“Why, mother, it’s Kroof!” she cried, clapping her hands with delight, and before her mother could say a word, she had thrown the door wide open. In shambled the bear forthwith, blinking her shrewd little eyes. She seated herself on her haunches, near the table, and gazed with intent curiosity at the fire. At this moment a dry stick snapped and crackled sharply, whereupon she backed off to a safer distance, but still kept her eyes upon the strange phenomenon.
Both Kirstie and Miranda had been watching her with breathless interest, to see how she would comport herself, but now Miranda broke silence.
“Oh! you dear old Kroof, we’re so glad you’ve come at last to see us!” she cried, rushing over and flinging both arms around the animal’s neck. Kirstie’s face looked a doubtful indorsement of the welcome. Kroof paid no attention to Miranda’s caresses beyond a hasty lick at her ear, and continued to study the fascinating flames. This quietness of demeanour reassured Kirstie, whose hospitality thereupon asserted itself.
“Give the poor thing some buckwheat cakes, Miranda,” she said. “I’m sure she’s come because she’s hungry.”
Miranda preferred to think the visit was due to no such interested motives; but she at once took up a plate of cakes which she had drenched in molasses for the requirements of her own taste. She set the plate on the edge of the table nearest to her visitor, and gently pulled the bear’s snout down toward it. No second invitation was needed. The fire was forgotten. The enchanting smell of buckwheat cakes and molasses was a new one to Kroof’s nostrils, but the taste for it was there, full grown and waiting. Out went her narrow red tongue. The cakes disappeared rather more rapidly than was consistent with good manners: the molasses was deftly licked up, and with a grin of rapture she looked about for more. Just in front of Kirstie stood a heaping dish of the dainties hot from the griddle. With an eager but tentative paw Kroof reached out for them. This was certainly not manners. Kirstie removed the dish beyond her reach, while Miranda firmly pushed the trespassing paw from the table.
“No, Kroof, you shan’t have any more at all, unless you are good!” she admonished, with hortatory finger uplifted.
There are few animals so quick to take a hint as the bear, and Kroof’s wits had grown peculiarly alert during her long intimacy with Miranda. She submitted with instant meekness, and waited, with tongue hanging out, while Miranda prepared her a huge bowl of bread and molasses. When she had eaten this, she investigated everything about the cabin, and finally went to sleep on a mat in the corner of the inner room. Before sundown she got up and wandered off to her lair, being still drowsy with winter sleep.
After this the old bear came daily at noon to the cabin, dined with Kirstie and Miranda, and dozed away the afternoon on her mat in the chosen corner. Kirstie came to regard her as a member of the household. To the cattle and the poultry she paid no attention whatever. In a few days the oxen ceased to lower their horns as she passed; and the cock, Saunders’s equally haughty successor, refrained from the shrill expletives of warning with which he had been wont to herald her approach.
One afternoon, before spring had fairly set in, there came two unwelcome visitors to the cabin. In a lumber-camp some fifteen miles away, on a branch of the Quah-Davic, there had been trouble. Two of the “hands,” surly and mutinous all winter, had at last, by some special brutality, enraged the “boss” and their mates beyond all pardon. Hooted and beaten from the camp, they had started through the woods by the shortest road to the Settlement. Their hearts were black with pent-up fury. About three o’clock in the afternoon, they happened upon the clearing, and demanded something to eat.
Though sullen, and with a kind of menace in their air, their words were civil enough at first, and Kirstie busied herself to supply what seemed to her their just demands. The laws of hospitality are very binding in the backwoods. Miranda, meanwhile, not liking the looks of the strangers, kept silently aloof and scrutinized them.