffered from severe headaches, and later the skin peeled from
the body. Greely says his party largely lived upon the meat, and that
it was coarse, tough, the fat having a decidedly rank flavor.
I believe that the physiognomist may follow the characteristics of an
animal by his facial expression, and that with the aid of a knowledge
of the cranial development he can gauge the mental caliber of the
beast. Following this system and adding to it the testimony of
credible explorers, it is quickly shown that the polar bear is
treacherous and intractable. While he is not the wise animal the
grizzly is, he is more cunning and is certainly not a coward.
There are times when he is not content with being let alone, but will
take the aggressive. Greely writes: "Doctor Copeland was surprised
only fifty yards from the ship by a bear which broke from a barrier of
ice hummocks, galloped up to within five paces, reared up and struck
him down with both forepaws. Copeland had no time to load his gun, but
as the animal caught his clothes, he swung the butt across his snout.
This and the noise of approaching comrades put the bear to flight, and
he started off with the swinging gallop peculiar with him."
The mother bear and cubs display a great fondness for one another.
Koldeway says: "No sooner did the young ones perceive the hunter than
they galloped toward their mother, who in two strides turned and stood
by them, with such rage expressed in all her actions that we knew we
must be careful. Finding, however, that they were unhurt, she seemed
to think only of bringing them to a place of safety."
Some authorities have it that only the she bear hibernates and that
the male continues in the active exercise of all his faculties. Ross
weighed a polar bear which tipped the scales at 1,131 pounds; Lyon saw
one which weighed 1,600 pounds; Dr. Neale tells of one measuring
eleven feet exclusive of the tail. Senator Wm. P. Frye has the skin of
one, presented to him by an explorer, which measures nine feet seven
inches exclusive of the tail of two inches. Its girth around the body
just back of the forelegs is ten feet.
IV.
THE CINNAMON BEAR.
_Ursus Cinnamoneous._
The Cinnamon Bear has been called a variety of black bear. I am
inclined to believe it a separate genus. The head has many points of
difference. It is wider. The eyes are set deeper, and closer together.
There is a better breadth of brain. The feet are smaller. The fur is
rather longer than that of the black bear and much softer. The color
is dark chestnut, and as the bear ages there is an occasional gray
hair. The cinnamon is more dignified than the black bear, and he also
remembers an injury longer. A baby cinnamon was captured by a friend
of mine and brought to the city. A chain was placed about its neck,
and this was attached to a peg that was hammered in the ground. As
soon as I heard of the coming of his bearship I hurried over and made
his acquaintance. He ate a quart of milk soaked into as much bread as
it would hold, and enjoyed it greatly. He chewed on my finger every
time I dipped it into sugared water without biting.
I left him fast asleep. When I returned in the afternoon he was
walking from side to side, shaking his head, and howling most
dolefully. The cry was much like that of a child, only louder and more
disagreeable. He was hungry. I went to him and I said, "Stop it." At
this he howled so it made my head ache. I picked him up, and with the
aid of a shingle, I gave him a spanking, just as you would a bad boy.
This stopped his howling, and then his master came and fed him.
After this spanking it was very evident that he did not care for my
acquaintance. He persistently refused to recognize me. As I approached
him his ears would go back, and his fur would rise. He had decided to
cut my acquaintance.
Some days after, I was watching a tennis game in the next yard,
standing with my back to baby bruin. He couldn't overlook the
opportunity to get even, and, watching his chance, he fastened his
teeth in the calf of my leg.
V.
THE BLACK BEAR OF CALIFORNIA.
_Ursus Californiensis._
This bear we will label for convenience _Ursus Californiensis_,
because the title of _Ursus Americanus_ has dignified the small black
bear of the Eastern states. There are, however, three species of the
black bear in California that are known, and there may be more. The
large black bear of California reaches very large proportions. I have
seen some that might weigh from 800 to 1,000 pounds. It is hunted for
its fur, which is uniform in color, and for its flesh, which is quite
good, either smoked or fresh. This animal will never seek an encounter
with man. I remember my original introduction to a bear of this
species. It was in the state of Washington. Owing to ill health I had
been staying at what is known there as a ranch. A ranch in the
western Washington forests generally consists of a shake hut or log
house, and a promise by the "rancher" that he will soon clear enough
ground to raise _something_. Generally this vague something is a
mortgage. This particular rancher had a cow, and this cow often
strayed away into the timber and had to be looked after when milking
time came.
One day, in the exuberance of new found health, I was taking the
greatest of pleasure in chasing that cow toward the "shed" road to the
ranch. I was feeling especially good, and I was jumping over fallen
trees, making short cuts and throwing broken branches and an
occasional stone at the old Jersey.
Suddenly I stopped before an extra high log, and gathering myself
together, I jumped high over it. I landed upon the upturned belly of
an old she bear. There was a sound like the escape of gas from a
rubber bag. I passed the cow like a streak of lightning. When I had
run a considerable distance I turned my head and saw the bear running
in the opposite direction. I did not stop, however, and I got to the
ranch nearly an hour before the old cow.
