The Return To The Trails

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Title:     The Return To The Trails
Author: Charles G. D. Roberts [More Titles by Roberts]

Down from the rocky den under the bald peak of Sugar Loaf, the old black bear led her cub. Turning her head every moment to see that he was close at her heels, she encouraged him with soft, half-whining, half-grunting sounds, that would have been ridiculous in so huge a beast had they been addressed to anything less obviously a baby than this small, velvet-dark, wondering-eyed cub.

Very carefully the old bear chose her path, and very slowly she moved. But for all her care, she had to stop every minute or two, and sometimes even turn back a few paces, for the cub was continually dropping behind. His big, inquiring ears took in all the vague, small noises of the mountainside, puzzling over them. His sharp little nose went poking in every direction, sniffing the strange new smells, till he would get bewildered, and forget which foot to put forward first. Then he would sit back and whine for his mother.

It was the cub's first adventure, this journey down the world outside his den. Hitherto he had but played about his doorway.

When the little fellow had somewhat recovered from his first bewilderment, the old bear moved more rapidly, leading him toward a swampy, grassy pocket, where she thought there might be roots to dig. The way was steep, winding down between rocks and stunted trees and tangles of thick shrubbery, with here and there a black-green spur of the fir forests thrust up tentatively from the lower slopes. Now and again it led across a naked shoulder of the mountain, revealing, far down, a landscape of dark, wide stretching, bluish woods, with desolate, glimmering lakes strung on a thread of winding river. When these vast spaces of emptiness opened suddenly upon his baby eyes, the cub whimpered and drew closer to his mother. The swimming deeps of air daunted him.

Presently, as the two continued their slow journey, the mother bear's nostrils caught a new savour. She stopped, lifted her snout, and tested the wind discriminatingly. It was a smell she had encountered once before, coming from the door of a lumber camp. Well she remembered the deliciousness of the lump of fat bacon which she had succeeded in purloining while the cook was out getting water. Her thin, red tongue licked her lips at that memory, and, without hesitation, she turned up the side trail whence came the luring scent. The cub had to stir his little legs to keep pace with her, but he felt that something interesting was in the wind, and did his best.

A turn around a thick clump of juniper, and there was the source of the savour. It looked pleasantly familiar to the old bear, that lump of fat bacon. It was stuck on the end of a pointed stick, just under a sort of slanting roof of logs, which, in a way, reminded her of the lumbermen's cabin. The cabin had done her no harm, and she inferred that the structure before her was equally harmless. Nevertheless, the man smell, not quite overpowered by the fragrance of the bacon, lurked about it; and all the works of man she viewed with suspicion. She snatched hastily at the prize, turning to jump away even as she did so.

But the bacon seemed to be fastened to the stick. She gave it an impatient pull,--and it yielded suddenly. At that same instant, while her eyes twinkled with elation, that roof of massive logs came crashing down.

It fell across her back. Weighted as it was with heavy stones, it crushed the life out of her in a second. There was a coughing gasp, cut off abruptly; and the flattened form lay still, the wide-open mouth and protruding tongue jammed down among the mosses. At the crash the cub had jumped back in terror. Then he sat up on his haunches and looked on with anxious bewilderment.

* * * * *

When, early the following morning, the Indian who had set the deadfall came, he found the cub near perishing with cold and fear and hunger. He knew that the little animal would be worth several bearskins, so he warmed it, wrapped it in his jacket, and took it home to his cabin. Fed and sheltered, it turned to its captor as a rescuer, and acquired a perilous faith in the friendliness of man. In fact, it speedily learned to follow the Indian about the cabin, and to fret for him in his absence.

That same autumn the Indian took the cub into Edmundston and sold him for a price that well repaid his pains; and thence, within three or four months, and by as many transfers, the little animal found his way into the possession of a travelling circus. Being good-natured and teachable, and inclined, through his first misunderstanding of the situation which had robbed him of his mother, to regard mankind as universally beneficent, he was selected to become a trick bear. In the course of his training for this honour, he learned that his trainer, at least, was not wholly beneficent, and toward him he developed a cordial bitterness, which grew with his years. But he learned his lessons, nevertheless, and became a star of the ring; and for the manager of the show, who always kept peanuts or gingerbread in pocket for him, he conceived such a warmth of regard as he had hitherto strictly reserved for the Indian.

