Wood Folk at School — When You Meet a Bear, part 1

When You Meet a Bear There are always two surprises when you meet a bear.

You have one, and he has the other.

On your tramps and camps in the big woods you may be on the lookout for Mooween; you may be eager and even anxious to meet him; but when you double the point or push into the blueberry patch and, suddenly, there he is, blocking the path ahead, looking intently into your eyes to fathom at a glance your intentions, then, I fancy, the experience is like that of people who have the inquisitive habit of looking under their beds nightly for a burglar, and at last find him there, stowed away snugly, just where they always expected him to be.

Mooween, on his part, is always looking for you when once he has learned that you have moved into his woods.

But not from any desire to see you!

He is like a lazy man looking for work, and hoping devoutly that he may not find it.

A bear has very little curiosity--less than any other of the wood folk.

He loves to be alone; and so, when he goes hunting for you, to find out just where you are, it is always with the creditable desire to leave you in as large a room as possible, while he himself goes quietly away into deeper solitudes.

As this desire of his is much stronger than your mere idle curiosity to see something new, you rarely see Mooween even where he is most at home.

And that is but another bit of the poetic justice which you stumble upon everywhere in the big woods.

It is more and more evident, I think, that Nature adapts her gifts, not simply to the necessities, but more largely to the desires, of her creatures.

The force and influence of that intense desire--more intense because usually each animal has but one--we have not yet learned to measure.

The owl has a silent wing, not simply because he needs it--for his need is no greater than that of the hawk, who has no silent wing--but, more probably, because of his whole-hearted desire for silence as he glides through the silent twilight.

And so with the panther's foot; and so with the deer's eye, and the wolf's nose, whose one idea of bliss is a good smell; and so with every other strongly marked gift which the wild things have won from nature, chiefly by desiring it, in the long years of their development.

This theory may possibly account for some of Mooween's peculiarities.

Nature, who measures her gifts according to the desires of her creatures, remembers his love of peace and solitude, and endows him accordingly.

He cares little to see you or anybody else; therefore his eyes are weak--his weakest point, in fact.

He desires ardently to avoid your society and all society but his own; therefore his nose and ears are marvelously alert to discover your coming.

Often, when you think yourself quite alone in the woods, Mooween is there.

The wind has told your story to his nose; the clatter of your heedless feet long ago reached his keen ears, and he vanishes at your approach, leaving you to your noise and inquisitiveness and the other things you like.

His gifts of concealment are so much greater than your powers of detection that he has absolutely no thought of ever seeing you.

His surprise, therefore, when you do meet unexpectedly is correspondingly greater than yours.

What he will do under the unusual circumstances depends largely, not upon himself, but upon you.

With one exception, his feelings are probably the reverse of your own.

If you are bold, he is timid as a rabbit; if you are panic-stricken, he knows exactly what to do; if you are fearful, he has no fear; if you are inquisitive, he is instantly shy; and, like all other wild creatures, he has an almost uncanny way of understanding your thought.

It is as if, in that intent, penetrating gaze of his, he saw your soul turned inside out for his inspection.

The only exception is when you meet him without fear or curiosity, with the desire simply to attend to your own affairs, as if he were a stranger and an equal.

That rare mental attitude he understands perfectly--for is it not his own?

--and he goes his way quietly, as if he had not seen you.

For every chance meeting Mooween seems to have a plan of action ready, which he applies without a question or an instant's hesitation.

Make an unknown sound behind him as he plods along the shore, and he hurls himself headlong into the cover of the bushes, as if your voice had touched a button that released a coiled spring beneath him.

Afterwards he may come back to find out what frightened him.

Sit perfectly still, and he rises on his hind legs for a look and a long sniff to find out who you are.

Jump at him with a yell and a flourish the instant he appears, and he will hurl chips and dirt back at you as he digs his toes into the hillside for a better grip and scrambles away whimpering like a scared puppy.

