The Grizzly King - James Oliver Curwood
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THE GRIZZLY KING
A ROMANCE OF THE WILD
BY
JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD
1918
ILLUSTRATIONS BY FRANK B. HOFFMAN
[Illustration: "As Thor had more than once come into contact with
porcupine quills, he hesitated."]
To
MY BOY
PREFACE
It is with something like a confession that I offer this second of my
nature books to the public--a confession, and a hope; the confession of one
who for years hunted and killed before he learned that the wild offered a
more thrilling sport than slaughter--and the hope that what I have written
may make others feel and understand that the greatest thrill of the hunt is
not in killing, but in letting live. It is true that in the great open
spaces one must kill to live; one must have meat, and meat is life. But
killing for food is not the lust of slaughter; it is not the lust which
always recalls to me that day in the British Columbia mountains when, in
less than two hours, I killed four grizzlies on a mountain slide--a
destruction of possibly a hundred and twenty years of life in a hundred and
twenty minutes. And that is only one instance of many in which I now regard
myself as having been almost a criminal--for killing for the excitement of
killing can be little less than murder. In their small way my animal books
are the reparation I am now striving to make, and it has been my earnest
desire to make them not only of romantic interest, but reliable in their
fact. As in human life, there are tragedy, and humour, and pathos in the
life of the wild; there are facts of tremendous interest, real happenings
and real lives to be written about, and very small necessity for one to
draw on imagination. In "Kazan" I tried to give the reader a picture of my
years of experience among the wild sledge dogs of the North. In "The
Grizzly" I have scrupulously adhered to facts as I have found them in the
lives of the wild creatures of which I have written. Little Muskwa was with
me all that summer and autumn in the Canadian Rockies. Pipoonaskoos is
buried in the Firepan Range country, with a slab over his head, just like a
white man. The two grizzly cubs we dug out on the Athabasca are dead. And
Thor still lives, for his range is in a country where no hunters go--and
when at last the opportunity came we did not kill him. This year (in July
of 1916) I am going back into the country of Thor and Muskwa. I think I
would know Thor if I saw him again, for he was a monster full-grown. But
in two years Muskwa had grown from cubhood into full bearhood. And yet I
believe that Muskwa would know me should we chance to meet again. I like to
think that he has not forgotten the sugar, and the scores of times he
cuddled up close to me at night, and the hunts we had together after roots
and berries, and the sham fights with which we amused ourselves so often in
camp. But, after all, perhaps he would not forgive me for that last day
when we ran away from him so hard--leaving him alone to his freedom in the
mountains.
JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD.
Owosso, Michigan,
May 5, 1916.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
"As Thor had more than once come into contact with porcupine quills, he
hesitated."
"Like the wind Thor bore down on the flank of the caribou, swung a little
to one side, and then without any apparent effort--still like a huge
ball--he bounded in and upward, and the short race was done."
"They headed up the creek-bottom, bending over from their saddles to look
at every strip of sand they passed for tracks. They had not gone a quarter
of a mile when Bruce gave a sudden exclamation and stopped."
"'Come on!' he cried. 'The black's dead! If we hustle we can get our
grizzly!'"
THE GRIZZLY KING
CHAPTER ONE
With the silence and immobility of a great reddish-tinted, rock, Thor stood
for many minutes looking out over his domain. He could not see far, for,
like all grizzlies, his eyes were small and far apart, and his vision was
bad. At a distance of a third or a half a mile he could make out a goat or
a mountain sheep, but beyond that his world was a vast sun-filled or
night-darkened mystery through which he ranged mostly by the guidance of
sound and smell.
It was the sense of smell that held him still and motionless now. Up out of
the valley a scent had come to his nostrils that he had never smelled
before. It was something that did not belong there, and it stirred him
strangely. Vainly his slow-working brute mind struggled to comprehend it.
It was not caribou, for he had killed many caribou; it was not goat; it
was not sheep; and it was not the smell of the fat and lazy whistlers
sunning themselves on the rocks, for he had eaten hundreds of whistlers. It
was a scent that did not enrage him, and neither did it frighten him. He
was curious, and yet he did not go down to seek it out. Caution held him
back.
