Chapter III: The Ghost-Bear

The cold increased. Pŭl-Yūn, debarred his usual exercise, suffered in his circulation and felt nipped within the robes which his nurse heaped upon him.

"Mittens thou shalt have," said she, and made her promise good at the charges of a brace of blue hare, whose longs-and-shorts she patiently followed up until her throwing-stick decided the ownership of the peltries which she claimed.

Pŭl-Yūn watched her stitching: a needle snapped. "My wife will be wanting a touch of my skill," he said, and selected a shank-bone, slim and straight, split it, and scraped the more promising piece to a point.

"That is all very well," said the Master-Girl, "but how about the eye?--I have no bits small enough for drilling a needle-eye. We must punch our holes in the skin, and poke the sinew through with a forked bone, as when one nets."

"That makes clumsy stitches," remarked the man. "No, I do not think we shall come down to the punch. Thy needles are pit-eyed--"

"We always make them so; how else?--with the centre-bit, a bent stick, a twist of hazel," said the girl.

"But we use the strung-drill. Hast never seen it?" She stared. "Then there is something that even a Little Moon woman can learn from her man!" He spoke in humorous mockery, but with a spice of malice, for truly this astonishing squaw of his had forereached upon her master in a manner beyond all precedent; would he ever get the whip-hand of her again?

She understood; she crawled to him cooing gently; patted his hand; they rubbed noses.

"Why are my needles clumsy?" she asked humbly, and he showed her that her people's method of boring the eye, a funnel-shaped hole driven from each side and meeting midway, necessitated a broader head than a small true hole drilled straight through at one asking.

"Our holes are big and shallow, yes, like ant-lion pits," she laughed. "That is because our centre-bit wobbles; but how can one help the centre-bit wobbling?"

From the raffle of bones upon the floor (Cave-man was an untidy fellow, or 'tis little we should know about him)--from the remains of his yesterday's dinner Pŭl-Yūn chose a young roe's shin-bone, sawed off the joint with care and sucked out the marrow. "I want," said he, "a small sharp stone, to sit in that hollow: there are such in the bellies of bigger stones,"--he meant quartz crystals, and the Master-Girl nodded; so far his requirements presented no difficulty. "And I must have," he went on, "a couple of smooth rods of rowan or hazel as long as my arm; also an elder-stick as long as my hand."

There was meat in the larder for two days; the nurse was keen to provide play-things for her convalescent, nor was she herself loth or incurious; within the hour she was back with a handful of sparkling gems from the hollow of a big pebble and a pair of rods, one of which she watched her husband bend and string with a thong of deer-skin.

Presently he had found a shard of rock-crystal to his mind, and had hafted it in the hollow bone with a morsel of pitch picked from his axe-head and warmed in the embers. (It is singular, but beyond controversy, that the Old Stone men, who used the drill so adroitly for small work, and could pierce the enamel of a bear's tooth, or the nacre of a sea-shell when a necklace was required, never applied their invention to the hafting of their weapons. An axe was apparently too serious a matter to be bored, nor did the presence of a natural hole in a flint pebble suggest the insertion of a stick, any more than the hole for the handle in a trade hatchet appeals to a South-Sea Islander of one of the more backward races; no, he stops the hole with gum and hafts as his fore-fathers did, and as Pŭl-Yūn and Dêh-Yān did, in a cleft stick).

What next?--Dêh-Yān, still very much in the dark but longing for light, watched her husband with absorbed attention. Now he had laid aside the strung rowan-rod and the armed bone for a moment, and was at work upon the elder-stick, working one end of it to a smooth rounded head, driving into the tough, yielding, pithy hollow of its opposite extremity the sharpened shank of the armed roedeer's bone as far as it would go. He had now to his hand a short, solidly-made dagger, stoutly cylindrical in form, and bearing as its head a glittering morsel of crystal. He next fastened the slip of hare's bone which he proposed to convert to a needle firmly to the handle of his axe, and bound the axe in turn to the thigh of his sound leg, raised his knee, and said--

"Now, I begin!"

"Wah!--this is a wonder! But have a care of thy broken ankle!"

"I will have a care. Give me that strung rowan-rod." He took it from her hand, bent it yet more and looped the slackened thong once around the barrel of his drill, or bit, and then, using his own breast and left hand as bearings for the smooth butt, applied the crystal point to the blind head of the needle and drew the bent rod swiftly from left to right. The drill revolved, its armature began to mark the bone, to penetrate infinitesimally. He reversed the action and again the tool spun and cut. He persisted, it began to excavate. Pŭl-Yūn was no novice at the work, he had an instinctive appreciation of what his tool would bear, he knew to a nicety just what the fragile bone might be trusted to take without splitting.

