A Little Brother to the Bear
William J. Long
BOOKS BY WILLIAM-J-LONG
A Little Brother to the Bear
FOLLOWING THE DEER
SCHOOL OF THE WOODS
BEASTS OF THE FIELD
FOWLS OF THE AIR
WAYS OF WOOD FOLK
WOOD FOLK AT SCHOOL
WILDERNESS WAYS
SECRETS OF THE WOODS
A Little Brother to the Bear
"A fierce battle in the tree-tops"
A Little Brother to the Bear and other Animal Studies
BY William J Long
Author of
School of the Woods
Beasts of the Field
Fowls of the Air
Wood Folk Series
etc.
Illustrated by Charles Copeland
Boston U.S.A. and London
GINN AND COMPANY
THE ATHENÆUM PRESS
1903
Entered at Stationers' Hall
Copyright, 1903
By WILLIAM J. LONG
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
To Lois, who likes Bears, I dedicate this book of the Bear and his little brother.
PREFACE
THE object of this little book, so far as it has an object beyond that of sharing a simple pleasure of mine with others, will be found in the first chapter, entitled "The Point of View"; and the title will be explained in the chapter on "A Little Brother to the Bear" that follows.
All the sketches here are reproduced from my own note-books largely, or from my own memory, and the observations cover a period of some thirty years,—from the time when I first began to prowl about the home woods with a child's wonder and delight to my last hard winter trip into the Canadian wilderness. Some of the chapters, like those of the Woodcock and the Coon, represent the characteristics of scores of animals and birds of the same species; others, like those of the Bear and Eider-Duck in "Animal Surgery," represent the acute intelligence of certain individual animals that nature seems to have lifted enormously above the level of their fellows; and in a single case—that of the Toad—I have, for the story's sake, gathered into one creature the habits of four or five of these humble little helpers of ours that I have watched at different times and in different places.
The queer names herein used for beasts and birds are those given by the Milicete Indians, and represent usually some sound or suggestion of the creatures themselves. Except where it is plainly stated otherwise, all the incidents and observations have passed under my own eyes and have been confirmed later by other observers. In the records, while holding closely to the facts, I have simply tried to make all these animals as interesting to the reader as they were to me when I discovered them.
Stamford, September, 1903.
Contents
Full Page Illustrations
A fierce battle in the tree-tops
The little ones came out of their den and began playing together
Leaping out of the tree-top and hurling himself into the fight
One of the chicks was resting upon the mother's back
Once my old dog Don started a woodcock
Then he, too, shot over the rock
The soft tongue struck one of his trailing legs
Moowen had been here many times ahead of me
He drove off a mink and almost killed the savage creature
A flash of silver following the quick jerk of his paw
Escaped at last by swimming an icy river
The bear and her cubs are gathering blueberries in their greedy, funny way
Lunged away at a terrific pace
THE POINT OF VIEW
THE POINT OF VIEW
AN old Indian, whom I know well, told me that he once caught a bear in his deadfall. That same day the bear's mate came and tried to lift away the heavily weighted log that had fallen on her back and crushed her. Failing in this he broke his way into the inclosure; and when the Indian came, drawn in on silent, inquisitive feet by a curious low sound in the air, the bear was sitting beside his dead mate, holding her head in his arms, rocking it to and fro, moaning.—
Two things must be done by the modern nature writer who would first understand the animal world and then share his discovery with others. He must collect his facts, at first hand if possible, and then he must interpret the facts as they appeal to his own head and heart in the light of all the circumstances that surround them. The child will be content with his animal story, but the man will surely ask the why and the how of every fact of animal life that particularly appeals to him. For every fact is also a revelation, and is chiefly interesting, not for itself, but for the law or the life which lies behind it and which it in some way expresses. An apple falling to the ground was a common enough fact,—so common that it had no interest until some one thought about it and found the great law that grips alike the falling apple and the falling star.
