The Life Story of a Black Bear

ood enough. The snow had been unusually deep, and had only half melted when the cold returned, so that the remaining half stayed on the ground a long while, and sometimes it

hunger to dig woodchucks out of their holes, and eat the youn

bear, and no longer a youngster who had to make way for his elders when he met them[121] in the path. N

me to get my arm into, and I could smell the honey a foot or so away from my nose without being able to reach it-than which I know nothing more aggravating. And while you are hanging on to a tree with three paws, and trying to squeeze t

charged him. He was an older bear than I, and about my size;[122] and, as it was the first real fight that I had ever had, he probably had more experience. But I had the advantage of being thoroughly angry and wanting to hurt someone, without caring whether I was hurt myself or not, while he was feeling entirely peace

ad him rolling over and over and yelling for mercy. I really believe that, if he had not managed to get to his feet, an

ghting anybody, and had had no reason whatever for fighting that particular bear. Had I met him in the ordinary way, we should have been friendly, and I am not at all sure that, if I had had to make up my mind to it in cold blood, I should have dared to stand up to him, unless something very important depended on it. Yet all of a sudden the thing had happened. I had had my fir

ure to have one fight on which almost the whole course of his life depends. And that is when[124] he fights for his wife. Of course he may be beaten, and then he has to try again. Some bears never succeed in winning a wife at all. Some may win one and then have her taken from them, and have to se

and berries, sheltering during the heat of the day, and going wherever I felt inclined in the cool of the night and morning. I think I was disposed to be rather surly and quarrelsome, and more than once took upon my

e small sheltered patch which I knew, where the fruit had nearly all survived the frosts. I was there one evening, when, not far from me, out of the woods came another bear of about my si

SAT UP AND LOOKE

lar

and I cannot have been more than five or six yards away, when out of the bushes behind her, to my astonishment, came another he-bear. He growled at me, and began to sniff around at the bushes, to show that he was entirely ready to fight if I wanted to. And of course I wanted to. I probably should have wanted to in

er bear as big as himself, and only if one bear is markedly bigger than the other can he hope to reach his head, so as either to tear his face or give him such a blow as will daze him and render him incapable of going on fighting. A very much larger bear can beat down the smaller one's arms, and rain such a shower of blows upon him as will convince him at once that he is overmatched, and make him turn tail and run. When two are[127] evenly matched, however, the first interchange of blows with the paws is not likel

ening, and the interchange of single blows at arms' length would have gone on indefinitely until one or the other lost his temper and closed. I did not wait for that. The instant the first blow whistled past my head I threw myself on my hind-quarters and launched myself bodily at him, h

er. Altogether we must have fought for over an hour. Two or three times we were compelled to stop and draw apart, because neither of us had strength left to use either claws or jaw. And each time when we closed again I followed the sa

in time. And, as it proved then, it is a dangerous game to play, for it leaves you exposed if you miss your grip, and in this case it gave me the opportunity that I wanted, to get my teeth into his right paw just above the wrist. My teeth sank through the flesh and t

sition we were in, my teeth were slowly grinding into the bone of his arm, and again and again I felt his teeth grating and slipping on my skull as I clawed and pushed blindly at his face to keep him away. More and more desperate he grew, and still I hung on; a

ws, buffeting, biting, beating, driving him before me. Even now he had fight left in him; but with all his pluck he was helpless with his crippled limb, and slowly I bore him back out of the open patch w

in the intervals when we were taking breath, whenever I turned in her direction, she avoided my eye and pretended not to know that I was there or that anything that interested her wa

t to behave in that way. But I knew she did not mean it; and I was very tired and sore, with blood running from me in a dozen places. So I walked a few yards away from h

bear that I had beaten was a year older than myself. She had known him for some three weeks only, having met him a few days after her husband and her two children, the first s

nd of her, even though I was only three years old. If I filled out in proportion to my height and the size of my bones, there would not be a bear in the forest that would be able to stand up to me by the end of next summer. She told me that she

r off the berries, and later wandered into the woods side by side. She was very kind to me, and every caress and every loving thing she did or said was a delight. It was all so wonderfully new. And when at last we lay down under the stars, so that I coul

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