"I am through, or nearly," said he, the sweat running into his eyes, for he was wholly out of condition, and the attitude was trying. "Let us turn the needle, I will work a little from the other side and then we can give it a point and a polish."

The Master-Girl, meanwhile, overlooked this new magic of the Sun-Men, with a breathless frowning intentness which (and this marks the woman we have to deal with) had no contempt in it. Your savage has a fathomless irrational scorn for the arts and usages of any other tribe than his own. A traveller who had photographed a group of Fingo women at their field work showed them a picture of a similar group of Pondos taken a fortnight before; there was a shout of derisive laughter. "They are using the long-handled hoe--_Baboons!_" Upon his return journey he showed the Fingo photograph to his Pondo friends; again the yell of scorn. "They are using the short-handled hoe--the _Baboons_!"

The girl's cast of mind, or her relation to this man, saved her from this fatal attitude of sterile complacency. She waited and watched, reserving judgment. Full approval was conceded, with an undercurrent of doubt as to the possibility of improvement. To her husband the size and curvature of his implement were fixed by custom and unimprovable. To Dêh-Yān these dimensions were open questions. She experimented; would not a longer bow give longer strokes? He stared, but, being sensible beyond the run of men, and grateful somewhat, and what was possibly more to the point than all else, having no one to laugh at him[1]--consented to give the larger drill a trial and presently found his tool biting faster.

Within the week the girl, having such a head upon her brown shoulders as is conceded to a savage but once in a thousand generations or so, after much watching and brooding, made for herself a bigger drill from a bough of her own height, and seating herself opposite to her man, drove the bow rapidly, whilst he steadied the bit and watched the holes deepen at a pace quite new to his experience. It was no longer needles but hunting-whistles.

It was whilst thus at work, he, seated with his face to the mouth of the cave, beheld the broad, five-clawed fore-paw of a bear thrust up from below, feeling for foothold upon the smooth sill of the dwelling. The woman saw the living fear in his eyes, sprang for an axe, and was hacking hard at the protruding toes before they found their purchase. Thrice she beat them down, and when the great wrinkled, snarling muzzle and fanged cavern of a mouth came up within reach, she was too urgent and too sudden to be faced. The enemy withdrew deliberately beneath a pelting storm of stones not ill-directed.

It was all over, a brief struggle of wills between a girl and an ogre, but how intolerably long had it seemed to the foot-fast convalescent. It was over, and Pŭl-Yūn listening to the final slide and scratching upon the rock and crash among the bushes beneath, drew deep breaths and looked upon this woman of his with a new and huge admiration, for not once had she cried for help, but thrice and four times had she bidden him keep still and respect his injured limb.

There are people who give vent to the surplus excitement generated by an adventure in chatter and exclamation; there are others who take it quietly. Pŭl-Yūn was one of the latter, he felt the imperative need of silence in which to review the thing, and see whether he had played the game. Had Dêh-Yān fallen into tears or gigglings, he would have been hard put to it to have borne with her; but, it appeared that she was of his own way of taking things, and when for some while neither had spoken one word, their mutual respects had deepened.

"Woman, that was well done!" said the man at length, and the girl nodded with a proud humility. She had played a great innings and knew it, but, having an intuitive understanding of Man, she wisely forbore to celebrate her achievement with vaunts, as a brave of her tribe would certainly have done under like circumstances.

"We were near the end of our stones," remarked Pŭl-Yūn, looking about him.

"We had only one left--this--" replied the girl. "I kept it to the last."

"That was lucky," admitted her husband, meaning more than he said, but it was a maxim in old days that a woman was little the better for praise.

"He will come again," he added doubtfully.

"Next time I--we will kill him," said Dêh-Yān a little above herself; "I will get more stones, and bigger, for his entertainment."

"Yes, he will be back again; not to-morrow, perhaps, but within a while, when he has turned it over in his mind and thinks we have forgotten him," resumed the man, ignoring the woman's brag.

Dêh-Yān was sensible of her master's silent censure, and of a sex-superiority too secure of itself to need assertion, and shrunk back half-meekly, half-resentfully, but within a little found herself rising quietly and resolutely against its injustice. It must be so at present, no doubt, but it should not always be so. Meanwhile, her husband, satisfied with the effects of the snubbing, was speaking again.

