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MUSIC-LOVING BEARS
Joaquin Miller
A bear loves music better than he loves honey, and that is
saying that he loves music better than he loves his life.
We were going to mill, father and I, and Lyte Howard, in
Oregon, about forty years ago, with ox-teams, a dozen or two
bags of wheat, threshed with a flail and winnowed with a wagon
cover, and were camped for the night by the Calipoola River;
for it took two days to reach the mill. Lyte got his fiddle, keeping
his gun, of course, close at hand. Pretty soon the oxen came
down, came very close, so close that they almost put their cold,
moist noses against the backs of our necks as we sat there on the
ox-yokes or reclined in our blankets, around the crackling pine-
log fire and listened to the wild, sweet strains that swept up and
down and up till the very tree tops seemed to dance and quiver
with delight.
Then suddenly father seemed to feel the presence of some-
thing or somebody strange, and I felt it, too. But the fiddler
felt, heard, saw nothing but the divine, wild melody that made
the very pine trees dance and quiver to their tips. It is strange
how a man — I mean the natural man — will feel a presence long
before he hears it or sees it.
Father got up, turned about, put me behind him as an
animal will its young, and peered back and down through the
dense tangle of the deep river bank between two of the huge
oxen which had crossed the plains with us, to the water’s edge;
then he reached around and drew me to him with his left hand,
pointing between the oxen sharp down the bank with his right
forefinger.
A bear! two bears! and another coming; one already more
than half way across the great, mossy log that lay above the
deep, sweeping waters of the CaKpoola; and Lyte kept on, and
the wild, sweet music leaped up and swept through the delighted
and dancing boughs above. Then father reached back to the fire
and thrust a long, burning bough deeper into the dying embers,
and the glittering sparks leaped and laughed and danced and
swept out and up and up as if to companion with the stars. Then
Lyte knew. He did not hear, he did not see, he only felt; but
the fiddle forsook his fingers and his chin in a second, and his
gun was to his face with the muzzle thrust down between the
oxen. And then my father’s gentle hand reached out, lay on that
long, black, Kentucky rifle barrel, and it dropped down, slept
once more at the fiddler’s side. And again the melodies; and
the very stars came down, believe me, to Hsten, for they never
seemed as big and so close by before. The bears sat down on
their haunches at last, and one of them kept opening his mouth
and putting out his red tongue, as if he really wanted to taste the
music. Every now and then one of them would lift up a paw
and gently tap the ground, as if to keep time with the music.
And both my papa and Lyte said next day that those bears really
wanted to dance.
And that is all there is to say about that, except that my
father was the gentlest gentleman I ever knew and his influence
must have been boundless; for who ever before heard of any
hunter laying down his rifle with a family of fat black bears
holding the little snow-white cross on their breasts almost within
reach of its muzzle.
The moon came up by and by, and the chin of the weary
fiddler sank lower and lower, till all was still. The oxen lay down
and ruminated, with their noses nearly against us. Then the
coal-black bears melted away before the milk-white moon, and
we slept there, with the sweet breath of the cattle, like incense,
upon us.
