True Bear Stories Part 7

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 corks.c.r.e.w.i.n.g 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" amus.e.m.e.nt 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 gra.s.sy 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 carca.s.s had received nearly lead enough to sink a small s.h.i.+p. 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 s.h.i.+ps 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 ill.u.s.trate 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 s.n.a.t.c.hing 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 superst.i.tion 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 l.a.b.i.atus) 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 superst.i.tiously afraid of him, and their dogs, very numerous, and good c.o.o.n dogs, too, will not touch him. His feet are large and flat, to accommodate him in getting over the soft ground, while his s.h.a.ggy 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, superst.i.tious, voodoo-wors.h.i.+ping 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 s.h.a.ggy, 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 sh.o.r.e from a s.h.i.+p. 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The bear was waiting there.--Page 111.]