Valued and well cared for, he grew to a magnificent stature, and up to the middle of his fifth year he never knew what his life was missing. To be sure, it was exasperatingly monotonous, this being rolled about the world in stuffy, swaying cage-cars, and dancing in the ring, and playing foolish tricks with a red-and-white clown, and being stared at by hot, applauding, fluttering tiers of people, who looked exactly the same at every place he came to. His memory of that first walk down the mountain, at his great mother's heels, had been laid to sleep at the back of his curiously occupied brain. He had no understanding of the fierce restlessness, the vague longing, which from time to time, and especially when the autumn frosts began to nip and tingle, would take possession of him, moving him almost to hatred of even his special friends, the manager and the clown.

One vaporous, golden afternoon in early autumn, the circus drew into the little town of Edmundston, at the mouth of the Madawaska River. When the noise of the train stopped, the soft roar of the Little Falls grew audible,--a voice at which all the weary animals pricked their ears, they knew not, most of them, why. But when the cars and cages were run out into the fields, where the tents were to be raised, there drew down from spruce-clad hills a faint fragrance which thrilled the bear's nostrils, and stirred formless longings in his heart, and made his ears deaf to the wild music of the falls. That fragrance, imperceptible to nostrils less sensitive than his, was the breath of his native wilderness, a message from the sombre solitudes of the Squatook. He did not know that the lonely peak of Sugar Loaf was but thirty or forty miles away. He knew only that something, in the air and in his blood, was calling him to his own.

The bear--well-taught, well-mannered, well-content--was not regarded as even remembering freedom, let alone desiring it. His fetters, therefore, were at times little more than nominal, and he was never very closely watched. Just on the edge of evening, when the dusk was creeping up the valley and honey-scents from the fields mixed with the tang of the dark spruce forests, his opportunity came. His trainer had unhitched the chain from his collar and stooped over it to examine some defect in the clasp.

At this instant that surge of impulse which, when it does come, shatters routine and habit to bits, seized the bear. Without premeditation, he dealt the trainer a cuff that knocked him clean over a wagon-pole and broke his arm. Before any of the other attendants could realize what had happened, the bear was beyond the circle of wagons, and half-way across the buckwheat-fields. In ten minutes more he was in the spicy glooms of the spruce-woods.

His years of association with men had given the bear a great confidence in their resources. He was too crafty, therefore, to slacken his efforts just because he had gained the longed-for woods. He pressed on doggedly, at a shambling, loose-jointed, but very effective run, till it was full night and the stars came out sharply in the patches of clear, dark sky above the tree-tops. In the friendly dark he halted to strip the sweet but insipid fruit of an Indian pear, which for a little assuaged his appetite. Then he rushed on,--perhaps aimlessly, as far as conscious purpose was concerned, but, in reality, by a sure instinct, making toward his ancestral steeps of Sugar Loaf.

All night he travelled; and in the steely chill of dawn he came out upon a spacious lake. The night had been windless, and now, in the first of the coming light, the water was smooth like blue-black oil under innumerable writhing wisps and streamers of mist. A keen smell, raw but sweet, rose from the wet shores, the wet spruce and fir woods, and the fringe of a deep cedar swamp near by. The tired animal sniffed it with an uncomprehending delight. He did not recognize it, yet it made him feel at home. It seemed a part of what he wanted.

Being thirsty as well as hungry, he pushed through the bushes,--not noiselessly, as a wild bear moves, but with crashing and tramplings, as if there were no need of secrecy in the wilds,--and lurched down to the gravelly brink. Here, as luck would have it, he found a big, dead sucker lying half-awash, which made him a meal. Then, when sharp streaks of orange along the eastern horizon were beginning to shed a mystic colour over the lake, he drew back into the woods and curled himself up for sleep behind the trunk of a big hemlock.

When the sun was about an hour high he awoke, and made haste to continue his journey. Along the lake shore he went, to the outlet; then down the clear, rushing Squatook; and in the afternoon he came out upon a smaller lake, over which stood sentinel a lofty, beetling mountain. At the foot of the mountain, almost seeming to duplicate it in miniature, a steep island of rock rose sharply from the water.

The bear halted on the shore, sniffed wistfully, and looked up at the lonely mountain. Dim memories, or emotions too dim to be classed as memories, began to stir in the recesses of his brain. He hurried around the lake and began to climb the steeps. The lonely mountain was old Sugar Loaf. The exile had come home.

It was his feet, rather than his head, perhaps, that knew the way so well. Upward he toiled, through swamps and fir woods, over blueberry barrens and ranges of granite boulders, till, looking down, he saw the eagle flying far below him. He saw a vast, empty forest land, beaded with shining lakes,--and a picture, long covered up in his brain, came back to him. These were the great spaces that so long ago had terrified the little cub creeping at his mother's heels. He knew now where his den was,--just behind that whitish gray rock with the juniper shrub over it. He ran eagerly to resume possession.