It is so in the animal world. The common facts of color, size, and habit were seen for centuries, but had little meaning or interest until some one thought about them and gave us the law of species. For most birds and animals these common facts and their meaning are now well known, and it is a wearisome and thankless task to go over them again. The origin of species and the law of gravitation are now put in the same comfortable category with the steam engine and the telegraph wire and other things that we think we understand. Meanwhile the air has unseen currents that are ready to bear our messages, and the sun wastes enough energy on our unresponsive planet daily to make all our fires unnecessary, if we but understood. Meanwhile, in the animal world, an immense array of new facts are hidden away, or are slowly coming to light as nature students follow the wild things in their native haunts and find how widely they differ one from another of the same kind, and how far they transcend the printed lists of habits that are supposed to belong to them.
We were too long content with the ugly telegraph pole and wire as the limit of perfection in communication; and we have been too well satisfied with the assumption that animals are governed by some queer, unknown thing called instinct, and that all are alike that belong to the same class. That is true only outwardly. It is enough to give the animal a specific name, but no more; and an animal's name or species is not the chief thing about him. You are not through with Indians when you have determined their race. That is sufficient for ethnology; to write in a book: possibly also the Calvinistic theologian was one time satisfied therewith; but the Indian's life still remains, more important than his race, and only after two centuries of neglect, or persecution, or injustice, are we awaking to the fact that his life is one of extraordinary human interest. His medicine lore and his thoughts of God lie deeper than the curve of his cranium; his legends and his rude music must be interpreted, as well as the color of his skin, and we are but just beginning to see the meaning of these larger things.
All this is only an analogy and proves nothing. However, it may suggest, if one thinks about it, that possibly we have made a slightly similar mistake about the animals; that we are not quite through with them when we have cried instinct and named their species, nor altogether justified in killing them industriously off the face of the earth—as we once did with the poor Beothuk Indians for the skins that they wore. Beneath their fur and feathers is their life; and a few observers are learning that their life also, with its faint suggestion of our own primeval childhood, is one of intense human interest. Some of them plan and calculate; and mathematics, however elementary, is hardly a matter of instinct. Some of them build dams and canals; some have definite social regulations; some rescue comrades; some bind their own wounds, and even set a broken leg, as will be seen in one of the following chapters. All higher orders communicate more or less with each other, and train their young, and modify their habits to meet changing conditions. These things, and many more quite as wonderful, are also facts. We are still waiting for the naturalist who will tell us truly what they mean.
I have had these two things—the new facts and the interpretation thereof—in mind in putting together the following sketches from my note-books and wilderness records. The facts have been carefully selected from many years' observations, with a view of emphasizing some of the unusual or unknown things of the animal world. Indeed, in all my work, or rather play, out of doors I have tried to discover the unusual things,—the things that mark an animal's individuality,—leaving the work of general habits and specific classification to other naturalists who know more and can do it better. Therefore have I passed over a hundred animals or birds to watch one, and have recorded only the rare observations, such as are seldom seen, and then only by men who spend long days and seasons in the woods in silent watchfulness.
Whether these rare habits are common property among the species, and seem strange to us only because we know so very little of the hidden life of wild animals, or whether they are the discovery of a few rare individuals better endowed by nature than their fellows, I must leave to the reader to determine; for I do not know. This determination, however, must come, not by theory or prejudice or a priori reasoning, but simply by watching the animals more closely when they are unconscious of man's presence and so express themselves naturally. As a possible index in the matter I might suggest that I have rarely made an observation, however incredible it seemed to me at the time, without sooner or later finding some Indian or trapper or naturalist who had seen a similar thing among the wild creatures. The woodcock genius, whose story is recorded here, is a case in point. So is the porcupine that rolled down a long hill for the fun of the thing apparently—an observation that has been twice confirmed, once by a New Brunswick poacher and again by a Harvard instructor. So also are the wildcat that stole my net, and the heron that chummed little fish by a bait, and the fox that played possum when caught in a coop, and the kingfishers that stocked a pool with minnows for their little ones to catch, and the toad that learned to sit on a cow's hoof and wait for the flies at milking time. All these and a score more of incredible things, seen by different observers in different places, would seem to indicate that intelligence is more widely spread among the Wood Folk than we had supposed; and that, when we have opened our eyes wider and cast aside our prejudices, we shall learn that Nature is generous, even to the little folk, with her gifts and graces.
