CHAPTER X A VISIT TO THE OLD HOME

When I awoke I found that it was indeed all true, but I was so frightfully stiff that it was not easy to be very happy all at once. I slept straight on all through the morning until late in the afternoon. My new companion had been awake, and had wandered round a little in the early morning, but without awaking me. When I awoke in the afternoon she was asleep by my side. I tried to stand up, but every bone in my body hurt, every muscle ached, and every joint was so stiff that I could almost hear it creak. The fuss that I made in trying to get on to my feet disturbed her, and she helped me up. Somehow I managed to stagger along, and we went off for a short ramble in search of food. I could hardly dig at all, but she shared with me the roots she found, and with a few berries we made a sort of a meal; and then I was so tired that we lay down again, and I slept right on till daybreak the following morning.

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After that I felt myself again. It was days before all the stiffness wore off, and weeks before my wounds were entirely healed; while, as you can see, I carry some of the scars to this day.

For some days the bear that I had beaten hung about, in the hope of tempting Wooffa (that was what I called my wife, it being my mother’s name) to go back to him. But he was a pitiable object, limping about with his broken leg, and I never even offered to fight him again. There was no need for it. Wooffa did not wish to have anything to say to him, and she ignored him for the most part unless he came too near, when she growled at him in a way that was not to be misunderstood. I really felt sorry for him, remembering my own loneliness, and realizing that it was probably worse to lose her and have to go off alone, while she belonged to somebody else, than never to have known her at all. After a while he recognised that it was hopeless, and we saw him no more. We ourselves, indeed, did not stay in the same place, but as long as the summer lasted we wandered where we pleased.

We suited each other admirably, Wooffa and I. We had much the same tastes, with equal cause to hate man and to wish to keep away from his neighbourhood,[136] and we were very nearly of the same size and strength. I never knew a bear that had a keener scent, and she was a marvel at finding honey. In many ways it is a great advantage for two bears to be together, for they have two noses and two sets of eyes and ears, and two can turn over a log or a stone that is too heavy for one. Altogether, I now lived better and was much more free from care than I had been; while above all was the great fact of companionship—the mere not being alone. In small ways she used to tyrannize over me, just as mother did over father; but I liked it, and neither of us ever found any tit-bit which was large enough to share without being willing to go halves with the other.

The rest of that summer we spent together, and all the next, and I think she was as contented as I. What I had hoped came true, for I increased in weight so much that I do not think there was a bear that we saw that could have held his own against me in fair fight. Certainly there was no pair that could have stood up against Wooffa and me together; for though not quite so high at the shoulder as I, she was splendidly built and magnificently strong. On her chest she had a white spot or streak, of which she was very proud, and[137] which she kept always beautifully white and well combed.

Early in the summer of the year after I had met her, I took her to visit my childhood home. It needed a week’s steady travelling to get there, and when we arrived in the neighbourhood we found the whole place so changed that I could hardly find my way. It was more than three years since I had seen it, and man had now taken possession of the whole country. For the last day or two of our journey we had to go very carefully, for men’s houses were scattered along the banks of every stream, and wherever two streams of any size came together there had grown up a small town. In the burnt district many of the blackened trees were still standing, but the ground was carpeted with brush again, and young trees were shooting up in every direction. The beaver-dams were most of them broken, and those which remained were deserted. On all sides were the marks of man’s handiwork.

At last we came to the beaver-dam, the pool of which had saved my life in the fire. There were houses close beside the pool, and a large clearing which had been made in the forest was now a grass-field, and in that field for the first time[138] I saw cows. We had already passed several strings of mules and ponies on the mountain-paths which the men had made, each animal carrying a huge bundle lashed on its back; and now we met horses dragging carts along the wide road which had been made along the border of the stream. Of course, we did not venture near the road during the day, but stayed hidden well up on the mountain-side, where we could hear the noise of people passing, and in the evening we made our way down.

Just as we arrived at the road, going very cautiously, a pair of horses dragging a waggon came along. Curious to see it, we stayed close by, and peered out from behind the trees; but as they came abreast of us a gust of wind blew the scent of us to the horses, and they took fright and seemed to go mad in one instant. Plunging and rearing, they tried to turn round, backing the waggon off the road into a tree. Then, putting their heads down, they started blindly thundering up the road, with the waggon swaying and rocking behind them. The man shouted and pulled and thrashed them with his whip, but the horses were too mad with terror to listen to him. On they dashed until there came a turn in the road, when with a crash the waggon collided with a tree.[139] Precisely what happened we could not see. Bits of the waggon were strewn about the road, while the horses plunged on with what was left of it dangling behind them. But in what was left there was no man.

We made our way along the edge of the road to where the crash had taken place, and there among the broken wheels and splinters of the waggon we found the man lying, half on the road and half in the forest, dead. It was some time before we could make up our minds to approach him, but at last I touched him with my nose, and then we turned him over with our paws. We were still inspecting him, when we heard the sound of other men and horses approaching, and before they came in sight we slipped off into the wood. We saw the new horses shy just as the former ones had done, but whether at the smell of ourselves or of the dead man in the road we did not know. The men managed to quiet them, however, and got out of the waggon, and after standing over the dead man for a while they lifted him and took him away with them.

We loitered about until it was dark, and then tried to make our way on to where my old home had been. It could not be half a mile away, but that half-mile was beset with houses,[140] and as we drew nearer the houses became thicker, until I saw that it would be useless to go on, for where the cedar-trees used to grow, where the hill-slope was that I had tumbled down, where Blacky the squirrel and Rat-tat used to live, was now the middle of a town. At the first sign of dawn we made our way back to the beaver-pool, and, crossing the dam again, turned our backs for ever on the neighbourhood where I had spent my childhood. It was no longer bears’ country.

