Delphi Collected Works of Max Brand US

by Max Brand

  It did happen! Little Jack came to the fingertips, sniffed them, ventured closer, shrank from the hand which attempted, to caress him, and then came back and allowed the fingers to rub his head. He went farther out. With a faint growl of anxiety, she saw him taken up. But then there happened what had happened before. He was soothed by a gentle voice. He was stroked and rubbed to his heart’s content. Even when those sharp little teeth of his closed on the hand of the boy, even though that bite brought a small drop of crimson to the surface of the skin, he went unpunished.

  To be sure, when Jerry attempted to follow Jack, mother grizzly decided that one risk was enough at a time, and he was warned cowering back by a terrific snarl. But when Jack was returned to her a moment later, her examination of him was most cursory. At a glance, at a sniff, she knew that all was well with him still.

  The work at widening the hole continued, now, and Tommy made the chips of rock fly. But when the afternoon grew late and the spring sun sloped into the far west, he threw down the hammer with a great sigh and rubbed his aching shoulders as he contemplated what still remained to be done. And it meant days and days of this labor - and his hands were already blistered with what he had done!

  And yet what a wonderful thing it was, thought Tommy as he started home that evening, that it could lie within the power of his small hands not only to support his own life in the wilderness, but to save the lives of three other creatures? And the sense of labor accomplished and other labor to be done toward the good end filled him with a solid self-respect which was new to him. He felt these things; reason was not yet developed in him to the extent of allowing him to be mentally conscious of them.

  Once more he was too tired to keep his eyes open for long after he had eaten his supper, but as his eyes closed in profound slumber a new thought came to him. In the morning he would take all that he needed with him, block the mouth of his big cave with more and heavier rocks, and move to stay by the bear cave until the work of liberation was completed.

  That promise to himself he kept when the dawn wakened him. How little he needed, after all! Salt, a little flour, matches, and the rifle, the hammer, and a blanket tied up in the tarpaulin - that was all. As for the other food he required, his fishing line would get it for him, and he could supplement that excellent fare by knocking over one of the stupid mountain grouse now and again.

  Few as the articles were, they made a heavy pack for the legs of a twelve- year- old, and he was panting before he reached the bear cave after his breakfast. It seemed that his particular scent was now well known, for there was no thunderous roar to greet him - only a deep, anxious growl. And the little cubs, playing as usual in the clearing among the stones, retreated only to the mouth of the cave and there stood up on their hind legs, as bears do, to observe him, until they were dragged inside by the paw of bruin.

  But even this anxiety left her later on. She permitted Jack to steal out, during one of Tommy’s resting periods, while he sat down, always taking care to be in view of the mother bear so that she could see all that happened. For his great care was to reconcile her to him. As for the cubs, a thousand other persons had tamed young bears, but how often had grown grizzlies been made into safe companions? So much the greater triumph if he eventually should succeed! If a boy of twelve could succeed, surely that would be a proof that kindness is a greater weapon than the rifle. He had heard his father say that, but at the time he had not been able to understand.

  So he lay on one elbow near the mouth of the cave while Jack stole cautiously out to him - followed only by an anxious growl or two, as though to warn him that he must be on his good behavior. But Jack observed caution only for a moment. He skirmished around Tommy for a little while, and then he came straight to close quarters for a better investigation. And there followed a wonderful game!

  There were so many possibilities! There were pockets filled with strange scents which might be inquired into. There was the strange-smelling leather of the shoes, which might be chewed upon. And if one climbed to the shoulder of this playmate, his head was crowned by a thatch of hair just like the hair of a bear, although not quite so rough, perhaps.

  By this time Jerry had played the part of an idle spectator longer than he could endure, and he came out for his share of the fun. Where one had broken the ice already, it was not hard for a second to follow suit. In five minutes Jerry was every whit as familiar as Jack, while mother bruin contented herself with crowding her head out the opening and observing each move.