If Thor could have seen distinctly for a mile, or two miles, his eyes would
have discovered even less than the wind brought to him from down the
valley. He stood at the edge of a little plain, with the valley an eighth
of a mile below him, and the break over which he had come that afternoon an
eighth of a mile above him. The plain was very much like a cup, perhaps an
acre in extent, in the green slope of the mountain. It was covered with
rich, soft grass and June flowers, mountain violets and patches of
forget-me-nots, and wild asters and hyacinths, and in the centre of it was
a fifty-foot spatter of soft mud which Thor visited frequently when his
feet became rock-sore.
To the east and the west and the north of him spread out the wonderful
panorama of the Canadian Rockies, softened in the golden sunshine of a June
afternoon.
From up and down the valley, from the breaks between the peaks, and from
the little gullies cleft in shale and rock that crept up to the snow-lines
came a soft and droning murmur. It was the music of running water. That
music was always in the air, for the rivers, the creeks, and the tiny
streams gushing down from the snow that lay eternally up near the clouds
were never still.
There were sweet perfumes as well as music in the air. June and July--the
last of spring and the first of summer in the northern mountains--were
commingling. The earth was bursting with green; the early flowers were
turning the sunny slopes into coloured splashes of red and white and
purple, and everything that had life was singing--the fat whistlers on
their rocks, the pompous little gophers on their mounds, the big bumblebees
that buzzed from flower to flower, the hawks in the valley, and the eagles
over the peaks. Even Thor was singing in his way, for as he had paddled
through the soft mud a few minutes before he had rumbled curiously deep
down in his great chest. It was not a growl or a roar or a snarl; it was
the noise he made when he was contented. It was his song.
And now, for some mysterious reason, there had suddenly come a change in
this wonderful day for him. Motionless he still sniffed the wind. It
puzzled him. It disquieted him without alarming him. To the new and strange
smell that was in the air he was as keenly sensitive as a child's tongue to
the first sharp touch of a drop of brandy. And then, at last, a low and
sullen growl came like a distant roll of thunder from out of his chest. He
was overlord of these domains, and slowly his brain told him that there
should be no smell which he could not comprehend, and of which he was not
the master.
Thor reared up slowly, until the whole nine feet of him rested on his
haunches, and he sat like a trained dog, with his great forefeet, heavy
with mud, drooping in front of his chest. For ten years he had lived in
these mountains and never had he smelled that smell. He defied it. He
waited for it, while it came stronger and nearer. He did not hide himself.
Clean-cut and unafraid, he stood up.
He was a monster in size, and his new June coat shone a golden brown in the
sun. His forearms were almost as large as a man's body; the three largest
of his five knifelike claws were five and a half inches long; in the mud
his feet had left tracks that were fifteen inches from tip to tip. He was
fat, and sleek, and powerful. His eyes, no larger than hickory nuts, were
eight inches apart. His two upper fangs, sharp as stiletto points, were as
long as a man's thumb, and between his great jaws he could crush the neck
of a caribou.
Thor's life had been free of the presence of man, and he was not ugly. Like
most grizzlies, he did not kill for the pleasure of killing. Out of a herd
he would take one caribou, and he would eat that caribou to the marrow in
the last bone. He was a peaceful king. He had one law: "Let me alone!" he
said, and the voice of that law was in his attitude as he sat on his
haunches sniffing the strange smell.
In his massive strength, in his aloneness and his supremacy, the great bear
was like the mountains, unrivalled in the valleys as they were in the
skies. With the mountains, he had come down out of the ages. He was part of
them. The history of his race had begun and was dying among them, and they
were alike in many ways. Until this day he could not remember when anything
had come to question his might and his right--except those of his own
kind. With such rivals he had fought fairly and more than once to the
death. He was ready to fight again, if it came to a question of sovereignty
over the ranges which he claimed as his own. Until he was beaten he was
dominator, arbiter, and despot, if he chose to be. He was dynast of the
rich valleys and the green slopes, and liege lord of all living things
about him. He had won and kept these things openly, without strategy or
treachery. He was hated and he was feared, but he was without hatred or
fear of his own--and he was honest. Therefore he waited openly for the
strange thing that was coming to him from down the valley.
As he sat on his haunches, questioning the air with his keen brown nose,
something within him was reaching back into dim and bygone generations.
Never before had he caught the taint that was in his nostrils, yet now that
it came to him it did not seem altogether new. He could not place it. He
could not picture it. Yet he knew that it was a menace and a threat.
