by Max Brand
In the meantime, there could be no doubt that even her brute mind understood perfectly the service that human hands were performing for her. There was not a growl when Tommy came near her. She would come close to the entrance to the cave and lie there, just out of range of the flying chips, and observe his work with keen satisfaction. He, on his side, did all that he could to push forward their acquaintance. When he came up with fish, now, she would crowd as far out as she could, her little eyes glittering with a ferocious hunger— for the appetite of a bear is the appetite of a pig— and Tommy would feed her the fish he had captured, one by one, from his hands. He ventured at first only by holding the fish by the tail and offering the head foremost. But he grew bolder day after day. His child’s mind, having seen her do no wrong, could not conceive her repaying his kindness with beast ingratitude.
So, on a day, half closing his eyes, screwing up all the courage he could summon in his shaking body, he held out a small fish on the palm of his hand—and mother bear took it away at a bite without touching the skin of his fingers! She snorted a little. That was all. Then, as he kept the trembling hand extended, she licked the last trace of the fish oil from his palm!
It was almost the greatest event in Tommy’s life. For a moment he sat back incapable of speech, his heart thundering. But a little dog-like whine of eagerness from the bruin made him continue with the feeding, and from that time on every morsel she had was taken neatly from his hand.
Then—and all was ventured timidly, slowly—he tried to stroke that battered head while she ate. It was not easily done. At first, when the shadow of the hand extended over her, she winced away with a growl, her upper lip twitching back and disclosing huge fangs that could have shorn through the flesh and bone of his arm at a single snap. But, with twitching ears and quivering snout, she reached out for the fish again and this time allowed his hand to touch her head just between the little, pointed ears.
That was another great thrill, another great forward step of conquest for Tommy. Before the next day came, she was lying contentedly at the gap to her cave with Tommy Parks seated beside her— seated in fear, to be sure—stroking her great head and rubbing the loose fur, while mother bear seemed to take a profound satisfaction in his touch. But what was her pleasure compared with the wild delight of Tommy?
There he sat with two wild grizzly cubs playing on his knees, and with the huge head of mother bear dropped to the ground beside him. There he sat playing with the cubs, again, while that great head was raised and she sniffed at his back—a chill shot up his spine—at his arms and shoulders—at his neck—and snuffed strongly on his hair.
But that was all. No harm was done. Not once was her paw raised or were her teeth bared. To be sure, he knew that she had not admitted him to her confidence as the little cubs so freely admitted him, but she took him as a friend, an unmistakable ally, but for whose providence she must have starved and died there. And that, for the time being, was enough for Tommy.
CHAPTER EIGHT
A GREAT LESSON FOR TOMMY
What that two weeks of labor meant for Tommy, no one could have told—he, least of all. But for two mortal weeks he was so enthralled in body and spirit that he hardly had time to think back to the father he had lost, or to the strange and gloomy future. Or, if sorrow for the dead John Parks, or the dread of what was to come, now and then darted through his mind with a pang, the pain was short lived. Weariness leaves not much room in the spirit for anything but itself and the longing for sleep— and a weary boy he was long before the closing of every day. If he were not weary, he was in the thick of his work or resting momentarily from it or sitting soberly beside the scarred head of mother bruin or romping wildly with the cubs.
They had grown prodigiously during the two weeks. One could hardly recognize in them the soft little balls of fur that Tommy had first seen.
They had grown, indeed, like their mother’s appetite, and that was the despair of the boy. They skirted here and there all around the clearing. A thousand things came to their senses—things that remained invisible to Tommy.
