– and of course she would have defended them with her life.
It was just that she wanted them to start being independent, not forever quarrelling and harrassing her.
Babe, all this time, had carried on as usual. Even when there’d been five bears feeding just over the boundary fence she’d gone out to her truck, brought in wood, fetched greens in from the garden. They weren’t interested in her, she said. They’d probably watched her often at the cabin and knew that she presented no danger. All she did make 97
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The Coming of Saska sure of, when she went out into the open, was that the mother and cubs were together.
Until one day she was hoeing the vegetable patch down at the creek-side, thinking the bears were nowhere around, and suddenly she heard the cubs crying and when she looked up, they were on top of the bank on her right...
bawling like mad for Mum who, to Babe’s horror, suddenly appeared across the creek on her left. She had nothing but the hoe to defend herself with. She thought she hadn’t a chance. And then, she said, the she-bear looked at her...
looked beyond her at the cubs... and deliberately turned back into the woods leaving them to their own devices. It obviously knew Babe wouldn’t harm the cubs and as for her trying to steal them (which is apparently a continual fear with mother bears)... this one was patently so fed up with those two that if Babe wanted them, she was welcome!
Another time at Yarrow Creek Babe had actually seen a stolen cub. Apparently bears have a tremendously strong maternal instinct and, even while they have young themselves, if they can get another bear’s cubs away from her they will – fighting her for their possession if necessary, and adding them to their own litter. Unfortunately the instinct stops at that. They never treat the stolen cubs as well as they do their own, acting towards them like Cinderella’s stepmother. You could always tell a stolen cub, said Babe, from the fact that it would be thinner and poorer-looking than the others.
So when this particular procession passed through the Canyon one day... a female grizzly, two sturdy, playful cubs and a third one crying and dawdling in the rear... it didn’t need much deduction to work out that the third cub had been abducted. It was tatty-looking and seemed to be 98
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trying to get left behind. Probably its real mother was still following it through the woods. But every now and then back would come its new mother, growling and cuffing it for being tardy. And on would hurry the little bear, crying more loudly still.
If she could have done anything to help it she would have, said Babe. She was watching from a track higher up.
But if she’d shouted or thrown a stone the she-bear would have attacked her, with such very young cubs in question.
So the procession had passed on... down into a steep gully and up again, the twins following happily on the heels of their mother, the third one dropping once more behind.
Evidently he thought the gully was a good place to get lost in – but alas, he hadn’t a chance. Back came the she-bear to stand impatiently on the rim and tell him what would happen to him if he didn’t hurry... which he obviously decided he’d better do, but, having lagged behind while the others had climbed out, he couldn’t find the way out of the gully. He panicked, said Babe... kept scrambling up and falling down again, till at last he got up and over the top in sheer terror. The she-bear hit him, he fled down the path with her growling after him, and that was the last Babe saw of the group. She’d heard a crackling in the woods a while later, though, and hoped his real mother was still following.
That had been quite an experience, but Babe had had plenty, living all her life in the Rockies. Once, bird-watching up in the hills, she had come across an enormous hole under a rock... and beat it fast when she realised it was a bear-den, with signs that the bear had been recently working on it. And once – she talked of them still with great affection – she had looked after a pair of grizzly cubs.
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The Coming of Saska This was back in the days when her husband was alive and they were acting as guides to a surveying party. A bear kept stealing meat from the cook-tent, which was just behind the tent they slept in and her husband, hearing a movement one night, had raised their back tent-flap to see the huge, steel-hooked feet right in front of him. He had shot the bear... it was coming every night and was a danger... not realising that it was a female. Or, until they heard piteous crying next day from the slope beyond the camp, that she had a pair of cubs. She must have left them hidden in the bushes while she made her raid and they were still waiting for her to come back. Calling anxiously down at the camp because they knew that was where she had gone, but afraid to venture from the spot where she’d put them because small bears are trained to be obedient.
They put food out for them, said Babe. They felt terrible at having killed the mother: at the time they’d only thought of the danger. The cubs had cautiously taken the food and after a few days had ventured into camp, and, because they were obviously lonely as well as hungry, she’d taken on the job of looking after them.
They went off every night... after a week of searching she found where they were sleeping. Across a scree of rock under some pine trees, obviously the last place they’d slept with their mother. But every day they lolloped down into camp... a roly-poly male and a little female. The male was the world’s extrovert, always investigating something, but his sister was a small and nervous-looking and she obviously worried a lot about him. ‘Roff!’ she would call.
‘Roff! roff!’ when she thought he was doing something he shouldn’t... pulling blankets and towels off the airing-line or sticking his head into some-body’s tent. So they called 100
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him Ralph and he answered to it, though they’d never given the girl a name.
The horses were very curious and were always snorting round them... normally they would rear and whinny at the scent of a bear, but the cubs had obviously acquired the smell of the camp and the horses couldn’t make it out. One day, said Babe, she left her soap on a rock, and as soon as her back was turned Ralph stole it. She heard a gurgling noise... turned to see Ralph snuggling the Lifebuoy in his paws and rolling with it clasped to him, a sign that he was happy... and then up came two mules and started sniffing at him. She never knew what he’d have done with the soap.
He dropped it and ran for his life!
They grew to trust her. They would come when she called and they’d take bread with bacon grease and honey
– their favourite food – from her hands. Another week, she said, and she would have been able to touch them, but her father was ill and she had to leave camp to go and see him.
While she was packing in her tent she heard the she-cub calling ‘Roff! roff!’ outside and knew that the male must be up to something, so she pulled back the flap – and his nose was right there. He’d been lying on his stomach watching her.
The cubs had followed her a long way up the trail when she rode out. It was the first time they’d known her go away. She could see them now as they were when she looked back, she said... two small, forlorn figures looking after her. She was away for three weeks, and when she came back they had gone. Her husband said they’d stayed waiting for her at the top of the trail for days. He’d put food up there for them, but they wouldn’t come to him, and finally they’d disappeared.