They were good, straightforward, rollicking youngsters who got all the pleasure out of life that there was to be got, and enjoyed amazingly everything that was good to eat. I shall never forget the first time that we introduced them to a berry-patch; and their first wild-raspberries drove them nearly crazy. They would not go to sleep all next day, though it was blazing hot, but sat up while we slept, and whenever we woke begged to be taken to look for more raspberries.
When winter approached, we returned to the place where we had hibernated the previous year. Wooffa hollowed out her den to twice its former size, so as to hold herself and both the cubs, and I took my old quarters close by. Winter came slowly, and after all our preparations were made we were able to be about for a long time, during which we did nothing but eat and sleep, and gather strength and fatness for the long fast that was coming.
[CHAPTER XII]
WIPING OUT OLD SCORES
I have said more than once that both Wooffa and I had made up our minds that we never wished to see man again. Looking back now, it is hard to tell what made us depart from that determination; indeed, I am not sure that there was any particular moment at which we did definitely change our minds and decide to go into his neighbourhood once more. It was rather, I think, that we drifted or wandered into it; but we certainly must have known quite well what we were doing.
When we started out in the following spring, with Wahka and Kahwa in their second year, we were a formidable family, without much cause to be afraid of anything. We had no intention of meddling with a grizzly if we happened to meet one, and so long as we kept out of the way of thunder-sticks there was nothing to hurt us. At first we wandered northward with no definite object, but as we got nearer a great curiosity came over me to see the places which I had cause to remember so well—the berry-patch and the house where Kahwa had met her death; and also, I believe, there was a vague hope of somehow meeting again my old enemy and being able to square accounts with him. He had threatened me again and again, and I had always had to run from him. Moreover, I held him responsible in my mind for Kahwa’s death. If he had warned us, as decent bears always do warn one another of any danger, when we met him that night on our way to the berry-patch, we should never have gone on, and Kahwa would not have been captured. He was coming away from the patch, and he must have known that the men were there. But for mother’s help, he would probably have killed father that time when he tried to turn us out of our home. Altogether, it was a long list of injuries that I had against him, and I nursed the memory of them. Perhaps I should meet him some day, and this time I should not run away. Whenever I thought of him, I used to get so angry that I would sit up on my hind-legs and rub my nose in my chest and growl; and Wooffa knew what was in my mind, and growled in sympathy with me.
So it came about that we travelled steadily northward that summer, going back over much of the same ground as father, mother, and I had travelled when we came away after Kahwa’s death. Sometimes we stayed in one locality for a week, and then perhaps kept moving for a couple of days, until we came to another place which tempted us to loiter. Many times we saw man, but he never saw us; for we were old and experienced, and had no trouble in keeping out of his way. We found that he did not always stay wherever he came. Some houses, which I remembered passing three years before, we found empty now and in ruins, with the roofs falling in and bushes growing over them. On several streams the beavers told us that they had not seen a man for three years.
We now learned, too, something of the reason of man’s coming into the mountains. Sometimes men’s dogs were lost in the woods, or they made friends with coyotes and ran wild; and they told the coyotes all they knew, and from them it spread to the other animals. We met one of these coyotes who had been friends with a dog, and she told us what the dog had told her. It was gold that the men were looking for, yellow, shining stuff that was found in the gravel in the river-beds. What men wanted with it she had no idea, as the dog himself did not know, and it was not good to eat; but they set great store by it, and were always looking for it everywhere, following up the streams and scratching and digging in the beds. If they found no gold in a stream, they left it and went on to another. Where they did find it they built houses and stayed, and more men came, and more, until towns grew up, with roads and horses and cows as we had seen. In many ways what the coyote told us agreed with what we had observed for ourselves, so we presumed it was true; though a coyote is too much like a wolf to be safe to trust as a general rule.
The next time that we came to a place where the men had been working I thought I would like to see some of the wonderful yellow stuff. There were mounds of earth, and a long ditch running slantwise away from the stream, and nobody seemed to be about; so I scrambled down into the ditch to look if any of the yellow stuff was there. I was walking slowly along, sniffing at the ground and the sides of the ditch, when suddenly out of a sort of cave in one side, and only a few yards from me, came a man! Wooffa was just behind me, and the cubs behind her, and he was evidently no less astonished than I, and much more frightened. With one yell, he clambered up the bank before I could make up my mind what to do, and rushed to a small tree or sapling near by, and then for the first time I learned that a man could climb. He went up fast, too, until he got to the first branches, when he stopped and looked down and shouted at us—I suppose with some idea of frightening us. But he had no thunder-stick, and we were not in the least afraid; so we followed him and looked at the tree. It was too thin for us to climb—for a bear has to have something solid to take hold of—or I would certainly have gone up after him. As it was, we sat about for a while looking at him, and waiting to see if he would come down again; but he showed no intention of doing that, and, as we did not know how soon other men might come, we left him and went on our way. But I did not go investigating empty ditches in the daylight any more.