ST. SERAPHIMHE IS ONLY A WILD BEAST WHEN TREATED LIKE A WILD BEASTXVI. VISITED BY BEARS
ST. SERAPHIMHE IS ONLY A WILD BEAST WHEN TREATED LIKE A WILD BEAST
I retainvery cheerily in mind from Russia the memory of the typical Russian saint who lived in the woods and was so holy that the bears approached without malice and took what the saint could spare of the store of crusts on which he lived. The unfortunate Tsarina when she desired so religiously a male heir, went to the shrine of Seraphim in the “emptyplace” of Arzamas to pray for one. And the most famous thing about St. Seraphim was his love of the bears. He is nearly always depicted in popular oleographs feeding the bears with bread, and in Russian ikons the bear is the national emblem of the primitive nature of Russia and the saint is the emblem of Christ.
On the other hand, I remember also my good old friend Alexander Beekof, a hunter of bears who had himself snapshotted facing in the snowy forest the upstanding, snarling, dangerous beast which presently he was to lay low. And since we are thinking of bears, I call to mind how I saw last winter little baby bears, dressed up in ribbons and fed with milk from a pap-bottle, hawked for sale by refugee Russians from street to street in Constantinople—pets to put in the nursery with your children, astonishing little rompers and ideal players of hide and seek. I have wondered about the bear as we wonder now about the Russian as to just what sort of an animal he is. Is he only a wild beast when treated like a wild beast, but otherwise tame in the presence of saints and children? Or is he a wild beast all the while?
This problem we evidently went to the Rocky Mountains to solve. For there we met the bears, and even if we may not have the haloes of the saints we hope to find a place among the children.
Notthat we were entirely ready for the overtures of Brother Bear, and it is true that we frightened some bears away, but later we got on good terms. I saw the first bear on “Going-to-the-Sun” Mountain. No one, of course, is allowed to shoot bears in Glacier National Park, though it is not many years since hunters hunted them there with Indians and with dogs, and one may read of the bear-hunting adventures of Emerson Hough and others. Now without dogs or guns the bear has been won over and he has ceased to fear mankind.
It was a beautiful morning and Vachel had been sitting in Baring Creek, letting Balchis, as he called the waterfall, flow over him, and he was now lying in a blanket on the ferns and meditating when I heard an unwonted stump, stump, crash, in the undergrowth.
“Is it a man?” I asked.
Crash, stump, stump, it went again, andpeering through the trees I saw a black bear coming towards us, glossy and shaggy. I called Vachel, but at that the bear stopped short, raised his intent, listening ears and then made away from us in another direction. We saw no more of him.
After that I recognised the sound of the bear’s feet in the forest, quite a characteristic sound, and we knew there were many bears. But the next occasion of a personal encounter was some weeks later near Heaven’s Peak. Vachel had got himself an extra long wisp of old canvas from a ruined tent. We slept by a large fire, and when the fire went out a bear came to us. Vachel and I were lying close to one another and both had our blankets over our faces, for it was cold. Vachel, as he told me afterwards, was awakened by something and lay listening to my breathing. He thought to himself, “Stephen is certainly making a terrible racket; he must have a cold”; and then he thought again lazily and unsuspectingly, “Stephen surely must have caught a cold to be snuffing and snorting in that way.” Then he thought again, “He seems to be moving about, I wonder what he’s doing.”
ThenVachel put his head out of his blanket and what should he see standing beside us but a big black bear. As for me, I was sleeping like a babe, and the bear apparently had been snuffing at me to see whether I were live meat or dead meat. Vachel gave one terrific shout. “The Son of a Gun,” said he, and I wakened up.
“Wake up, Stephen; it’s a bear,” said he. At this Brother Bear walked across from my side, where I had a pile of boiled eggs, which he had scattered, and leisurely began to knock our tin cans about on the other side and try and find the ham which we had bought the day before. In a most unsaintly way we drove him off. We forgot the example of St. Seraphim, and Brother Bear was fain to depart. I repented too late and followed the old scallywag up the moon-bathed forest glade quite a way. But he would not be called by his pet name after the abuse we had hurled at him and went away and away till he was lost in the moon-beams. “He was smelling you to find out whether you were good to eat,” said Vachel, laughing. “He wouldn’t begin on you unless he were sure you were carrion.” “Curious,” said I, “isn’t it; we used as children to lookat pictures of bears smelling men who were shamming dead in order to escape being eaten by them. In children’s books, the bear won’t eat carrion. Out here in the Rockies you can’t keep them out of the garbage cans of the camps at night.”
On another occasion, however, when three bears came trundling down after our supper was over, I approached one with some bread, which he very gently took from my fingers, and I scratched his nose and put myself on speaking terms.
“Curious,” said I to Vachel, “is it not? These are the same bears which used to figure so largely in adventure stories of the Rocky Mountains. It follows they are ready to be good citizens of the forest if treated ‘good.’”
You’d have had a different experience had they been grizzlies, we were told later.
Maybe. But St. Seraphim himself did not tackle grizzlies.
So we’ve met the bear:The bear has snuffed at usAnd wondered what we were.Humans with a forest smell to us,No doubt quite game;Sleeping out too, very quietly.Good to eat no doubt,Dare one, dare a poor bear take a bite?Would they mind?I’ve bitten most of the animals in the woodExcept them—In my time.
So we’ve met the bear:The bear has snuffed at usAnd wondered what we were.Humans with a forest smell to us,No doubt quite game;Sleeping out too, very quietly.Good to eat no doubt,Dare one, dare a poor bear take a bite?Would they mind?I’ve bitten most of the animals in the woodExcept them—In my time.
So we’ve met the bear:
The bear has snuffed at us
And wondered what we were.
Humans with a forest smell to us,
No doubt quite game;
Sleeping out too, very quietly.
Good to eat no doubt,
Dare one, dare a poor bear take a bite?
Would they mind?
I’ve bitten most of the animals in the wood
Except them—
In my time.