Part 12

I know an old Indian who was terribly frightened by an old monster grizzly and her half-grown cub, one autumn, while out gathering manzanita berries. But badly as he was frightened, he was not even scratched.

It seems that while he had his head raised, and was busy gathering and eating berries, he almost stumbled over an old bear and her cub. They had eaten their fill and fallen asleep in the trail on the wooded hillside. The old Indian had only time to turn on his heel and throw himself headlong in the large end of a hollow log, which luckily lay at hand. This, however, was only a temporary refuge. He saw, to his delight, that the log was open at the other end, and corkscrewing his way along toward the further end, he was about to emerge, when, to his dismay, he saw the old mother sitting down quietly waiting for him!

After recovering his breath as best he could in his hot and contracted quarters, he elbowed and corkscrewed himself back to the place by which he first entered. But lo! the bear was there, sitting down, half smiling, and waiting to receive him warmly. This, the old Indian said, was repeated time after time, till he had no longer strength left to struggle further, and turned on his face to die, when she put her head in, touched the top of his head gently with her nose and then drew back, took her cub with her and shuffled on.

I went to the spot with the Indian a day or two afterward, and am convinced that his story was exactly as narrated. And when you understand that the bear could easily have entered the hollow log and killed him at any time, you will see that she had at least a faint sense of fun in that "cat and mouse" amusement with the frightened Indian.

XII.

THE GRIZZLY AS FREMONT FOUND HIM.

General Fremont found this powerful brute to be a gregarious and confiding creature, fond of his family and not given to disturbing those who did not disturb him. In his report to the government--1847--he tells of finding a large family of grizzly bears gathering acorns very much as the native Indians gathered them, and this not far from a small Mexican town. He says that riding at the head of his troops he saw, on reaching the brow of a little grassy hill set with oaks, a great commotion in the boughs of one of the largest trees, and, halting to cautiously reconnoiter, he noticed that there were grouped about the base of the tree and under its wide boughs, several huge grizzlies, employed in gathering and eating the acorns which the baby grizzlies threw down from the thick branches overhead. More than this, he reports that the baby bears, on seeing him, became frightened, and attempted to descend to the ground and run away, but the older bears, which had not yet discovered the explorers, beat the young ones and drove them back up the tree, and compelled them to go on with their work, as if they had been children.

In the early '50s, I, myself, saw the grizzlies feeding together in numbers under the trees, far up the Sacramento Valley, as tranquilly as a flock of sheep. A serene, dignified and very decent old beast was the full-grown grizzly as Fremont and others found him here at home. This king of the continent, who is quietly abdicating his throne, has never been understood. The grizzly was not only every inch a king, but he had, in his undisputed dominion, a pretty fair sense of justice. He was never a roaring lion. He was never a man-eater. He is indebted for his character for ferocity almost entirely to tradition, but, in some degree, to the female bear when seeking to protect her young. Of course, the grizzlies are good fighters, when forced to it; but as for lying in wait for anyone, like the lion, or creeping, cat-like, as the tiger does, into camp to carry off someone for supper, such a thing was never heard of in connection with the grizzly.

The grizzly went out as the American rifle came in. I do not think he retreated. He was a lover of home and family, and so fell where he was born. For he is still found here and there, all up and down the land, as the Indian is still found, but he is no longer the majestic and serene king of the world. His whole life has been disturbed, broken up; and his temper ruined. He is a cattle thief now, and even a sheep thief. In old age, he keeps close to his canyon by day, deep in the impenetrable chaparral, and at night shuffles down hill to some hog-pen, perfectly careless of dogs or shots, and, tearing out a whole side of the pen, feeds his fill on the inmates.

One of the interior counties kept a standing reward for the capture of an old grizzly of this character for several years. But he defied everything and he escaped everything but old age. Some hunters finally crept in to where the old king lay, nearly blind and dying of old age, and dispatched him with a volley from several Winchester rifles. It was found that he was almost toothless, his paws had been terribly mutilated by numerous steel traps, and it is said that his kingly old carcass had received nearly lead enough to sink a small ship. There were no means of ascertaining his exact weight, but it was claimed that skin, bone and bullets, as he was found, he would have weighed well nigh a ton.