"We shall certainly be looked up before long. But, there is something I do not understand about that bear, Dêh-Yān. In my country, south of the ranges, a brown bear ambushes and waylays, but rarely attacks by day and in the open. Is it more usual here? Are thy people's weapons so weak that a bear has no fear of them? or is this a Ghost-Bear, thinkest thou?--This beast should either have followed your tribe down, or have laid up for the winter. What is he doing abroad in snow?--_Is he a bear at all?_ Did any warrior of your tribe die during the past summer?"

"This was no Brown Bear--but a Grizzly of the Big Kind[2]--but--I think--" she paused, her hand over her mouth. "Saw-Kimo, the old chief's son, died--was found dead," she muttered reluctantly, for death is a very mysterious thing to your savage, and to speak of the recently deceased is unlucky; they may be about, anywhere, at your elbow, and may take offence; who can say?

"Was _found_ dead?" questioned the man.

"Yes ... no one saw how it happened.... A stone was thought to have fallen; so said Gow-Loo, who found him."

"Oho, Gow-Loo? Was not that one of the three who came a-hunting thee? Now tell me, Dêh-Yān, and speak the thing that is--"

"I always do!" exclaimed the girl.

"I believe thee, I shall always believe thee. So, tell me, was not this Saw-Kimo one of the young braves who had asked for thee? Yes?--And had not this Gow-Loo asked for thee too?"

The girl nodded. "I was to have been given to Saw-Kimo, but--he died."

"It is very unlucky when stones fall in that manner. Gow-Loo painted his face for his friend, no doubt, and made great lamentation, as I should expect. Was it not so?--But, is there no witch-doctor in your tribe? Was there no smelling-out for blood?"

The girl shook her head. "There was talk of it in the old chief's tee-pee, but--Gow-Loo's people are strong, and he and his two friends, Low-Mah and Pongu, who always hunt with him (it was they who came upon the winter-hunting)--they were thought to have made gifts to the medicine-man and put him off the line, if indeed there was a line. I do not know--how should I?--I am only a woman. I did not like Saw-Kimo--much; but--" with sudden heat, "I hate Gow-Loo--and the others."

"Humph," grunted Pŭl-Yūn, "it is curious that three braves who are tied up in a knot of this sort, and who are keen enough to go upon a winter-hunting together, should have run from a bear as they ran from this; right away down-stream and out of the valley too. It is strange. But, if they had reason to think he was their old friend, Saw-Kimo, that would explain a good deal."

"Perhaps he was very fierce--they had touched him, I think," argued the girl, willing to believe anything rather than that she and her crippled husband were beleaguered by her dead lover in the form of a ghost-bear.

"Touched?--What makes thee think so?"

"He seemed to climb clumsily. He had but one fore-paw to which he could fully trust, as it seemed to me. I watched him go, and he went lame in the shoulder, and it was not my stones that did that--no, there was a something there, a stump of a spear, as I think, and that is why he has lost some of his fat and cannot lay up for the winter."

"And, being too slow to catch bison calf, he comes for us. My dream was a true sending. He is certainly thy Saw-Kimo and will assuredly come back for thee, Dêh-Yān."

"And so will _they_," muttered the girl, "for they must know they have left a spear-head in him and that he must be getting weaker. They will give the wound time to ripen, and then--"

"It is time I was about again," growled the crippled hunter, and set to work upon his drilling with a grim face. Dêh-Yān was kneeling upon his right hand, her left resting loosely upon the cave-floor within his reach. Upon the impulse of the moment and without word or look, Pŭl-Yūn struck swift and hard at the brown wrist with the elder bit that he was holding: the stick encountered the rock and split, for the slim brown wrist had been withdrawn with nimble rapidity. The eyes of the young people met and smiled, it was their first attempt at play.

"My husband sees that I can take care of myself," remarked the girl sedately.

"That is well, Dêh-Yān, for with a Ghost-Bear and a hunting party of three in this glen, a woman has need of eyes in the back of her head," was the comment of her lover.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 1: Children, countrymen and savages are keenly sensitive to ridicule. It is the fear of failure and of becoming the butt of his fellows which keeps many a young labourer from attempting anything new. To have tried and failed is to incur some opprobrious by-name that may stick to a villager through life. Rustic wit is cruel and drearily long-lived.]

[Footnote 2: She meant Cave Bear (_Ursus spelæus_), now extinct.]