A brown blur took clearer shape. The bear outside, tired of digging, sat leaning against a boulder. She was waiting for the squirrel to come out of its hole. Now and then she squinted at the burrow; most of the time she turned a wagging head to the cliff, the canyon, and the sky. She wanted nothing, feared nothing. Human creatures seldom climbed down the steep face of Beetle Rock. If one did, she would hear the shoes on the granite. She dreaded no other animal. And so she rested, with an unchallenged and aimless ease — and with a hint of arrogance that made the mother suspect she knew that she was being watched.
The single bear let herself fall to one side, towards a large mushroom, fragrant beneath a pocket of needles. She clawed it out and fondled it as she ate it, stretched on the ground, dropping her muzzle into her paws for each musty bite. At the end she licked up the crumbs with a sort of defiant laziness, her brown head weaving interminably above her paws. Was she trying to torment the one who watched?
A temper had begun to flame in the mother’s eyes. Her ears lay back and the hairs of her ruff bristled. Now she saw the single female get up and start shambling towards a meadow below. She came to a young pine and rode it down, with the trunk between her legs. She had an air of being too indolent to walk around it, but when the leading shoot was under her mouth, she lay upon the tree and ate its tender top. She turned over on her back, letting the tree spring up. Then she started to the meadow again, her gait loose and her head wobbling.
Suddenly the canyon wind rushed into the leaves above the nook and shook them, tossing a bluebird and a pewee from their perches and swirling a pale mountain swallowtail. As if signalled by the wind, the Bear leapt over the log and galloped after the other female, threatening her with chopping teeth and a rumble in her throat. The other rolled into a trot. But she was not really being driven away. For she slowed down to flip a paw at a seedling fir, as if to express what she felt towards irritable bears. Apparently the mother did not see the insolent gesture. She had stopped and was absorbed in rooting out a lily bulb. An instant later, however, she allowed herself a peek, then an open gratified glance, at the brown rump vanishing among the trees.
This was the other’s year of freedom. Next June she would have the cubs and the fears born with them; the Bear would be the one to relax in the sun, to eat or not eat, to follow any brief whim, safe in a world where most animals were anxious. Such carefree security was always the lot of the male bears, but now had come the alternate year when the female, the mother, must be industrious and wary.
The cubs had been born during the late winter, under the snow, in a hollow sequoia log. The Bear’s maternal cycle had started. For two months, however, it was a dozing sort of motherhood. None of the family left the den. The cubs were so tiny, scarcely squirrel-sized, that the Bear fed them from stored nourishment in her body. In April, when she brought them out, each was about the length of two paws. By fall they would be half as large as she, and must have learned to take care of themselves. For the mother would sleep off all sense of responsibility before the following spring.
Now in June she was teaching the young ones as strenuously as if she knew to the day how short was the time for imparting all the bear skills. The cubs tried to somersault out of every tedious lesson. First and constantly, the Bear must discipline herself, drive muscles habitually lazy, hold in line a capricious nature. Although safe herself, she never ceased listening, testing the wind, trying to peer into shadows of trees and brush with her half-blind eyes, to protect the cubs from their particular danger.
After the single female left, the mother sauntered around, apparently aimless, actually making a shrewd survey of the neighborhood odors. She wanted to go into the meadow, but first must be sure that the cubs were safe. They still slept. She went a short way up the wooded slope, sniffing into the footprints where Beetle Rock bears climbed to the human village each night. She found no new male scent. At the upper point of the meadow flowed a spring. No male had drunk there since the previous evening. She circled two granite blocks at the base of the slide. They hid no trace of bears, nor did a chinquapin thicket. Finally the mother tested the canyon wind, blowing in over the meadow. Then she walked down in the grass.
This was the smallest meadow she visited — only a pocket of vivid green in the mountain crease between Beetle Rock and the bordering trees. The grasses were thick and throat-high, but the Bear flattened them without effort. A month earlier she would have eaten them; now in June she was moving on to a patch of corn lilies. The naked pads of her feet squelched into mud. For the water of the spring spread over the sedge-roots here; farther down it channelled into a brook, then cascaded over a blade of granite at the meadow’s end.