In the shingle mills of the North the Norwegian hands have the same
veneration for the bear as the Indian. They always speak of him not as
a bear, but as "the old man with the fur coat on."
VI.
QUAINT INDIAN LORE
IN REGARD TO THE MYSTICAL POWER OF THE BEAR AS A GREAT MEDICINE.
This is a legend of the Ojibwa Indians as told by Sikassige, the
officiating priest of the Ojibwas at White Earth, Minnesota:
In the beginning were created two men and two women. They had no power
of thought or reason. Then the Almighty took them into his hands that
they might multiply, and he made them reasonable beings. He paired
them, and from this sprung the Indians.
Then when there were people the Great Spirit placed them upon the
earth; but he soon observed that they were subject to sickness, misery
and death. Then the Manitou called upon the Sun Spirit (the Bear) and
asked him to instruct the people in the Sacred Medicine. The Sun
Spirit, in the form of a little boy, went to the earth and was
adopted by a woman who had a little boy of her own.
This family went away in the autumn to hunt, and during the winter the
woman's son died. The parents were much distressed and decided to
return to the village and bury the body there. So they made
preparation to return, and as they traveled along they would each
evening erect poles upon which the body was placed, to prevent the
wild beasts from devouring it. When the dead boy was thus hanging upon
the poles, the adopted child, the Bear Spirit, or Sun child, would
play about the camp and amuse himself, and finally told his adopted
father he pitied him and his mother for their sorrow.
The adopted son said he could bring his dead brother to life,
whereupon the parents expressed great surprise and desired to know how
that could be accomplished.
The adopted boy then had the party hasten to the village, when he
said: "Get the woman to the wigwam of bark, put the dead body in a
covering of birch bark, and place the body on the ground in the middle
of the wigwam." On the next morning, when this had been done, the
family and friends went into the lodge and seated themselves around
the corpse.
Then they saw, through the doorway, the approach of a bear, which
gradually came toward the wigwam, entered it, and placed itself before
the dead body, and said "Hu, hu, hu," when he passed around toward the
left side, with a trembling motion, and as he did so, the body began
quivering, which increased as the bear continued, until he had passed
around four times, when the body came to life and stood up. Then the
bear called to the father, who was sitting in the distant right hand
corner of the wigwam, and said:
"My father is not an Indian. You are a spirit son. Insomuch my fellow
spirit now as you are. My father now tobacco you shall put. He speaks
of only once to be able to do it. Why he shall live here now that he
scarcely lives; my fellow spirit I shall now go home."
The little bear boy was the one who did this. He then remained among
the Indians and taught them the mysteries of the Grand Medicine, which
would assist them to live. He also said his spirit could bring a body
to life but once, and he would now return to the sun, from which they
would feel his influence.
This is called "Kwi-wi-senswed-di-tshi-ge-wi-nip"--"Little boy, his
work."
VII.
CURIOUS FACTS ABOUT THE BEAR.
With the different seasons the bear presents a varied appearance.
There are times when you would scarce recognize the same animal. In
the autumn of the year the bear takes on fat in preparation for
hibernating. At this time the fur is glossy and long, and in the
grizzly almost a seal brown.
A curious phenomenon now takes place in the animal's digestive organs,
which gives it the capability of remaining the entire winter in a
state of lethargy, without food and yet without losing condition. As
the stomach is no longer furnished with food, it soon becomes quite
empty, and, together with the intestines, is contracted into a
very small space. No food can now pass through the system, for
an obstruction, a mechanical one--technically called the
"tappen"--blocks the entrance to the passage and remains in this
position until spring. The "tappen" is composed almost entirely of
pine leaves and the various substances which the bear scratches out of
the ants' nests or the hives of bees. During the season of
hibernation, the bear gains a new skin on its feet. It will remain in
its den until about the middle of April or the beginning of May, and
will emerge almost as fat as when it entered, unless it has lost the
"tappen" too soon.
It will now be seen that the fur has undergone a change. With the
grizzly it has the real grizzly hue; with the brown or black bear it
has a dead look. This is the hungry season for the bear, and until
fall, when the berries are ripe and the salmon run in the streams, his
bearship has a hard time of it. By the end of July and until the
middle of August the fur undergoes a further change. The old coat is
hanging upon him in shreds, he is much emaciated, and there is a
hungry look in his eye. His ears appear abnormally large, and his
paws seem enormous. When the berries are ripe and there are fish in
the streams, the preparation for winter begins, the fur is sleek and
greasy-looking again. Mr. Bear is fat and contented and ready to go
into his long sleep.
When he awakes one of the first things he does is to suck his feet.
This is done because the skin is new and tender.
