CHAPTER XIII THE TRAP

The old neighbourhood was no place for us to stay in, however satisfactory our brief visit to it had been. It was man’s country now, and there were no other bears in the vicinity. My enemy of the night before, being old and cunning and solitary, had managed to live there unscathed year after year, after the other bears had all gone away or been killed; but for us, a family of four, of whom two were inexperienced youngsters not yet two years old, it was different. Many times during the day men passed not far from us, and the distant sounds of their voices and the chopping of axes was in our ears all day. So we remained under cover till well into the night, when man’s eyes are useless, and then we started out silently, and, as our custom was when moving through dangerous country, in single file, with the cubs between Wooffa and myself.

The end of that summer was very hot, and [177]partly for the coolness, and partly, also, to get as far away from man as possible, we went northward and up into higher ranges of the mountains than we usually cared to visit.

As we climbed upwards, the trees grew smaller and further apart, until, just below the extreme top, they ceased altogether. Above the tree-line rose what looked from below like the ordinary rounded summit of a mountain with rocky sides, and even at this time of year small patches of snow still lingered in the sheltered spots. As we came out on the top, however, instead of the rounded summit which we expected, the ground broke suddenly away before our feet, and below us, blue and still and circular, lay a lake. The mountain was no more than a shell or a gigantic cup, filled to within fifty feet of its rocky brim with the clearest of water. I had seen a similar lake in the year when I roamed alone before I met Wooffa, and my father had told me long ago that there were many of these mountain lakes round us, though, of course, we could not see them from below.

Here on these lonely summits live the mountain-sheep and mountain-goat. Round the edge of the water their feet had beaten a regular trail, and in the rough crevices of the bark of the last of the[178] trees, tufts of white wool were sticking where the goats had rubbed themselves against the trunks. As we stood on the edge of the thin lip of rock, a sheep with its great curved horns that had been drinking at the lake scrambled in alarm up the further side, and, standing for a minute against the skyline opposite, disappeared over the edge; and though we lived there for nearly two months, and smelled them often and heard them every night, we never saw one again except clear across the whole width of the lake. They were probably right in keeping away from us, because a young mountain sheep—well, though I had never tasted one, it somehow suggested thoughts of pig.

At one side there was a break in the rocky wall or rim of the cup, and through this the water trickled, to swell gradually, as it went on down the mountain, into a stream, which, joining with other streams, somewhere became, no doubt, a river. At the point where the water flowed out of the lake, the hillside was strewn with huge boulders and fragments of rock down to below the timber-line, and here among these rocks, where the brush grew over them and the stream tumbled by, was an ideal place to spend the remaining hot weather; and here we stayed. Man, we were sure, had never[179] been here, nor was he likely to come, and we wandered carelessly and without a shadow of fear.

Before the cold weather came our family broke up. We did not quarrel; but it is in the course of nature that young bears, when they are able to take care of themselves, should go out into the world. Wahka was no longer a cub, and there is not room in one family for two full-grown he-bears. On the other hand, Wooffa and Kahwa had not of late got on well together. My wife, as is the way of women, was a little jealous of my affection for Kahwa, and—well, sometimes I am bound to say that I thought Wooffa spent rather too much time with Wahka and forgot my existence. So on all accounts it was better that we should separate. I had been driven away by my father when I was a year younger than Wahka was now, but I do not blame him; for the disappearance of Kahwa—the first Kahwa—and living away from home and nightly wanderings in the town, had made a breach between us. Now, at the separation from my son, there was no bad feeling, and one day by common consent he and Kahwa went away not to return. I had no apprehension that they would not be able to take care of themselves; and as for me, Wooffa[180] was company enough, and we were both glad to have each other all to ourselves again.

Soon after the children had gone, the chill in the wind gave warning that winter was not far away, and we began to move down towards the lower levels; for on the mountain-tops it is too exposed and cold, and the snow stays too long to make them a good winter home. As we looked up a few days later to the peak which we had left, we saw it standing out against the dull sky, not yellow-grey and rocky as we had left it, but all gleaming white and snow-covered. For a day or two more we followed the streams down to the lower country, and then made our dens beneath the roots of two upturned trees close together. And again, as two years before, Wooffa spent much time and great care over the lining of hers, making it very snug and soft and warm.

