CHAPTER VII.
THE ADVENTURES OF PIKE.
Pike was one of the oldest of Yosemite guides and altogether the quaintest of the many queer old fellows who drifted into the valley in early days and there were stranded for life. He had another name, no doubt, but nobody knew or cared what it might be, and he seemed to have forgotten it himself. "Pike" fitted him, served all the purposes for which names were invented, was easy to pronounce, and therefore was all the name he needed. Pike was tall, round-shouldered, lop-sided, slouchy, good-natured, illiterate, garrulous, frankly vain of the little scraps of botanical nomenclature he had picked up and as lazy and unacquainted with soap as an Indian.
Pike dearly loved bears and bear stories. When there were no tourists about to whom he could tell bear stories, he would go into the woods and have adventures with bears and stock up with stories for the next season. Pike never had to kill a bear to get a story out of him. He brought in no bear skins, pointed out no bullet holes, exhibited no scars and told no blood-curdling tales of furious combat and hair-breadth escapes. Pike and the bears appeared to have an understanding that there was room enough in the woods for both and that his hunting was all in the way of innocent amusement and recreation, to be spiced now and then with a practical joke.
"Black bears and brown bears are peaceable folks," Pike used to say in his Californianized-Missourian vernacular. "There's nothing mean about 'em and they don't go around with chips on their shoulders. I generally get along with them slick as grease and they never try to jump me when I haven't got a gun. Why, sir, I can just talk a brown bear out of the trail, even when he thinks he owns it. I did one night in the valley. I was going from Barnard's up to the Stoneman when I ran right up against a big brown bear in the dark. He was coming down the road and was in pretty considerable of a hurry, too—going down to the butcher's corral for supper I reckon—and we stopped about three feet apart. 'What you adoin' of here,' says I. 'Seems to me you're prowling around mighty permiscuous, buntin' inter people on the State stage road. You git inter the bresh,' says I, 'where you belong or I'll kick a few dents into you. Now don't stand here argifying the pint,' says I, just as important as if I was the Gardeen of the Valley, which I wasn't. 'Scoot, skedaddle, vamoos the ranch, git off the earth,' I says, 'if you ain't aimin' to git your head punched.'
"Well, sir, he stood there a minute with his head cocked sidewise, kinder grunted once as if he was saying 'good-night,' and turned off the road into the brush and went about his business, and I poked along up to the Stoneman. 'Course I can't swear that he knew just what I said, but he ketched the general drift of the argyment all right, what you might call the prepoort of my remarks, and he knowed he hadn't no case worth fighting about.
"I remember once when Jim Duncan and me was ketched out in a snowstorm up near the head of Alder Creek, and lost each other in the dark. I knew Jim would take care of himself and it was no use tramping around, so I hunted a hole to sleep in. I found a place under a rock just big enough for me, where the snow didn't blow in, and I curled up on some dry leaves and snoozed off in no time. By and by something touched my face and I woke up, and there was a bear poking his head in and wondering if there was room for two. There wasn't no room and I don't like to sleep with bears nohow. Bears are all right in their place and I don't hold to no prejudices, but I'm notional about some things and I never could stand bears in my bed; they smell worse than Indians. So I says to that bear, which was looking mighty wishful into my snug quarters, 'Git along out of this; I was here first,' and I reached up and fetched him a back-handed slap on the nose. You'd orter heard him sneeze as he moseyed off. Last thing I remembered when I turned over and went to sleep was him a sneezing as he wandered around looking for another hole.
"If that had been a she-bear, of course I'd have crawled out and gave her my place like a gentleman. You never know what a she—bear, or any other kind of she, is going to do next, and the best way to get along with 'em is to let 'em have their own way and be polite. I'm always polite to ladies—or most always any way. Of course when they get too cantankerous a man has to forget his manners and call 'em down.
"I was impolite to a she-bear once, but she got back at me. I was over on the far side of Signal Peak hunting gray squirrels with a shot-gun. I heard a funny sort of squealing a little way off, and set out to find out what was going on in the woods. Poking quietly through the brush, I came to the top of a ledge that dropped off straight and smooth to a flat covered with bear clover, just an opening in the forest. A she-bear was busy cracking open sugar pine cones and showing two cubs how to get the nuts out of them. The little fellows were having a gay old time, wrestling, boxing, stealing nuts from mamma and rolling about in the clover like a couple of kids, and I laid down in some bushes on top of the ledge and watched them. Sometimes they would grab a cone from the old one or bite her ear, and she would scold them and cuff them until they yelped that they'd be good. They couldn't be good half a minute, and they had the old lady's patience most worn out before I took a hand in the frolic.
