The Black Bear

by William H. Wright

But now, while camped near this mountain meadow, Ben would pull at his leash and even bawl to get loose, and I soon took to letting him go and to following him about to learn what it was that he wished to do. I was amazed to find that he knew every root and plant that the oldest bears knew of and fed upon in that particular range of mountains. He would work around by the hour, paying not the least attention to my presence; eat a bit of grass here, dig for a root there, and never once make a mistake. When he got something that I did not recognize, I would take it away from him and examine it to see what it was, and in this way I learned many kinds of roots that the bears feed on in their wild state. I have seen Ben dig a foot down into the ground and unearth a bulb that had not yet started to send out its shoot. Later, when the time came for the sarvis berries and huckleberries to ripen, he would go about pulling down bushes, searching for berries. And not once in the whole summer did I ever see him pull down a bush that was not a berry bush. This was the more remarkable because he would occasionally examine berry bushes on which there happened to be no berries at the time.

At our next camp we killed a small moose for meat, and the hide was used during the remainder of the trip as a cover for one of the packs. After a few days in the sun it dried as hard as a board and of course took the shape of the pack over which it had been used. And this skin box now became Ben’s home when in camp. It was placed on the ground, Ben’s picket pin driven near it, and he soon learned to raise up one edge and crawl inside. It was funny, when he had done some mischief in camp and we stamped our feet and took after him, to see him fly to the protection of his skin teepee, and raise the edge with one paw so quickly that there was no apparent pause in his flight. Then, safe inside, we would hear him strike the ground with his forefoot and utter angry “whoofs,” daring us to come any nearer. After a few minutes the edge of the hide would be lifted a few inches and a little gray nose would peep out to see if the coast was clear. If no notice was taken of him he would come back into camp, only to get into trouble again and be once more shooed back to cover.

Ben took great pride in this home of his and was an exemplary housekeeper, for no insect was ever permitted to dwell in the coarse hair. At first, when the hide was green, the flies would crowd into the hair and “blow,” or deposit their eggs. These Ben never allowed to hatch. As soon as he was off his pony he would get to work on his house, and with much sniffing and clawing, would dig out and eat every egg to be found. And not one ever escaped his keen little nose. Many times in the night we would hear him sniffing and snuffing away, searching out the fly-blows.

He grew to be more of a pet each day and he still juggled his ball of rope. Indeed, he got to be a great expert at this trick. He knew his own frying-pan from the others, and would set up a hungry bawl as soon as it was brought out. His food in camp was still flour and water, a little sugar, and condensed milk. This we fed him for more than a month, after which we cut out the milk and gave him just flour and water with a pinch of sugar. He did not care about meat and would eat his frying-pan food, or bread, in preference to deer or moose meat. Sometimes, when we killed a grizzly, we would bring in some of the meat and cook it for the dogs. This was the only meat that Ben would touch and very little of that. But although he occasionally consented to dine on bear meat, he showed unmistakable signs of temper whenever a new bear-skin was added to our growing pile of pelts. On these occasions, even before the hide was brought to camp, we would find him on our return in a towering rage. No amount of coaxing would induce him to take a romp. Not even for his only four-footed friend, Jim, would he come out of his huff. He would retreat beneath his moose-skin house, and we could hear him strike the ground, champ his jaws, and utter his blowing “whoofs.” I was never able to make out whether he resented or was made fearful by the killing of his kind, or whether it was the smell of the grizzlies, of which the Black Bear is more or less afraid, that affected him. He still remembered his mother, and on every occasion when he could get to our pile of bear hides he would dig out her skin—the only Black Bear skin in the lot—sniff it all over, and lie on it until dragged away. Indeed he seemed to mourn so much over it, even whimpering and howling every time the wind was in the right direction for him to smell it, that we finally had to keep this hide away from camp.

One day a little later on, as we were working our way toward the Montana side of the mountains, we arrived after a hard day’s work at the bank of a large stream flowing into the middle fork of the Clearwater River. As the stream to be forded was a swift and dangerous one, and as we had as high a mountain to climb on the other side as the one we had come down, we decided to go into camp and wait till morning to find a practicable ford. In this deep canyon there was no feed for the horses, and not even enough level ground on which to set up our tent. So the horses were tied up to the trees, supper was cooked and eaten, Ben’s “coop,” as we called his skin house, was placed under a tree, and then each of us rolled up in his blankets and was soon lulled to sleep by the roar of the water over the boulders that lined the river’s bed.

Ready for the start

We were up and ready for the start before it was fairly light in the deep canyon, and, on account of the dangerous work ahead of us, both in fording the river and in climbing the opposite mountain, we determined to put Ben on a pony that could be led. We were careful, however, to tie him up short enough to prevent any repetition of his former antics. I then mounted my riding horse, a good sure-footed one, and, with the lead rope of Ben’s horse in my hand, started for the other shore. The first two-thirds of the ford was not bad, but the last portion was deep and swift, the footing bad, and the going dangerous. However, by heading my horse diagonally down-stream, and thus going with the current, we succeeded in making the opposite bank in safety and waited for Spencer and Jack to follow. They got along equally well until near the bank on which I stood, when Spencer’s horse slipped on one of the smooth rocks and pitched his rider over his head into the swirling water. With a pole which I had cut in case it should be needed I managed to pull the water-soaked fellow out of the current, however, and when we had seen once more to the security of the packs we started on the steep climb ahead of us. There was not so much as an old game trail to mark our way, and the hill was so steep that we could only make headway by what are known as “switchbacks.” Our one desire now was to get up to where we could find grass for the horses, and a place level enough to pitch a tent and to unpack and give the ponies a few days in which to rest up.

The horse on which Ben had been mounted for the day was called Riley, and, as I have already said, we had selected him for his steady-going qualities and his reliability in leading. But just as we reached a particularly steep place about half-way up the mountain, Riley suddenly stopped and threw his weight back on the lead rope, which was lapped around the horn of my riding saddle, in such a way that the rope parted, the horse lost his balance, and falling backward landed, all four feet in the air, in a hole that had been left by an upturned root. We at once tied up the rest of the horses to prevent them from straying, and, cutting the cinch rope to Riley’s pack, rolled him over and got him to his feet again. We then led him to as level a spot as we could find and once more cinched on the saddle, and, while Spencer brought the various articles that made up the pack, I repacked the horse. All this time nobody had thought of Ben. In the excitement of rescuing the fallen horse he had been completely forgotten, and when Spencer lifted the pack cover, which was the last article of the reversed pack, he called out in consternation, “Here’s Ben, smashed as flat as a shingle.” When we rushed to examine him we found that he still breathed, but that was about all; and after I got the horse packed I wrapped him in my coat, placed him in a sack, and hanging this to the horn of my riding saddle, proceeded up the hill.

In the course of a couple of hours we reached another of those ideal camping spots, a summit marsh, and here we unpacked the horses, turned them loose, set up our tent, and then looked Ben over to see if any bones were broken. His breathing seemed a little stronger, so I put him in the sun at the foot of a large tree and in a few minutes he staggered to his feet. We always carried a can-full of sour dough to make bread with, and Ben was extravagantly fond of this repulsive mixture which he considered a dainty. I now offered him a spoonful of it, and as soon as the smell reached his nostrils he spruced up and began to lap it from the spoon; and from that time on his recovery was rapid. The next day he was as playful as ever and seemed none the worse for his close call.