And next spring there were two more little ones—another woolly brown Wahka, and another Kahwa, just as woolly and just as brown—to look after and teach, and protect from porcupines and pumas and wolves, and make fit for the struggle of life.

I am not going to attempt to tell you any stories of the early days of the new cubs, for the events of a bear’s babyhood are always much alike, and it[181] is not easy, looking back, to distinguish one’s later children from one’s first; and I should probably only tell over again stories of the Wahka and Kahwa of two years before. They were healthy, vigorous cubs, the new little ones, and they tumbled and played and were smacked, and blundered their way along somehow.

But it was a terrible year, with late snows long after spring ought to have begun; and then it rained and rained all the summer. There was no berry crop, insects of all kinds had been killed by the late cold and were very scarce, every stream stayed in flood, so that the fish never came up properly, and there was none of the usual hunting along the exposed herbage as the streams went down in the summer heat. It was, as I said, a terrible year, and food was hard to get for a whole family. We were driven to all sorts of shifts, and then, to make matters worse, long before the usual time for winter came, bitter frosts set in. Driven by hunger and the necessity of finding food for the little ones we did what we had thought never to do again, and once more went down to the neighbourhood of man.

We were not the only ones that did so, for the animals were nearly all driven out of the mountains,[182] and the bears, especially, congregated about the settlements of man in search of food. Wherever we went we found the same thing, the bears coming out at night to hunt round the houses for food; and many stories we heard of their being shot when greedily eating meat that had been placed out for them, or when sniffing round a house or trying to take a pig. Now, too, man brought a new weapon beside his thunder-stick—huge traps with steel jaws that were baited with meat and covered with sticks and twigs and earth, so that a bear could not see them; but when he went to take the meat the great toothed jaws closed round his leg, and then he found that the trap was chained to a neighbouring log which he had to drag round with him till the men came out and killed him with their thunder-sticks.

Having been told all about it, when we came one day to a large piece of a young pig lying on the ground, I made the others stand away while I scratched cautiously round and pushed sticks against the pig, carefully keeping my own paws out of the way. Even as it was, when the steel jaws came together with a snap that made the whole trap leap into the air as if it was alive, they passed so near my nose that I shudder now when[183] I think of it. But we ate the pig. And that happened two or three times, until the men took the trap away from that particular place.

Another time I had a narrow escape on approaching a house at night. We had been there several times, and usually picked up some scraps of stuff that was good. I always went down first alone to see if all was safe, leaving the others in the shelter of the woods, and on this occasion I was creeping stealthily up to the house, when suddenly, from behind a pile of chopped wood, a thunder-stick spoke and I felt a sudden pain in my shoulder. I was only grazed, however, and scrambled back to Wooffa and the cubs in safety. But we did not visit that house any more, and I heard that a few days after another bear that went down just as I had gone was killed by a thunder-stick from behind the same pile of wood.

In the long-run, however, a bear is no match for man. It was a dangerous life that we were living, and we knew it; but both Wooffa and I had had more than ordinary experience of man, and we believed we could always escape him. Besides, what else were we to do? It is doubtful if we could have lived in the mountains that winter, and we had our cubs to look after. In the old days before man[184] came, when, as once in many years, the weather drove us from the mountains, we could have gone down to the foot-hills and the plains, and found food there; but man now barred our way, and the only thing that we could do was to go where he was, and live on such food as we could get. Much of that food was only what was thrown away, but much of it also we deliberately stole. More than one cornfield we visited, and in the fenced enclosures round his houses we found strange vegetables that were good to eat; but we had to break down fences to get them. We stole pigs, too, and twice when dogs attacked us we had to kill the dogs. Once we found half a sheep, which had been killed by man, lying on the ground, as if man had forgotten it. We ate it, and were all dreadfully ill afterwards. Then we knew that it had been poisoned and put out for us; but, fortunately, the poison was not enough to kill four of us, though, I suppose, if any one of us had eaten the whole, that one would have died. After that we never touched large pieces of meat which we found lying about.