As for the interpretation of the facts, upon which I have occasionally ventured,—that is wholly my own and is of small consequence beside the other. Its value is a purely personal one, and I record it rather to set the reader thinking for himself than to answer his questions. In the heart of every man will be found the measure of his world, whether it be small or great. He will judge heat, not by mathematical computation of the sun's energy, but by the twitch of his burned finger, as every other child does; and comprehend the law of reaction, not from Ganot's treatise, but by pulling on his own boot-straps. So, with all the new facts of animal life before him, he will still live in a blind world and understand nothing until he have the courage to look in his own heart and read.
A Little Brother to the Bear
A LITTLE BROTHER TO THE BEAR
FEW knew the way to the little house in the rocks where the Little Brother to the Bear lived. It was miles away from every other house but one, in the heart of the big still woods. You had to leave the highway where it dipped into a cool dark hollow among the pines, and follow a lonely old road that the wood-choppers sometimes used in winter, and that led you, if you followed it far enough, to a tumble-down old mill on another cross-road, where the brook chattered and laughed all day long at the rusty wheel, and the phœbe built unmolested under the sagging beams, and you could sometimes hear a trout jumping among the foam bubbles in the twilight. But you did not go so far if you wanted to find where the Little Brother to the Bear lived.
As you followed the wood road you came suddenly to a little clearing, with a brook and a wild meadow and a ledge all covered with ferns. The road twisted about here, as a road always does in going by a pretty place, as if it were turning back for another look. There was a little old house under the ledge wherein some shy, silent children lived; and this was the only dwelling of man on the three-mile road. Just beyond, at a point where the underbrush was thickest, an unnoticed cart path stole away from the wood road and brought you to a little pond in the big woods, at the spot where, centuries ago, the beavers had made a dam and a deep place for stowing their winter's wood. If you took a long pole and prodded deep in the mud here, you would sometimes find a cut stick of the beaver's food wood, its conical ends showing the strong tooth marks plainly, its bark still fresh and waiting to be eaten when the little owner should come back again; for that is what he cut it and put it there for, untold years ago. Very few ever thought of this, however; those who came to the spot had all their thoughts for the bullpouts that swarmed in the beaver's old storehouse and that would bite well on dark days. There were ledges all about the ancient dam and on both sides of the woodsy valley below; and among the mossy, fern-covered rocks of these ledges one of the shy children, with whom I had made friends, pointed out an arched doorway made by two great stones leaning against each other.
"Thome animal livth in there. I theen him. I peeked, one day, an' I theen hith eyeth wink; an', an', an' then I ran away," he said, his own eyes all round with the wonder of the woods.
We made no noise, but lay down under a bush together and watched the wonderful old doorway until it was time for the shy child to go home; but nothing came out, nor even showed a shining inquisitive eye in the doorway behind the screen of hanging ferns. Still we knew something was in there, for I showed my little woodsman, to his great wonder and delight, a short gray hair tipped with black clinging to the rocks. Then we went away more cautiously than we came.
"Maybe it's a coon," I told the shy child, "for they are sleepyheads and snooze all day. Foxy, too; they don't come out till dark and go in again before daylight, so that boys can't find out where they live."
When the time of full moon came I went back to the little house among the ledges, one afternoon, and hid under the same bush to watch until something should come out. But first I looked all about and found near by a huge hollow chestnut tree that the wood-choppers had passed by for years as not worth the cutting. There were scratches and claw pits everywhere in the rough bark, and just under the lower limbs was a big dark knot hole that might be a doorway to a den. So I lay down in hiding where I could see both the tree and the fern-screened archway among the rocks by simply turning my head.
At twilight there were sudden scratchings in the hollow tree, mounting higher and higher; then muffled grunts and whinings and expostulations, as if little voices inside the tree were saying: My turn first. No, mine! E-e-e-e-ahh, get out! The whinings stopped abruptly and a face appeared in the dark knot hole—a sharp, pointed face with alert ears and bright eyes that looked out keenly over the still woods where only shadows were creeping about and only a wild duck disturbed the silence, quacking softly to her brood in the little pond. Then the whining began again in the hollow tree, and four other little faces pushed their sharp noses into the knot hole, filling it completely, all watching and listening, and wiggling their chins down on their fellows' heads so as to get a better view point, yet all eager as children to be out and at play after their long sleep.
