The Life Story of a Black Bear

by Harry Perry Robinson

One thing that completely puzzled us—as completely as it terrified—was the thunder-stick. What was it? How came man to be able to kill at such distances with it? Above all, at what distance could he kill? These questions puzzled me many a time.

It was soon after the adventure in the ditch that for the first time we saw a boat. It was coming down the stream with three men in it. At first we thought the boat itself to be some kind of an animal, and that the long oars waving on either side were its legs or wings; but as it came near we saw the men inside, and understood what it was. So we stood and watched it. Fortunately, we were out of sight ourselves, or I am afraid to think what might have happened.

Just opposite to us, on the very top of a pine-tree on the other bank, an osprey which had been fishing was sitting and waiting for the boat to go by. As the boat came alongside of us, one of the men, as he sat, raised a thunder-stick and pointed it at the osprey, and the bird fell dead, even before, as it seemed to us, the thunder-stick had spoken.

Until then we had had no idea that the thunder-stick could kill up in the air just as well as along the ground; indeed, we had always agreed among ourselves that, in case we should meet a man with a thunder-stick and not have time to get away, we would make for the nearest trees and climb out of his reach. But what was the use of climbing a tree, when we had just seen the osprey killed on the top of one much higher than any that we could climb? This incident made man seem more awful than before.

We were now within one night’s journey of the places that I knew so well, and in a country where men were on all sides. We kept crossing well-worn trails over the mountains, on which we sometimes saw men, and often when we were lying up during the day we heard the noise of mule-trains passing, the clangle-clangle-clang of the bell round the neck of the leading mule, and the hoarse voices of the men as they shouted at them. Now, also, many of the houses were like the one we had seen by the pool at the beaver-dam, with clearings round them in which cows lived and strange green things were growing.

On the evening of the day on which the osprey had been shot we came to one of these. I remembered the house from three years ago, but other buildings had been added to it, and round it was a wide open space full of stuff that looked like tall waving grass, which I now know was wheat. There was a fence all round it, made of posts with barbed wire stretched between, and it was the first time that we had seen barbed wire. Wahka, with his inquisitiveness, was the first to find out what the barbed wire was. He found out with his nose. When he had stopped grumbling and rubbing his nose on the ground, and could explain what was the matter, I tried it, more cautiously than he had done, but still sufficiently to make my nose bleed. We walked nearly all round the field, and everywhere was the horrid wire with its vicious spikes. But we wanted to get into the field because we were sure that the long, waving, yellowing wheat would be good to eat. At last an idea occurred to Wooffa, who took the top of one of the posts in her two paws, and throwing, her whole weight back, wrenched it clean out of the ground. Still the wire held across, and I had to treat the next post in the same way, and then the next. Both she and I left tufts of our hair on the sharp points, but the wire was now lying on the ground where we could step over it; so we waded shoulder-high into the wheat, and before we left the field it was gray dawn, and we had each of us, I think, eaten more than we had eaten before in all our lives.

We had trampled all over the field munching and munching and munching at the wheat-ears, which were full and sweet and just beginning to ripen. Then we went down to the stream for a drink, and by the time the sun was up we were three or four miles away in the mountains. The children pleaded to be allowed to go there again next night, but that was a point which we had settled that evening when we had caught the pig. Never again would we go back to a place where we had taken anything of man’s which he could miss, and where he might be prepared for a second visit.

So we went cautiously onward the next evening, with the signs of man’s presence always around us. Almost half the trees had been chopped down; there were trails over the mountains in all directions, and houses everywhere by the streams, from which men’s voices came to us until late at night. Silently, in single file, we threaded our way, I leading, and Wooffa bringing up the rear. Bears that had not our experience would certainly have got into trouble; but I knew man, and was not terrified at his smell or the sound of his voice, and knew, too, that all that was needed was to keep out of his sight and move quietly. Mile by mile we pushed on without mishap, but there were so many men, and things had changed so much that, remembering the visit to my first home, I doubted whether I should be able to recognise the berry-patch when I came to it; when suddenly there it was in front of me!

The trees all round it had been cut down, so that it came into view sooner than I had expected; but when I looked upon it I saw that it had hardly changed. The moon was high overhead, and the patch glistened in the light, as of old. Across the middle ran a hard brown roadway which was not there in the old days; but otherwise all was the same. I was standing almost on the spot from which we had watched Kahwa being dragged away, and the scene was nearly as distinct to me as it had been at that time.