In the picture illustrating the fight between the bear and the boy
upon the log, the bear is shown as he appears during the emaciated
season, a caricature of himself when well fed. The bear in captivity
receives his food at regular intervals and in large quantities, and he
loses many of the marked characteristics of the bear in his wild or
untamed state. There is just as much difference between a society
leader and a man who lives close to nature.
Transcriber's Notes:
Archaic and inconsistent spelling and punctuation retained.
End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of True Bear Stories, by Joaquin Miller
*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TRUE BEAR STORIES ***
***** This file should be named 40869-8.txt or 40869-8.zip *****
This and all associated files of various formats will be found in:
http://www.gutenberg.org/4/0/8/6/40869/
Produced by David Edwards, Matthew Wheaton and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
file was produced from images generously made available
by The Internet Archive)
Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions
will be renamed.
Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no
one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation
(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without
permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules,
set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to
copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to
protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark. Project
Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you
charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission. If you
do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the
rules is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose
such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and
research. They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do
practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks. Redistribution is
subject to the trademark license, especially commercial
redistribution.
*** START: FULL LICENSE ***
THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE
PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK
To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free
distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work
(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project
Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project
Gutenberg-tm License available with this file or online at
www.gutenberg.org/license.
Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm
electronic works
1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm
electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to
and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property
(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all
the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy
all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession.
If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the
terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or
entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8.
1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be
used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who
agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few
things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works
even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See
paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement
and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
works. See paragraph 1.E below.
1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation"
or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual works in the
collection are in the public domain in the United States. If an
individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are
located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from
copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative
works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg
are removed. Of course, we hope that you will support the Project
Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by
freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of
this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with
the work. You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by
keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project
Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others.
1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern
what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are in
a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States, check
the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement
before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or
creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project
Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no representations concerning
the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United
States.
1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg:
1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate
access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently
whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the
phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project
Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed,
copied or distributed:
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived
from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is
posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied
and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees
or charges. If you are redistributing or providing access to a work
with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the
work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1
through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the
Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or
1.E.9.
1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted
with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution
must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional
terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms will be linked
to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the
permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work.
1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm
License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this
work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm.
1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this
electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without
prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with
active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project
Gutenberg-tm License.
1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary,
compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any
word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access to or
distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than
"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version
posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org),
you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a
copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon
request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other
form. Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm
License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1.
1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying,
performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works
unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9.
1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing
access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided
that
- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from
the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method
you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is
owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he
has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the
Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments
must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you
prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax
returns. Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and
sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the
address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to
the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation."
- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies
you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he
does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm
License. You must require such a user to return or
destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium
and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of
Project Gutenberg-tm works.
- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any
money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the
electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days
of receipt of the work.
- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free
distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works.
1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm
electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set
forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from
both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael
Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark. Contact the
Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below.
1.F.
1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable
effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread
public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm
collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain
"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or
corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual
property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a
computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by
your equipment.
1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right
of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project
Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project
Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all
liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal
fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT
LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE
PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE
TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE
LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR
INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH
DAMAGE.
1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a
defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can
receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a
written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you
received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with
your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you with
the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a
refund. If you received the work electronically, the person or entity
providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to
receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If the second copy
is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further
opportunities to fix the problem.
1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth
in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS', WITH NO OTHER
WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO
WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE.
1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied
warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages.
If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the
law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be
interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by
the applicable state law. The invalidity or unenforceability of any
provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions.
1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the
trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone
providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance
with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production,
promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works,
harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees,
that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do
or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm
work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any
Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause.
Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm
Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of
electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers
including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It exists
because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from
people in all walks of life.
Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the
assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's
goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will
remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project
Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure
and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations.
To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation
and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4
and the Foundation information page at www.gutenberg.org
Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive
Foundation
The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit
501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the
state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal
Revenue Service. The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification
number is 64-6221541. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent
permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws.
The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S.
Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered
throughout numerous locations. Its business office is located at 809
North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887. Email
contact links and up to date contact information can be found at the
Foundation's web site and official page at www.gutenberg.org/contact
For additional contact information:
Dr. Gregory B. Newby
Chief Executive and Director
[email protected]
Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg
Literary Archive Foundation
Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide
spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of
increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be
freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest
array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations
($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt
status with the IRS.
The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating
charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United
States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a
considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up
with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations
where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To
SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any
particular state visit www.gutenberg.org/donate
While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we
have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition
against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who
approach us with offers to donate.
International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make
any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from
outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff.
Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation
methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other
ways including checks, online payments and credit card donations.
To donate, please visit: www.gutenberg.org/donate
Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic
works.
Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm
concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared
with anyone. For forty years, he produced and distributed Project
Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support.
Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed
editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S.
unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not necessarily
keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition.
Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility:
www.gutenberg.org
This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm,
including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary
Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to
subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks.