Once in a way, as you steal through the autumn woods or hurry over the trail, you will hear sudden loud rustlings and shakings on the hardwood ridge above you, as if a small cyclone were perched there for a while, amusing itself among the leaves before blowing on.

Then, if you steal up toward the sound, you will find Mooween standing on a big limb of a beech tree, grasping the narrowing trunk with his powerful forearms, tugging and pushing mightily to shake down the ripe beechnuts.

The rattle and dash of the falling fruit are such music to Mooween's ears that he will not hear the rustle of your approach, nor the twig that snaps under your careless foot.

If you cry aloud now to your friends, under the hilarious impression that you have Mooween sure at last, there is another surprise awaiting you.

And that suggests a bit of advice, which is most pertinent: don't stand under the bear when you cry out.

If he is a little fellow, he will shoot up the tree, faster than ever a jumping jack went up his stick, and hide in a cluster of leaves, as near the top as he can get.

But if he is a big bear, he will tumble down on you before you know what has happened.

No slow climbing for him; he just lets go and comes down by gravitation.

As Uncle Remus says--who has some keen knowledge of animal ways under his story-telling humor--"Brer B'ar, he scramble 'bout half-way down de bee tree, en den he turn eve'ything loose en hit de groun' _kerbiff_!

Look like 't wuz nuff ter jolt de life out'n 'im."

Somehow it never does jolt the life out of him, notwithstanding his great weight; nor does it interfere in any way with his speed of action, which is like lightning, the instant he touches the ground.

Like the coon, who can fall from an incredible distance without hurting himself, Mooween comes down perfectly limp, falling on himself like a great cushion; but the moment he strikes, all his muscles seem to contract at once, and he bounds off like a rubber ball into the densest bit of cover at hand.

Twice have I seen him come down in this way.

The first time there were two cubs, nearly full-grown, in a tree.

One went up at our shout; the other came down with such startling suddenness that the man who stood ready with his rifle, to shoot the bear, jumped for his life to get out of the way; and before he had blinked the astonishment out of his eyes Mooween was gone, leaving only a violent nodding of the ground spruces to tell what had become of him.

All these plans of ready action in Mooween's head, for the rare occasions when he meets you unexpectedly, are the result of careful training by his mother.

If you should ever have the good fortune to watch a mother bear and her cubs when they have no idea that you are near them, you will note two characteristic things.

First, when they are traveling--and Mooween is the most restless tramp in all the woods--you will see that the cubs follow the mother closely and imitate her every action with ludicrous exactness, sniffing where she sniffs, jumping where she jumps, rising on their hind legs, with forearms hanging loosely and pointed noses thrust sharp up into the wind, on the instant that she rises, and then drawing silently away from the shore into the shelter of the friendly alders when some subtle warning tells the mother's nose that the coast ahead is not perfectly clear.

So they learn to sift the sounds and smells of the wilderness, and to govern their actions accordingly.

And second, when they are playing you will see that the mother watches the cubs' every action as keenly as they watched hers an hour ago.

She will sit flat on her haunches, her fore paws planted between her outstretched hind legs, her great head on one side, noting every detail of their boxing and wrestling and climbing, as if she had showed them once how it ought to be done and were watching now to see how well they remembered their lessons.

And now and then one or the other of the cubs receives a sound cuffing; for which I am unable to account, except on the theory that he was doing something contrary to his plain instructions.

It is only when Mooween meets some new object, or some circumstance entirely outside of his training, that instinct and native wit are set to work; and then you see for the first time some trace of hesitation on the part of this self-confident prowler of the big woods.

Once I startled him on the shore, whither he had come to get the fore quarters of a deer that had been left there.

He jumped for cover at the first alarm without even turning his head, just as he had seen his mother do, a score of times, when he was a cub.

Then he stopped, and for three or four seconds considered the danger in plain sight--a thing I have never seen any other bear imitate.

He wavered for a moment more, doubtful whether my canoe were swifter than he and more dangerous.

Then satisfied that, at least, he had a good chance, he jumped back, grabbed the deer, and dragged it away into the woods.