Part 6
I do not like even now to think of the half-hour which followed. So strong was the steel trap that the combined efforts of Brother and myself could only pry the cruel jaws apart the fraction of an inch. We were hampered, too, in our work of mercy by poor little Timothy, who, not realizing that we were trying to help him, shrieked and bit at us and scratched with his hind feet. Our hands were soon covered with blood, and there was a long, jagged line of red on Brother’s face where the baby bear had clawed him. But we did not pause in our efforts. Finally, by the aid of a stout stick, we managed to open the jaws of the vicious trap, and the poor little fellow, his front paws cruelly torn and bleeding, whimpering like a baby, sat down on his haunches and began to lick his wounded paws, stopping at intervals to hold them out in front of him like a child whose finger is hurt and wants it made well by a kiss.
Strangely enough, he was not afraid of us now, and when I took him in my arms his plaintive whimpering gradually ceased, and he licked at his paws solicitously.
No doubt we should have taken Timothy back to his mother and trusted to nature to heal his grievous hurts. But nature would take too long, and in the meantime he would suffer cruelly. He was such a little bear, you know, and had not yet achieved the stoicism which makes the older woods creatures almost indifferent to pain. So even at the cost of causing his mother a great deal of worry at his prolonged absence, we took him down the hill with us to the log cabin to receive first aid treatment for his wounds.
That is how Timothy, the Dirty Bear, became a friend of ours. Fate in the form of a hunter prevented us from taking him back to his home in the creek bank. The poor lady bear was shot the next day. One of her cubs was captured and the other two children escaped to the woods to live as best they could. So Timothy belonged to us, and he was the merriest of playmates.
When we rescued him from the trap he was a very tiny bear, being no larger than Tinker, our black and tan rat terrier. He slept in a clothes-basket on the back porch, sometimes having for a bedfellow Three-Spot, the mottled black and white cat. Three-Spot at first had been greatly alarmed by Timothy’s rough and sportive overtures of friendship. But when she found that by boxing his ears she could correct his manners and set him to yelping with fright, she took to imposing upon his good nature by making him serve at night for a mattress. In the morning we would find the two of them curled up together, Timothy snoring gently and Three-Spot digging her paws into his soft, thick fur with a purr that was a monotone of content.
Brother and I did not know whether Timothy’s mother had weaned him from a milk diet, but we felt that we would be safeguarding his digestion if we brought him up on liquid food for a time at least, so we rowed into town especially to purchase a bottle with a strong rubber nipple attached. The druggist asked if there was a baby at our house, and we told him yes—what kind of baby, we did not state.
Whether or not we were following the same system of dietetics that Mrs. Bear would have employed in bringing up her child, Timothy really did thrive on his liquid menu. Even after he outgrew the necessity for milk, he clung to the bottle habit and would sample the contents of any bottle he found. We used to bring him ginger ale from town and soda pop of all flavors. If nothing else was handy, we filled a battered old canteen with sweetened water, and he would tilt back on his hind legs, hold the canteen perpendicularly aloft, close his eyes, and drink it slowly, making funny little rumbling noises deep in his throat which, Brother maintained, were imitations of Three-Spot’s purring. Once he got hold of a bottle of kerosene and had closed his eyes in anticipatory ecstasy before the taste of the first terrible mouthful reached his throat. I shall never forget the look of pained disillusion on Timothy’s face. He threw the bottle from him, coughed and sputtered, gagged once or twice as if deathly sick, and then waddled off to the spring, walking pigeon-toed, and with uncomprehending anguish in the very tilt of his furry hind quarters. That should have cured him of his liking for promiscuous bottles, but it did not—as you shall see.
We worried a little at first as to what else we should give him besides milk, but we need not have concerned ourselves. Timothy’s appetite was without limits, and he could eat anything—bread, meat scraps, griddle cakes, or cold potatoes. On top of the civilized food we fed him he hunted on his own account for certain roots he liked, clawed the bark from fallen logs to get the white grubs underneath, and buried his head at the foot of hollow stumps where the red ants had made their hills. After an hour or two of such foraging, he would return to us, his face and paws besmeared with loam and covered with cobwebs, his furry coat rusty with sand and tagged by twigs and strands of blackberry vine. He would blink at us questioningly, a trifle shamefacedly, running his small red tongue along the sides of his mouth, and we would shake our heads and say mournfully, “Oh, Timothy, you dirty, dirty bear!”
After such excursions we always gave him a bath in the big washtub, and though he knew there was no escaping it, he always squealed and struggled while we lathered him and only ceased his whining when we had rinsed him and put him in the sun to dry, giving him the canteen filled with sugared water to keep him quiet.
