Children of the Wild Part 10

"You see, as soon as the bees got it into their cunning heads that their enemy was going to succeed in breaking into their storehouse, they decided that it was more important to save their treasures than to fight the enemy. It's like when one's house is on fire. At first one fights to put the fire out. When that's no use, then one thinks only of saving the things. That's the principle the bees generally go upon.

At first they attack the enemy, in the hope of driving him off. But if they find that he is going to succeed in breaking in and burglarizing the place, then they fling themselves on the precious honey which they have taken so much pains to store, and begin to stuff their honey sacks as full as possible. All they think of then is to carry away enough to keep them going while they are getting established in new quarters.

The trouble with the fool bear who has got us into this mess to-day was that he tackled a bee tree where the outside wood was too strong for him to rip open. The bees knew he couldn't get in at them, so they all turned out after him, to give him a good lesson. When he got away through the underbrush so quickly they just turned on us, because they felt they must give a lesson to somebody."

"_We_ didn't want to steal their old honey," muttered the Babe in an injured voice.

"Oh, I'm not so sure!" said Uncle Andy. "I shouldn't wonder if Bill and I'd come over here some night and smoke the rascals out. But we can wait. That's the difference between us and Teddy Bear. He wouldn't even wait to clean the leaves off his face, he was so anxious for that honey, and his revenge.

"This time he went up the tree slowly and quietly, keeping out of sight all the way. When he was exactly on a level with the entrance he braced himself solidly, reached his right paw around the trunk like lightning, got a fine hold on the edge of the new crack, and wrenched with all his might.

"A big strip of half-rotten wood came away so suddenly that Teddy Bear nearly fell out of the tree.

"A lot of bees came with it; and once more Teddy Bear's head was in a swarm of little darting, piercing flames. But his blood was up. He held onto that chunk of bee tree. A big piece of comb, dripping with honey and crawling with bees, was sticking to it. Whimpering and pawing at his face, he crunched a great mouthful of the comb, bees and all.

"Never had he tasted, never had he dreamed of, anything so delicious!

What was the pain of his smarting muzzle to that ecstatic mouthful? He s.n.a.t.c.hed another, which took all the rest of the comb. Then he flung the piece of wood to the ground.

"The bees, meanwhile--except those which had stung him and were now crawling, stingless and soon to die, in his fur--had suddenly left him.

The whole interior of their hive was exposed to the glare of daylight, and their one thought now was to save all they could. Teddy Bear's one thought was to seize all he could. He clawed himself around boldly to the front of the tree, plunged one greedy paw straight into the heart of the hive, s.n.a.t.c.hed forth a big, dripping, crawling comb, and fell to munching it up as fast as possible--honey, bees, brood-comb, bee-bread, all together indiscriminately. The distracted bees paid him no more attention. They were too busy filling their honey sacks."

The Babe smacked his lips. He was beginning to get pretty hungry himself.

"Well," continued Uncle Andy, "Teddy Bear chewed and chewed, finally plunging his whole head into the sticky mess--getting a few stings, of course, but never thinking of them--till he was just so gorged that he couldn't hold another morsel. Then, very slowly and heavily, grunting all the time, he climbed down the bee tree. He felt that he wanted to go to sleep. When he reached the bottom he sat up on his haunches to look around for some sort of a snug corner. His eyelids were swollen with stings, but his little round stomach was swollen with honey, so he didn't care a cent. His face was all daubed with honey, and earth, and leaves, and dead bees. His whole body was a sight. And his claws were so stuck up with honey and rotten wood and bark that he kept opening and shutting them like a baby who has got a feather stuck to its fingers and doesn't know what to do with it, But he was too sleepy to bother about his appearance. He just waddled over to a sort of nook between the roots of the next tree, curled up with his sticky nose between his sticky paws, and was soon snoring."

"And did he ever get out of that deep hole?" inquired the Babe, always impatient of the abrupt way in which Uncle Andy was wont to end his stories.

"Of course he got out. He climbed out," answered Uncle Andy. "Do you suppose a bear like that could be kept shut up long? And now I think we might be getting out, too! I don't hear any more humming outside, so I reckon the coast's about clear."

He peered forth cautiously.

