The Life Story of a Black Bear

by Harry Perry Robinson

For a long time yet we would have to go cautiously, for man was all around us. Along the streams he had been digging, digging, digging, endlessly digging, but what he gained by it we could not comprehend; for we often watched him at work, and he seemed to take nothing out of the ground, nor to eat anything as he dug. When he was not digging, he was chopping trees, either to build more houses, to make dams across the streams, or to break the wood up into pieces to burn. So wherever he came the forest disappeared, and the rivers were disfigured with holes and ditches and piles of gravel on which no green thing grew, and nothing lived that was good to eat.

In travelling we kept away from the streams as much as possible, moving along the hillsides, and only coming down to the water when we wished to cross. We had been travelling in this way for some two or three nights, when one morning very early we came down to a stream at a point close by a clump of buildings. The wind was blowing from them to us, and suddenly Wooffa threw herself up on her haunches and gasped one word—‘Pig!’

I had heard of pig before, and Wooffa had eaten it to her cost; and in spite of the cost she agreed with everyone in saying that young pig is the very best thing there is to eat in all the world. I had often wondered whether some of the best scraps that I had picked up about the houses in the town in the old days might not be pig, and now I know that they were. But they were cooked and salted pig, and not the fresh young pig newly killed, which is the joy of joys to a bear. This it was that Wooffa now smelled, and as the scent came to my nostrils I knew that it was something new to me and something very good.

The smell came from a sort of pen at one side of the biggest building, not unlike that in which Kahwa had been shut up, only the walls were not so high. They were too high to look over, however, and there was no way of climbing up until Wooffa helped me, and by standing on her back I was able to see over. It was a small square pen, the floor deep in mud, and at one end was a covered place something like the boxes that men keep dogs in; and in the door of this covered place I could see, asleep, a large black-and-white sow and five little pigs.

If I got inside, I saw that I could climb on the roof of the covered part and get out again; so I did not hesitate, but with one scramble I was over and down in the middle of the family. Wouff! what a noise they made! But with one smack of my paw I had killed the nearest little one, and grabbed it in my mouth, and in a minute I was up on the covered roof and out with Wooffa on the grass outside.

We did not stop to eat the pig there, for the others were still squealing as if they were all being killed, and we were afraid that they would wake the men; so we made off as fast as we could into the wood, taking the pig with us. It was as well that we did, for we had not gone far before we heard a door bang and a dog barking, and then the voices of men shouting to each other. We kept on for a mile or so before we stopped, down by the side of a little stream. Then we divided the pig fairly, and nothing that I had heard about his goodness had been exaggerated. No; there are many good things in the world—honey and berries and sugar and cooked things; but pig is above all others.

So good was he that, if I had been by myself, I think I should have stayed there, and gone down again next night for another, and probably been shot for my pains. But, as Wooffa had told me long ago, it was in doing just that very thing that her husband and two children had lost their lives. They had found some pigs kept by men just as we had, and had taken three the first night. The next night they went and got two more; the third night the men were waiting for them, and only Wooffa escaped. The smell of the pig when it came to her again after two years had for the moment overcome all her fears; but she told me that she had been terrified all the time that I was in the sty, and nothing on earth would tempt her to risk a second visit.

I have said before that greediness is the undoing of nearly all wild animals, and, however much I longed for another taste of pig, I knew that she was right. It was better to go without pig and keep alive. So we set our faces resolutely in the other direction, and kept on our course, vowing that nothing should tempt us to linger in the proximity of man. And very glad we both were when we found ourselves at last once more in a region where as yet man had not been seen, where we could wander abroad as we pleased by night or day, where the good forest smells were still untainted, and where we could lie in the water of the streams at sunset or fish as long as we pleased without thought of an enemy.

It was a beautiful autumn that year, and I think, as I look back to it, I was as happy then as ever in my life. There had been a splendid crop of berries, in contrast to the year before, and now, with the long clear autumn, all signs pointed to a hard winter. So we made our preparations for the cold season early, hollowing out our dens carefully side by side under the roots of two huge trees, where they were well sheltered from the wind, and lining them with sticks and leaves. Wooffa in particular spent a long time over hers; and afterwards I understood why.

It was still bright autumn weather, when the birds flying southwards told us that already snow had fallen to the north, and it was bitterly cold. Everyone was talking of the severe winter that was ahead of us, and the wolves and the coyotes had gone to the plains. We were glad we had made our preparations in good time, for, when the winter came, it came, in spite of all that had been said about it, unexpectedly. There was no warning of snow upon the higher peaks, but one night the north wind blew steadily the long night through, and in the morning the winter was on us, settling down on all the country, peak and valley, together.