"Let her go!" Forcing the door back with her own eager strength, she fearlessly dropped the intervening eighteen inches to the floor of the den, and was free. The very next second the male flung his great bulk upon her, and the tragedy was on.
I would not for five thousand dollars see such a thing again. A hundred times in the twenty minutes that followed I bitterly regretted my folly in acting contrary to my own carefully formed conclusions regarding the temper, the strength, and the mental processes of that male bear.
He never left her alone for ten seconds, save when, at five or six different times, we beat him off by literally ramming him away. When she first fell, the slope of the floor brought her near the cage bars, which gave us a chance to fight for her. We beat him over the head; we drove big steel spikes into him; and we rammed him with planks, not caring how many bones we might break. But each time that we beat him off, and the poor harried female rose to her feet, he flung himself upon her anew, crushed her down upon the snow, and fought to reach her throat!
Gallantly the female fought for her life, with six wild men to help her. After a long battle,—it seemed like hours, but I suppose it was between twenty and thirty minutes, the male bear recognized the fact that so long as the female lay near the bars his own punishment would continue and the end would be postponed. Forthwith he seized his victim and dragged her inward and down to the ice that covered the swimming-pool in the centre of the den, beyond our reach. The floor of the den was so slippery from ice and snow that it was utterly unsafe for any of our men to enter and try to approach the now furious animal within striking distance.
Very quickly some choice pieces of fresh meat were thrown within six feet of the bears, in the hope that the male would be tempted away from his victim. In vain! Then, with all possible haste, Keeper Mulvehill coiled a lasso, bravely entered the den, and with the first throw landed the noose neatly around the neck of the male bear. In a second it was jerked taut, the end passed through the bars, and ten eager arms dragged the big bear away from his victim and close up to the bars. Another lariat was put on him to guard against breakages, and no bear ever missed being choked to death by a narrower margin than did that one. That morsel of revenge was sweet. While he was held thus, two men went in and attached a rope to the now dying female, and she was quickly dragged into the shifting-cage.
But the rescue came too late. At the last moment on the ice, the canine teeth of the big bear had severed the jugular vein of the female, and in two minutes after her rescue she was dead. It is my belief that at first the male did not intend to murder the female. I think his first impulse was to play with her, as he had always done with the male comrade of his own size. But the joy of combat seized him, and after that his only purpose was to kill. My verdict was, not premeditated murder, but murder in the second degree.
In the order of carnivorous animals, I think the worst criminals are found in the Marten Family (Mustelidae); and if there is a more murderous villain than the mink, I have yet to find him out. The mink is a midnight assassin, who loves slaughter for the joy of murder. The wolverine, the marten, mink and weasel are all courageous, savage and merciless. To the wolverine Western trappers accord the evil distinction of being a veritable imp of darkness on four legs. To them he is the arch-fiend, beyond which animal cunning and depravity cannot go. Excepting the profane history of the pickings and stealings of this "mountain devil" as recorded by suffering trappers, I know little of it; but if its instincts are not supremely murderous, its reputation is no index of its character.
The mink, however, is a creature that we know and fear. Along the rocky shores of the Bronx River, even in the Zoological Park, it perversely persisted long after our park-building began. In spite of traps, guns, and poison, and the killing of from three to five annually in our Park, Putorius vison would not give up. With us, the only creatures that practiced wholesale and unnecessary murder were minks and dogs. The former killed our birds, and during one awful period when a certain fence was being rebuilt, the latter destroyed several deer. A mink once visited an open-air yard containing twenty-two pinioned laughing gulls, and during that noche triste killed all of those ill-fated birds. It did not devour even one, and it sucked the blood of only two or three.
On another tragic occasion a mink slaughtered an entire flock of fifteen gulls; but its joy of killing was short-lived, for it was quickly caught and clubbed to death. A miserable little weasel killed three fine brant geese, purely for the love of murder; and then he departed this life by the powder-and-lead route.
All the year round captive buffalo bulls are given to fighting, and for one bull to injure or kill another is an occurrence all too common. Even in the great twenty-seven thousand acre reserve of the Corbin Blue Mountain Forest Association, fatal fights sometimes occur. It was left to a large bull named Black Beauty, in our Zoological Park herd, to reveal the disagreeable fact that under certain circumstances a buffalo may become a cunning and deliberate assassin.