The Bear dug up one of the corn lily bulbs and ate it, crushing it with a single chomp of her teeth. It was crisp and cold, and rich enough to relieve her emptiness slightly. More lily bulbs, also bulbs of blue flowering camass, and shooting stars she scooped out and ate with motions so fast and efficient that they had a gross beauty. Since the Bear was weaning the cubs, her need for food was not the obsession it had been, but she seldom was merely hungry. More of the time she was famished. No taller than a doe, she weighed four times as much and must labor to keep her bulk nourished.
At the ground, the Bear’s nose was upon the spice of water cress and the clean decay of sticks and dead roots wet by the brook. The sweetness of Queen Anne’s lace and rein-orchis hung over the grass, mixed with the piney warmth of the trees. All of these were only a pleasant blend, the smell of bright summer. More meaningful to the Bear was the scent of mice, and of the Coyote, who must have been hunting them recently. From the thickets below Beetle Rock the wind blew up the scent of a deer herd pasturing there. The smell of deer was often in the air, a dull, familiar torment. The mother caught no trace of the odor she dreaded.
Her weak eyes did not show her the meadow’s sparkle — the electric blue of the Steller Jay, sipping at the spring, the dragonflies’ wings, like woven cobwebs, and a western tanager. But the Bear listened to the meadow sounds. One made her lift her head. Was it a click of claws on wood? She waited. Through her misty impression of the meadow spread a quail’s call, a sapsucker’s drill, and the brook’s cool curling over the ledge and crystal trickle below. Then came the voice she expected:
“Muh! Muh!”
It was the brown cub’s cry. The tone was a clang, loud and hoarse, as if the voice were a grown bear’s, but the expression was helpless, even a little frightened.
The Bear started for the nook. When it cleared in her eyes, she found that the brown cub was up on the log. Still too sleepy to straighten out, he stood with hind legs turned sidewise, forelegs to the front. He was whimpering into the fur of his chest, for he wanted his mother, and food. Instead now he got a push from the nose of his brother. He fell off the log and the black cub climbed up. He walked along on his hind legs, scratching the sides of his belly. But his nose was too high. He stumbled over a snag and fell off, too. The cubs began scuffling. The mother strode up and gave each a cuff that rolled him into the grass.
As the Bear followed them into the meadow, they bounded towards her, their small bodies rocking from front legs to back. They romped against her, trying to force her into a sitting position so they could nurse. She trotted away from them. They thought her escape a game, and rollicked along behind. When they caught her, they tried to nuzzle against her. She spanked them away. Instead of milk this morning, they were going to have a lesson in digging bulbs.
The black cub stood off in the grass, peeking at his mother through the tall blades. She uprooted a lily bulb for the brown one. He turned his face aside. She pushed it nearer. He started to walk away — and suddenly was going much faster than his own legs had carried him. When he stopped, he unwound and whined, not interested in bulbs, very sorry for himself. The Bear dug up two more bulbs and left him looking at them as if they were insults.
Where was the black cub? The Bear sniffed but could not find his scent. A slap of claws on stone d
rew her to the upper end of the meadow. The cub was on the top of a flat boulder. He had been chasing a lizard, which had darted into a crack. Now he sat up, clinging to a hind foot with each forepaw, teetering back and forth. He would not recognize his mother, for she had disappointed him. Yet — she might, after all, be coming to give him some milk. He tumbled off the rock and ran to her, realized his mistake, and dodged her paw. Then he hid again in the grass.
The brown one too had disappeared. Their hunger would bring them back; meanwhile the Bear would find more bulbs for herself. She started into the meadow, the dusty smell of lichen here blending into the fresh resin of new fir needles, that into a root’s dank woodiness, and the pungency of chinquapin. The juiciness of deep grass came into focus, but crossed with a scent less harmless. The Bear stood erect, her nose turned into the wind. Then she called the cubs with an urgent warning, half-disguised, an ominous cough.
