IN SWIMMING WITH A BEAR.
What made these ugly rows of scars on my left hand?
Well, it might have been buckshot; only it wasn’t. Besides, buckshot would be scattered about, “sort of promiscuous like,” as backwoodsmen say. But these ugly little holes are all in a row, or rather in two rows. Now a wolf might have made these holes with his fine white teeth, or a bear might have done it with his dingy and ugly teeth, long ago. I must here tell you that the teeth of a bear are not nearly so fine as the teeth of a wolf. And the teeth of a lion are the ugliest of them all. They are often broken and bent; and they are always of a dim yellow color. It is from this yellow hue of the lion’s teeth that we have the name of one of the most famous early flowers of May: dent de lion, tooth of the lion; dandelion. Get down your botany, now, find the Anglo-Asian name of the flower, and fix this fact on your mind before you read further.
I know of three men, all old men now, who have their left hands all covered with scars. One is due to the wolf; the others owe their scars to the red mouths of black bears.
You see, in the old days, out here in California, when the Sierras were full of bold young fellows hunting for gold, quite a number of them had hand-to-hand battles with bears. For when we came out here “the woods were full of ’em.”
Of course, the first thing a man does when he finds himself face to face with a bear that won’t run and he has no gun—and that is always the time when he finds a bear—why, he runs, himself; that is, if the bear will let him.
But it is generally a good deal like the old Crusader who “caught a Tartar” long ago, when on his way to capture Jerusalem, with Peter the Hermit.
“Come on!” cried Peter to the helmeted and knightly old Crusader, who sat his horse with lance in rest on a hill a little in the rear. “Come on!”
“I can’t! I’ve caught a Tartar.”
“Well, bring him along.”