Sometimes, he would see them, of one accord, start digging the soft dirt where there was nothing on the surface, and presently they would be snuffing in the dirt like little pigs, and champing at white, soft roots. The strangely sensitive noses had told them that the roots, once found, would be good to the taste. Not that they actually ate any quantity of them. Mother’s milk was their food, and would be for weeks and weeks to come, but they loved the taste of things, of nearly all things, so it seemed. They would chew grass or bark with avidity and eject it with equal disgust. An end of Tommy’s coat was a morsel to be tested at the least, as poor Tommy learned to his despair. They scratched at the bag that held his small and dwindling supply of cornmeal. And they persisted in coming after him and digging up the grains of corn that Tommy found in a separate bag and bethought himself to plant.
Finally, in despair, he had taken all that remained of that precious seed and carried it back to his own home grounds. There, along the banks of the little rivulet that flowed across his plateau, he planted the corn, with high hopes for what it might bring forth for him in the autumn.
But even his home place was not secure from these ready prowlers. They loved Tommy with a perfect and beautiful love. When he was absent, they wailed for him in unison. And, when he took his daily trips back to the home cave to see that all was well, to replace whatever stones had been scratched from the entrance by some prowler, or to open the cave and examine the condition of his total worldly possessions, the cubs formed the habit of following him some distance down the way.
At first they would turn and scamper back to the mother as soon as the distance made them uncomfortable or the tall woods oppressed them, or, most of all, the sullen commands of the bruin herself overawed them. But every day they went a little farther until they reached a point when they were more afraid of going back alone than of going ahead into unexplored country with Tommy. So it was, to his unspeakable delight, that they one day went with him to the home cave.
They began to grow homesick and hungry at once, and they whimpered most of the way back to their mother, but, having followed him once, they could not resist the lure each succeeding day. They returned always to take a severe cuffing and scolding from the bruin, but what little bear can remember a beating from one day to the next? Jack and Jerry certainly could not.
The bruin was wildly jealous at first, but her jealousy diminished. If Jack and Jerry depended upon the boy for fun and romping that she could not give them, she depended upon him for the very food that sustained her life, and, although her appetite was even more rapidly outgrowing his ability to supply her with provisions, a small oasis is better than a complete desert.
Moreover, the time of liberation was approaching. Little by little the solid rock had been eaten away by the hammering. Perhaps it was because he had gained strength from practice, perhaps it was because he had studied out little systems of attack, but it seemed to Tommy that the rock began to grow softer and to break away more and more readily until, finally, every stroke gave him a chip.
Yet he still thought that the hole must be far too small when, one morning after he had done a scant hour’s work, the bruin approached the gap and deliberately thrust herself through up to the shoulders. There she stuck, and, when she drew back, growling, Tommy attacked the rock with a freshened hope. He knelt in the entrance itself. He shortened his hold on the hammer, and the rock fell before him in chunks. Some of those fragments landed with cruel force on the head and body of the bruin, but she refused to move back. With a fascinated interest she watched and held up a great paw to shield her face from the flying fragments, just as a man will shelter his eyes against the glare of sunlight.
Tommy laughed at her as he worked, and he worked until his trembling arms could not lift the hammer again. Then he stepped back. He was weak all over from the exertion. His head swam, his legs sagged beneath him; it seemed that surely he could never ag
ain attack that stubborn rock. The bruin, in the meantime, stepped to the gap, sniffed at the place where he had recently been hammering, with her head cocked wisely to one side, and then deliberately wedged into the gap.
At the first effort her shoulders came clear through. The head of Tommy cleared instantly. He forgot his weakness. The bruin, grunting with satisfaction, lunged forward again, and suddenly she was in the open, her sides scratched and bleeding, to be sure, by the sharp projections of the rock. But what did that matter, compared with the freedom she had gained?
Jack and Jerry, too, seemed to realize how great this moment was. They galloped before her and stood up and cuffed at her face with their little paws. But the grizzly, with a grunt and a growl, turned about and confronted Tommy. All the friendliness that she seemed to have felt for him while she was hopelessly imprisoned now vanished, apparently. Tommy, with a beating heart, stepped forward with extended hand, speaking softly. But she stopped him with a warning snarl, a terrible, indrawn breath, showing those great, yellow fangs as she did so.