Now for the first time I understood what the coming of man meant to the people of the forest and the mountains. I had, indeed, seen a man-town before, and the men coming and going up and down the streams, but, somehow, it had not occurred to me that where they came they never went away again. These men here, however, with their houses, their roads and cows and horses—they would never go away. They were wiping out the forest: the animals that lived in it had vanished: the very face of the mountains was changed, so that I could not tell the spots that I knew best; and I was sure that we could never drive them out again. I was sorry that I had come to see the old home, and we were a gloomy couple as we started on our return journey southwards.

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For a long time yet we would have to go cautiously, for man was all around us. Along the streams he had been digging, digging, digging, endlessly digging, but what he gained by it we could not comprehend; for we often watched him at work, and he seemed to take nothing out of the ground, nor to eat anything as he dug. When he was not digging, he was chopping trees, either to build more houses, to make dams across the streams, or to break the wood up into pieces to burn. So wherever he came the forest disappeared, and the rivers were disfigured with holes and ditches and piles of gravel on which no green thing grew, and nothing lived that was good to eat.

In travelling we kept away from the streams as much as possible, moving along the hillsides, and only coming down to the water when we wished to cross. We had been travelling in this way for some two or three nights, when one morning very early we came down to a stream at a point close by a clump of buildings. The wind was blowing from them to us, and suddenly Wooffa threw herself up on her haunches and gasped one word—‘Pig!’

I had heard of pig before, and Wooffa had eaten it to her cost; and in spite of the cost she agreed with everyone in saying that young pig is the very[142] best thing there is to eat in all the world. I had often wondered whether some of the best scraps that I had picked up about the houses in the town in the old days might not be pig, and now I know that they were. But they were cooked and salted pig, and not the fresh young pig newly killed, which is the joy of joys to a bear. This it was that Wooffa now smelled, and as the scent came to my nostrils I knew that it was something new to me and something very good.

The smell came from a sort of pen at one side of the biggest building, not unlike that in which Kahwa had been shut up, only the walls were not so high. They were too high to look over, however, and there was no way of climbing up until Wooffa helped me, and by standing on her back I was able to see over. It was a small square pen, the floor deep in mud, and at one end was a covered place something like the boxes that men keep dogs in; and in the door of this covered place I could see, asleep, a large black-and-white sow and five little pigs.

If I got inside, I saw that I could climb on the roof of the covered part and get out again; so I did not hesitate, but with one scramble I was over and down in the middle of the family. Wouff![143] what a noise they made! But with one smack of my paw I had killed the nearest little one, and grabbed it in my mouth, and in a minute I was up on the covered roof and out with Wooffa on the grass outside.

We did not stop to eat the pig there, for the others were still squealing as if they were all being killed, and we were afraid that they would wake the men; so we made off as fast as we could into the wood, taking the pig with us. It was as well that we did, for we had not gone far before we heard a door bang and a dog barking, and then the voices of men shouting to each other. We kept on for a mile or so before we stopped, down by the side of a little stream. Then we divided the pig fairly, and nothing that I had heard about his goodness had been exaggerated. No; there are many good things in the world—honey and berries and sugar and cooked things; but pig is above all others.

So good was he that, if I had been by myself, I think I should have stayed there, and gone down again next night for another, and probably been shot for my pains. But, as Wooffa had told me long ago, it was in doing just that very thing that her husband and two children had lost their lives.[144] They had found some pigs kept by men just as we had, and had taken three the first night. The next night they went and got two more; the third night the men were waiting for them, and only Wooffa escaped. The smell of the pig when it came to her again after two years had for the moment overcome all her fears; but she told me that she had been terrified all the time that I was in the sty, and nothing on earth would tempt her to risk a second visit.

I have said before that greediness is the undoing of nearly all wild animals, and, however much I longed for another taste of pig, I knew that she was right. It was better to go without pig and keep alive. So we set our faces resolutely in the other direction, and kept on our course, vowing that nothing should tempt us to linger in the proximity of man. And very glad we both were when we found ourselves at last once more in a region where as yet man had not been seen, where we could wander abroad as we pleased by night or day, where the good forest smells were still untainted, and where we could lie in the water of the streams at sunset or fish as long as we pleased without thought of an enemy.

It was a beautiful autumn that year, and I think,[145] as I look back to it, I was as happy then as ever in my life. There had been a splendid crop of berries, in contrast to the year before, and now, with the long clear autumn, all signs pointed to a hard winter. So we made our preparations for the cold season early, hollowing out our dens carefully side by side under the roots of two huge trees, where they were well sheltered from the wind, and lining them with sticks and leaves. Wooffa in particular spent a long time over hers; and afterwards I understood why.

It was still bright autumn weather, when the birds flying southwards told us that already snow had fallen to the north, and it was bitterly cold. Everyone was talking of the severe winter that was ahead of us, and the wolves and the coyotes had gone to the plains. We were glad we had made our preparations in good time, for, when the winter came, it came, in spite of all that had been said about it, unexpectedly. There was no warning of snow upon the higher peaks, but one night the north wind blew steadily the long night through, and in the morning the winter was on us, settling down on all the country, peak and valley, together.

That day we retired into our dens for good. When I came out in the spring, Wooffa had not[146] appeared, so I began to scratch away the stuff from the opening of her den, and as I did so I heard new noises inside; and all at once it dawned upon me that I was a father. Wooffa had brought me a little Kahwa and a little Wahka for my own.