For ten minutes he sat like a carven thing on his haunches. Then the wind
shifted, and the scent grew less and less, until it was gone altogether.
Thor's flat ears lifted a little. He turned his huge head slowly so that
his eyes took in the green slope and the tiny plain. He easily forgot the
smell now that the air was clear and sweet again. He dropped on his four
feet, and resumed his gopher-hunting.
There was something of humour in his hunt. Thor weighed a thousand pounds;
a mountain gopher is six inches long and weighs six ounces. Yet Thor would
dig energetically for an hour, and rejoice at the end by swallowing the fat
little gopher like a pill; it was his _bonne bouche_, the luscious tidbit
in the quest of which he spent a third of his spring and summer digging.
He found a hole located to his satisfaction and began throwing out the
earth like a huge dog after a rat. He was on the crest of the slope. Once
or twice during the next half-hour he lifted his head, but he was no longer
disturbed by the strange smell that had come to him with the wind.
CHAPTER TWO
A mile down the valley Jim Langdon stopped his horse where the spruce and
balsam timber thinned out at the mouth of a coulee, looked ahead of him for
a breathless moment or two, and then with an audible gasp of pleasure swung
his right leg over so that his knee crooked restfully about the horn of his
saddle, and waited.
Two or three hundred yards behind him, still buried in the timber, Otto was
having trouble with Dishpan, a contumacious pack-mare. Langdon grinned
happily as he listened to the other's vociferations, which threatened
Dishpan with every known form of torture and punishment, from instant
disembowelment to the more merciful end of losing her brain through the
medium of a club. He grinned because Otto's vocabulary descriptive of
terrible things always impending over the heads of his sleek and utterly
heedless pack-horses was one of his chief joys. He knew that if Dishpan
should elect to turn somersaults while diamond-hitched under her pack,
big, good-natured Bruce Otto would do nothing more than make the welkin
ring with his terrible, blood-curdling protest.
One after another the six horses of their outfit appeared out of the
timber, and last of all rode the mountain man. He was gathered like a
partly released spring in his saddle, an attitude born of years in the
mountains, and because of a certain difficulty he had in distributing
gracefully his six-foot-two-inch length of flesh and bone astride a
mountain cayuse.
Upon his appearance Langdon dismounted, and turned his eyes again up the
valley. The stubbly blond beard on his face did not conceal the deep tan
painted there by weeks of exposure in the mountains; he had opened his
shirt at the throat, exposing a neck darkened by sun and wind; his eyes
were of a keen, searching blue-gray, and they quested the country ahead of
him now with the joyous intentness of the hunter and the adventurer.
Langdon was thirty-five. A part of his life he spent in the wild places;
the other part he spent in writing about the things he found there. His
companion was five years his junior in age, but had the better of him by
six inches in length of anatomy, if those additional inches could be called
an advantage. Bruce thought they were not. "The devil of it is I ain't done
growin' yet!" he often explained.
He rode up now and unlimbered himself. Langdon pointed ahead.
"Did you ever see anything to beat that?" he asked.
"Fine country," agreed Bruce. "Mighty good place to camp, too, Jim. There
ought to be caribou in this range, an' bear. We need some fresh meat. Gimme
a match, will you?"
It had come to be a habit with them to light both their pipes with one
match when possible. They performed this ceremony now while viewing the
situation. As he puffed the first luxurious cloud of smoke from his
bulldog, Langdon nodded toward the timber from which they had just come.
"Fine place for our tepee," he said. "Dry wood, running water, and the
first good balsam we've struck in a week for our beds. We can hobble the
horses in that little open plain we crossed a quarter of a mile back. I saw
plenty of buffalo grass and a lot of wild timothy."
He looked at his watch.
"It's only three o'clock. We might go on. But--what do you say? Shall we
stick for a day or two, and see what this country looks like?"
"Looks good to me," said Bruce.
He sat down as he spoke, with his back to a rock, and over his knee he
levelled a long brass telescope. From his saddle Langdon unslung a
binocular glass imported from Paris. The telescope was a relic of the Civil
War. Together, their shoulders touching as they steadied themselves against
the rock, they studied the rolling slopes and the green sides of the
mountains ahead of them.
They were in the Big Game country, and what Langdon called the Unknown. So
far as he and Bruce Otto could discover, no other white man had ever
preceded them. It was a country shut in by tremendous ranges, through which
it had taken them twenty days of sweating toil to make a hundred miles.