"It's all right. Come along," he said. "And there's my pipe at the foot of the rock, just where I dropped it," he added, in a tone of great satisfaction. Then, with mud-patched, swollen faces, and crooked but cheerful smiles, the two refugees emerged into the golden light of the afternoon, and stretched themselves. But, as Uncle Andy surveyed first the Babe and then himself in the un.o.bstructed light, his smile faded.

"I'm afraid Bill's going to have the laugh on us when we get home!"

said he.

CHAPTER VII

THE SNOWHOUSE BABY

There had been a film of gla.s.s-clear ice that morning all round the sh.o.r.es of Silverwater. It had melted as the sun climbed high into the bland October blue; but in the air remained, even at midday, a crispness, a tang, which set the Child's blood tingling. He drew the spicy breath of the spruce forests as deep as possible into his little lungs, and outraged the solemn silences with shouts and squeals of sheer ecstasy, which Uncle Andy had not the heart to suppress. Then, all at once, he remembered what the thrilling air, the gold and scarlet of the trees, the fairy ice films, the whirr of the partridge wings, and the sharp cries of the bluejays all meant. It meant that soon Uncle Andy would take him back to town, the cabin under the hemlock would be boarded up. Bill the Guide would go off to the lumber camps beyond the Ottanoonsis, and Silverwater would be left to the snow and the solitude of winter. His heart tightened with homesickness. Yet, after all, he reflected, during the months of cold his beloved Silverwater would be none too friendly a place, especially to such of the little furred and feathered folk as were bold enough to linger about its sh.o.r.es. He s.h.i.+vered as he thought of the difference winter must make to all the children of the wild.

"Why so solemn all of a sudden?" asked Uncle Andy, eyeing him suspiciously. "I thought a minute ago you'd take the whole roof off the forest an' scare the old bull moose across the lake into shedding his new antlers."

"I was just thinking," answered the Child.

"And does it hurt?" inquired Uncle Andy politely.

But, young as he was, the Child had learned to ignore sarcasm--especially Uncle Andy's, which he seldom understood.

"I was just wondering," he replied, shaking his head thoughtfully, "what the young ones of all the wild creatures would do in the winter to keep warm. Bill says they all go to sleep. But I don't see how _that_ keeps them warm, Uncle Andy."

"Oh, _Bill_!" remarked Uncle Andy, in a tone which stripped all Bill's statements of the last shreds of authority. "But, as a matter of fact, there _aren't_ many youngsters around in the woods in winter--not enough for you to be looking so solemn about. They're mostly born early enough in spring and summer to be pretty well grown up by the time winter comes on them."

"Gee!" murmured the Child enviously. "I wish I could get grown up as quick as that."

Uncle Andy sniffed.

"There are lots of people besides you," said he, "that don't know when they're well off. But," he continued, seating himself on Bill's chopping log and meditatively cleaning out his pipe bowl with a bit of chip, "there _are_ some youngsters who have a fas.h.i.+on of getting themselves born right in the worst of the cold weather--and that not here in Silverwater neither, but way up north, where weather is weather, let me tell you--where it gets so cold that, if you were foolish enough to cry, the tears would all freeze instantly, till your eyes were shut up in a regular ice jam."

"I wouldn't cry," declared the Child.

"No? But I don't want you to interrupt me any more."

"Of course not," said the Child politely. Uncle Andy eyed him searchingly, and then decided to go on.

"Away up north," he began abruptly--and paused to light his pipe--"away up north, as I was saying, it was just midwinter. It was also midnight--which, in those lat.i.tudes, is another way of saying the same thing. The land as far as eye could see in every direction was flat, dead white, and smooth as a table, except for the long curving windrows into which the hard snow had been licked up by weeks of screaming wind.

Just now the wind was still. The sky was like black steel sown with diamonds, and the stars seemed to snap under the terrific cold. Suddenly their bitter sparkle faded, and a delicate pale green glow spread itself, opening like a fan, till it covered half the heavens. Almost immediately the center of the base of the fan rolled itself up till the strange light became an arch of intense radiance, the green tint s.h.i.+fting rapidly to blue-white, violet, gold, and cherry rose. A moment more and the still arch broke up into an incalculable array of upright spears of light, pointing toward the zenith, and dancing swiftly from side to side with a thin, mysterious rustle. They danced so for some minutes, ever changing color, till suddenly they all melted back into the fan-shaped glow. And the glow remained, throbbing softly as if breathless, uncertain whether to die away or to go through the whole performance again."

"I know--" began the Child, but checked himself at once with a deprecating glance of apology.