One impatient little fellow clawed his way upon his mother's back and thrust his face out between her ears, and then I had a chance to see it better—a wonderful face, full of whims and drollery, with a white ring about its pointed muzzle, and a dark line running from the top of its nose and spreading into ebony rings around each eye, as if he were wearing queer smoked goggles, behind which the eyes twinkled and shone, or grew sober with much gravity as he heard the duck quacking. A keen face, yet very innocent, in which dog intelligence and fox cunning and bear drollery mingled perfectly; a face full of surprises, that set you smiling and thinking at once; a fascinating, inquisitive face, the most lovable and contradictious among the Wood Folk,—the face of Mooweesuk the coon, the Little Brother to the Bear, as Indian and naturalist unite in calling him.
The mother came out first and sagged away backwards down the tree, swinging her head from side to side to look down and see how far yet, in true bear fashion. The four little ones followed her, clawing and whining their way to the bottom—all but one, who when half-way down turned and jumped, landing on his mother's soft back to save himself trouble. Then she led the way to the doorway among the rocks, and the young followed in single file, winding about on her trail, stopping and sniffing when she did, and imitating her every action, just as young bear cubs do when roaming about the woods.
At the mouth of the den she stepped aside, and the young filed in out of sight one after another. The mother looked and listened for a moment, then scuttled away through the woods as a clear tremulous whinny came floating in through the twilight. A moment later I saw her on the shore of the pond with a larger coon, her mate probably, who had been asleep in another hollow tree by himself; and the two went off along the shore frogging and fishing together.
The mother had scarcely disappeared when the little ones came out of their den and began playing together, rolling and tumbling about like a litter of fox cubs, doing it for fun purely, yet exercising every claw and muscle for the hard work that a coon must do when he is called upon to take care of himself. After a time one of the cubs left his brothers playing and went back to the chestnut tree by the same way that he had come, following every turn and winding of the back trail as if there were a path there—as there probably was, to his eyes and nose, though mine could not find any. He climbed the tree as if he were after something, and disappeared into the knot hole, where I could hear the little fellow whining and scratching his way down inside the tree. In a moment he reappeared with something in his mouth. In the dusk I could not make out what it was, but as he came back and passed within ten feet of where I was hiding I had my field-glasses upon him and saw it plainly—a little knot of wood with a crook in it, the solitary plaything which you will find, all smooth from much handling, in almost every house where the Little Brother to the Bear has lived.
"The little ones came out of their den and began playing together"
He carried it back to where the young coons were playing, lay down among them, and began to play by himself, passing the plaything back and forth through his wonderful front paws, striking it up, catching it, and rolling it around his neck and under his body, as a child does who has but one plaything. Some of the other coons joined him, and the little crooked knot went whirling back and forth between them, was rolled and caught, and hidden and found again,—all in silent intentness and with a pleasure that even in the twilight was unmistakable.
In the midst of this quiet play there came a faint ripple and splash of water, and the little coons dropped their plaything and stood listening, eyes all bright behind their dark goggles, noses wiggling, and ears cocked at the plashing on the pond shore. The mother was there diligently sousing something that she had caught; and presently she appeared and the little ones forgot their play in the joy of eating. But it was too far away and the shadows were now too dark to see what it was that she had brought home, and how she divided it among them. When she went away again it had grown dark enough for safety, and the young followed her in single file to the pond shore, where I soon lost them among the cool shadows.
That was the beginning of a long acquaintance, cultivated sometimes by day, more often by night; sometimes alone, when I would catch one of the family fishing or clamming or grubbing roots or nest robbing; sometimes with a boy, who caught two of the family in his traps; and again with the hunters under the September moon, when some foxy old coon would gather a freebooter band about him and lead them out to a raid on the corn-fields. There each coon turned himself promptly into an agent of destruction and, reveling in the unwonted abundance, would pull down and destroy like a child savage, and taste twenty milky ears of corn before he found one that suited him perfectly; and then, too full for play or for roaming about to find all the hollow trees in the woods, he would take himself off to the nearest good den and sleep till he was hungry again and the low whinny of the old leader called him out for another raid.