He was the merriest playfellow we ever had. He went with us everywhere—up the Hill Trail, into the orchard, and out on the bay when we sailed our little boat and played that we were pirates. Timothy never objected to anything except a bath. We dressed him in outlandish costumes, sometimes with a red bandanna tied around his head, a shawl looped about his fat and furry body, and a wooden knife stuck in his belt. He was always ready to wrestle with us, to climb hills with us, or to be a pillow for our heads as Brother and I lay through the long, drowsy, summer afternoons and read fairy-tales aloud to each other, or described the shapes we saw in the clouds.
When the late fall came, Timothy remembered he was a bear long enough to have a desire to go to bed for the winter, but what chance had a tired bear for a seasonal sleep when living in the same house with Tinker, Three-Spot, Brother, and myself? We would drag him from his clothes-basket while he whimpered with half-closed eyes, and Tinker would badger him into wakefulness and a game of tag. Then the four of us would go through the orchard up to the Hill Trail, pushing each other into the drifts of dead leaves and playing hide and seek around the stumps and logs.
Of course Timothy could not stay with us always; that was too much to expect. He belonged to the woods, and sooner or later he must obey their call. He had belonged to us for almost a year, and it was only right that the out-of-doors should at last claim her child. But when the call of the wild did come, we were sorry in spite of ourselves, and when Timothy’s absences came more and more frequently and the intervals of time he spent with us lessened, we missed him sorely. We knew that soon our playmate would be with us no more, that he would go back to the forest whence he came, and take up the serious business of finding a wife and of locating a tree or a hole in which to spend the next winter.
The manner of his departure was dramatic, even as was his advent into our lives. We were up on the Hill Trail, Brother and I, and we had, as we supposed, left Timothy on the back porch sleeping in his clothes-basket, for which he was now much too big, but to which he had become attached through habit. On the open trail with its sound-deadening mat of hard, brown earth we did not hear the soft, padding feet that followed us and were not aware that our friend was near at hand until we met a hunter, brown-faced and with a gun in hand, near the bend in the path that we called “U-Chu-Ka’s Corner,” in memory of our little rabbit friend.
The man had a red band around his hat, I remember, and a canteen was slung at his side. He had put it to his lips to drink when he caught sight of us, and suddenly his eyes widened, and the hand that held the canteen became rigid.
“Run, you kids!” he gasped out, “there’s a bear behind you!”
We turned to confront Timothy, who was standing pigeon-toed in the middle of the trail, his face covered with loam from a rotten stump where he had been digging for ants, his eyes blinking at us sleepily and a trifle reproachfully for having gone off without him. But before we could explain to the hunter that the bear behind us was a friend of ours, the man had raised his gun and leveled it at our playfellow. I screamed aloud and Brother, heedless of the danger flung himself in front of the rifle.
Now Timothy knew nothing of guns, but he had long and satisfactory acquaintance with bottles and canteens. He had seen the man drink. There was something contained therein that he, Timothy, would like. The man would not mind sharing it—I’m sure he reasoned thus to himself—and in that instant when the gun was pointed straight at him, he rose on his hind feet, his furry arms outstretched, and started toward the hunter.
The man with the gun forgot to pull the trigger; he forgot everything except that a dark brown body with gleaming black eyes was advancing upon him. He gave a little squeal of terror, and the rifle dropped from his hands. He turned and fled down the trail with Timothy galloping on all fours close at his heels. In spite of our breathless calls he would not return to us, and though we ran and called and laughed at the same time, he soon outdistanced us. When last we saw the hunter he was disappearing over the crest of a little hillock in the trail with the canteen bobbing behind him, and the hat with the red band made a dot of scarlet against the underbrush where it had fallen.
We heard afterward that the man had not stopped running until he reached the little town. Timothy by that time was nowhere in sight, having given up the pursuit of the canteen in disgust.
But we never saw him again. Perhaps returning home he met a comely lady bear and they decided to set up housekeeping together. Perhaps she even won his heart by telling him that she knew where there was a nice bottle full of sweetened water.
Long afterward we found one day by the creek bed a ginger ale bottle dropped there by some picknickers. It was empty, and on the gravel near by we saw footprints almost human in shape, only smaller and toeing in toward each other.
We knew somehow that Timothy had been there. It was almost as if he had known we would pass that way, and had left the bottle and his footprints where we would see them to tell us that we were not forgotten, nor were the things we had taught him.
_Part Nine_ THE BANDIT BIRD
_Part Nine_ _The_ BANDIT BIRD
I hope the fact that Hector was a chicken hawk will not prejudice you against him unduly. There are brigands, you know, who have gentlemanly instincts, and I am sure that if Hector had been a bandit chief, he would have spared women and children and given part of his plunderings to charity. After all, he was not to blame for being a hawk or for having a natural liking for live poultry. There was at times a mournful dignity about him, as if he resented the unfair workings of a fate which had made him a robber bird, a trespasser on the lives of other creatures, and at enmity with every living thing.