It was, as I have said, a dangerous life, and we knew it; but we were driven to it, and we trusted to our experience, our cunning, and our strength, to pull us through somehow.

[185]

Winter came, and we ought to have gone to our dens, but we were not fit for it. We were too poorly fed and thin, and hunger would probably have driven us out in midwinter. It was better to stay out now. So we stayed, keeping for the most part in the immediate neighbourhood of a number of men’s houses along a certain stream. It was not a town, though there was one a few miles further down the stream; but for a distance of a mile or more on both sides of the water there were houses every hundred yards or so, and all day long men were at work digging and working in the ground along by the water looking for gold. We had kept all other bears away from the place, and, living in the mountains during the day, we used to come down at night, never going near the same house on two nights in succession, but being sometimes on one side of the stream, which was easily crossed, and sometimes on the other, and paying our visits wherever we thought we were least likely to be expected. Some nights we would not go near the houses at all, but would content ourselves with such food as we could find in the woods, though now in the bitter cold it was hard to find anything.

Early one morning, after one of these nights[186] when we had kept away from the houses, we came across a trap. It evidently was a trap, because there was the bait put out temptingly in plain sight, not on the ground this time, but about a foot from the ground, tied to a stick. The curious thing about it was, however, that the whole affair was inside some sort of a house; or, rather, there were the three walls and roof of a small house, but there was no front to it—that was all open; and there, well inside, was the bait. I did not know why men had been at so much pains to build the house round the trap, but I had no doubt that if I approached the bait with proper caution, and scratched at it, the steel jaws would spring out as usual from somewhere, and then we could eat the meat. And we were all four distressingly hungry.

IT WAS EVIDENTLY A TRAP.

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So I told the others to stay behind while I went into the house and sprung the trap and brought the meat out to them. I went in, and began to scratch about on the ground where I supposed the usual trap to be; but there was nothing there but the hard, dry earth. This puzzled me, but the lump of meat tied to the stake was an obvious fact; and I was hungry. At last, since, scratch as I would, no steel jaws[187] appeared from anywhere, nor was there any place where they could be concealed, nothing remained but to take the meat boldly. I reached for it with my paw, but it was firmly tied; so I took it in my mouth and pulled. As I did so I heard a sudden movement behind me. A log had fallen behind me, almost blocking up the door. Well, I would move that away when I had the meat, I thought, and, seizing it firmly in my mouth, I tore it from its fastenings and turned to take it to the others waiting outside. But the log across the door was bigger than I thought; it completely blocked my passage, and when I gave it a push it did not yield.

Still, I had no uneasiness. I pushed harder at the log, but it did not move. I tried to pull it inward, but it remained unshaken. I sniffed all along it and round it, and round the other walls of the small house, and was puzzled as to what to do next. So I called to Wooffa, who came outside and began sniffing round, too. Remembering how I had released Kahwa from her pen, I told Wooffa to lift the latch; but there was no latch, she said. This was growing tiresome, and then, all of a sudden, it dawned on me.

This was the trap—this room! There was no[188] steel thing with jaws; no poisoned meat; nothing but this house, which itself was the trap, left open at one side so that I might walk in, and so arranged that as I pulled at the meat the heavy log dropped, shutting the open door, and dropped in such a way that the strength of ten bears would not move it. This was the trap, and I—I was caught!

That I was really, hopelessly, and finally caught I could not, of course, believe at first. There was some mistake—some way out of it. I had outwitted man so often that it was not to be thought of that he had won at last. And round and round the small space I went again and again, always coming back to the cracks above the fallen log to scratch and strain at them without the smallest result. Outside Wooffa was doing the same. I was inclined to lose my temper with her at first, believing that if I was outside in her place I could surely find some way of making an opening; but I saw that she was trying as hard to let me out as I was to get out myself. And then I heard the cubs beginning to whimper, as they comprehended vaguely what had happened, and saw their mother’s fruitless efforts and her evident distress.