They broke out of the grass, too slowly, pouting. The Bear rushed at one and the other, growling through her teeth. If nothing else would frighten them, she would, for they must get into a tree! The cubs bounded to a tall pine. The mother followed, swimming up the trunk so swiftly that her fur rippled.
The wind continued to polish the grasses. And a purple finch unfurled his song. Twice, and now three times, its last sure note streamed into the sun-bloom. But a huge, blunt head had risen above the meadow’s outer ledge. Behind it pushed the shoulders of a cinnamon male bear. He had heard the rattle of claws, and now galloped to the family’s tree, agile within his massive bear coat.
With momentum like a wave’s against a rock, his immense bulk lifted upon the pine trunk. He stood, gripping the bark and snarling, lips back from teeth long, strong, and white. Between those teeth, any living flesh would be soft.
The mother leaned from the lowest bough. Saliva poured from her mouth as her teeth reached down for the male. His claws tore the bark from the trunk. The snarls of the mother rose to a deadlier clang than his. The male bear embraced the trunk as though starting up the tree.
But his gesture was a bluff. He would have small chance of climbing past the mother, for she would attack from above. His deep animosity was not towards her, but the cubs. Even if he could break through her defense, the cubs would escape him here. She would have taught them to retreat to the ends of boughs too light to hold a grown bear. He dropped with all feet on the ground, but remained beside the pine. A grumble in his throat meant plainly that he controlled the situation, since he could keep the others aloft as long as he stayed in the meadow.
The mother was silent. She crouched closer against the trunk, now seeming to draw within the shadow of her fur.
After a while the male bear wandered towards the grass. The breadth of his shaggy back was impressive, even here near the cliff’s great wall. Many animals looked unnaturally small on Beetle Rock, dwarfed by the canyon below them, startling-deep, and the trees above, lifting to unreal heights. Excepting the bears, only the deer and cougars held their size.
But the motions of deer and cougars were as sharply clean as the mountain light, while the gait of the male bear, now, was blurred and undecided. He walked with a pigeon-toed, wavering swing. Often he stopped and waited, blinking.
He dominated only in size, not in action, because sounds and scents, by which he was guided, must be groped for. His attack at close range was strong, but his partial blindness made it impossible for him to chase. Therefore he must be satisfied with food like grass and nuts. The blindness put a curse on his temper, too. He must be suspicious, ready with quick-flaring anger, in case an enemy crept undetected into his fog. No creature would start a fight with him, but some of them tried to steal what food he did get. Sullenness was part of his defense — necessary, but it darkened even his relationship with his own kind.
At the edge of the meadow he waited for something to reach into his boredom. Something did — a thin thread of scent, growing stronger as he followed it to the pine tree the single female had ridden down. All his movements were decisive now, as he smelled around the base of the tree. He partly reared, one forepaw on the trunk, and sniffed up and down the bark minutely. A tuft of the female’s fur had pulled out on the needles of a branch. The bear muzzled it as if he could not get enough of her delectable scent. Then suddenly he left the tree and was following her trail out of the meadow. For the present, at least, the mother and cubs were forgotten. The bear disappeared into the grove.
The mother’s discipline was not softened by the experience with the cinnamon male. She called the cubs out of the tree and resumed the lessons in bulb-digging. The cubs were too hungry now to be playful. They tried the new food. It did not have the lovely milk taste, but felt better than nothing going into their stomachs.
Before their appetites were satisfied, the Bear started the trip of the day. The family would spend the rest of the morning rounding Beetle Rock. In the hollow at the other end, they would sleep until early evening. Then they would descend to the stream and follow it to a greater meadow.
The cubs’ training would continue all the way. Black bears ate many things, and the getting of most required practice. Honey, grass, acorns, and berries were found without skill, and the bears stole cones from chickarees. But the cubs must learn to smell beetles under the bark of trees, and roots deep in the soil. Ground squirrels, mice, frogs, and fish each were captured by a different technique.
