CHAPTER XII WIPING OUT OLD SCORES

I have said more than once that both Wooffa and I had made up our minds that we never wished to see man again. Looking back now, it is hard to tell what made us depart from that determination; indeed, I am not sure that there was any particular moment at which we did definitely change our minds and decide to go into his neighbourhood once more. It was rather, I think, that we drifted or wandered into it; but we certainly must have known quite well what we were doing.

When we started out in the following spring, with Wahka and Kahwa in their second year, we were a formidable family, without much cause to be afraid of anything. We had no intention of meddling with a grizzly if we happened to meet one, and so long as we kept out of the way of thunder-sticks there was nothing to hurt us. At first we wandered northward with no definite object, but as we got nearer a great curiosity came[164] over me to see the places which I had cause to remember so well—the berry-patch and the house where Kahwa had met her death; and also, I believe, there was a vague hope of somehow meeting again my old enemy and being able to square accounts with him. He had threatened me again and again, and I had always had to run from him. Moreover, I held him responsible in my mind for Kahwa’s death. If he had warned us, as decent bears always do warn one another of any danger, when we met him that night on our way to the berry-patch, we should never have gone on, and Kahwa would not have been captured. He was coming away from the patch, and he must have known that the men were there. But for mother’s help, he would probably have killed father that time when he tried to turn us out of our home. Altogether, it was a long list of injuries that I had against him, and I nursed the memory of them. Perhaps I should meet him some day, and this time I should not run away. Whenever I thought of him, I used to get so angry that I would sit up on my hind-legs and rub my nose in my chest and growl; and Wooffa knew what was in my mind, and growled in sympathy with me.

So it came about that we travelled steadily[165] northward that summer, going back over much of the same ground as father, mother, and I had travelled when we came away after Kahwa’s death. Sometimes we stayed in one locality for a week, and then perhaps kept moving for a couple of days, until we came to another place which tempted us to loiter. Many times we saw man, but he never saw us; for we were old and experienced, and had no trouble in keeping out of his way. We found that he did not always stay wherever he came. Some houses, which I remembered passing three years before, we found empty now and in ruins, with the roofs falling in and bushes growing over them. On several streams the beavers told us that they had not seen a man for three years.

We now learned, too, something of the reason of man’s coming into the mountains. Sometimes men’s dogs were lost in the woods, or they made friends with coyotes and ran wild; and they told the coyotes all they knew, and from them it spread to the other animals. We met one of these coyotes who had been friends with a dog, and she told us what the dog had told her. It was gold that the men were looking for, yellow, shining stuff that was found in the gravel in the river-beds. What men wanted with it she had no[166] idea, as the dog himself did not know, and it was not good to eat; but they set great store by it, and were always looking for it everywhere, following up the streams and scratching and digging in the beds. If they found no gold in a stream, they left it and went on to another. Where they did find it they built houses and stayed, and more men came, and more, until towns grew up, with roads and horses and cows as we had seen. In many ways what the coyote told us agreed with what we had observed for ourselves, so we presumed it was true; though a coyote is too much like a wolf to be safe to trust as a general rule.

The next time that we came to a place where the men had been working I thought I would like to see some of the wonderful yellow stuff. There were mounds of earth, and a long ditch running slantwise away from the stream, and nobody seemed to be about; so I scrambled down into the ditch to look if any of the yellow stuff was there. I was walking slowly along, sniffing at the ground and the sides of the ditch, when suddenly out of a sort of cave in one side, and only a few yards from me, came a man! Wooffa was just behind me, and the cubs behind her, and[167] he was evidently no less astonished than I, and much more frightened. With one yell, he clambered up the bank before I could make up my mind what to do, and rushed to a small tree or sapling near by, and then for the first time I learned that a man could climb. He went up fast, too, until he got to the first branches, when he stopped and looked down and shouted at us—I suppose with some idea of frightening us. But he had no thunder-stick, and we were not in the least afraid; so we followed him and looked at the tree. It was too thin for us to climb—for a bear has to have something solid to take hold of—or I would certainly have gone up after him. As it was, we sat about for a while looking at him, and waiting to see if he would come down again; but he showed no intention of doing that, and, as we did not know how soon other men might come, we left him and went on our way. But I did not go investigating empty ditches in the daylight any more.