He was a beautiful hawk with gray-brown plumage, wing tips that turned slightly upward when he flew, and a fierce and royal beak curved like a scimitar. His eyes were very black, very bright, and very knowing. Most of the time they were superbly disdainful. But Brother and I have seen them when they actually seemed to smile.
It was Brother who named him, for the alliterative privilege, I suspect, of calling him “Hector, the Horrible Hawk.” But that was only in fun. For he was not horrible at all when we got to know him. Lazarus thinks otherwise, very probably. But then his experience with Hector was a trying one, and to this day—if he still lives—he carries the marks of his eventful meeting with our friend, the robber chief.
Lazarus was a pet chicken, son of Sironda, the black minorca hen. We gave him his curious name because he had a talent for venturing very near death’s door, and the fact that we always saved him lent appropriateness to his name. Once when very young, no more than five days out of his shell, he was all but scalped by a rival mother hen, and when we answered his frantic baby peeps for help his head was bleeding profusely, and his eyes were closed as if in death. We sprinkled water on his tiny bill and salved his lacerated head. And he, having a strong constitution, came back from the tomb, as it were, and lived a long and eventful life. In order to care for him better, we kept him in the back-yard, tucking him at night into a small box under flannel coverings. He thrived and grew from chickhood very sturdily, and the only ill effect that remained from his early mishap was that he was quite bald. No feathers ever came on the spot where the lady hen had scalped him, and we could have distinguished him from every cockerel of his size and color in the world by that little bare place on the top of his head.
Now, when Lazarus lost his first baby down and was in that shorn and untidy condition which always precedes the growth of real feathers, he suddenly became lonesome for the other members of the poultry yard. He would run the length of the wire fence, poking his head through the small meshes, and more than once he nearly strangled to death by getting it caught. We always rescued him just in time to save his life. So finally we allowed him to go into the barnyard with the rest of his kindred. It was then that Lazarus had the big adventure of his already crowded career. His meeting with Hector lifted him to dizzy heights—and I am not speaking figuratively. It really did. At that, it wasn’t so much a meeting as an abduction. At least Hector intended it to be such.
We were constantly on guard to keep hawks away from the ranch. They waged merciless warfare on our chickens, pigeons, and guinea-pigs, and there was always a loaded, double-barreled shotgun behind the kitchen door ready for action in case of an air raid. When we heard the frightened flapping of the pigeons as they flew in aimless circles around the cabin and barn, we knew a hawk was somewhere overhead, hovering with curved-up wings and cruel, bright eyes, seeking his prey, choosing it calmly, waiting patiently the proper moment to swoop down upon it.
The chickens, too, always told us when such danger was near. Prince, the great white Plymouth Rock rooster, would set up a long-drawn cry of warning, and the hens would burst into frenzied cackling. The whole poultry yard would cock its head on one side to get a better view of the air robber, then would scoot to cover of the barn or hen-houses, every neck ruff distended. Sometimes it was a false alarm. A crow would be flying peaceably on his business, or a sea-gull would have swerved inland a bit. Prince took no chances. It was his duty to guard the poultry yard, and he believed firmly in the policy of safety first.
But many times the warning was one of real danger. A hawk would indeed be circling slowly above the barnyard, his bright eyes fixed calculatingly on the scurrying fowls below. Then one of the grown-ups would snatch the double-barreled shotgun from behind the kitchen door and fire at the winged plunderer. The shot, though it did not usually kill, always frightened the air robber away, and we would watch him fly lazily, almost contemptuously, off toward the hill and the thick woods, his powerful wings moving steadily and easily.
Sometimes, though, the bandit birds came and swooped down on their prey—a small chick or a baby guinea-pig—before we could prevent it. And often a bloody bunch of feathers near the rookery would testify to the murderous skill of a hawk and the sad fate of a hapless pigeon.
It was on a day when the grown-ups had gone to town. The Old Fisherman was mending his nets down on the float in front of the cabin. It was a lazy summer day, and Brother and I were sitting on the porch steps reading—the steps that were made of roughly-hewn logs.
All at once we heard the familiar danger signal of Prince, the white rooster, and then the hens began to cackle in a very panic of fear. We dropped our books, but before we could even start for the back-yard, we heard another sound which seemed so impossible and so out of place that we listened paralyzed with astonishment. It was the shrill and frenzied peeping of a half-grown chicken in terrible distress—_and the sound came from above us_!