Then I began to rage. I remember taking the[189] meat in my mouth and, without eating a morsel, rending it into small bits. I found the stick to which it had been tied and broke it with my jaws into a hundred pieces. I attacked the walls and the door furiously, beating them with my paws blow after blow that would have broken a bear’s neck, and tearing at the logs with my teeth till my gums were cut so that my mouth ran blood. And outside, as they heard me raging within, not the cubs only but Wooffa also whimpered and tore the ground with teeth and claws.

We might as well have stormed at the sky or the mountains. The house stood, none the worse, and I was as far from freedom as ever. By this time the night had passed and dawn had come. I could smell it, and see through the chinks that the air was lightening outside. And then outside I heard a new sound, a sound that filled me with rage and fear—the barking of a dog.

Nearer it came and nearer, and I heard the voice of a man calling; but the dog was much nearer than the man, evidently running ahead of him, and evidently also coming straight for the trap. In another minute the dog had caught sight of the bears outside, for I heard the snarling rush of an angry dog, and with it Wahka growling as the dog[190] attacked him. The shouting of the man’s voice grew nearer, and then, mingled with the noise of the fight between Wahka and the dog, I heard the angry ‘wooffing’ of Wooffa’s voice. The dog’s voice changed as it turned to attack this more formidable enemy, but suddenly its barking ended in a yelp, followed by another and another, which slowly faded away into what I knew were its death-cries. What could any dog expect who dared to face such a bear as Wooffa fighting for her children?

But the last of the dog’s death-cries were drowned by the most awful of all sounds, the voice of the thunder-stick; and my heart leaped as I heard Wahka cry out in what I knew was mortal agony. Then came Wooffa’s voice again, and in such tones that I pitied anyone who stood before her. Again the thunder-stick spoke, and I heard what I knew was Wooffa charging. I heard her growling in her throat in what was almost a roar, and the crashing of bushes and the shouts of the man’s voice, and more crashing of bushes, which died away in the distance down the hillside. Then all was silent except where somewhere in the rear of the house, little Kahwa whimpered miserably to herself.

All this I heard, and most of it I understood,[191] standing motionless and helpless inside the trap, powerless to help my wife and children when in such desperate straits within a few yards of me. As the silence fell and the tension was relaxed, I fell to raging again, with a fury tenfold greater than before, tearing and beating at the walls, rending great lumps of fur out of myself with my claws, biting my paws till the blood ran, and filling the air with my cries of helpless anger. At last through the noise that I was making I heard Wooffa’s voice. She had returned, and was speaking to me from outside. Brokenly—for she was out of breath, and in pain—she told me the story.

Wahka was dead, and the dog. The latter she had killed with her paw; the former had been slain by the first stroke of the thunder-stick. Then she had charged at the man, who, however, was a long way off. The thunder-stick had spoken again, and had broken her leg. As she fell, the man had turned to run; she had followed, but he had a start, and, with her broken leg, she could not have caught him without chasing him right up to his house. But he had thrown the thunder-stick away as he ran, and that she had found and chewed into small pieces before returning to me. And now her leg[192] was utterly useless, here was Kahwa a helpless cub: what was she to do?

There was only one thing for her to do: to make good her own escape with Kahwa if possible. But how about me? she asked. I must remain. There was no alternative, and she could do no good by staying. With her broken leg, she could not help me against the men, who would undoubtedly return in force, and she would only be sacrificing Kahwa’s life and her own. She must go, and at once.

She knew in her heart that it was the only thing, and very reluctantly, for Kahwa’s sake, she consented. There was no time for long farewells; and there was no need of them, for we knew that we loved each other, and, whatever came, each knew that the other would carry himself or herself staunchly as a bear should.

So she went, and I heard her stumbling along with her broken leg, and Kahwa whining as she trotted by her mother’s side. I knew that, even if they escaped with their lives, I should in all probability never hear of it. I listened till the last sound had died away and it was so still outside that it seemed as if everything in the forest must be dead. My rage had passed away, and in its place [193]was an unspeakable loneliness and despair; and I sat myself up in the furthest corner of the narrow house, with my back against the wall and my face to the door, and, with my muzzle buried in my chest, awaited the return of the enemy.