MUSIC-LOVING BEARS. No, don’t despise the bear, either in his life or his death. He is a kingly fellow, every inch a king; a curious, monkish, music-loving, roving Robin Hood of his somber woods—a silent monk, who knows a great deal more than he tells. And please don’t go to look at him and sit in judgment on him behind the bars. Put yourself in his place and see how much of manhood or kinghood would be left in you with a muzzle on your mouth, and only enough liberty left to push your nose between two rusty bars and catch the peanut which the good little boy has found to be a bad one and so generously tosses it to the bear. Of course, the little boy, remembering the experience of about forty other little boys in connection with the late baldheaded Elijah, has a prejudice against the We were going to mill, father and I, and Lyte Howard, in Oregon, about forty years ago, with ox-teams, a dozen or two bags of wheat, threshed with a flail and winnowed with a wagon cover, and were camped for the night by the Calipoola River; for it took Then suddenly father seemed to feel the presence of something or somebody strange, and I felt it, too. But the fiddler felt, heard, saw nothing but the divine, wild melody that made the very pine trees dance and quiver to their tips. Oh, for the pure, wild, sweet, plaintive music once more! the music of “Money Musk,” “Zip Coon,” “Ol’ Dan Tucker” and all the other dear old airs that once made a thousand happy feet keep time on the puncheon floors from Hudson’s bank to the Oregon. But they are no more, now. They have Father got up, turned about, put me behind him like, as an animal will its young, and peered back and down through the dense tangle of the deep river bank between two of the huge oxen which had crossed the plains with us to the water’s edge; then he reached around and drew me to him with his left hand, pointing between the oxen sharp down the bank with his right forefinger. A bear! two bears! and another coming; one already more than half way across on the great, mossy log that lay above the And that is all there is to say about that, except that my father was the gentlest gentleman I ever knew and his influence must have been boundless; for who ever before heard of any hunter laying down his rifle with a family of fat black bears holding the little snow-white cross on their breasts almost within reach of its muzzle? The moon came up by and by, and the chin of the weary fiddler sank lower and lower, till all was still. The oxen lay down and ruminated, with their noses nearly against us. Then the coal-black bears melted away before the milk-white moon, and we slept there, with the sweet breath of the cattle, like incense, upon us. But how does a bear die? Ah, I had forgotten. I must tell you of death, then. I shall find time, as we go forward, to set down many incidents out of my own experience to prove that the bear is often a humorist, and never by any means a bad fellow. Judge Highton, odd as it may seem, has left the San Francisco bar for the “bar” of Mount Shasta every season for more than a quarter of a century, and he probably knows more about bears than any other eminently learned man in the world, and Henry Highton will tell you that the bear is a good fellow at home, good all through, a brave, modest, sober old monk. A monkish Robin Hood In his good green wood. |