The Bear had led the way onto the wooded ledge along the face of the cliff. Now came a lesson in ant-hunting. The Bear sniffed along the trail until she found an anthill, then stopped with her nose over it. The cubs, following in single file, came up and stood beside her. While they watched, she clawed out a crater. She laid her paw upon it. Soon ants were running over the pads and toes. She licked them off.
The brown cub was the first to try. He put his small paw on the anthill, at once took it off, and began to lick. He got few ants, but he ran his tongue all over the paw, with a pleased hum and frequently a smack.
It was the black one’s turn. He sat down on the anthill. The mother cuffed him off and tried to teach him by placing her paw on the sand, then eating the ants she captured. She moved back. Again he sat on the mound. She let him stay. Soon the ants were swarming over his legs and body, even into his ears. He ran around rubbing against tree trunks, and whimpering, but she did nothing to help him.
She walked on. This stone might have grubs beneath it. While the cubs waited, she turned it over. The grubs were there. She licked up one and gave each young bear a chance. A few steps farther the lesson was repeated. The black cub knew what he should do. He saw a boulder twice his size, stood against it, and pushed. It didn’t go over! He pushed again, giving his mother a sidewise, cheated look. She showed him a smaller rock, but he continued to shove at the big one, now in a little temper. Finally he ran off into the brush. He didn’t want grubs anyway, he wanted milk. The brown cub turned over a stone and found nothing but gravel. He lay down and rolled in some crackling oak leaves. The black cub came and punched him. He got to his feet, and the two began to box. The mother left them. Abruptly she trotted off along the trail, keeping her ears turned back, however. Soon the scuffling ceased and following her she heard the padding feet of the cubs, who had not yet learned the knack of a silent tread.
Now the Bear felt a need to rest and, in her skillful wild way, relaxed without losing any of her caution. Her very motions seemed a kind of sleep, so undriven were they, so lightly directed towards one thing then another. She meandered from side to side on the trail, took the curves roundly, slowed on the upgrades, let her weight carry her down the declines. She stopped to feel the wind, which lifted the sunny-morning heat out of her fur. This shelf on the Rock was narrow, but a strip of wilderness grew upon it. Trees were near if a bear wanted a refuge, or one could disappear anywhere into a dense confusion of leaves. Here a paw could scarcely be lifted without touching a green spray, or fall without stepping on flowers, or the mountain misery, like minute ferns, that covered the groun
d. Spikes of blue lupine raised their fragrance nose-high. Scarlet hummers’ trumpets tossed from cracks in the rocks; the deeper red of snow plant stalks glowed from the black loam.
The family came to a turn, and beyond it found their path blocked by the single female. She sat in the middle of the trail, tearing apart a sugar pine cone. Since bears take utmost pride in possessing the right of way, an important issue at once arose. Neither female looked at the other, but each would try, now, to prove her dominance.
The unattached bear shifted more squarely across the path; the mother gave all her attention to the cubs, seeming for a change to enjoy their antics. How could she get them on the trail ahead of the other? To circle around frankly would be a humiliation. Suddenly the mother dashed into the brush. This chinquapin bush was an old and hated enemy! Today she would demolish it forever! Standing on her hind feet, she boxed the bush with her forepaws, right, left, and right. The branches swung, the leaves flew. She batted until only a few frayed stalks remained. Then she walked back on the trail, now in advance of the single bear. She called the cubs, with an air of having triumphed over everything, and particularly everyone, in sight. And she really had done that, for a bear who excels in bluff has proved itself the better creature.
Beside the trail stood a bear-tree, a cedar where each who passed must place his mark. The mother stretched up to tear the bark with claws and teeth, as high as she could reach. But an odor on the tree struck the action out of her. It was the odor of the cinnamon male, and it was very fresh.
At the cliff’s outer corner the grove came to an end and the ledge broke down into a slide of boulders, polished and bare. Here the animal path, winding among the granite blocks, was marked only by scratches and scents. The mother left it and led the cubs lower, to a den she knew, a cleft in the steep stone mountain.
One Day On Beetle Rock Page 7