The next instant she had wheeled and was ambling swiftly away toward the familiar shadows of the woods. Jack and Jerry scampered in her rear. In another moment she was lost in the undergrowth. The cubs turned and whined at Tommy as though bidding him follow, also, but a deep-throated growl from the front made them turn about and scurry away. In scarcely a minute from the instant of her liberation she was gone, and Tommy stood still and listened to the diminishing crackling of the twigs. He stood still, and the tears trickled slowly down his face, for, after all, he was only twelve, and this desertion was more than he could stand.
The keen, steady heat of the sun burning through the shoulders of his shirt roused him at last. Labor had swollen his hands with blood. Long labor had weakened them. It seemed to Tommy that he had barely the strength to gather up his belongings and make his pack again. When he had started on the back trail toward his cave, he was so weak that he had to sit down for a rest every two or three hundred yards.
It was a melancholy march, indeed, that trip back to the camp. He felt in a single rush the reflex of the excitement that had been supporting him for the past two weeks. The old sorrow, the old fear that had been lurking in the back of his brain all that time, now stepped out and took possession of him. Again and again the emotion of self-pity came so stingingly upon him that the tears welled up into his eyes.
He fought them away. He forced himself to raise his head and to step on more lightly, for, if he gave way completely to the weakness, he felt that it would overwhelm him in a wave of unbearable strength. But how changed everything was. All these days he had been walking gaily back and forth along this trail. He had come to know each runlet that crossed the way, each clearing, each denser growth of trees. All had become familiar and kind to him by constant seeing, but now the familiarity was gone. The trees wore altered faces. The wind swept through the treetops with an ominous strength.
A chilling thought possessed him. He had been so confident that his blazed trails would soon lead a trapper or traveler to him, and a full two weeks had passed without a sign of a deliverer. Might not the entire summer and autumn pass in just that manner? In such case, what would he do when the bleak winter dropped upon this country, when the snow fell many feet in depth, and when the cruel northers howled around the peaks and cuffed the forest until it groaned? How strongly that wind blew, he could see evidenced on every hand. Yonder was a tree with a broken top. Here was a mighty pine knocked over simply because it had stood by itself in an exposed place. How dark and cold and cheerless the cave would be through that long winter season.
The heart of Tommy was failing him completely, and, as always when he was sad, the picture of his dead father grew up in his mind as vividly as if John Parks were walking just behind him—as if at any moment he would hear the familiar voice, feel the hand dropped upon his shoulder.
He built strange fancies, kind and cruel at once. He imagined John Parks returning, weak and pale, with a tale of how he had been carried down the current, battered and torn by the sharp rocks, but how he had managed to reach the bank—how he had lain, delirious and sick, for days—how he had managed to kill a grouse, perhaps, and so obtain food. And so, at last, he was come back to Tommy. All the horror was simply a great, gloomy adventure.
Such thoughts came to Tommy as he walked home this day. Before he reached the clearing, there was established in his mind an undying hope that once again, before the end, he would find John Parks.
The minds of children move strangely. Delicate, small things that quite escape the attention of their elders, to them are all in all. A tree in the dark of night may seem to them ominous as the victim of the play; a smile may shock them through and through with happiness; a frown may lock up a lasting sorrow in their hearts. However cruelly casual they may be themselves, they are keenly aware of all the moods of others. To poor Tommy, lost in the wilderness, every mountain head that reared above the Turnbull valley was as dreadful as a threatening man about to descend upon him or one holding a threat of perpetual danger above his head. So he took this weird hope for the return of his father into his inmost soul, and it cheered him wonderfully. It was like the flame of a match cherished painfully in a wind—the last match of a store, lighted precariously. So it was that he kept that thought of his father apart in a quiet place of his mind to be turned to in moments of dread and sorrow.