One thing that completely puzzled us—as completely as it terrified—was the thunder-stick. What was it? How came man to be able to kill at such distances with it? Above all, at what distance could he kill? These questions puzzled me many a time.

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It was soon after the adventure in the ditch that for the first time we saw a boat. It was coming down the stream with three men in it. At first we thought the boat itself to be some kind of an animal, and that the long oars waving on either side were its legs or wings; but as it came near we saw the men inside, and understood what it was. So we stood and watched it. Fortunately, we were out of sight ourselves, or I am afraid to think what might have happened.

Just opposite to us, on the very top of a pine-tree on the other bank, an osprey which had been fishing was sitting and waiting for the boat to go by. As the boat came alongside of us, one of the men, as he sat, raised a thunder-stick and pointed it at the osprey, and the bird fell dead, even before, as it seemed to us, the thunder-stick had spoken.

Until then we had had no idea that the thunder-stick could kill up in the air just as well as along the ground; indeed, we had always agreed among ourselves that, in case we should meet a man with a thunder-stick and not have time to get away, we would make for the nearest trees and climb out of his reach. But what was the use of climbing a tree, when we had just seen the osprey killed on the top of one much higher than any that we[169] could climb? This incident made man seem more awful than before.

We were now within one night’s journey of the places that I knew so well, and in a country where men were on all sides. We kept crossing well-worn trails over the mountains, on which we sometimes saw men, and often when we were lying up during the day we heard the noise of mule-trains passing, the clangle-clangle-clang of the bell round the neck of the leading mule, and the hoarse voices of the men as they shouted at them. Now, also, many of the houses were like the one we had seen by the pool at the beaver-dam, with clearings round them in which cows lived and strange green things were growing.

On the evening of the day on which the osprey had been shot we came to one of these. I remembered the house from three years ago, but other buildings had been added to it, and round it was a wide open space full of stuff that looked like tall waving grass, which I now know was wheat. There was a fence all round it, made of posts with barbed wire stretched between, and it was the first time that we had seen barbed wire. Wahka, with his inquisitiveness, was the first to find out what the barbed wire was. He[170] found out with his nose. When he had stopped grumbling and rubbing his nose on the ground, and could explain what was the matter, I tried it, more cautiously than he had done, but still sufficiently to make my nose bleed. We walked nearly all round the field, and everywhere was the horrid wire with its vicious spikes. But we wanted to get into the field because we were sure that the long, waving, yellowing wheat would be good to eat. At last an idea occurred to Wooffa, who took the top of one of the posts in her two paws, and throwing, her whole weight back, wrenched it clean out of the ground. Still the wire held across, and I had to treat the next post in the same way, and then the next. Both she and I left tufts of our hair on the sharp points, but the wire was now lying on the ground where we could step over it; so we waded shoulder-high into the wheat, and before we left the field it was gray dawn, and we had each of us, I think, eaten more than we had eaten before in all our lives.

We had trampled all over the field munching and munching and munching at the wheat-ears, which were full and sweet and just beginning to ripen. Then we went down to the stream for[171] a drink, and by the time the sun was up we were three or four miles away in the mountains. The children pleaded to be allowed to go there again next night, but that was a point which we had settled that evening when we had caught the pig. Never again would we go back to a place where we had taken anything of man’s which he could miss, and where he might be prepared for a second visit.