XIII.

THE BEAR WITH SPECTACLES.

And now let us go down to near the mouth of the Father of Waters, to "Barra Tarra Land" or Barren Land, as it was called of old by Cervantes, in the kingdom of Sancho Panza. Strange how little the great men of the old world knew of this new world! In one of his plays Shakespeare speaks of ships from Mexico; in another he means to mention the Bermudas. Burns speaks of a Newfoundland dog as

"Whelped in a country far abroad Where boatmen gang to fish for cod,"

and Byron gets in a whole lot about Daniel Boone; but as a rule we were ignored.

Barra Tarra, so called, is the very richest part of this globe. It must have been rich always, rich as the delta of the Nile; but now, with the fertility of more than a dozen States dumped along there annually, it is rich as cream is rich.

The fish, fowl, oysters of Barra Tarra--ah, the oysters! No oysters in the world like these for flavor, size and sweetness. They are so enormous in size that--but let me illustrate their size by an anecdote of the war.

A Yankee captain, hungry and worn out hewing his way with his sword from Chicago to the sea, as General Logan had put it, sat down in a French restaurant in New Orleans, and while waiting for a plate of the famous Barra Tarra raw oysters, saw that a French creole sitting at the same little side table was turning over and over with his fork a solitary and most tempting oyster of enormous size, eyeing it ruefully.

"Why don't you eat him?"

"By gar! I find him too big for me. You like?"

"Certainly. Not too big for me. See this!" and snatching the fork from the Frenchman the oyster was gone at a gulp.

The little Frenchman shrugged his shoulders, looked at the gallant officer a moment and then said in a fit of enthusiastic admiration:

"By gar, Monsieur Capitaine, you are one mighty brave man! I did try him t'ree times zat way, but he no stay."

The captain threw up his arms and--his oyster!--so runs the story.

The soil along the river bank is so rich that weeds, woods, vines, trench close and hard on the heels of the plowman. A plantation will almost perish from the earth, as it were, by a few years of abandonment. And so it is that you see miles and miles on either side--parishes on top of parishes, in fact--fast returning to barbarism, dragging the blacks by thousands down to below the level of brutes with them, as you descend from New Orleans toward the mouth of the mighty river, nearly one hundred miles from the beautiful "Crescent City." And, ah, the superstition of these poor blacks!

You see hundreds of little white houses, old "quarters," and all tenantless now, save one or two on each plantation. Cheap sugar and high wages, as compared with old times of slavery--but then the enormous cost of keeping up the levees, and above all, the continued peril to life and property, with a mile of swift, muddy water sweeping seaward high above your head--these things are making a desert of the richest lands on earth. We are gaining ground in the West, but we are losing ground in the South, the great, silent South.

Of course, the world, we, civilization, will turn back to this wondrous region some day, when we have settled the West; for the mouth of the mightiest river on the globe is a fact; it is the mouth by which this young nation was trained in its younger days, and we cannot ignore it in the end, however willing we may be to do so now.

Strange how wild beasts and all sorts of queer creatures are overrunning the region down there, too, growing like weeds, increasing as man decreases. I found a sort of marsh bear here. He looks like the sloth bear (Ursus Labiatus) of the Ganges, India, as you see him in the Zoo of London, only he is not a sloth, by any means. The negroes are superstitiously afraid of him, and their dogs, very numerous, and good coon dogs, too, will not touch him. His feet are large and flat, to accommodate him in getting over the soft ground, while his shaggy and misshapen body is very thin and light. His color is as unlovely as his shape--a sort of faded, dirty brown or pale blue, with a rim of dirty white about the eyes that makes him look as if he wore spectacles when he stops and looks at you.