The Life Story of a Black Bear

by Harry Perry Robinson

Soon after the children had gone, the chill in the wind gave warning that winter was not far away, and we began to move down towards the lower levels; for on the mountain-tops it is too exposed and cold, and the snow stays too long to make them a good winter home. As we looked up a few days later to the peak which we had left, we saw it standing out against the dull sky, not yellow-grey and rocky as we had left it, but all gleaming white and snow-covered. For a day or two more we followed the streams down to the lower country, and then made our dens beneath the roots of two upturned trees close together. And again, as two years before, Wooffa spent much time and great care over the lining of hers, making it very snug and soft and warm.

And next spring there were two more little ones—another woolly brown Wahka, and another Kahwa, just as woolly and just as brown—to look after and teach, and protect from porcupines and pumas and wolves, and make fit for the struggle of life.

I am not going to attempt to tell you any stories of the early days of the new cubs, for the events of a bear’s babyhood are always much alike, and it is not easy, looking back, to distinguish one’s later children from one’s first; and I should probably only tell over again stories of the Wahka and Kahwa of two years before. They were healthy, vigorous cubs, the new little ones, and they tumbled and played and were smacked, and blundered their way along somehow.

But it was a terrible year, with late snows long after spring ought to have begun; and then it rained and rained all the summer. There was no berry crop, insects of all kinds had been killed by the late cold and were very scarce, every stream stayed in flood, so that the fish never came up properly, and there was none of the usual hunting along the exposed herbage as the streams went down in the summer heat. It was, as I said, a terrible year, and food was hard to get for a whole family. We were driven to all sorts of shifts, and then, to make matters worse, long before the usual time for winter came, bitter frosts set in. Driven by hunger and the necessity of finding food for the little ones we did what we had thought never to do again, and once more went down to the neighbourhood of man.

We were not the only ones that did so, for the animals were nearly all driven out of the mountains, and the bears, especially, congregated about the settlements of man in search of food. Wherever we went we found the same thing, the bears coming out at night to hunt round the houses for food; and many stories we heard of their being shot when greedily eating meat that had been placed out for them, or when sniffing round a house or trying to take a pig. Now, too, man brought a new weapon beside his thunder-stick—huge traps with steel jaws that were baited with meat and covered with sticks and twigs and earth, so that a bear could not see them; but when he went to take the meat the great toothed jaws closed round his leg, and then he found that the trap was chained to a neighbouring log which he had to drag round with him till the men came out and killed him with their thunder-sticks.

Having been told all about it, when we came one day to a large piece of a young pig lying on the ground, I made the others stand away while I scratched cautiously round and pushed sticks against the pig, carefully keeping my own paws out of the way. Even as it was, when the steel jaws came together with a snap that made the whole trap leap into the air as if it was alive, they passed so near my nose that I shudder now when I think of it. But we ate the pig. And that happened two or three times, until the men took the trap away from that particular place.

Another time I had a narrow escape on approaching a house at night. We had been there several times, and usually picked up some scraps of stuff that was good. I always went down first alone to see if all was safe, leaving the others in the shelter of the woods, and on this occasion I was creeping stealthily up to the house, when suddenly, from behind a pile of chopped wood, a thunder-stick spoke and I felt a sudden pain in my shoulder. I was only grazed, however, and scrambled back to Wooffa and the cubs in safety. But we did not visit that house any more, and I heard that a few days after another bear that went down just as I had gone was killed by a thunder-stick from behind the same pile of wood.

In the long-run, however, a bear is no match for man. It was a dangerous life that we were living, and we knew it; but both Wooffa and I had had more than ordinary experience of man, and we believed we could always escape him. Besides, what else were we to do? It is doubtful if we could have lived in the mountains that winter, and we had our cubs to look after. In the old days before man came, when, as once in many years, the weather drove us from the mountains, we could have gone down to the foot-hills and the plains, and found food there; but man now barred our way, and the only thing that we could do was to go where he was, and live on such food as we could get. Much of that food was only what was thrown away, but much of it also we deliberately stole. More than one cornfield we visited, and in the fenced enclosures round his houses we found strange vegetables that were good to eat; but we had to break down fences to get them. We stole pigs, too, and twice when dogs attacked us we had to kill the dogs. Once we found half a sheep, which had been killed by man, lying on the ground, as if man had forgotten it. We ate it, and were all dreadfully ill afterwards. Then we knew that it had been poisoned and put out for us; but, fortunately, the poison was not enough to kill four of us, though, I suppose, if any one of us had eaten the whole, that one would have died. After that we never touched large pieces of meat which we found lying about.

It was, as I have said, a dangerous life, and we knew it; but we were driven to it, and we trusted to our experience, our cunning, and our strength, to pull us through somehow.