It was now, for the first time, that he found the wilderness less empty than he had imagined it. Another bear was in possession of the den,--and in no mood to be disturbed.

He flung himself upon the intruder with a savage roar. The next moment the two, clutched in a madly clawing embrace, went crashing through a fringe of bushes and rolled together down a twenty-foot slope of bald rock. They landed in a crevice full of roots, with a violence that half-stunned them and threw them apart. As they picked themselves up, it was plain that the exile had had the best of the tussle. His rich black fur, to be sure, was somewhat torn and bloody, but he showed no other signs of battle; while his antagonist breathed heavily and held one paw clear of the ground.

The exile was quite fearless, and quite ready to fight for what he wanted, if necessary. But he was not conscious of any particular ill-will toward his assailant. What he wanted was possession of that den. Now, instead of taking advantage of his adversary's partly disabled condition, he clambered with undignified haste up the steep rock and plunged into the cave. It was certainly much smaller than he had imagined it, but it was, nevertheless, much to his taste. He turned around in it two or three times, as if to adjust it to himself, then squatted on his haunches in the entrance and looked out complacently over the airy deeps. The dispossessed bear stood for a few minutes irresolute, his small eyes red with wrath. For a moment or two he hesitated, trying to work himself up to the attack. Then discretion came to his rescue. Grumbling deep in his throat, he turned and limped away, to seek new quarters on the other side of the mountain.

Now began for the returned exile two or three months of just such a life as he had longed for. The keen and tonic winds that blew around the peak of Sugar Loaf filled his veins with vigour. Through his lack of education in the lore of the wilderness, his diet was less varied than it might have been; but this was the fat of the year, and he fared well enough. When the late berries and fruits were all gone there were sweet tubers and starchy roots to be grubbed up along the meadow levels by the water. Instinct, and a spirit of investigation, soon taught him to find the beetles and grubs that lurked under stones or in rotting logs,--and in the course of such a search he one day discovered that ants were good to eat. But the small animals with which a wild bear is prone to vary his diet were all absent from his bill of fare. Rabbits, woodchucks, chipmunks, wood-mice, they all kept out of his sight. His ignorance of the law of silence, the universal law of the wild, deprived him of many toothsome morsels. As for the many kinds of fungus which grew upon the mountain, he knew not which were edible and which poisonous. After an experiment with one pleasant-smelling red-skinned specimen, which gave him excruciating cramps, he left the whole race of fungi severely alone.

For perhaps a month he had the solitudes to himself, except for the big, scornful-looking eagle which always spent a portion of every day sitting on the top of a blasted pine about a hundred feet above the den. But, at length, one crisp morning, when he was down by the lakeside fishing, he found a mate. A young she-bear came out of the bushes, looked at him, then turned as if to run away,--but didn't. The exile stopped fishing, and waited civilly to see if the newcomer wanted to fight. Evidently she had no such desire.

The exile took a few steps up the beach,--which action seemed to terrify the newcomer almost into flight. Seeing this, he sat down on his haunches amiably, and waited to see what she would do. What she did, after much hesitation and delay and half-retreat, was to come up to his side and sniff trustfully but wonderingly at the great iron-studded leather collar on his neck. After that the two soon reached an understanding; and for the next six weeks or so they spent most of their time together.

Under his mate's instruction, or else by force of her example, the big bear made some progress in woodcraft, and gained some inklings of the lesson of silence. He learned, also, to distinguish between the wholesome and the poisonous fungi. He learned the sweets of a bee-tree, and how a bear must go to work to attain them. Moving through the shadows more quietly, he now had glimpses of rabbits and chipmunks, and even caught sight of a wood-mouse whisking into his hole under a root. But before he had acquired the cunning to capture any of these shy kindreds, his mate wandered away, on her own affairs intent; and he found himself once more alone. Frosts by this time were binding swale and pool. Ice was forming far out from the edges of the lake. The first snows had fallen and the great snows were threatening. And the little she-bear was getting ready to creep into a hole and curl up for her winter's sleep. She no longer wanted company,--not even the company of this splendid, black comrade, whose collar had so filled her with admiration.