Could we have followed the family on this first night of their wanderings, before the raids began and the dogs had scattered them, we would have understood why Mooweesuk is called a brother to the bear. Running he steps on his toes like a dog; and anatomically, especially in the development of the skull and ear bones, he suggests the prehistoric ancestor of both dog and wolf; but otherwise he is a pocket-edition of Mooween in all his habits. The mother always leads, like a bear, and the little ones follow in single file, noting everything that the mother calls attention to. They sit on their haunches and walk flat-footed, like a bear, leaving a track from their hind feet like that of a dwarf baby. Everything eatable in the woods ministers to their hunger, as it does to that of the greedy prowler in the black coat. Now they stir up an ant's nest; now they grub into a rotten log for worms and beetles. If they can find sweet sap, or a bit of molasses in an old camp, they dip their paws in it and then lick them clean, as Mooween does. They hunt now for wintergreen berries, and now for a woodmouse. They find a shallow place in the brook when the suckers are running and wait there till the big fish go by, when they flip them out with their paws and scramble after them. From this fishing they turn to lush water-grass, or to digging frogs and turtles out of the mud; and the turtle's shell is cracked by dropping a stone upon it. Now they steal into the coop and scuttle away with a chicken; and after eating it they come back to the garden to crack a pumpkin open and make a dessert of the seeds. Now they see a muskrat swimming by in the pond with a mussel in his mouth, and they follow after him along the bank; for Musquash has a curious habit of eating in regular places—a flat rock, a stranded log, a certain tussock from which he has cut away the grass—and will often gather half a dozen or more clams and mussels before he sits down to dine. Mooweesuk watches till he finds the place; then, while Musquash is gone away after more clams, he will run off with all that he finds on the dining table. A score of times, on the ponds and streams, I have read the record of this little comedy. You can always tell the place where Musquash eats by the pile of mussel shells in the water below it; and sometimes you will find Mooweesuk's track stealing down to the place, and if you follow it you will find where he cracked the clams that Musquash had gathered.
There is another way in which Mooweesuk is curiously like a bear: he wanders very widely, but he has regular beats, like Mooween, and if not disturbed always comes back with more or less regularity to any place where you have once seen him, and comes by the same unseen path. Like Mooween, his knowledge of the woods is wide and accurate. He knows—partly by searching them out, and partly from his mother, who takes him and shows him where they are—every den and hollow tree that will shelter a coon in times of trouble. He has always one den near a corn-field, where he can sleep when too full or too lazy to travel; he has one dry tree for stormy weather, and one cool mossy shell in deep shadow for the hot summer days. He has at least one sunny nook in the top of a hollow stub, where he loves to lie and soak in the fall sunshine; and one favorite giant tree with the deepest and warmest hollow, which he invariably uses for his long winter sleep. And besides all these he has at least one tower of refuge near every path of his, to which he can betake himself when sudden danger threatens from dogs or men.
Though he walks and hunts and fights and feeds like a bear, Mooweesuk has many habits of his own that Mooween has never approached. One of these is his habit of nest robbing. Mooween does that, to be sure, for he is fond of eggs; but he must confine himself largely to ground-birds and to nests that he can reach by standing on his hind legs. Therefore are the woodpeckers all safe from him. Mooweesuk, on his part, can never see a hole in a tree without putting his nose into it to find out whether it contains any eggs or young woodpeckers. If it does contain them, he will reach a paw down, clinging close to the tree and stretching and pushing his arm into the hole clear to his shoulder, to see if perchance the nest be not a foolishly shallow one and the eggs lie within reach of his paw—which suggests a monkey's, by the way, in its handlike flexibility.
Once, on the edge of a wild orchard, I saw him rob a golden-winged woodpecker's nest in this way. The mother bird flew out as Mooweesuk came scratching up the tree, which assured him that he would find something worth while within. He stretched in a paw, caught an egg, and appeared to be rolling it up, holding it against the side of the tunnel. When the egg was almost up to the entrance he put in his nose to see the treasure. Then it slipped and fell back, and probably broke. He tried another, got it up safely, and ate it whole where he was. He tried a third, which slipped and broke like the first. At this, with the taste of fresh egg in his mouth, he seemed to grow impatient, or perhaps he got an idea from the yellow streaks on his claws. He jabbed his paw down hard to break all the eggs, and drew it up dripping. He licked it clean with his tongue and put it back again into the yellow mess at the bottom. This was easy, and he kept it up until his moist paw brought up only shells and rotten wood, when he backed away down the tree and shuffled off into the woods, leaving a sad mess for a mother woodpecker to face behind him.