All was well in the clearing. Other prowling beasts of prey had been there, to be sure, drawn by the odor of the strong bacon, perhaps, or lured by the man smell where there was no man. The rocks at the entrance to the cave had been partially scratched away. But no harm was done.
Tommy removed the stones and found all well inside the cave. That night he had not the courage to go abroad foraging for food. He let the very squirrels chatter unheeded in the trees above his head. He ate bacon and fried cornmeal and went to bed hopelessly, wearily. His last thought before he closed his eyes was of Jack and Jerry. What merry, merry companions they would have been for him. But now they were gone forever from him into the wilderness, and, when he encountered them next, they would not remember him. All that he had done for them had been thrown away.
CHAPTER NINE
COMPENSATIONS
There were dreadful times ahead for poor Tommy, but, of all that was to come, nothing so stayed with him, nothing was so burned into his consciousness, as the fortnight that followed. Yet it should have been an easy time, for the spring was softening toward summer. All the forest stirred with life. Within a hundred yards of his home cave there lay an ample hunting ground for Tommy. He had no need to range abroad in search of game. It came up to his doorstep, so to speak, and invited the hand that destroyed it. Yet he grew thin and anxious. For one thing, an almost straight diet of meat is not good for a child, and although long walks through the forest hardened him, and the labor of cutting down trees and chopping them into firewood seasoned his lithe, young muscles, still, as he grew harder, he grew thinner. And worry was the poison in his life, the worry of loneliness.
A boy overflows with talk. He is full of questions as a pine tree is full of needles. But all this chatter of light-hearted words and inquiry was dammed and stopped up in Tommy Parks. He began to develop a deep wrinkle in the very center of his forehead, a wrinkle that should not have come there for another twenty years.
Every day was a long agony of waiting—for what, he could not tell. But something must happen, something must flow into the sterile current of this life. That expectation took the form of hearing his father in every echo, his breath in the whisper of the wind among the trees, his footfall in the crackling of every twig, and sometimes Tommy would draw himself up with his small fists gripped, so keen was the suspense.
Sometimes, too, he felt his brain whirl, his eyes grow misty, as the strain began to tell upon him. Every day was an eternity. It made no difference what he attempted to do. Thought came between him and the labor of his hands.
There is always a
saving grace of some kind. For Tommy, it came in the form of the sprouting of the corn that he had planted. In the rich soil of the sunshiny bank of the stream that trickled across his little tableland, the seed germinated quickly and then the pale green shoots came feebly above the surface of the ground. Once up to the light, they flourished amazingly. A dozen times a day, Tommy went out to watch them growing, and, when he sat at the mouth of his cave, listening and waiting for the men who must someday come to find him and save him, the play of the sun glistening upon the waving young stalks was a perpetual delight to him.
Every young plant took on a different character in his eyes. There were some that prospered more than others, of course. There was one that was the dwarf, the weakling. Tommy felt a keen affinity for it. Finally he discovered that it was being crowded by a small rock on either side, and, when these were removed, it began to prosper like the others— or even more so. There seemed to be a greater energy in it, born of repression. It shot up noticeably every hour, so to speak. Tommy was delighted by it. Although he kept the ground loose around all the others, that particular stalk he tended with an extra precision.
It was at the end of that miserable fortnight of silence and dying hope, just after he had lain down in his blankets at the mouth of the cave, that a new adventure came. He had closed his eyes and turned on his side toward the cave when he heard a light, crunching sound on the gravel of the small plateau. That little sound was enough to bring Tommy into a sitting posture, fevered with hope. As he jerked upright, a great growl turned his blood to ice.
Six feet from him, a great grizzly reared up with dreadful arms raised, ready to strike. Through the twilight, and looking up, it seemed to Tommy that the monster was as tall as the trees. He could not stir. Then, from behind the big bear, two little cubs came running to him, tumbled upon him, rolled him over, licked his face, bit at his hair, with a babble of noise and a flurry of many motions.
