GOSHMEELEE
In the deep, damp silence of the ancient forest you could not hear a sound. Through the swampy thickets, sodden with old rain, and floored with slime, nothing stirred. The very trees—cedar, tamarack, waterash, and black poplar—seemed to do their growing by stealth, as if afraid of its being found out. Even the skunk cabbage—that robust vegetable—spread its broad leaves craftily, as if it covered a world of secrecy, and might at any moment be forced to confess. If any life were gnawing at the roots of this damp silence, or paddling among the slime, its teeth and toes were muffled. The world just here was dreadfully damp, dreadfully secret, and dreadfully old.
Not a nice nursery for babies, you might imagine. In such a place, if ever a baby were rash enough to get born there, you would think it must be born old, and be damp for the rest of its days. Which only shows how deceptive things may be. For—in the very heart of the dampness, and where the ancientness was so old as to have begun falling to pieces—two perfectly new, and (what is perhaps even more surprising) perfectly dry babies were curled up in a hollow scooped out between the roots of a couple of hemlocks growing together on a knoll! Neither the dampness, nor the ancientness, nor the silence, nor the gloom, nor any of the other things which would have made ordinary civilized people uncomfortable, had the least effect upon the babies. To be quite truthful, I must here remark that it was partly because they were fast asleep. If you curl yourself up very tight, and sleep very sound, and if, when you wake, you spend a good deal of your spare time in taking in food, it is quite surprising what a snug place the old, damp world may seem; and it would be quite ridiculous to sit up and worry.
Except very rarely the babies did not sit up. Their usual position when awake was a sprawling one on their stomachs, while they pushed their little fore paws into their mother's and sucked and sucked and sucked. And most certainly they never worried; worrying being a disease which grown people seem to catch from each other in places where the sky scrapers go up and scratch the stars.
The babies in the tamarack swamp knew nothing about civilization. Their umbrella was the hemlock and their mother's body was the stove. And if a raving wind moaned gustily in the poplars, and twisted the tamaracks till they creaked, the umbrella never closed and the stove never burned out.
Perhaps I ought to be a little more accurate about the stove. It did not burn out, but it sometimes went out. Occasionally when the babies woke up, they found that the stove had gone out walking, taking care, however, to leave part of its warmth behind.
One day Dusty Star, on his way across to the opposite side of the valley to dig roots, passed through the spruce wood which skirted the swamp on its eastern side. On the brown, elastic carpet of dead fir needles, he went without paying any special heed to his footsteps, because the travelling was so good. Suddenly round the end of a hollow tree, he found himself face to face with a large black she-bear.
Now Dusty Star knew nothing about the babies in the tamarack swamp, nor that this great furry blackness was their blessed heating apparatus gone out for a walk. But he knew that a bear as a bear can be an extremely dangerous animal if there is any reason for its being cross. Also he knew that, of all the wild creatures, a bear is the most human, and is prepared, at a moment's notice, to do all sorts of unexpected things.
Goshmeelee gazed at Dusty Star with disapproval out of her little shining eyes. She had no desire to have people hanging about the borders of the tamarack swamp, whether they had business there or not. They might mean no harm to her babies, even if they found them, which was very unlikely; but she wasn't going to take any risks. What sort of creature this new animal was, she couldn't directly decide. Its going on its hind legs was bear-like, but, except on the top of its head, it was very deficient in fur.
Dusty Star remembered that Lone-Chief once presented to him a piece of very old Indian wisdom: "Bear won't bother you, if you don't bother bear." But in case you did meet a bear that seemed determined to be bothered, another piece ran: "If Bear is angry, make medicine with your mouth."