Another habit in which he has improved upon Mooween is his fishing. He knows how to flip fish out of water with his paw, as all bears do; but he has also learned how to attract them when they are not to be found on the shallows. Many times in the twilight I have found Mooweesuk sitting very still on a rock or gray log beside the pond or river, his soft colors and his stillness making him seem like part of the shore. Other naturalists and hunters have mentioned the same thing, and their testimony generally agrees in this: that Mooweesuk's eyes are half shut at such times, and his sensitive feelers, or whiskers, are playing on the surface of the water. The fish below, seeing this slight motion but not seeing the animal above, attracted either by curiosity or, more likely, by the thought of insects playing, rise to the surface and are snapped out by a sweep of Mooweesuk's paw.
In a lecture, many years ago, Dr. Samuel Lockwood, a famous naturalist, first called attention to this curious way of angling. Since then I have many times seen Mooweesuk at his fishing; but I have never been fortunate enough to see him catch anything, though I have seen a wildcat do the trick perfectly in the same cunning way. Remembering his fondness for fish, and the many places where I have seen that he has eaten them and where the water was too deep to flip them out in the ordinary bear way, I have no doubt whatever that Dr. Lockwood has discovered the true secret of his patient waiting above the pools where the fish are feeding.
There is another curious habit of the coon which distinguishes him from the bear and from all other animals. That is, his habit of washing, or rather of sousing, everything he catches in water. No matter what he finds to eat,—mice, chickens, roots, grubs, fruit—everything, in fact, but fish,—he will take it to water, if he be anywhere near a pond or brook, and souse it thoroughly before eating. Why he does this is largely a matter of guesswork. It is not to clean it, for much of it is already clean; not to soften it, for clams are soft enough as they are, and his jaws are powerful enough to crush the hardest shells, yet he souses them just the same before eating. Possibly it is to give things the watery taste of fish, of which he is very fond; more probably it is a relic, like the dog's turning around before he lies down, or like the unnecessary migration of most birds, the inheritance from some forgotten ancestor that had a reason for the habit, and that lived on the earth long, long years before there was any man to watch him or to wonder why he did it.
Deep in the wilderness Mooweesuk is shy and alert for danger, like most of the wild things there; but if approached very quietly, or if he find you unexpectedly near him, he is filled with the Wood Folk's curiosity to know who you are. Once, on the long tote-road from St. Leonards to the headwaters of the Restigouche, I saw Mooweesuk sitting on a rock by a trout brook diligently sousing something that he had just caught. I crept near on all fours to the edge of an old bridge, when the logs creaked under my weight and he looked up from his washing and saw me. He left his catch on the instant and came up the brook, part wading, part swimming, put his forepaws on the low bridge, poked his head up over the edge, and looked at me steadily, his face within ten feet of mine. He disappeared after a few moments and I crawled to the edge of the bridge to see what it was that he was washing. A faint scratching made me turn round, and there he was, his paws up on the other edge of the bridge, looking back at the queer man-thing that he had never seen before. He had passed under the bridge to look at me from the other side, as a fox invariably does if you keep still enough. The game that he was washing was a big frog, and after a few moments he circled the bridge, grabbed his catch, and disappeared into the woods.
Near towns where he is much hunted Mooweesuk has grown wilder, like the fox, and learned a hundred tricks that formerly he knew nothing about. Yet even here, if found young, he shows a strange fearlessness and even a rare confidence in man. Once, in the early summer, I found a young coon at the foot of a ledge, looking up at a shelf a few feet above his head and whimpering because he could not get up. It was a surprise to him, evidently, that his claws could not make the same impression on the hard rock that they did on the home tree in which he was born. He made no objection—indeed, he seemed to take it as the most natural thing in the world—when I picked him up and put him on the shelf that he was whimpering about; but in a moment, like a baby, he wanted to get down again, and again I ministered to his necessities. When I went away he followed after me whimpering, forgetting his own den and his fellows in the ledge hard by, and was not satisfied till I took him up, when he curled down in the hollow of my arm and went to sleep perfectly contented.