  With that romp ended, the cubs stayed out to continue a play of their own, while Tommy went back to his labors. At noon he went down to the brook and caught more fish, some for himself, but more for the grizzly, since she had devoured the last of those he had brought her the day before. He fed them to her, then brought up water as he had done before and actually ventured a hand inside the cave to scrape the dirt out of the hollow of the rock which served her as a drinking trough.

  But bruin merely snorted at him and came to smell the rock after he had done with it. And when the water was brought, she drank long and deep. After that, there were new mysteries into which the cubs were quickly initiated. First of all, when Tommy’s fire was lighted, they scampered, whining, back to the cave; but, after the flames had died down a bit, they were lured by the delicious odors of the roasting fish and ventured close again. They not only came close, but one at a time they sat up on their haunches and received tiny bits of the fish from the tips of Tommy’s fingers. And they relished the taste!

  Where one thing was good, why might not all be harmless?

  Alas, that it could not prove to be so! Poor Jerry selected for his next investigation a little, red hot wood coal and, after a bit of tentative sniffing, picked it up boldly in both forepaws.

  There followed a shrill squeal of pain - a roar from mother grizzly - and a slight taint of burnt hair in the air. Tommy turned anxiously to watch bruin. Would she feel that he had harmed her young ones purposely? By no means, apparently. She simply sniffed the burned paws and then promptly turned her head away and calmly ate another fish, as though she intended to convey that those who would not be warned must take the consequences. But that day and the next and the next Jerry went about on his hind legs, or if he wanted to run, he had to put all his weight upon the outside rim of his forepaws.

  All those days Tommy was working like a Trojan to widen the mouth of the cave. A week passed, and he was still at it. And now he could no longer catch enough fish to satisfy bruin. In the first place, it was harder to take them in the waters of the creek. In the second place, and primarily, the appetite of bruin had grown beyond all measure. Both food and water she seemed to require in unheard-of quantities. He kept enough of the latter for her in the cave, but of the former he could not bring sufficient. And Tommy worked with all his might to let her out so she might forage for herself.

  It was terribly slow work, however. The edge of the rock had given way rapidly enough, but now, as he came to the body of it, every inch added to the gap meant many hours of hammering. There was one great advantage, at least. The blisters had dried away, healed, and now his palms were growing calloused. And new muscles, too, had grown out on his slender young arms, so that the labor of wielding the hammer was far easier. Probably the stalwart arms of his father, swinging a sledge, would have battered away the rock in great chunks and freed the big bear within a short time. But he, with his lesser strength, could only gnaw at the rock-face little by little.

  Ten days of labor passed, and now, half a dozen times a day, bruin came to the entrance and strove to squeeze her way out, but the passage was still not big enough. And she would retire and lie down to watch and wait, though sometimes, as the wind brought to her the delightful fragrance of roots and of honey from over the woods, she would raise her big head and growl with deep impatience.

  In the meantime, there could be no doubt that even her brute mind understood perfectly the service which 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. And 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 it 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. And 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 doglike whine of eagerness from 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!

  And 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 VIII

  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. And 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 which 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 which 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 were there, perhaps, and century- old instincts which needed no supplementary instructions 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 which held his small and dwindling supply of com meal. And they persisted in coming after him and digging up the grains of corn which 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 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. And so it was, to his unspeakable delight, that they one day went with him clear 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 bruin, but what little bear can remember a beating from one day to the next? Jack and Jerry certainly could not!

  Bruin was wildly jealous at first, but her jealousy diminished. If Jack and Jerry depended upon the boy for fun and romping which she could not give them, she depended upon him for the very food which sustained her life, and, though 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, 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 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 again attack that stubborn rock. Bruin, in the meantime, stepped to the gap, sniffed at the place where he had recently been hammerin
g, with her head cocked wisely to one side, and then deliberately wedged into the gap.

  And at the first effort her shoulders came clear through!

  The head of Tommy cleared instantly. He forgot his weakness. 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 which 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.