So we went cautiously onward the next evening, with the signs of man’s presence always around us. Almost half the trees had been chopped down; there were trails over the mountains in all directions, and houses everywhere by the streams, from which men’s voices came to us until late at night. Silently, in single file, we threaded our way, I leading, and Wooffa bringing up the rear. Bears that had not our experience would certainly have got into trouble; but I knew man, and was not terrified at his smell or the sound of his voice, and knew, too, that all that was needed was to keep out of his sight and move quietly. Mile by mile we pushed on without mishap, but there were so many men, and things had changed so much that, remembering the visit to my first home, I doubted whether I should be able to recognise the berry-patch[172] when I came to it; when suddenly there it was in front of me!

The trees all round it had been cut down, so that it came into view sooner than I had expected; but when I looked upon it I saw that it had hardly changed. The moon was high overhead, and the patch glistened in the light, as of old. Across the middle ran a hard brown roadway which was not there in the old days; but otherwise all was the same. I was standing almost on the spot from which we had watched Kahwa being dragged away, and the scene was nearly as distinct to me as it had been at that time.

We did not go down into the patch. The trees around the edges had been so much thinned out that it was less easy to approach in safety; so we contented ourselves with wandering round and eating such fruit as remained on the scattered bushes which grew among the trees on the outskirts of the wood. It was already after midnight, and we only stayed for an hour or so, and then I led the way back into the hills, intending to go and see if our old lair, for which my father and mother had had to fight in the former days, was still untouched by man and would afford us safe shelter for the coming day. As I did so, my[173] thoughts went back to that morning, and I growled to myself; for I was thinking of my old enemy, and wondering whether I should ever have the opportunity of avenging the old injuries. And, lo! even as I was wondering the opportunity came.

Wahka had strayed from the path, and suddenly I heard him growling; and a moment later he came running to my side, and out of the brush behind him loomed the figure of another bear. I knew him in a moment, and it was characteristic of him that he should have attacked a cub like Wahka—not, of course, knowing that it was the grandchild of the pair whom he had tried to dispossess of their home so long before. As he saw the rest of us, he stopped in his pursuit of Wahka, and stood up on his hind-legs growling angrily; and as I measured him with my eyes I realized how much bigger I must be than my father, for this bear, who had towered over my father, was not an inch taller or an ounce heavier than I. We were as nearly matched as two bears could be; but I had no doubt of my ability to punish him, for I had right on my side, and had waited a long time for this moment, and would fight as one fights who is filled with rage at old wrongs that are left to him to redress.

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And I did not leave him long in any doubt as to my intentions, but walked straight towards him, telling him as I did so that I had been looking for him, and that the time had come for the settling of old scores. He understood who I was, and was just as ready to fight as I.

I am not going to trouble you with an account of another fight. I pursued my old plan, and he had been so used to have other bears make way for him, and fight only under compulsion, that I think my first rush surprised him so much that it gave me even more advantage than usual. Big and strong as he was, the issue was never in doubt from the start; for I felt within myself that my fury made me irresistible, and from the moment that I threw myself on him he never had time to breathe or to take the initiative. He was beaten in a few minutes, and he knew it; but he fought desperately, and with a savageness that told me that if he had won he would have been satisfied with nothing less than my life. But he was not to win; and whimpering, growling, bleeding, and mad with shame and rage, I drove him back, and it was only a question of how far I chose to push my victory.

FROM THE MOMENT I THREW MYSELF ON HIM HE NEVER HAD TIME TO BREATHE.

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I let him live; but he went away torn and[175] crippled, with his spirit broken and his fighting days over. Never again would he stand to face a full-grown bear. For years he had made everything that he met move aside from his path in the forest, and he had used his strength always for evil, to domineer and to crush and to tyrannize. Thenceforward he would know what it was to be made to stand aside for others, to yield the right of way, and to whine and fawn on his fellows; for a bear once broken in body and spirit, as I broke him, is broken for good.

I was not hurt beyond a few flesh wounds, which Wooffa licked for me before we slept; and it was with a curious sense of satisfaction and completeness, as if the chief work of my life were now well done, that I lay down in the old lair which had so many associations for me, with my wife and well-grown children by me, and rested through the heat of the following day.