As with the little, so also with the larger wood folk, even those whom we ignorantly call savage; when you meet without frightening them in their native woods, they all seem to be playing at comedy for the greater part of their days. I suppose there are no animals that have given rise to more fearsome stories than the wolves and bears, one a symbol of ravin, the other of ferocity; but when you meet the real wolf he turns out to be a very shy beast, one that has a doglike interest in man, but is afraid to show it openly; and Mooween the bear, far from being the terrible creature of literary imagination, is in reality a harmless vagabond whose waking life is one long succession of whims and drolleries.
The trouble is, on first meeting a bear, that one is so frightened by the brute, or so eager to kill, that one never opens his eyes frankly to see what kind of fellow blunderer is before him. Several times, when I have had the luck to find bears among the blueberries of the burnt lands, I have crept near to watch them (it is quite safe so long as you do not blunder between an old she-bear and her cubs), and their droll attitudes, their greed, their lively interest in something to eat, their comical ways of stripping a berry bush or robbing an ant’s nest, their watchfulness lest one of their number discover something good and eat it all by himself, their surprises and alarms, their piglike fits of excitement, their whimsical and ever-changing expression,—all this is so unexpected, so entertaining, that a few minutes of it will change your whole opinion of the bear’s character. You meet him as a dangerous beast; you leave him, or he leaves you, with the notion that he is the best of all natural comedians.
Here, for example, is an illuminating show of bear nature, one of a score which you uncover with surprise as you follow Mooween’s trail. When a cub finds a toothsome morsel he sweeps it instantly into his mouth, if it be small enough to swallow; but if it offers several mouthfuls, the first thing he does is to look alertly about to see where the other cubs are. If they are near or watching him, he sits on his morsel and pretends to be surveying the world, wagging his head from side to side; but if they are busy with their own affairs, he comes between them and his find, turning his back on them while he eats.
One might think this little deception a mere accident until it is repeated, or until this supplemental bit of bear psychology bubbles up to the surface. When a cub sees another cub with back turned, holding still in one place, he first stares hard, his face an exclamation point, as if he could not believe his eyes. Then he cries, ur-rump-umph! and comes on the jump to have a share of whatever the fortunate one has uncovered. Knowing what it means when he turns his own back, I suppose, he jumps to the conclusion that he is like all other greedy cubs, or that other cubs are just like him. To a spectator the most amusing part of the comedy is that, when a cub is discovered in his greediness, he seems to treat it as a joke, gobbling as much as possible of his find, but showing no ill temper if another cub arrives in time to have a bite of it. “Get away with it if you can, but don’t squeal if you are caught” seems to be the sporting rule of a young bear family. As they grow older they become unsociable, even morose; and occasionally one meets a bear that seems to be a regular sorehead.
Once when I was near a family of black bears, my position on a high rock preventing them from getting my scent, I saw one of the cubs unearth a morsel and gobble it greedily. It was a bee’s nest, I think, and it was certainly delicious; the little fellow ate with gusto, making a smacking sound as he opened his mouth wide or licked his chops again and again, as if he could never have enough of the taste. Twenty yards away another cub suddenly threw up his head, smelling the sweets, undoubtedly, for they can wind a disturbed bee’s nest at an incredible distance. Rolling his fur in anticipation, he scampered up and nosed all over the spot, sniffing and whining. Finding nothing but a smell, he sat down, crossed both paws over the top of his head, and howled a falsetto oooo-wow-ow-ow-ow! twisting and shaking his body like a petulant child. The other cub looked cunningly at the howling one; now and then he would run out a slender red tongue and lap it around his lips, as if to say, “Yum-yum, it was good!”
When their stomachs are filled the cubs take to playing; and one who watches them at their play has no more heart to kill them. They are too droll, and the big woods seem to need them. They hide, and the mother, after vain calling, must go smell them out; but as the end of that game is commonly a cuffing, it is not repeated. Then, mindful of their ears, the cubs begin to wrestle; or they face each other and box, striking and fending till one gets more than he wants, when they clinch and go rolling about in a rough-and-tumble. The most fascinating play is when two cubs climb a tree on opposite sides, a tree so big that they are hidden one from the other. The one in your sight goes humping aloft, clasping the tree with his paws and hurling himself upward by digs of his hind claws, till he thinks he is well above his rival. In the excitement, what with flying chips and the loud scratching of bark, he hears nothing but the sound of his own going. Then he peeks cautiously around the tree, and very likely finds a black nose coming to meet him. He hits it quickly, and dodges away to the other side, only to get his own nose rapped. So they play hide and peek, and hit and dodge and peek again, till they scramble into the high branches. And there they whimper awhile, afraid to come down. Not till they are sharply called will they try the descent, sagging down backward, looking first over one shoulder, then over the other. But if they are in a hurry and the branches are not too high, they turn all loose, like a coon; they tumble down in a heap, hit the ground, and bound away like rubber balls.
Meanwhile the old she-bear is watching over the family in an odd mixture of fondness and discipline, with temper enough to give variety to both. Sometimes she mothers the cubs with a gruff, bearish kind of tenderness. When they bother her, or when they are heedless of some warning or message, she cuffs them impatiently; and a bear’s cuff is no love pat, but a thud from a heavy paw which sends a cub spinning end over end. If you are near enough to read her expression, you will hear her at one moment saying, “That’s my little cubs! Oh, that’s my little cubs!” A few minutes later she may be sitting with humped back, her paws between her outstretched hind legs, and in her piggy, disapproving eye the question, “Can these greedy little unfillable things be my offspring?” So they move across the berry field, a day-long comedy. What they do at night nobody has ever seen.
“Then he peeks cautiously around the tree, and very likely finds a black nose coming to meet him.”