In the hot, stifling summer days, when his cage seemed so cramped and unendurable, how Black Bruin thirsted for the woods, he alone knew. Sometimes he would fall asleep and dream of the old free life, only to wake to the torment of his prison-bars.
There was but one incident during the first year of Black Bruin's circus life that is worth mentioning. The circus was showing in a fair-sized city in Northern New York, in St. Lawrence River County. The day was exceptionally warm, the crowd was unusually large and the torment of captivity was unusually galling to the wild beasts.
Black Bruin was restless and paced to and fro in his cage, and sniffed its bars more often than usual.
Suddenly from out the babel about him a voice spoke that fell pleasantly on his ear and in the sound was something that he remembered. When the voice ceased speaking, some psychological reaction slipped a slide in the brute mind, the impression of which had been gained many years before, and the great bear saw, as plainly as he had seen it then, the farmhouse with the chicken-coops in the front yard, and ducks, geese, turkeys and hens all moving about over the green turf. There was the barn and the outbuildings and the long low hen-house where he had so often robbed the hens' nests. Then the scene shifted slightly and the dreamer saw the orchard at the back of the farmhouse with its gnarled and twisted trees and the row of little white houses in the shade near by. "Hum, hum, zip—hum," went the bees flying in from their long quest afield in search of the heart secret of the floral world. But whether it was the droning of bees or the hum of many voices that he heard Black Bruin could not tell.
At this point in his reverie he looked through his bars at three of the circus-goers who were evincing peculiar interest in him. These were a man, a woman, and a boy of about nine years.
"What a fine bear," the man was saying; "much larger than the old female that I shot on that——" But the man did not finish the sentence, for noticing the pallor that crept into his wife's face at his words and the shiver that ran through her frame, he desisted.
"Look here, sonny," he continued to the boy, "if we had been able to have kept Black Bruin until now he would probably have looked just about like this old chap. What do you think of that?"
"Whew," whistled the boy. "Ain't he a monster? Our bear wasn't more than a quarter as big."
"No," replied the man. "That was because he was not grown, but he was a fine cub when we let the peddler have him. I have often wondered what became of him."
"Wasn't Bar-bar cunning," exclaimed the boy, "when he was a little fuzzy fellow and I used to roll about with him on the floor and pull his ears, just like the photograph you had taken of us."