"The old bear's coat was pretty thin and rusty, and she'd been sitting down or coasting down a bear slide so much that all the hair was worn off her hams slick and smooth. She looked mighty ridiculous when her back was turned, and it came into my fool head that a charge of small shot in the smooth place would be mighty surprising to her and help out the fun a whole lot. She couldn't get at me on the ledge, so I was perfectly safe to play jokes on her, and I wanted to see her jump. So I shoved the gun out through a bush and turned it loose. She was sixty yards away and the shot stung her good without doing any great harm.
"'Woof!' said the old bear as she jumped four feet high, and when she lit she was as mad as a wet hen. She looked up at the ledge, but couldn't see me, and she looked all around for somebody or something to blame for her trouble. Not a thing was in sight to account for it. She sat down sort of sideways, reached around with one paw to scratch where it hurt and thought the matter over. I had to stuff grass in my mouth to keep from howling with laughter at the way she cocked her head and seemed to be sizing up the situation while she scratched the stinging place.
"The cubs had stopped playing at the sound of the gun and run up close to her, and they were watching her for further orders. The old girl finally got her eye on them, and she looked at them solemnly for half a minute, and it was plain as print she was beginning to have suspicions. Then she was sure she had the thing figured out, and she fetched first one and then the other a cuff that sent them rolling ten feet away. When they got up bawling she was right there and gave them the darndest spanking two innocent cubs ever got. Every time she hit one he would go heels over head and yell blue murder, and by the time he got up she gave him another belt, scolding like an old woman all the time. It seemed to me I could almost hear her say, 'Play tricks on your mammy, will ye? I'll teach ye. Get along home without your supper, ye little scamps, and take that.' And so she went through the woods; spanking her babies, and they a'yelling for keeps and not knowing what they were being licked for, and I rolled around on top of the ledge, kicking my heels in the air and just bellowing with laughter.
"I thought that was the end of the funniest time I ever had with a bear, but it wasn't. Along about the first of March there was a warm spell in the mountains, and I went down the South Fork to Devil's Gulch, which heads up toward Signal Peak, to look over a timber claim and see if it was worth taking up. It was one of those warm days that take the snap out of a man, and I got tired and went to sleep under a tree. When I waked a bear had me half covered up with leaves and was piling on more. I wasn't cold, and didn't need any covering, but she seemed to think I did, and I reckoned the best thing to do was to keep still and let her finish the job. She seemed so serious about it that I didn't dare take it as a joke and try any tricks on her, but I couldn't figure out what her game was. She covered me with oak leaves, pine-needles and dirt from head to foot, and then all was still. I couldn't see, and I didn't dare to lift my head and shake off the leaves.
"After a while I made up my mind to take some chances to find out if the bear was on watch, and I wiggled my foot. Nothing happened, so I wiggled it a little harder. Then I felt around slowly until I got hold of my gun, and when I had that where I could handle it, I jumped up and shook the leaves and dirt from my face. The bear was gone. I had a sort of notion of what she was driving at, and so I fixed up the pile of leaves just as she had left them, went up the hill a little way and shinned a tree.
"About half an hour later the bear came back, leading two half-grown cubs so thin you could count their slats, and I recognized the interesting family I had met and had fun with in the fall. She was saying things to them in bear-talk, sort of whining and grunting, and they wobbled along behind her up to that pile of leaves. The cubs laid down with their tongues hanging out as if they were pretty tired, and the old girl tackled the pile confidently. It was plain enough that she had cached me for dinner, gone home into the gulch after the cubs and brought them back to have a square meal after being holed up for two or three months.
"The old bear made only two or three dabs at the pile when she began to suspect something was wrong, and then she sailed into it like a steam shovel. She made leaves and dirt fly so fast out between her hind legs that the cubs had to get out of the way or be buried, and the more she dug, the more excited she got. She worked over that pile and all the ground for ten feet around it until she was down to the frost, and when she finally got it through her head that the cupboard was bare, she was the most foolish-looking critter a man ever saw. She stood there blinking at the cubs, who were sniffing at the rubbish she had scattered about, and couldn't explain to them what had become of that square meal, and I reckon the cubs had it put up that mamma was getting light-headed and having dreams. They quit prospecting and sat down and looked at her and whined, and that set her off again raking over all the leaves in the neighborhood as if she hoped to find me hiding under them. Pretty soon she struck some kind of a root that was good to eat, and she braced up and called the cubs and showed it to 'em as if that was what she had been hunting for all the time. She made more fuss over that root than there was any call for and pretended it was the greatest thing a bear ever struck in the woods, and the cubs were so glad to get anything that they allowed roots were good enough and forgot all about what she had promised them.
"If her pelt had been good and the cubs had been big enough, I reckon I'd have got even with her for caching me, but she wasn't worth skinning and the cubs were no good for grub. It was getting late and I was tired of my tree, so I ploughed up the dirt under her nose with a load of shot and let out a yell, and she herded those cubs off into the brush and lit out for Devil's Gulch, and I went home. That was the nearest I ever came to being eaten up by bears."