Bear Brownie: The Life of a Bear

by Harry Perry Robinson

Bears, when they live far enough away from man, have absolutely nothing to be afraid of. There are, of course, bigger bears—perhaps bigger ones of our own kind, either black or brown ("cinnamon," the brown members of our family are called), or, especially, grizzly. But I never heard of a grizzly bear hurting one of us. When I smell a grizzly in the neighborhood, I confess that it seems wiser to go round the other side of the hill; but that is probably inherited superstition more than anything else. My father and mother did it, and so do I. Apart from these, there lives nothing in the forest that a full-grown bear has any cause to fear. He goes where he pleases and does what he likes, and nobody ventures to dispute his rights. With a cub, however, it is different.

I had heard my father and mother speak of pumas, or mountain lions, and I knew their smell well enough—and did not like it. But I shall never forget the first one that I saw.

We were out together—father, mother, Kahwa and I—and it was getting well on in the morning. The sun was up, and the day growing warm, and I, wandering drowsily along with my nose to the ground, had somehow strayed away from the rest, when suddenly I smelled puma very strong. As I threw myself up on my haunches, he came out from behind a tree, and stood facing me only a few yards away. I was simply paralyzed with fear—one of the two or three times in my life when I have been honestly and thoroughly frightened. As I looked at him, wondering what would happen next, he crouched down till he was almost flat along the ground, and I can see him now, his whole yellow body almost hidden behind his head, his eyes blazing, and his tail going slap, slap from side to side. How I wished that I had a tail!

Then inch by inch he crept towards me, very slowly, putting one foot forward and then the other. I did not know what to do, and so did what proved to be the best thing possible: I sat quite still, and screamed for mother as loud as I could. She must have known from my voice that something serious was the matter, because in a second, just as the puma's muscles were growing tense for the final spring, there was a sudden crash of broken boughs behind me, a feeling as if a whirlwind was going by, and my mother shot past me straight at the puma. I had no idea that she could go so fast. The puma was up on his hind-legs to meet her, but her impetus was so terrific that it bore him backwards, without seeming to check her speed in the least, and away they went rolling over and over down the hill.

But it was not much of a fight. The puma, willing enough to attack a little cub like me, knew that he was no match for my mother, and while they were still rolling he wrenched himself loose, and was off among the trees like a shadow.

When mother came back to me blood was running over her face, where at the moment of meeting, the puma had managed to give her one wicked, tearing claw down the side of her nose. So, as soon as my father and Kahwa joined us, we all went down to the stream, where mother bathed her face, and kept it in the cold water for nearly the whole day.

It was probably in some measure to pay me out for this scrape, and to give me another lesson in the unwisdom of too much independence and inquisitiveness in a youngster, that my parents, soon after this sad event, allowed me to get into trouble with that porcupine.

One evening my father had taken us to a place where the ground was full of mountain lilies. It was early in the year, when the green shoots were just beginning to appear above the earth; and wherever there was a shoot there was a bulb down below. And a mountain lily bulb is one of the very nicest things to eat that there is—so sweet, and juicy, and crisp! The place was some distance from our home, and after that first visit Kahwa and I kept begging to be taken there again. At last my father yielded, and we set out early one morning just before day was breaking.

We were not loitering on the way, but trotting steadily along all together, and Kahwa and I, at least, were full of expectation of the lily bulbs in store, when in a little open space among the trees, we came upon an object unlike anything I had ever seen before. As we came upon it, I could have declared that it was moving—then that it was an animal which, at sight of us, had stopped stock still, and tucked its head and toes in underneath it. But it certainly was not moving now, and did not look as if it ever could move again, so finally I concluded that it must be a large fungus or a strange new kind of hillock, with black and white grass growing all over it. My father and mother had stopped short when they saw it, and just sat up on their haunches and looked at it; and Kahwa did the same, snuggling up close to my mother's side. Was it an animal, or a fungus, or only a mound of earth? The way to find out was to smell it. So, without any idea of hurting it, I trotted up and reached out my nose. As I did so it shrank a little more into itself, and became rounder and more like a fungus than ever; but the act of shrinking also made the black and white grass stick out a little farther, so that my nose met it sooner than I expected, and I found that, if it was grass, it was very sharp grass, and pricked horribly. I tried again, and again it shrank up and pricked me worse than ever. Then I heard my father chuckling to himself.

That made me angry, for I always have detested being laughed at, and, without stopping to think, I smacked the thing just as hard as I could. A moment later I was hopping round on three legs howling with pain, for a hunch of the quills had gone right into my paw, where they were still sticking, one coming out on the other side.