Presently he waked up, cocking his ears and twisting his head dog fashion at some sound that was too faint for my ears, and poked his inquisitive nose all over me, even putting it down inside my collar, where it felt like a bit of ice creeping about my neck. Not till he had clawed his way inside my coat and put his nose in my vest pocket did he find the cause of the mysterious sounds which he heard. It was my watch ticking, and in a moment he had taken it out and was playing with the bright thing, as pleased as a child with a new plaything. He made a famous pet, full of tricks and drollery, catching chickens by pretending to be asleep when they came stretching their necks for the crumbs in his dish, playing possum when he was caught in mischief, drinking out of a bottle, full of joy when he could follow the boys to the woods, where he ran wild with delight but followed them home at twilight, and at last going off by himself to his home tree to sleep away the winter—but I must tell about all that elsewhere.
Like the bear, Mooweesuk is a peaceable fellow and tends strictly to his own affairs as he wanders wide through the woods.
This is not from fear, for no animal, except perhaps the wolverine—who is a terrible beast—is more careless of danger or faces it with such coolness and courage when it appears. Of a dog or two he takes little heed. If he hear them on his trail, he generally climbs a tree to get out of the way; for your dog, unlike his wild brother, the wolf, is a meddlesome fellow and must needs be worrying everything; and Mooweesuk, like most other wild creatures, loves peace, hunts only when hungry, and would always prefer to avoid a row if possible. When caught on the ground, or cornered, or roused to action by a sudden attack, he backs up against the nearest tree or stone to keep his enemies from getting at him from behind, and then fights till he is dead or till none of his enemies are left to bother him, when he goes quietly on his way again. No matter how great the odds or how terribly he is punished, I have never seen a coon lose his nerve or turn his back to run away. If the dogs be many and he is near a pond or river, he will lead them into deep water, where he is at home, and then swimming rapidly in circles will close with them one by one and put them out of the fight most effectively. His method here seldom varies. He will whirl in suddenly on the dog that he has singled out, grip him about the neck with one arm, saw away at his head with his powerful teeth, at the same time slashing him across the eyes with his free claws, and then pile his weight on the dog's head to sink him under and drown all the rest of the fight out of him. That is generally enough for one dog; and Mooweesuk, without a scratch and with his temper cool as ice, will whirl like a flash upon his next victim.
Fortunately such troublous times are rare in Mooweesuk's life, and the wilderness coon knows little about them. His life from beginning to end is generally a peaceable one, full of good things to eat, and of sleep and play and a growing knowledge of the woods. He is born in the spring, a wee, blind, hairless little fellow, like a mole or a bear cub. As he grows he climbs to the entrance to his den, and will sit there as at a window for hours at a time, just his nose and eye visible, looking out on the new, bright, rustling world of woods, and blinking sleepily in the flickering sunshine. Then come the long excursions with his mother, at first by day when savage beasts are quiet, then at twilight, and then at last the long night rambles, in which, following his leader, he learns a hundred things that a coon must know: to follow the same paths till he comprehends the woods; to poke his inquisitive nose into every crack and cranny, for the best morsels on his bill of fare hide themselves in such places; to sleep for a little nap when he is tired, resting on his forehead so as to hide his brightly marked face and make himself inconspicuous, like a rock or a lichen-covered stump; to leap down from the tallest tree without hurting himself; and when he uses a den in the earth or rocks, to have an exit some distance away from the entrance, and never under any circumstances to enter his den save by his front door. There is great wisdom in this last teaching. When a dog finds a hole with a trail that always leads out of it he goes away, knowing it is of no use to bark there; but when he finds an opening into which a trail is leading, he thinks of course that his game is inside, and proceeds to howl and to dig without ever a thought in his foolish head that there may be another way out. Meanwhile, as he digs and raises an unpardonable row in the quiet woods, Mooweesuk will either wait just inside the entrance till she gets a chance to nip the dog's nose or crush his paw, or else will slip quietly out of the back door with her little ones and take them off to a hollow tree where they can sleep in peace and have no fear till the dog goes away.