That afternoon they had crossed the summit of the Great Divide that split
the skies north and south, and through their glasses they were looking now
upon the first green slopes and wonderful peaks of the Firepan Mountains.
To the northward--and they had been travelling north--was the Skeena
River; on the west and south were the Babine range and waterways; eastward,
over the Divide, was the Driftwood, and still farther eastward the Ominica
range and the tributaries of the Finley. They had started from civilization
on the tenth day of May and this was the thirtieth of June.
As Langdon looked through his glasses he believed that at last they had
reached the bourne of their desires. For nearly two months they had worked
to get beyond the trails of men, and they had succeeded. There were no
hunters here. There were no prospectors. The valley ahead of them was
filled with golden promise, and as he sought out the first of its mystery
and its wonder his heart was filled with the deep and satisfying joy which
only men like Langdon can fully understand. To his friend and comrade,
Bruce Otto, with whom he had gone five times into the North country, all
mountains and all valleys were very much alike; he was born among them, he
had lived among them all his life, and he would probably die among them.
It was Bruce who gave him a sudden sharp nudge with his elbow.
"I see the heads of three caribou crossing a dip about a mile and a half
up the valley," he said, without taking his eyes from the telescope.
"And I see a Nanny and her kid on the black shale of that first mountain to
the right," replied Langdon. "And, by George, there's a Sky Pilot looking
down on her from a crag a thousand feet above the shale! He's got a beard a
foot long. Bruce, I'll bet we've struck a regular Garden of Eden!"
"Looks it," vouchsafed Bruce, coiling up his long legs to get a better rest
for his telescope. "If this ain't a sheep an' bear country, I've made the
worst guess I ever made in my life."
For five minutes they looked, without a word passing between them. Behind
them their horses were nibbling hungrily in the thick, rich grass. The
sound of the many waters in the mountains droned in their ears, and the
valley seemed sleeping in a sea of sunshine. Langdon could think of nothing
more comparable than that--slumber. The valley was like a great,
comfortable, happy cat, and the sounds they heard, all commingling in that
pleasing drone, was its drowsy purring. He was focussing his glass a
little more closely on the goat standing watchfully on its crag, when Otto
spoke again.
"I see a grizzly as big as a house!" he announced quietly.
Bruce seldom allowed his equanimity to be disturbed, except by the
pack-horses. Thrilling news like this he always introduced as unconcernedly
as though speaking of a bunch of violets.
Langdon sat up with a jerk.
"Where?" he demanded.
He leaned over to get the range of the other's telescope, every nerve in
his body suddenly aquiver.
"See that slope on the second shoulder, just beyond the ravine over there?"
said Bruce, with one eye closed and the other still glued to the telescope.
"He's halfway up, digging out a gopher."
Langdon focussed his glass on the slope, and a moment later an excited gasp
came from him.
"See 'im?" asked Bruce.
"The glass has pulled him within four feet of my nose," replied Langdon.
"Bruce, that's the biggest grizzly in the Rocky Mountains!"
"If he ain't, he's his twin brother," chuckled the packer, without moving a
muscle. "He beats your eight-footer by a dozen inches, Jimmy! An'"--he
paused at this psychological moment to pull a plug of black MacDonald from
his pocket and bite off a mouthful, without taking the telescope from his
eye--"an' the wind is in our favour an' he's as busy as a flea!" he
finished.
Otto unwound himself and rose to his feet, and Langdon jumped up briskly.
In such situations as this there was a mutual understanding between them
which made words unnecessary. They led the eight horses back into the edge
of the timber and tied them there, took their rifles from the leather
holsters, and each was careful to put a sixth cartridge in the chamber of
his weapon. Then for a matter of two minutes they both studied the slope
and its approaches with their naked eyes.
"We can slip up the ravine," suggested Langdon.
Bruce nodded.
"I reckon it's a three-hundred-yard shot from there," he said. "It's the
best we can do. He'd get our wind if we went below 'im. If it was a couple
o' hours earlier--"
"We'd climb over the mountain and come down on him from _above_!" exclaimed
Langdon, laughing.
"Bruce, you're the most senseless idiot on the face of the globe when it
comes to climbing mountains! You'd climb over Hardesty or Geikie to shoot a
goat from above, even though you could get him from the valley without any
work at all. I'm glad it isn't morning. We can get that bear from the
ravine!"
