my bright young reader: i was once exactly your own age. like all boys, i was, from the first, fond of bear stories, and above all, i did not like stories that seemed the least bit untrue. i always preferred a natural and reasonable story and one that would instruct as well as interest. this i think best for us all, and i have acted on this line in compiling these comparatively few bear stories from a long life of action in our mountains and up and down the continent.
as a rule, the modern bear is not a bloody, bad fellow, whatever he may have been in bible days. you read, almost any circus season, about the killing of his keeper by a lion, a tiger, a panther, or even the dreary old elephant, but you never hear of a tame bear’s hurting anybody.
i suppose you have been told, and believe, that bears will eat boys, good or bad, if they meet them in the woods. this is not true. on the contrary, there are several well-authenticated cases, in germany mostly, where bears have taken lost children under their protection, one boy having been
reared from the age of four to sixteen by a she bear without ever seeing the face of man.
i have known several persons to be maimed or killed in battles with bears, but in every case it was not the bear that began the fight, and in all my experience of about half a century i never knew a bear to eat human flesh, as does the tiger and like beasts.
each branch of the bear family is represented here and each has its characteristics. by noting these as you go along you may learn something not set down in the schoolbooks. for the bear is a shy old hermit and is rarely encountered in his wild state by anyone save the hardy hunter, whose only interest in the event is to secure the skin and carcass.
of course, now and then, a man of science meets a bear in the woods, but the meeting is of short duration. if the bear does not leave, the man of books does, and so we seldom get his photograph as he really appears in his wild state. the first and only bear i ever saw that seemed to be sitting for his photograph was the swamp, or “sloth,” bear—ursus labiatus—found in the marshes at the mouth of the mississippi river. you will read of an encounter with him further on.
i know very well that there exists a good deal of bad feeling between boys and bears, particularly on the part of boys. the trouble began, i suppose, about the time when that old she bear destroyed more than forty boys at a single meeting, for poking fun at a good old prophet. and we read that david, when a boy, got very angry at a she bear and slew her single-handed and alone for interfering with his flock. so you see the feud between the boy and bear family is an old one indeed.
but i am bound to say that i have found much that is pathetic, and something that is almost half-human, in this poor, shaggy, shuffling hermit. he doesn’t want much, only the wildest and most worthless parts of the mountains or marshes, where, if you will let him alone, he will let you alone, as a rule. sometimes, out here in california, he loots a pig-pen, and now and then he gets among the bees. only last week, a little black bear got his head fast in a bee-hive that had been improvised from a nail-keg, and the bee-farmer killed him with a pitchfork; but it is only when hungry and far from home that he seriously molests us.
the bear is a wise beast. this is, perhaps, because he never says anything. next to the giraffe, which you may know never makes any noise or note whatever, notwithstanding the wonderful length of his throat, the bear is the most noiseless of beasts. with his nose to the ground all the time, standing up only now and then to pull a wild plum or pick a bunch of grapes, or knock a man down if he must, he seems to me like some weary old traveler that has missed the right road of life and doesn’t quite know what to do with himself. ah! if he would only lift up his nose and look about over this beautiful world, as the indians say the grizzly bear was permitted to do before he disobeyed and got into trouble, an account of which you will find further on, why, the bear might be less a bear.
stop here and reflect on how much there is in keeping your face well lifted. the pig with his snout to the ground will be forever a pig; the bear will be a bear to the end of his race, because he will not hold up his head in the world; but the horse—look at the horse! however, our business is with the bear now.