When, at length, the winter of the north had fairly settled down upon the Squatooks, the exile's ribs were well encased in fat. But that fortunate condition was not to last long. When the giant winds, laden with snow and Arctic cold, thundered and shrieked about the peak of Sugar Loaf, and in the loud darkness strange shapes of drift rode down the blast, he slept snugly enough in the narrow depths of his den. But the essential winter lore of his kind he had not learned. He had not learned to sleep away the time of storm and famine. As for instinct, it failed him altogether in this emergency. During his five years of life with the circus, he had had no chance to gratify his winter drowsiness, and gradually the power to hibernate had passed away from him. The loss was irremediable. By this one deprivation his contact with man had ruined him for the life of nature.

When man has snatched away from Nature one of her wild children, Nature, merciless in her resentments, is apt to say, "Keep him! He is none of mine!" And if the alien, his heart aching for his own, insists upon returning, Nature turns a face of stone against him.

Unskilled in hunting as he was, and unable to sleep, the bear was soon driven to extremes. At rare intervals he succeeded in capturing a rabbit. Once or twice, after a fierce frost had followed a wet sleet storm, he had climbed trees and found dead birds frozen to their perches. But most of the time he had nothing but starvation rations of wood-ants and buds. In the course of a few weeks he was lean as a heron, and his collar hung loose in his fur. He was growing to hate the icy and glittering desolation,--and, as he had once longed for an untried freedom, now he longed for the companionship of men.

He was now wandering far afield in his daily quest for food, sometimes not returning for three or four days at a time. Once, on an excursion over into the Madawaska Valley, he came upon a deadfall temptingly baited with pork. He rushed forward ravenously to snatch the bait,--but just in time that scent called up an ancient memory. The horror and the shock of that far-off day when such a trap had crushed his mother's life out, came back upon him. It was not the scene, exactly, that came back, but rather the memory of an anguish. Obscure as it was, it had power to master his appetite and drive him to another foraging-ground. Thenceforth he foraged no more in the Madawaska Valley.

In such a desolate fashion the exile dragged through the frozen weeks, till February came in with deeper snows and fiercer frosts. At this time hunger and loneliness drove him far over to the valley of the Toledi; and here, one still and biting day, he came upon a human trail.

Delightedly he sniffed at the familiar scent, which to him, as pleasant memories of food and companionship welled up in his heart, represented nothing but kindliness. His little disagreements with his trainer were forgotten. He remembered only his unfailing friends, the manager and the clown. The trail was a broad and mixed one,--the trail of oxen, and of men with larriganed feet. It led toward a camp of lumbermen, near the river. Joyously and confidently the exile followed it. Soon he heard men's voices, and the familiar clank of chains. Then a biting breeze drew through the forest,--biting, but sweet to the bear's nostrils. It carried a savour of richness from the cook's steaming boilers. It was dinner-hour at the camp.

For the second time in his life, the bear felt that he had come home. Captive, indeed, he had been among men,--but a captive always highly valued and heedfully cared for. He never for a moment doubted that these men-creatures, who had always wanted him, would want him now. They would chain him up, of course,--for fear he would change his mind and leave them again. But they would feed him,--all he could eat; and stare at him; and admire him. Then he would dance for them, and do foolish things with a gun, and perhaps stand on his head. Whereupon they would applaud, and laugh, and feed him with peanuts and gingerbread. His famished jaws dripped at the thought.

Within the camp one of the hands, glancing from the window, saw him just as he came in view. In an instant every man was looking out. The boldness of the animal stirred up a great excitement. His terrible leanness was noticed. He was coming straight for the door,--evidently savage, insane with hunger! And such a big fellow, too!

Men seized their axes. The boss snatched down his big-bore Snider rifle, slipped in a cartridge, and coolly threw open the cabin door. He was a tall, ruddy-faced, wide-mouthed man, much like the kindly manager of the show. At sight of him, standing there in the door, the bear was overjoyed, and broke into a shuffling run.

Seeing what seemed to them such reckless ferocity, the lumbermen cried out in amazement, and shouted hoarse warnings to the boss. But the boss was a man of nerve. Raising his rifle to the shoulder, he stepped right out clear of the door. He was a dead shot, and very proud of the fact. When the bear was within thirty paces of him, he fired.

The massive bullet sped true; and the exile fell forward on his snout without a gasp, shot through the brain.

The men gathered about the body, praising the shot, praising the prize, praising the reckless audacity which had led the beast to rush upon his doom. Then in the long, loose fur that clothed his bones they found the heavy collar. At that they all wondered. The boss examined it minutely, and stood pondering; and the frank pride upon his face gradually died into regret.

"I swan, boys," said he, presently, "if that ain't the b'ar that run away from the circus las' fall! I heard tell he was reckoned always kind!"

[The end]
Charles G. D. Roberts's essay: Return To The Trails

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