"Except for the dancing wonder of the light," continued Uncle Andy, graciously pretending not to hear the interruption, "nothing stirred in all that emptiness of naked s.p.a.ce. Of life there was not the least sign anywhere. This appeared the very home of death and intolerable cold.

Yet at one spot, between two little, almost indistinguishable ridges of snow, might have been noticed a tiny wisp of vapor. If one had put his face down close to the snow, so that the vapor came between his eyes and the light, he would have made it out quite distinctly. And it would have certainly seemed very puzzling that anything like steam should be coming up out of that iron-bound expanse."

Now the Child had once seen, in the depth of winter, a wreath of mist arising from the snowy rim of an open spring, and for the life of him he could not hold his tongue.

"It was a boiling spring," he blurted out.

Uncle Andy gazed at him for some seconds in a disconcerting silence, till the Child felt himself no bigger than a minute.

"It was a bear," he announced at length coldly. Then he was silent again.

And the Child, mortified at having made such a bad guess, was silent too, in spite of his pangs of curiosity at this startling a.s.sertion.

"You see," went on Uncle Andy, after he was satisfied that the Child was not going to interrupt again, at least for the moment, "you see, under those two ridges of frozen snow there was a little cavern-like crevice in the rock. It was sheltered perfectly from those terrific winds which sometimes for days together would drive screaming over the levels. And in this crevice, at the first heavy snowfall, a big white bear had curled herself up to sleep.

"She had had a good hunting season, with plenty of seals and salmon to eat, and she was fat and comfortable. Though very drowsy, she did not go quite to sleep at once, but for several days, in a dreamy half-doze, she kept from time to time turning about and rearranging her bed. All the time the snow was piling down into the crevice, till at last it was level full and firmly packed. And in the meantime the old bear, in her sleepy turnings, had managed to make herself a sort of snowhouse--decidedly narrow, indeed, but wonderfully snug in its way. There was no room to take exercise, of course, but that, after all, was about the last thing she was thinking of. A day or two more and she was too fast asleep to do anything but breathe.

"The winter deepened, and storm after storm scourged the naked plain; and the snow fell endlessly, till the snowhouse was buried away fairly out of remembrance. The savage cold swept down noiselessly from outer s.p.a.ce, till, if there had been any such things as thermometers up there, the mercury would have been frozen hard as steel and the thin spirit to a sticky, ropy syrup. But even such cold as that could not get down to the hidden snow-house where the old bear lay so sound asleep."

The Child wagged his head wistfully at the picture, and then cheered himself with the resolve to build just such a snowhouse in the back yard that winter--if only there should fall enough snow. But he managed to hold his tongue about it.

"Just about the middle of the winter," went on Uncle Andy, after a pause to see if the Child was going to interrupt him again, "the old bear began to stir a little. She grumbled, and whimpered, and seemed to be having uneasy dreams for a day or two. At last she half woke up--or perhaps a little more than half. Then a little furry cub was born to her. She was just about wide enough awake to tell him how glad she was to see him and have him with her, and to lick him tenderly for a while, and to get him nursing comfortably. When she had quite satisfied herself that he was a cub to do her credit, she dozed off to sleep again without any anxiety whatever. You see, there was not the least chance of his being stolen, or falling downstairs, or getting into any mischief whatever. And that was where she had a great advantage over lots of mothers whom we could, think of if we tried."

"But what made the steam, Uncle Andy?" broke in the Child, somewhat irrelevantly. He had a way, sometimes rather exasperating to the narrator, of never forgetting the loose ends in a narrative, and of calling attention to them at unexpected moments.

"Can't you see that for yourself?" grunted Uncle Andy impatiently. "It was breath. Try to think for yourself a little. Well, as I was trying to say, there was nothing much for the cub to do in the snowhouse but nurse, sleep, and grow. To these three important but not exciting affairs he devoted himself entirely. Neither to him nor to his big white mother did it matter in the least whether the long Arctic gales roared over their unseen roof, or the unimaginable Arctic cold groped for them with noiseless fingers. Neither foe could reach them in their warm refuge. Nothing at all, indeed, could find them, except, once in a while, when the Northern Lights were dancing with unusual brilliance across the sky, a dim, pallid glow, which would filter down through the snow and allow the cub's eyes (if they happened to be open at the time) to make out something of his mother's gigantic white form.