no, don’t despise the bear, either in his life or his death. he is a kingly fellow, every inch a king; a curious, monkish, music-loving, roving robin hood of his somber woods—a silent monk, who knows a great deal more than he tells. and please don’t go to look at him and sit in judgment on him behind the bars. put yourself in his place and see how much of manhood or kinghood would be left in you with a muzzle on your mouth, and only enough liberty left to push your nose between two rusty bars and catch the peanut which the good little boy has found to be a bad one and so generously tosses it to the bear.
of course, the little boy, remembering the experience of about forty other little boys in connection with the late baldheaded elijah, has a prejudice against the bear family, but why the full-grown man should so continually persist in caging this shaggy-coated, dignified, kingly and ancient brother of his, i cannot see, unless it is that he knows almost nothing at all of his better nature, his shy, innocent love of a joke, his partiality for music and his imperial disdain of death. and so, with a desire that man may know a little more about this storied and classic creature which, with noiseless and stately tread, has come down to us out of the past, and is as quietly passing away from the face of the earth, these fragmentary facts are set down. but first as to his love of music. a bear loves music better than he loves honey, and that is saying that he loves music better than he loves his life.
we were going to mill, father and i, and lyte howard, in oregon, about forty years ago, with ox-teams, a dozen or two bags of wheat, threshed with a flail and winnowed with a wagon cover, and were camped for the night by the calipoola river; for it took two days to reach the mill. lyte got out his fiddle, keeping his gun, of course, close at hand. pretty soon the oxen came down, came very close, so close that they almost put their cold, moist noses against the backs of our necks as we sat there on the ox-yokes or reclined in our blankets, around the crackling pine-log fire and listened to the wild, sweet strains that swept up and down and up till the very tree tops seemed to dance and quiver with delight.
then suddenly father seemed to feel the presence of something or somebody strange, and i felt it, too. but the fiddler felt, heard, saw nothing but the divine, wild melody that made the very pine trees dance and quiver to their tips. oh, for the pure, wild, sweet, plaintive music once more! the music of “money musk,” “zip coon,” “ol’ dan tucker” and all the other dear old airs that once made a thousand happy feet keep time on the puncheon floors from hudson’s bank to the oregon. but they are no more, now. they have passed away forever with the indian, the pioneer, and the music-loving bear. it is strange how a man—i mean the natural man—will feel a presence long before he hears it or sees it. you can always feel the approach of a—but i forget. you are of another generation, a generation that only reads, takes thought at second hand only, if at all, and you would not understand; so let us get forward and not waste time in explaining the unexplainable to you.
father got up, turned about, put me behind him like, as an animal will its young, and peered back and down through the dense tangle of the deep river bank between two of the huge oxen which had crossed the plains with us to the water’s edge; then he reached around and drew me to him with his left hand, pointing between the oxen sharp down the bank with his right forefinger.
a bear! two bears! and another coming; one already more than half way across on the great, mossy log that lay above the deep, sweeping waters of the calipoola; and lyte kept on, and the wild, sweet music leaped up and swept through the delighted and dancing boughs above. then father reached back to the fire and thrust a long, burning bough deeper into the dying embers and the glittering sparks leaped and laughed and danced and swept out and up and up as if to companion with the stars. then lyte knew. he did not hear, he did not see, he only felt; but the fiddle forsook his fingers and his chin in a second, and his gun was to his face with the muzzle thrust down between the oxen. and then my father’s gentle hand reached out, lay on that long, black, kentucky rifle barrel, and it dropped down, slept once more at the fiddler’s side, and again the melodies; and the very stars came down, believe me, to listen, for they never seemed so big and so close by before. the bears sat down on their haunches at last, and one of them kept opening his mouth and putting out his red tongue, as if he really wanted to taste the music. every now and then one of them would lift up a paw and gently tap the ground, as if to keep time with the music. and both my papa and lyte said next day that those bears really wanted to dance.
and that is all there is to say about that, except that my father was the gentlest gentleman i ever knew and his influence must have been boundless; for who ever before heard of any hunter laying down his rifle with a family of fat black bears holding the little snow-white cross on their breasts almost within reach of its muzzle?
the moon came up by and by, and the chin of the weary fiddler sank lower and lower, till all was still. the oxen lay down and ruminated, with their noses nearly against us. then the coal-black bears melted away before the milk-white moon, and we slept there, with the sweet breath of the cattle, like incense, upon us.
but how does a bear die? ah, i had forgotten. i must tell you of death, then. well, we have different kinds of bears. i know little of the polar bear, and so say nothing positively of him. i am told, however, that there is not, considering his size, much snap or grit about him; but as for the others, i am free to say that they live and die like gentlemen.
i shall find time, as we go forward, to set down many incidents out of my own experience to prove that the bear is often a humorist, and never by any means a bad fellow.
judge highton, odd as it may seem, has left the san francisco bar for the “bar” of mount shasta every season for more than a quarter of a century, and he probably knows more about bears than any other eminently learned man in the world, and henry highton will tell you that the bear is a good fellow at home, good all through, a brave, modest, sober old monk.
a monkish robin hood
in his good green wood.