The next instant, as we stood staring, hardly crediting what our eyes told us, we saw a large chicken hawk fly slowly past the cabin, no higher than the roof of the porch. He flew so slowly and at such a short distance from the earth because he was weighted down with a live and struggling young cockerel, which he held grimly in his sharp talons! There was a shout that came from our throats simultaneously, “_Lazarus!_”
For the struggling, shrilly-peeping victim was no other than our bald-headed friend whom we had saved from death half a dozen times before. His bare, gangling legs hung limply beneath him; his neck jerked spasmodically with his frantic appeals for help. His wings, with their absurd tufts of feathers, stuck out at right angles from his body, for the hawk’s talons were buried in the flesh beneath them.
At the time, you may be sure, we did not wait to make any remarks on all these observations. With one thought Brother and I plunged through the front door, back into the kitchen, and bumped into each other in our eagerness to get the gun. It was Brother who seized it first, and through the two rooms we dashed again and out into the front yard. The hawk was flying slowly and with evident difficulty—for Lazarus was a healthy, heavy youngster—across the open space that lay between the yard of the cabin and the old brickyard shed which adjoined it.
Brother, bent back almost double by the weight of the heavy weapon, pressed it against his shoulder, took careful aim, and fired. I screamed, for there were three falls. Brother tumbled backward from the kick of the shotgun. Lazarus hurtled to earth in a sprawl of legs and wings and lay there, uttering feeble, choking sounds. The hawk rocketed down, a flutter of gray-brown feathers; there was blood upon the grass where he dropped.
The Old Fisherman, hearing the commotion, came running up the float, the wooden shuttle with which he mended nets still grasped tightly in his hand.
Brother scrambled to his feet, blinking dazedly at the result of his marksmanship. Our first thought was that Lazarus was killed at last. But he was apparently only severely shaken by his fall, for presently he walked off a little dizzily, his tender skin bleeding where the hawk’s talons had sunk in.
The hawk was our next consideration. Now that we had wounded him—I say “we,” because I felt that the responsibility was half mine—we were sorry for his plight. He was thrashing about helplessly on the grass, one wing dragging at his side. He was trying desperately to fly, but could not so much as lift himself above the ground. His fierce, dark eyes blazed at us, and his powerful, curved beak snapped menacingly when we approached him. But at last his strength failed him, the bleeding wing spread itself out in a fan, and he sank over on one side, his talons jerking spasmodically. As we came nearer he regarded us with eyes that were unafraid. They even seemed dull with apathy, as if he knew that the end had come and that he, like the robber aristocrat that he was, must accept it philosophically.
The Old Fisherman was for ending his life then and there. But Brother and I could not bear to have him killed, for he was at our mercy, hurt and helpless. For the first time in our lives we had deliberately wounded something that lived and had feelings even as we. The knowledge that we had fired upon him to save our friend’s life was not sufficient excuse for us to allow the Old Fisherman to kill him.
So together we caught him, tied his fierce beak so he could not snap at us, bound his powerful legs so that his talons should not tear our hands, then the Old Fisherman, grumblingly, but gently, bathed and salved the injured wing. In time it would be as good as new, he told us, but he didn’t know what our folks would say to our saving the life of a “pesterin’, low-lived hawk.”
As he anticipated, the grown-ups were not at all pleased when they returned from town and found Hector—he had been named by that time—tied by one leg to a stake in the back-yard, his right wing sadly out of focus and smeared with a clot of blood. But it was not in their kindly hearts to kill in cold blood, so they let the hawk live.
For the first few days that Hector was in our midst he did little except to tug at the chain which bound him to the stake, slowly and automatically, like a man taking morning exercises with rubber ropes. He hated us and repulsed our attentions fiercely and scornfully. He refused to eat the tempting bits of raw meat that we spread before him; he sulked all day with his curved beak hidden in the ruffled feathers of his breast. He was indeed like a robber chieftain in captivity. We were patient, however, for we knew that according to Hector’s viewpoint we had injured him without reason. He had been in search of his dinner—a perfectly legitimate occupation for any one—and as he was carrying it off we had not only robbed him of it, but wounded him grievously. You can see that he had a great deal of logic on his side.
But little by little his haughty antagonism melted before our daily overtures. He no longer snapped at us when we came near, and began to take an active interest in the food we brought him. There came a day when he allowed me to put my hand on the soft, smooth feathers of his head and back, and when I gently massaged his wounded wing with vaseline he opened his beak as if to bite my hand but closed it without doing me harm.
Then, wonder of wonders, Hector began to like us. When he saw us coming into the back-yard he would set up a sort of dancing, jumping up and down stiff-legged, spreading out his dark wings, and straining at the chain. His beak would snap open and shut, and his bright, black eyes seemed actually to have a smile in them. He would allow me to salve his injury with only the faintest suggestion of nervousness in his half-open beak, and on the day when we unchained his leg from the stake he sat on my hand with all the dignity of an emperor receiving his court after a long illness.