"Mebbe," said Bruce, and they started.
They walked openly over the green, flower-carpeted meadows ahead of them.
Until they came within at least half a mile of the grizzly there was no
danger of him seeing them. The wind had shifted, and was almost in their
faces. Their swift walk changed to a dog-trot, and they swung in nearer to
the slope, so that for fifteen minutes a huge knoll concealed the grizzly.
In another ten minutes they came to the ravine, a narrow, rock-littered and
precipitous gully worn in the mountainside by centuries of spring floods
gushing down from the snow-peaks above. Here they made cautious
observation.
The big grizzly was perhaps six hundred yards up the slope, and pretty
close to three hundred yards from the nearest point reached by the gully.
Bruce spoke in a whisper now.
"You go up an' do the stalkin', Jimmy," he said. "That bear's goin' to do
one of two things if you miss or only wound 'im--one o' three, mebbe: he's
going to investigate _you_, or he's going up over the break, or he's comin'
down in the valley--this way. We can't keep 'im from goin' over the break,
an' if he tackles you--just summerset it down the gully. You can beat 'im
out. He's most apt to come this way if you don't get 'im, so I'll wait
here. Good luck to you, Jimmy!"
With this he went out and crouched behind a rock, where he could keep an
eye on the grizzly, and Langdon began to climb quietly up the
boulder-strewn gully.
CHAPTER THREE
Of all the living creatures in this sleeping valley, Thor was the busiest.
He was a bear with individuality, you might say. Like some people, he went
to bed very early; he began to get sleepy in October, and turned in for his
long nap in November. He slept until April, and usually was a week or ten
days behind other bears in waking. He was a sound sleeper, and when awake
he was very wide awake. During April and May he permitted himself to doze
considerably in the warmth of sunny rocks, but from the beginning of June
until the middle of September he closed his eyes in real sleep just about
four hours out of every twelve.
He was very busy as Langdon began his cautious climb up the gully. He had
succeeded in getting his gopher, a fat, aldermanic old patriarch who had
disappeared in one crunch and a gulp, and he was now absorbed in finishing
off his day's feast with an occasional fat, white grub and a few sour ants
captured from under stones which he turned over with his paw.
In his search after these delicacies Thor used his right paw in turning
over the rocks. Ninety-nine out of every hundred bears--probably a hundred
and ninety-nine out of every two hundred--are left-handed; Thor was
right-handed. This gave him an advantage in fighting, in fishing, and in
stalking meat, for a grizzly's right arm is longer than his left--so much
longer that if he lost his sixth sense of orientation he would be
constantly travelling in a circle.
In his quest Thor was headed for the gully. His huge head hung close to the
ground. At short distances his vision was microscopic in its keenness; his
olfactory nerves were so sensitive that he could catch one of the big
rock-ants with his eyes shut.
He would choose the flat rocks mostly. His huge right paw, with its long
claws, was as clever as a human hand. The stone lifted, a sniff or two, a
lick of his hot, flat tongue, and he ambled on to the next.
He took this work with tremendous seriousness, much like an elephant
hunting for peanuts hidden in a bale of hay. He saw no humour in the
operation. As a matter of fact, Nature had not intended there should be any
humour about it. Thor's time was more or less valueless, and during the
course of a summer he absorbed in his system a good many hundred thousand
sour ants, sweet grubs, and juicy insects of various kinds, not to mention
a host of gophers and still tinier rock-rabbits. These small things all
added to the huge rolls of fat which it was necessary for him to store up
for that "absorptive consumption" which kept him alive during his long
winter sleep. This was why Nature had made his little greenish-brown eyes
twin microscopes, infallible at distances of a few feet, and almost
worthless at a thousand yards.
As he was about to turn over a fresh stone Thor paused in his operations.
For a full minute he stood nearly motionless. Then his head swung slowly,
his nose close to the ground. Very faintly he had caught an exceedingly
pleasing odour. It was so faint that he was afraid of losing it if he
moved. So he stood until he was sure of himself, then he swung his huge
shoulders around and descended two yards down the slope, swinging his head
slowly from right to left, and sniffing. The scent grew stronger. Another
two yards down the slope he found it very strong under a rock. It was a big
rock, and weighed probably two hundred pounds. Thor dragged it aside with
his one right hand as if it were no more than a pebble.